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 1591 5th March 2021                                                                                                                          40p Weekly

The West’s latest “colour revolution” attempt to overturn the Myanmar nationalist government for resisting Western dominance, and the demented “Uighur genocide” lies against the Chinese workers state are both desperate stunts to distract attention from Western warmongering degeneracy.  The ever more lurid BIG LIES want to cover up the sick and degenerate slaughter and torture of hundreds of thousands – millions – imposed by capitalism itself as it heads for the rocks of the greatest slump Catastrophe in history. Half a dozen countries already destroyed from Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya to Yemen only the prelude to its World War “solution”. But the gross hypocrisy of UN moralising condemnations is reaching the limit with stunts like the Russia Navalny protests exposed as Nazi fascism, shaming the duped petty bourgeois “liberals” and fake-“lefts” who still swallow the “freedom and democracy” fraud and its anti-communism instead of contemptuously exposing it.  Build Leninist science 

The West’s demented Goebbels-lie campaign about “genocide” and “totalitarianism” against China, Myanmar, and worldwide anti-imperialism, is being driven to an absurd frenzy because the monopoly capitalism’s economic crisis is about to implode on a Catastrophic scale never before seen in history.
A giant diversion is needed and scapegoats to blame.
Every disciplined workers state, or anti-imperialist “rogue state” simply defending itself in response to the barbarism being imposed on the world by the disintegrating “free market” system, and every rebellious anti-imperialist movement attempting to resist or fightback against exploitation and tyranny, is now declared with utmost nazi-inversion logic as being “the cause of the problems in the world”.
From Hong Kong, Belarus and Russia, to Myanmar, the Donbass (eastern) Ukraine, Syria, Morsi’s Egypt and Venezuela, and most of all against communists like Cuba and North Korea and the ever-more confident, successful and huge Chinese workers state, an endless stream of wildly exaggerated or outright lying accusations are made while artificially sustained “street movements”, luridly inflated (and usually provocatively violent) “peaceful” demonstrations, coups, blitzes and invasions (Serbia, Libya eg) are set in train or inflamed, and many more attempted.
Their aim where possible is to topple governments (however democratically they might have been elected, – for what that is worth) or disrupt any “rogue nations” or revolt which show even a smidgeon of resistance to Western diktat (even if it is merely a posture, driven by popular street sentiment, like Saddam Hussein), let alone full anti-imperialist national liberation struggles and even the all-out resistance by communism and workers state authority.
On top of that they are a major tool for the continuing brainwashing lies to fool and confuse the masses in the Western imperialist countries particularly, that “communism does not work” and worse still “can only be and only ever was a ghastly grey repressive nightmare”.
Simultaneously the real horrors in the world imposed by imperialist blitzkrieg, state terrorising, non-stop war, and tyrannical exploitation, – and which are the cause and generator of all the rising struggle against the West and within the West – are all hidden away, suppressed, censored, downplayed and ignored.
But while the big lie fabrications and distortions pour out with ever more inflated lurid nonsense, and hysterical evidence-free hyperbole about “mass killing” and aggressive Western United Nations denunciations (led by Tories and reactionaries throughout the West!), they are also becoming more glaringly and hypocritically ridiculous in their desperation.
Contradictions, inconsistencies, and hypocrisies abound, inflated to insane proportions.
Even those usually reliable stooges for Western intelligence agency anti-communist fabrications and exaggerations, Amnesty International, are finding themselves caught out and having to retract some of the usual sanctimonious rubbish, even if their sour “freedom” self-righteousness cannot quite bring itself to admit the full story, in this case that Alexei Navalny, their “democratic hero” for Russia, is in fact an out and out nazi racist.
Stupidity and complicity with a century of brainwashing crap about bourgeois “freedom and the rule of law” is not so easily demolished – but the edifice is beginning to crack:

Amnesty International has said it will cease calling Alexei Navalny a “prisoner of conscience”, following pressure to condemn anti-migrant statements he made in the 2000s as hate speech.
Employees of Amnesty International said the organisation had received messages about Navalny’s past remarks that they felt “were part of a coordinated campaign to discredit him abroad”, but nonetheless felt compelled to change his designation.
“Yes, we are no longer going to use the phrase ‘prisoner of conscience’ in regards to [Navalny] insofar as our law and policy department, having reviewed Navalny’s remarks from the mid-2000s, came to the conclusion that they meet the level of ‘hate speech’,” Alexander Artemev, Amnesty International’s media manager for Europe and central Asia, told TV Rain.
In a crowing tweet, the head of Russia’s state-funded TV network RT, Margarita Simonyan, wrote that the west was “crying that this came after our columnist used concrete examples that reminded everyone he [Navalny] is a Nazi”.
She added: “Happy Defender of the Fatherland Day, countrymen!”
Navalny was arrested in January upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from an assassination attempt carried out by individuals identified as FSB operatives. His arrest and subsequent jailing sparked nationwide protests in Russia, but his allies say they have now paused serious demonstrations until the spring.
Navalny’s offending remarks have not been specified, but the 44-year-old was engaged in nationalist politics at the time and voiced strongly anti-migrant views in several videos, including one in which he dressed as a dentist and appeared to compare immigrants to rotten teeth.
He has moved away from rightwing politics in the years since the videos were made, but has declined to renounce his past views in numerous interviews, including one with the Guardian in 2017.
Amnesty International’s change in policy was made internally and was revealed this week in an email exchange posted online by Aaron Maté, a US journalist who has been critical of Navalny.
Julie Verhaar, Amnesty International’s acting secretary general, said in emailed remarks on Wednesday evening: “The speculation around Amnesty International’s use of the term ‘prisoner of conscience’ is detracting attention from our core demand that [Navalny] be freed immediately.”
She said the term “prisoner of conscience” denoted specific criteria established by Amnesty International and that “nothing Navalny has said in the past justifies his current detention”.
In another twist on Wednesday evening, the head of Amnesty International appeared to fall victim to a prank caller imitating Leonid Volkov, a close ally of Navalny’s. 
...Alexei Stolyarov, a member of a duo who goes by the nickname Pranker Lexus, indicated in a post on Facebook on Wednesday evening that he was indeed behind the call. “This was probably the most constructive and direct conversation in Volkov’s life,” he wrote.
A spokesperson for Amnesty International was not immediately able to confirm or deny the reports of the prank phone call.

The grudging admission here is still downplaying this foulness (Navalny “jokes” about shooting immigrant “cockroaches”) and comes complete with liberal Guardian sneers about “crowing” (really? – for exposing a total fascist????). 
It really wants to continue support for this vile and bent Western stooge and his “movement”, desperately covering up with a “moved left” excuse. 
Petty bourgeois “popular” opinion worldwide (including most of the fake-“left”) is so fearful of the revolutionary implications of the oncoming crisis that it continues to swallow every increasingly bilious nonsense, as if in some surreal Alice-through-the-Loooking-Glass competition to see who can believe the most insane irrealities and impossible things before breakfast. 
Without this liberalism and reformism, and the fake-“left” posturing about abstract democracy (Kautskyism etc) which props it up, capitalism would be in much greater trouble than it is already, unable to hide the vicious dictatorship reality that is its true nature (and which Trumpism has already halfway brought into the open once more – see last issue).
But it is getting much more difficult all the same. 
In fact these latest disclosures were not even needed to understand the sheer poisonous sabotaging reactionariness of the Navalny pretence – a Marxist-Leninist scientific perspective of the onrushing world crisis and constantly updated assessment of the balance of class forces was already a far better guide, as it is and has always been, for this and a dozen other current examples of this propaganda onslaught and its tangled contradictory deceit.
And Leninism, incidentally, would also be clear that Russia’s current oligarch-capitalist restoration is not much of a future either for the working class there which needs to rebuild the fight to re-establish proletarian dictatorship just as workers do throughout capitalism.
Not a jot of support should be offered to the idiot Vladimir Putin.
There should only be the understanding that his continuing bonapartist balancing act between the gang of mafia-gangster thugs who carpet-bagged the hard-won workers state resources of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, to create a crude new capitalist ruling class after the stupid Gorbachev liquidation of the USSR, and the social concessions he has had to restore, reformist-style, to a small extent (some pensions, schools, medical services) to head off a working class nostalgic for once-communist society from turning to revolutionary politics, remains a thorn in the side for much of imperialism. 
Defeat the ludicrous reactionary US-led imperialist stunts, but without a jot of confidence in Putin‘s Orthodox relic-kissing restorationism which needs overturning and replacing as soon as possible.
There are obviously wide variations in the nature of other various targeted regimes, some little more than unsavoury bourgeois regimes themselves which have got in the way of US imperialism’s world domination or been forced to make a show of standing up to it, as Iraq’s CIA thug-stooge Saddam Hussein did, bending to Arab anti-Zionist street pressure, or one-time US collaborator Noriega in Panama before he was toppled by brutal US military invasion, and as Iran has.
Others like Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Libya, Venezuela and recently the Ethiopian regime displacing the Tigrayan reactionaries, have or had some anti-imperialist form or leanings, while others are outright workers states like Cuba and China deserving unconditional support by the working class, despite revisionist illusions in the leadership. 
Each needs examining in concrete detail.
But first the overall world crisis context needs to be foremost, in other words the foundation of Marxist-Leninist science as studied in detail in Capital and by Lenin (Imperialism- the highest stage of capitalism for example).
That is the only perspective in which any of these wild and increasingly topsy-turvy fictions can be examined and made sense of in the astoundingly complex and shifting world balance of class forces. 
What it shows clearly is a Western imperialist order desperate for diversions and excuses for the sickening depravity and blitzing which it alone has already imposed on the world for two decades (on top of centuries of brutal colonialism, slavery and exploitation tyranny, and the post-war US order of Cold War and international CIA installed fascist stoogery) as its “endless boom” faltered in 2000’s dotcom failure and then ground to a halt in the global credit meltdown in 2008.
The boss and billionaire class is trying to head mass understanding away from the gross reality of actual non-stop warmongering butchery and torture that the US empire has turned to since 9/11 (though plotted and prepared in its New American Century plans well beforehand). 
“Shock and awe” war terrorising and intimidation has been its escape plan – the only one the ruling class can conceive of – from crisis bankruptcy, and from the far worse devastation to come as its system implodes under the weight of its intractable contradictions.
To suppress inevitably rising world rebellion and prepare the world for World War Three, country after country has already been wiped out or Balkanised and fragmented, in the Middle East, Ukraine, Africa and elsewhere (Serbia to start, then Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and more) with indiscriminate bombing, missiling, droning and shooting to slaughter, maim, imprison and torture, wiping out hundreds of thousands, and the destroying of the lives of tens of millions, starving, left in wrecked cities, refugee camps or desperate migrancy. 
The devastation of half a dozen countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria, razing of huge cities (Raqqa, Mosul, Tikrit, Benghazi) and non-stop terrorising has been solely imposed by Washington and its stooges and sidekicks, (notably Britain but variously the rest of imperialism too and sometimes dragging confused local nationalism in too).
Even then, such war destruction is only the warm-up, acclimatising the world for the main event, the degeneration of unstoppably intensifying trade war into the all-out world war that is its only “solution” for the inevitable “overproduction crisis” built into the monopoly capitalist system  (see box page 6, the Communist Manifesto, the collected works of Marx, Engels and Lenin and nearly 1600 issues of the ILWP Bulletin/EPSR).
But the increasingly bankrupt and harried US empire has failed, unable to ruthlessly “discipline” the world back into compliance with its exploitation and dominance, suppress worldwide revolt and warn off its ever more challenging capitalist rivals.
And the US Empire rulers know that far worse collapse and chaos is now breaking, not “because of Covid” as it pretends (though the pandemic clearly makes matters worse), but because its system is out of time. 
The collapse began decades ago, long before Covid, unravelling the world capitalist system in a series of shattering breakdowns, financial crises and regional failures (Russia’s late 90s bankruptcy, Asian currency collapse, waves of Latin America credit bankruptcies, Japanese stagnation).
Even as the inflationary credit-fuelled  postwar “boom” continued, every billion newly-printed (and essentially valueless) dollars was simultaneously adding to the accumulating heap of contradictions which are heading the world to a now imminent economic, environmental, social, and above all World War cataclysm.
The slump disaster of “austerity” ramping-up homelessness, hunger and shortly unprotected (dole free) mass unemployment (like the “self-employed” have endured for the last Covid year), is already agony for millions of families, intensified by the arrogant, callous and disgusting profiteering inequality and greed of the billionaire class,  while planet-threatening global warming, pollution and species destruction is accelerated by a failing profit system that is driven to ever greater plundering and wastefulness, as the likes of Brazil’s fascist president Jair Bolsonaro make explicit.
But as trade war deepens and the full economic disaster can no longer be held off with more credit dollars, far worse is coming, unimaginable in its effects, and not far off either, endable only by revolution.
Hence the insane outright LIES.
Stunted- up CIA/MI6/Zionist instigated “colour revolutions”, “warcrime trials” and artificial “democracy” protests have always been a major part of imperialism’s ideological armoury to subvert any advance towards socialism by the working class since the great Bolshevik revolution in 1917, trying to head off constantly rising spontaneous international rebellion (in the present period mostly “terrorist” in form) driven by the crisis collapse of the Western monopoly capitalist order, while maintaining maximum confusion domestically, propping up the lying fraud of “democracy” and the “rule of law” by which it covers up its actual dictatorship rule. 
But so terrifying has the crisis collapse now become that an hysterical frenzy of completely glaring nonsense is now needed, magnified courtesy of a craven media ready to repeat, inflate and exaggerate every agonised story invented or embroidered by the intelligence agencies and then carefully rehearsed and coached into bribed or axe-grinding pro-Western “witnesses” and hate-filled on-the-make dissidents, all primed for tear-jerking silhouetted interviews and shadowy “re-enactments” to suitably heart-wrenching or doomy music.
Along with shallow rumours and unverified assertions reported repeatedly until they become “facts”, (becoming the foundation stone “evidence” for ever more elaborate accusations from then on), lurid accounts are given of supposed “horrors” which are never actually proven or amount to any more than unverified “accusations” or alleged “intelligence assessments”.   
Ridiculous “martyr leaders” are set up and internationally “recognised” like the reactionary jerk Juan Guaidó in Venezuela, against the legitimately elected president Nicolás Maduro, or Navalny in Russia, hyped up as a supposed “victim of poisoning because of his democratic challenge”. 
Hand in hand goes the hugely escalating censorship and suppression of all criticism and exposures of imperialism’s monstrous record, from the murderous and inhumane treatment of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, being punished for revealing details of imperialism’s widespread warcrimes massacres, terror, torture and abuse, to the gross Mccarthyism of the worldwide Zionist conspiracy to shut down all criticism of the genocidal Palestine occupation with deranged “left anti-semitism” rubbish.
Government instructions prevent schools teaching anti-capitalism, but insist on “free speech” for Nazis, the sneaky Prevent programme reels in and even imprisons anyone merely suspected of rebellious thoughts, and now the “editing” of social media is imposed to suppress communist ideas under cover of “acting against extremism”.
The temporary necessities of the pandemic are now used too, to impose repressive police restrictions on travel and meetings that are and will be used for political control. 
The only counter to this non-stop fake-news, confusion and distortion is the fight for Leninist scientific theory in a party built for its conscious polemical development, insisting on the vital necessity for the class war overthrow of this rank, festering inhuman system of alienation and antagonism to create a rational world of cooperative collective socialist society.
Then the cracks in all this brittle propaganda onslaught, already visible to any halfway rational human, are like chasms, allowing the working class to navigate its way through the seemingly overwhelming confusion and guide the class war struggle.
One such disparity for example is the obvious difference between the immediate grandstanding political “outrage and condemnation” of the Moscow regime blamed for an alleged poisoning long before any evidence could even have emerged and the endless prevarication, evasion and playing down of the mafia-style “silencing” of journalist Jamal Khashoggi an outright gruesome murder by the Saudi Arabian regime and its head Prince Salman.
Underlining the grotesque hypocrisy of the “Joe” Biden US presidency, using its “new broom” of “restored democracy” to immediately brush this psychotic murder under the carpet, is the simultaneous British ruling class collusion with the sinister kidnap disappearances of Princesses Latifa and Maya under the orders of Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum in the equally primitive and reactionary UAE Gulf state Saudi allies.
If the most backward tribalist and now gangsterish ruling class on the planet is not only let off the hook but rewarded with red-carpet banquets and personal friendships with aristocrats, royalty and billionaires; with hosting roles for well-attended high-flown economic forums; with critical chairman’s roles at the United Nations,  what are rational minds to make of the cynical and hollow  “outrage” and “denunciations” of Moscow etc?
Damaging sanctions are imposed against Vladimir Putin’s Russia around hyped-up and completely unproven accusations of “Novichok poisoning”, with only the most tenuous circumstantial “evidence” built from unproven suppositions, politically biased assumptions, unverifiable dissident assertions and simple Western accusations while all flaws and holes in the “case” are ignored – like the fact that the sinister sounding “nerve agent”, which might or might not have been used on Navalny (itself not remotely proven) had been freely available in the 1990s mafia-gangster black-market created in Russia once Gorbachevite revisionism had liquidated the workers state.
Anyone could have got hold of it, then or now, from gangsters or vengeful oligarchs to the CIA or MI6.
But there are Turkish security videos of the disgusting Khashoggi assassination events and even realtime audio recordings of the depraved mafia-style murder itself as the gruesomely psychotic dismemberment and carefully plotted disposal was carried out, complete with an elaborate lookalike feint, and with constant high-level phone calls back to Saudi for instructions and approvals. 
Vladimir Putin is “obviously personally responsible” for attempts on “opposition leader” Navalny, the red-faced posturing declares from the US dominated United Nations’ podiums “because he is in charge” – but it “could be” that Prince Salman in Saudi, though running a much more authoritarian regime of pre-feudal tribalism, where personal fealty to the ruler is absolute and the most serious transgressions still potentially rewarded with beheading, “did not know what was happening”.
Now, none of this means it should be assumed Putin’s oligarch-based regime by any means  has clean hands, and its record on brutally suppressing valid Chechen self-determination, and against “terrorism”, (working with the US and Western forces at times) is deplorable, reflecting all the worst aspects of past revisionist confusion condemning “anarchy and violence” (see EPSR 1248 eg) magnified by bourgeois restorationist apeing of imperialism (which itself feeds much Great Russian chauvinism).
But these empty Navalny fabrications neither remotely sustain or justify pariah status in themselves – they are designed solely to bolster the “peaceful protest for democracy” lies they are surrounded with, which have everything to do with Western attempts to sabotage and subvert the lingering potential in Russia for revived socialism by filling heads with shallow “freedom” delusions.
Sections of the Western ruling class, even now, do not trust that Putin is sufficiently onside with capitalism to fully suppress communist revival, which can only grow again once the capitalist crisis really bites.
He still lauds some past achievements and sacrifices of the Soviet Union, such as the 1945 defeat of German Nazism. 
His philistine contempt for the “communism” of the USSR lies in a petty bourgeois moralising failing to separate the correct building of the dictatorship of the proletariat which produced giant advances for the working class in social, economic, educational, scientific and cultural fields, from the difficulties, mistakes and alleged crimes which resulted from Moscow’s revisionist weaknesses and retreats from Lenin’s revolutionary perspectives as the EPSR has analysed (eg see books Vol 13 Gorbachevism, Vol 18 on Leninist Discussion and Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics against Stalinism).
It is another variant of the “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” that besets Western fake-“leftist” hostility to the Soviet Union (most poisonously from the Trotskyists but also including the revisionist groups which are notionally pro-Soviet but only for a non-existent “perfect” variant under a mythically unflawed Stalin figure).
Putin himself might be irredeemable but pride in the USSR’s history and working class achievements could swing to mass support for renewed communism if the vital re-examination of past revisionist errors were battled for (as needed for all the international working class too).  
In the Middle East meanwhile, letting the degenerate thug-monarchs off the hook for their grotesque and arrogant murderous criminality (and plenty more, like the thousands of overseas workers killed annually working near-slave conditions) is only one per cent of the story anyway.
Along with the UAE pre-feudal absolutist tribalism, the Saudi regime has been running the most degenerate yet of the repressive wars in the Middle East, bringing the entire country of Yemen to a grinding halt with a six-year campaign of barbaric war blitzing and butchery including much indiscriminate killing of civilian men, women and children at wedding parties, on schoolbuses and in local markets and hillside villages, and now tipping 4 million into outright famine, all to suppress a movement wanting more say in its own affairs (ie democracy).  
No “sanctions” are imposed on Saudi Arabia for this, no local military leaders blown to pieces by drones (as the US did to the Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani), or scientists assassinated, however many tens of thousands are slaughtered or tortured or brought to the point of disastrous famine as a result of the deliberately destroyed roads, bridges, ports, water treatment plants and power stations, all targeted with helpful “advice” from British and American military and technicians (using British and US supplied arms), or if that fails, droned down by remote-controlled direct interventions from “hero” operators far away from the fighting in Florida or Lincolnshire (set up by Biden-supported Obama-ism in the first place).
If the Bidenites are pretending to hold back the Saudis now, with some wrist-slapping restraints on arms sales (but only if “used aggressively”) that is only because it looks increasingly that Riyadh is being defeated, bankrupting itself and still failing to stop the Houthi resistance which has inflicted numerous blows on the Saudis and is increasingly reaching the heart of the Kingdom:
Yemen’s Houthi rebels have offered to stop attacks against Saudi Arabia in return for halting airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition.
“We are the ones who call for peace and have offered many solutions for it, but the outcome so far is that the American, British and European bombing continues and the battles continue,” Muhammad Ali Al-Houthi, a member of the group’s Supreme Political Council, said on Twitter.
Al-Houthi said his group is ready to take the initiative of halting attacks on Saudi Arabia provided “there is seriousness” from the Saudi-led coalition to end its “aggression” on Yemen.
In recent days, the Houthi militias have accelerated their drone and ballistic missile attacks on Saudi Arabia, garnering widespread Arab and international condemnation.
The Arab coalition announced recently the interception and destruction of around ten drones launched by the Houthis towards Saudi Arabia in less than a week...
A Saudi-led coalition aimed at reinstating the Yemeni government has worsened the situation, causing one of the world’s worst man-made humanitarian crises with 233,000 people killed, nearly 80% or about 30 million needing humanitarian assistance and protection, and more than 13 million in danger of starving to death (14 Feb).

Multiple explosions were heard and the night skies above Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, lit up with bright flashes on Saturday as a Saudi-led military coalition announced the thwarting of a missile attack that it blamed on Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
Brigadier General Turki al-Malki, a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, said in a statement the Houthis launched a ballistic missile towards Riyadh and three booby-trapped drones towards the province of Jizan, with a fourth towards the southwestern city of Khamis Mushait.
No casualties were reported, although state-run Al Ekhbariya television said fragments of the missile scattered over several Riyadh neighbourhoods, damaging at least one home.
The Iranian-aligned Houthis said they deployed a ballistic missile and nine drones at “sensitive targets” in Riyadh and six drones at military sites in Abha and Khamis Mushait.
The attacks came as Saudi Arabia hosted a Formula E championship on the outskirts of Riyadh, which state media said was attended by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Al Ekhbariya broadcast footage of what appeared to be explosions in the air over Riyadh, and social media users also posted videos, with some showing residents shrieking as they watched the fiery blast pierce the night sky, which appeared to be the kingdom’s Patriot missile batteries intercepting the ballistic missile (01 Mar).

The West’s crisis depravity and mass slaughter must be the context also for the hysterical meal currently being made of the latest “street movement” the Western agencies have succeeded in mobilising in Myanmar after decades of subversion around the fragrant Oxford-trained Aung San Suu Kyi, trying to topple the bourgeois nationalism which succeeded in breaking away from weakened British empire dominance in 1947 and which has been under attack ever since by various local civil war movements (all suddenly appearing just after the British were forced out) and Western organised drug running.
Not least have been the provocations around the Rohingya (largely migrants from Bangladesh), and the violent Muslim insurgency it spawned which the West suddenly decided it should support after a decade and a half of “war on terror” blitzing and slaughter of such jihadism, hysterically and farcically deemed to be an “existential threat” to “our calm and peaceful way of life”.  
The latest “protests” (suddenly redeeming Aung San Suu Kyi, who five minutes ago was an “international pariah” herself, denounced from the rooftops for failing to go along with the “Rohingya genocide” stunt, itself a wildly exaggerated propaganda embellishment of some local conflicts – with some nasty nationalist elements perhaps but far away from “systematic slaughter of a whole people”) have been anything but mere “peaceful demonstrations for democracy”.
These have been a violent and coordinated civil insurrection from the beginning, with well-organised street barricades quickly appearing, physical attacks on the state forces, and constant demands for Western military intervention by the reactionaries on the streets (as usual far fewer than the wildly exaggerated numbers poured out by the Western media along with the usual carefully framed video shots to pretend “mass participation” to inflame the situation, just as in Libya, Syria, Iraq etc).
Once it had forced the hand of the bourgeois nationalist core of the regime by pushing it into a corner, after years of plotting, with a manipulated election (like every election within capitalism, stitched-up in a dozen different ways with money, advertising, brainwashing influence, outside interference and outright bribery) the Western stooges left it no choice but to assert direct authority to stop the country being handed over to full Western corporate plundering which has been excluded so far to avoid creating another sweatshop Bangladesh or Thailand.
The petty bourgeois elements, looking for Western jobs and opportunities (they think) could then use this to get the demonstrations going and succeed in provoking the military enough to draw blood.
It is a recipe worked out over decades by the CIA. 
Forcing defensive violence from a besieged state, especially if this includes deaths on the street, has been the provocateurs’ central aim in all these artificial stunts, aiming to create mass hysteria and chaos internally and confusion and hostility worldwide.
It failed in China in 1989 despite a week of deliberate violent lynching attacks instigated by the “pro-democracy” pro-US Tiananmen petty bourgeois students on the disciplined workers state army and police (whose butchered personnel accounted for half the count of a few hundred deaths in the streets around the square – since solidified into the outright LIE/myth of a “massacre of thousands in the Square” where there were actually no deaths at all – see EPSR Book Vol 16 China and recent issues 1557-8). 
It failed again in the 2002 anti-Hugo Chávez CIA coordinated coup attempt in Venezuela despite sinister secret snipers posted on rooftops (in case the military did not respond to provocations) and since in Venezuela again where murderously violent demonstrations have repeatedly been set going by bourgeois elements.
But it worked to set civil war going in Syria in 2011 when early sectarian demonstrations provoked by CIA/Zionist agents against the Assad regime (bogusly dressed up as “extensions of the Arab Spring” to head off the real Spring in Cairo) were lethally shot at by shadowy figures in the bushes to bolster the “brutal regime crackdown” hysteria, and it worked again in the carefully orchestrated and Western funded 2014 “Orange revolution” in Ukraine (total cost $5bn), with hidden snipers above Kiev’s Maidan square to whip up the crowd chaos and fear, to make sure the fascist side triumphed.
The 50 or so deaths in Myanmar – at least according to never fully trustable Western sources – are tragic, and possibly might have been avoided by a more confident workers state (which might have resisted fraudulent “democracy” games in the first place), but are still a pinprick against the non-stop unpunished butchery by imperialism for two decades in the Middle East and worldwide.
And they would be a pinprick against the bloody reprisals which the bourgeoisie has always inflicted as far as it can when it triumphs against working class rebellion, from the thousands hunted down like vermin after the fall of the 1871 Paris Commune to the torture and killings of tens of thousands in Chile after 1973’s General Pinochet coup, the up to three million butchered in Indonesia in 1965 after the overthrow of left-nationalist Sukarno (and many killed since), thousands of men, women and children killed in the Cairo streets after the military overturned newly and properly elected president Mohamed Morsi in Egypt in 2013 (and many killed since by the Sisi dictatorship), and the shooting of indigenous  protestors in Bolivia after the toppling of Evo Morales in 2018 (using manipulated “democracy” and judicial mechanisms, just as a slew of reactionary coups have done in Latin America recently).
The play-acting “concern about violence” is particularly hypocritical from the squads of journalists writing it up from their comfortable Bangkok flats and hotels in nearby Thailand, which has seen at least four bloody coups since the Second World War, with dozens of killings of the redshirt protestors after the 2006 events, and a string of brutal deathsquad killings of mostly exiled oppositionists in the five years of the 2014 coup. 
Not a murmur of protest has been heard from the podiums and platforms of the “democratic” Western politicians, nor sanctions imposed and interventions called for.
The pretence of elections in 2019 was a completely stitched-up farce installing a military/monarchical approved “civilian” government which is anything but “free and fair”:
A former civil servant has been jailed for 43 years and six months for insulting the Thai monarchy, lawyers said, in what is thought to be the toughest sentence ever passed under the kingdom’s strict lese-majesty law.
The woman, said to be in her 60s, was accused of posting audio clips to Facebook and YouTube with comments deemed critical of the monarchy, according to the group Thai Lawyers for Human Rights.
A sentence of 87 years was announced initially, but this was halved because she pleaded guilty.
Under the lese-majesty law, anyone who “defames, insults or threatens the king, queen, heir apparent or regent” can face between three and 15 years on each charge. The woman, whose lawyers have identified her only by her first name, Anchan, was found guilty on 29 counts of breaching the law.
Her case dates back six years, but the sentencing comes at a time when the authorities are attempting to clamp down on an unprecedented youth-led pro-democracy movement that has challenged both the monarchy and the government.
Protesters, who gathered in the tens of thousands last year, have criticised King Maha Vajiralongkorn and questioned the royal family’s vast wealth and power. They have demanded reform, arguing that the institution should be accountable and under the constitution.
Such public discussion of the royal family was, until recently, highly unusual. Initially, authorities did not charge protesters with lese-majesty, which, the prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, said in June was no longer being used because of “His Majesty’s mercy”.
Since November, however, lese-majesty cases have been brought against dozens of protesters, including students as young as 16. Demonstrators have also been accused of sedition and holding gatherings in violation of Covid-19 restrictions.

A similar law imposed by Spain’s still Francoist Catholic-fascist penetrated establishment has been rightly greeted with mass revolt:

Police and demonstrators in Barcelona clashed for a fifth night on Saturday, with thousands taking to the streets across Spain to protest against the jailing of a controversial rapper for glorifying terrorism and insulting royalty in his music and on Twitter.
Angry demonstrations first erupted on Tuesday after police detained Pablo Hasél, 32, and took him to jail to start serving a nine-month sentence in a highly contentious free speech case.
Since then, protesters have turned out every night, clashing with police in disturbances which began in Hasél’s home region of Catalonia, but have since spread to Madrid and beyond.
Ahead of the rallies, police were out en masse in an attempt to head off the violence that has marred earlier protests, with dozens of police vans lining the streets of Madrid and Barcelona.
Several thousand demonstrators began gathering around 7pm in Barcelona, and clashes broke out as they started marching towards police headquarters.
Protesters hurled bottles, cans and firecrackers at police, who charged at them as smoke poured into the air from burning barricades, an AFP correspondent said.
Others smashed their way into shops along Barcelona’s Passeig de Gracia shopping avenue, looting stores such as Nike, Versace, Tommy Hilfiger, Hugo Boss and Diesel.
They also attacked the Barcelona stock exchange building and torched several motorbikes.
The Mossos d’Esquadra regional police said nine people had been arrested at demonstrations across Catalonia, six of them in Barcelona. The region’s emergency services said six people had been injured, two in Barcelona.
In Madrid, around 400 people gathered under a heavy police presence in the city centre, chanting and clapping as curious shoppers stopped to watch.
“Free Pablo Hasél!” they yelled as a helicopter flew overhead and at least 17 police vans could be seen lined up along Gran Via, Madrid’s busiest shopping street.
Earlier, several hundred people had gathered in the southern cities of Malaga, Cordoba and Seville, local media reported, with another 100 protesters gathering in the northern city of Santander and a similar number in Logrono.
So far, more than 100 people have been arrested in the protests over Hasél, and scores more injured in the clashes, among them many police officers and a young woman who lost an eye after being hit by a foam round fired by police.     

And still the fake-”left” falls for ever more threadbare “democracy”, “free speech”  and “rule of law” pretences veiling monopoly capitalism’s actual bourgeois dictatorship rule, helping imperialism get away with these obvious BIG LIE attempts to subvert, disrupt and topple governments. 
The most absurd, hypocritical and inflated of all have poured out against the Chinese workers state, relentlessly growing in economic, political and social strength, and beginning to go well beyond simply catching-up with imperialism (astonishing enough in just a few decades starting from a low base of rural backwardness), to overtake it in many sectors, social, scientific, cultural and economic.
While there are many doubts to be expressed about the extent of Beijing’s continuing use of capitalist economic methods, particularly with it now having more billionaires than the US itself (!!!), and the direction of its development in some philosophical particulars (consumerism etc), it has undoubtedly stunned the capitalist world.
Small wonder that counter-revolutionary provocations and lying propaganda campaigns are almost constant.
But they have foundered one after the other.
The attempted “democracy” protests in Hong Kong  rapidly showed themselves to be anything but the “peaceful protests” they claimed as they unfolded over a 12 month period, early on turning to violence and then destructive attacks on the legislature, and exposing their counter-revolutionary pro-Western ambitions.
But they were defeated and the subversives and reactionary leaders are being firmly dealt with by an increasingly confident Beijing:  
Forty-seven Hong Kong democrats and activists have been charged with conspiracy to commit subversion, in the largest single crackdown on the democratic opposition under a China-imposed national security law.
Sam Cheung, a young activist and a participant in an unofficial primary election last summer, was charged after reporting to a local police station on Sunday, dressed in a black mask and accompanied by his wife.
“Hong Kongers have a really tough time these days,” he told reporters before entering the station. “I hope everyone won’t give up on Hong Kong ... (and) fight on.”
Cheung was arrested in a dawn raid along with more than 50 other democrats on 6 January in the largest national security operation since the law’s passage last June.
They were accused of organising and participating in an unofficial “primary election” last July aimed at selecting the strongest candidates for a legislative council election.
The Hong Kong police said in a statement on Sunday they had laid a charge against 47 persons with the single count of subversion. They will appear in court Monday morning, the statement added.
The democrats were detained at the time, questioned, and some had their mobile phones and computers confiscated, then released pending further investigations.
“My chance of bail won’t be too great,” wrote Benny Tai in an earlier social media post. He was also charged and accused by Chinese authorities of being a key tactician for the pro-democracy movement in the former British colony.
Those also called in by Hong Kong police include a group of younger “resistance camp” democratic activists including Lester Shum, Sam Cheung, Ventus Lau and Fergus Leung.
The democrats denounced the arrests as political persecution for the informal, peaceful poll that drew 600,000 votes in a city of 7.5 million.
A rights advocacy group, “Power for Democracy”, that co-organised the primary elections, said in a Facebook post it had disbanded.
The Hong Kong police say 99 individuals have been arrested for suspected violations of the security laws so far.
Some of these have been denied bail, including media mogul and prominent China critic Jimmy Lai, despite protracted legal appeals.
The sweeping national security laws introduced last June – essentially by decree from Beijing, but with the blessing of the Hong Kong government – are seen by critics as a threat to Hong Kong’s freedoms and autonomy. The laws punish acts of subversion, secession, collusion with foreign forces and terrorism with possible life imprisonment.

The only criticism that might be made of Beijing is to ask why it waited so long, allowing the Western media to inflate this outrageous attempted “colour revolution” with its backing and advice from Western intelligence and finance from  billionaire-backed “democracy foundations” (!!) as far as it did.
It could possibly be argued that it was “giving it enough rope to hang itself” but in the end it was crucial for the workers state to exert its authority against this stunt. 
China is equally undeterred from pursuing restoration of full control over Taiwan, detached from Beijing by the retreating Chiang Kai-Shek counter-revolutionaries holing up there as a very undemocratic reactionary dictatorship (with American backing) after the 1949 communist victory:

The Chinese Communist party has never ruled Taiwan but nevertheless considers it to be a part of China. Beijing, driven by President Xi Jinping, wants unification without war, although it is prepared to use force if required. The Taiwanese government, meanwhile, seeks continuation of the precarious status quo: self-governing without the threat of invasion. The positions are irreconcilable.
Amid rising US support for Taiwan under Donald Trump, which the new president, Joe Biden, has said will continue, Beijing has responded with bellicose rhetoric and increased military activity. Last year, China’s People’s Liberation Army increased drills and flights into Taiwan’s air defence zone, crossing the median line for the first time in two decades in August. It has hugely ramped up aggressive and illegal sand dredging operations. On consecutive days in January more than a dozen PLA planes buzzed towards Taiwan, a message to the newly inaugurated Biden. Taiwan’s air force scrambled, and for days the roar of jets punctured Tainan City’s hazy skies.
In a speech this month, Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, said the issue had risen from a bilateral matter to a concern of “the Indo-Pacific region, or even the global focus”.

Even as the Hong Kong subversion has been seen off the even more demented campaign around the Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province has reached  ludicrous proportions with wild and demented stories of “sterilisations” and a “programme of concentration camps” being built.
The gobsmacking nonsense of this fantastical campaign is answered first of all by the general statistics on population and economic development in the region  which as explained in Socialist Review (page 8) is both steadily climbing and greatly outpacing the local Han Chinese population which is allegedly “suppressing the Uighurs”. 
On top of that, like everywhere else in China, the only programme to suppress and eliminate anything is that against the Covid virus, with both a lockdown policy and testing policy efficiently applied as necessary, and highly successfully too. Vaccinations will also be rolled out, which is all a bizarre way to carry through an alleged “genocide”.
But what about the camps it can be asked?
The deliberate innuendo, surrounded by endless “secret filming” and lying “witness accounts”, is that these facilities are “really” “concentration camps” (and that implying “death camps”). 
But they are exactly as described by the Chinese state; part of a major reeducation programme to counter jihadist and terrorist disruption which has caused major devastation in the region including hundreds of deaths in bomb attacks.
Militant Uighurs have been affected by the rising tide of Islamic revolt which has grown in response to the crisis and in opposition to imperialist tyranny – including many of them travelling to join groups in the Middle East (including ISIS).
As the EPSR has explained, the vacuum in Leninist revolutionary understanding and leadership temporarily left in the world by the failure of revisionism and the liquidation of the Soviet Union it led to, has been filled to some extent by militant Islamism, expressing the hatred and hostility of the Third World for the tyrannical oppression which has been imposed on it for centuries.
But while it provides a militant leadership in lieu of anything better, the barmy and backward ideology of Islamic religion does not understand or sympathise with communism either.
The Chinese workers state answer to a widespread and dangerous problem has been a systematic reeducation programme, necessarily using state force to impose it – usually involving one to two year stays in purpose built camps, with language training, skills training of all types and political training in the collective discipline of a workers state.
As discussed previously, (EPSR No1581) there can  be a Leninist criticism of precisely what the training programme embodies, or to be more accurate, does not embody, and particularly the absence of revolutionary philosophical understanding.
Far from simply countering the militancy and suppressing it, much better would be to develop an educational perspective explaining why jihadism and “terrorism” is rising world wide, (in response to the crisis) and transforming the militants into trained Marxist revolutionaries where possible, able to take up these questions throughout the Third World.
But that would also mean Beijing itself taking up these issues far more clearly.
Whether or not it does, the humane Uighur programme stands in stark contrast to the West’s treatment of similar jihadism,  bombing, droning and destroying, and simply inflaming the anger and hatred.
If there are accusations to be made of genocide, put them at imperialism’s door, as with the latest revelations about the Covid vaccine deliberately withheld from the Islamist Hamas-led Palestinian population in the Gaza strip, which is nothing but one giant concentration camp controlled by the Zionist colonial occupiers of this heroic people’s own land, stolen from them at gunpoint over the decades since 1947:     
  
Israel’s agreement to secretly provide coronavirus vaccines for the Syrian regime to sweeten a prisoner swap deal has raised questions about whether limited global vaccine supplies could see doses become a new form of diplomatic currency.
The clandestine deal made last week, and confirmed by an Israeli source who asked for anonymity, reportedly involved Israel paying Russia $1.2m (£850,000) to send Sputnik V jabs to Syria.
While it is not clear how many doses were bought, the deal is highly contentious...
It has also spotlighted Israel’s unwillingness to provide the millions of Palestinians who live under its control with significant doses, especially if it is quietly agreeing to secure potentially hundreds of thousands for an enemy state.
On Saturday, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed reports of the deal by saying “not one dose of Israel’s vaccines was used”. However, he did not comment on whether his government had paid for Moscow’s supply.
Netanyahu had previously said the trade involved the repatriation of a young Israeli woman who crossed the border into Syria. In return, his government had returned two Syrian shepherds it had been holding. It is not clear why the Israeli woman entered Syria....
The Syria vaccine deal might increase pressure on Netanyahu to use a similar method with the Hamas militant group in the blockaded Gaza Strip. The families of two Israeli soldiers whose bodies are held in the enclave have been calling for the government to use vaccines as a bargaining chip.
It will also open up the country to already established criticism from rights groups and UN officials that it should be offering vaccines to all Palestinians it occupies anyway, and without conditions.
Israel has allowed the Palestinian Authority to send 2,000 vaccine doses into the blockaded Gaza Strip, and has transferred 5,000 of its own Moderna vaccine to Palestinian medical workers in the occupied West Bank.
However, most Palestinians will have to wait much longer for vaccines. Meanwhile, all Israelis over 16 are eligible and nearly half the country has received at least one shot, allowing the government to gradually reopen the economy.
Israel says the Palestinian Authority, which is attempting to source millions of vaccines, is responsible for inoculating Palestinians.

This sick racist-supremacist nazi-logic, which will potentially lead to hundreds or thousands of Palestinian deaths, (on top of all those butchered and maimed anyway, month after month, year after year, by Zionist bombing, shelling and shooting, sporadically and in occasional all-out onslaughts) is all the more depraved for being carried out by the “country” which has used its heavily US-subsidised wealth and power to be first to inoculate the whole population (if they are Jewish), and has vaccine to spare.
The Western propaganda machine is now even more desperate to rubbish China as such callousness and even deliberate murderousness has been exposed across the board by the pandemic responses.
Not only does China continue growing, its example during the year of the pandemic has been in sharp contrast to the incompetence, prevarication, indifference and sometimes sinister callousness of the capitalist5 ruling class to the lives and safety of those at the bottom of the heap.
Wilful indifference and even encouragement of casual and dangerous bravado in the mass population in Brazil, in the US and effectively in the UK through prevarication, vacillation and “eat out” idiot schemes,  on top of a sinister “cull the old” policy (hiding behind “mistakes” in sending the sick into care homes etc – some mistakes!!!!!) have seen huge death tolls; half a million dead in the US; virtually the highest (“world beating”) per thousand death toll in the UK; hundreds of thousands in Brazil. Ghastly scenes with coffins left by the roadside in some countries have compounded the agony.
And in China, with the largest population in the world of some 1400 million, the fatality count has been just 4632.
Sensitivity, competence, organisation and resilience as the pandemic has developed has prevented nearly all the possible devastation from the disease, even though it began in China before anywhere else, was an unknown threat, and has had longer to spread.
As the EPSR has discussed from the beginning of the outbreak, the disciplined collective organisation of society in a workers state has demonstrated a capacity to cope with the virus disaster which cannot be matched by the chaotic individualist anarchy of capitalist “freedom” and its tradewar and profit-making imperatives.
Despite some initial wobbles by the local bureaucracy in Wuhan, where the outbreak first emerged, which were almost certainly caused trying to prevent panic by excessively heavy handed measures, (made a meal of by Western anti-communist attempts to blame China for the appalling results of Western indifference and incompetence) the country has demonstrated a calm, rapid and efficient system of lockdowns, mass testing (using quite simple temperature gun methods initially, but efficiently and universally applied), tracking, quarantining and where necessary, treating. 
Above all the collectively organised economy under a disciplined central authority accepted by all, was able to provide social and economic monitoring and checking, combined with support for those obliged to isolate,  which has suppressed the virus quickly and sharply and allowed the rapid return to almost normal life, including restoring economic activity.
Above all the whole society wanted to work together to stop the pandemic and safeguard its people.
Everything that all serious medical advice suggests as best practice was carried out, without the foot-dragging, croneyism, incompetence and callous disregard for the poor and the working class seen under capitalism.
But capital does not have people and their lives as the priority and  its class divisions make a mockery of its “all in this together” flannel, with only the interests of the rich and perhaps middle-class elements who service the rich, taken care of.
Not only can the rest go to hell in a handcart (or hospital trolley) but it suits the interests of a system in crisis to cull surplus workers and “unproductive” old people. 
But the contrast between capitalism and a planned economy under workers control, (despite the use of capitalism in a significant sector of the economy) cannot go unnoticed by the world’s masses, including in the “advanced countries”. 
So from the beginning the poison hate campaigning has been deliberately and consciously stepped-up, not only escalating the Uighur nonsense but blaming the Chinese themselves for the virus with a deluge of “fake-news” finger-pointing accusations of “letting it escape” or “cover-ups” etc deliberately and lyingly fostered.
But the World Health Organisation investigation, much hyped as “being blocked” says differently (in just the way the arms inspectors in Iraq in 2002-3 undermined the deliberate lies about WMD used to “justify” the war-invasion):
Much has been said of the politics surrounding World Health Organization’s (WHO)mission to investigate the viral origins of Covid-19. So it’s easy to forget that behind these investigations are real people.
As part of the mission, we met the man who, on 8 December 2019, was the first confirmed Covid-19 case; he’s since recovered. We met the husband of a doctor who died of Covid-19 and left behind a young child. We met the doctors who worked in the Wuhan hospitals treating those early Covid-19 cases, and learned what happened to them and their colleagues. We witnessed the impact of Covid-19 on many individuals and communities, affected so early in the pandemic, when we didn’t know much about the virus, how it spreads, how to treat Covid-19, or its impacts.
We talked to our Chinese counterparts – scientists, epidemiologists, doctors – over the four weeks the WHO mission was in China. We were in meetings with them for up to 15 hours a day, so we became colleagues, even friends. This allowed us to build respect and trust in a way you couldn’t necessarily do via Zoom or email.
It was in Wuhan, in central China, that the virus, now called Sars-CoV-2, emerged in December 2019, unleashing the greatest infectious disease outbreak since the 1918-19 influenza pandemic.
Our investigations concluded the virus was most likely of animal origin. It probably crossed over to humans from bats, via an as-yet-unknown intermediary animal, at an unknown location. Such “zoonotic” diseases have triggered pandemics before. But we are still working to confirm the exact chain of events that led to the current pandemic. Sampling of bats in Hubei province and wildlife across China has revealed no Sars-CoV-2 to date.
We visited the now-closed Wuhan wet market which, in the early days of the pandemic, was blamed as the source of the virus. Some stalls at the market sold “domesticated” wildlife products. These are animals raised for food, such as bamboo rats, civets and ferret badgers. There is also evidence some domesticated wildlife may be susceptible to Sars-CoV-2. However, none of the animal products sampled after the market’s closure tested positive for Sars-CoV-2.
After Covid-19, China brought in new regulations for the trade and consumption of wild animals.
We also know not all of those first 174 early Covid-19 cases visited the market, including the man who was diagnosed in December 2019 with the earliest onset date.
However, when we visited the closed market, it’s easy to see how an infection might have spread there. 
There’s also genetic evidence generated during the mission for a transmission cluster there as viral sequences from several of the market cases were identical. However, there was some diversity in other viral sequences, implying other unknown or unsampled chains of transmission.
A summary of modelling studies of the time to the most recent common ancestor of Sars-CoV-2 sequences estimated the start of the pandemic between mid-November and early December. There are also publications suggesting Sars-CoV-2 circulation in various countries earlier than the first case in Wuhan, although these require confirmation.
The market in Wuhan, in the end, was more of an amplifying event rather than necessarily a true ground zero. 
Then there was the “cold chain” hypothesis. This is the idea the virus might have originated from elsewhere via the farming, catching, processing, transporting, refrigeration or freezing of food. Was that food ice-cream, fish, wildlife meat? We don’t know. It’s unproven that this triggered the origin of the virus itself. 
Several “cold chain” products present in the Wuhan market were not tested for the virus. Environmental sampling in the market showed viral surface contamination. This may indicate the introduction of Sars-CoV-2 through infected people, or contaminated animal products and “cold chain” products.
The most politically sensitive option we looked at was the virus escaping from a laboratory. We concluded this was extremely unlikely.
We visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is an impressive research facility, and looks to be run well, with due regard to staff health.
We spoke to the scientists there. We heard that scientists’ blood samples, which are routinely taken and stored, were tested for signs they had been infected. No evidence of antibodies to the coronavirus was found. We looked at their biosecurity audits. No evidence.
We looked at the closest virus to Sars-CoV-2 they were working on – the virus RaTG13 – which had been detected in caves in southern China where some miners had died seven years previously.
But all the scientists had was a genetic sequence for this virus. They hadn’t managed to grow it in culture. While viruses certainly do escape from laboratories, this is rare. ..it was extremely unlikely this had happened in Wuhan.
When I say “we”, the mission was a joint exercise between the WHO and the Chinese health commission. In all, there were 17 Chinese and 10 international experts, plus seven other experts and support staff from various agencies. We looked at the clinical epidemiology (how Covid-19 spread among people), the molecular epidemiology (the genetic makeup of the virus and its spread), and the role of animals and the environment.
The clinical epidemiology group alone looked at China’s records of 76,000 episodes from more than 200 institutions of anything that could have resembled Covid-19 – such as influenza-like illnesses, pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses. They found no clear evidence of substantial circulation of Covid-19 in Wuhan during the latter part of 2019 before the first case.
Our mission to China was only phase 1. Investigators will also look further afield for data, to investigate evidence the virus was circulating in Europe, for instance, earlier in 2019.
Staggeringly the Western propaganda now even manages to turn the massive and generous vaccine aid from China on its head by declaring it to be “aggressive international diplomacy” - presumably in the “evil” way  Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition used a “comfy chair” for its torture?????  
Meanwhile Britain’s Tories cut their overseas aid leaving thousands more to starve in Yemen and elsewhere.
The quicker the revolutionary struggle is built to end this vile and depraved system the better.
Build Leninism 
Don Hoskins

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.

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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

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"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.)

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" 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."

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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.)

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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperia1ist struggles).

Xinjiang population growth best answers Western smear campaign on Uygurs
Recently, an anti-China pseudo-scholar from Germany named Adrian Zenz (who calls himself Zheng Guoen in Chinese) has published a paper titled “Sterilizations, iuds, and Coercive Birth Prevention: The ccps Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birth Rates in Xinjiang.” The paper cites false statistics and highly misleading sources, drawing a ridiculous conclusion that ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region are under the threat of “genocide.” However, his analysis and conclusion are neither in line with scientific research standards nor academic norms.
According to official statistics, the overall population in Xinjiang continued to grow steadily from 2010 to 2018. During this period, the population of permanent residents increased by 13.99 percent, among which the Uygur population increased by 25.04 percent, and the Han population 2.0 percent. Clearly, the growth rate of the Uygur population is nearly twice that of the overall residents and is way higher than that of the Han population. The Uygur population has increased by more than 2.5 million people in merely eight years. What kind of “genocide” is this? Zenz, with his anti-China stance, fabricated his conclusion without any basis. 
Nobody knows Xinjiang better than the local Chinese citizens. At present, the people’s livelihood in Xinjiang has greatly improved. Citizens there now live in peace and tranquility. And people of all ethnic groups are as united as pomegranate seeds. 
In the recent outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic in Xinjiang, the government has, as always, put humanity as the top priority. The government took quick and appropriate actions, providing nucleic acid tests and professional treatments free of charge. Thanks to such comprehensive efforts, China has put an end to the spread of coronavirus in Xinjiang with no deaths. Till September 4, there has been no infection for 17 consecutive days in Xinjiang and the whole of society is back to normal. 
The Chinese government shows the world with its real actions that the human rights that matter the most are “the right to life” and “the right to health.” Therefore, it is ridiculous to turn a blind eye to the facts and use population issues as a new lever to smear China, especially under such special circumstances when people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang are united against the epidemic. 
Some Western pseudo-scholars pursue double standards on human rights. But the truth is that their accusations related to nationality, religion and human rights have never been the real situation in Xinjiang. Now that the pandemic continues to spread in the West, Western countries had better spend more energy caring for their own citizens as well.
As a Uygur proverb goes, “The camel marches while the dog keeps on barking.” Lies and slanders will not stop China’s development. Western radical forces will not stop China’s development. Nothing will. We have faith that people of all ethnic groups will continue to follow the Party and stay united. The best response to those attacking China and its Xinjiang policy is Xinjiang’s stability, prosperity and harmonious development. 
Wang Yan is a lecturer of political science at Xinjiang Normal University. Peng Wuqing is a professor of political science at the same university. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn