Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.—V.I.Lenin
I.L.W.P. BULLETIN
Weekly newspaper of the International Leninist Workers Party (P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL)((GPO Regd.)   
No 653 Tuesday June 16 1992                                                                                                                        10p 

The contradictions of economic colonialism ready to explode

Nothing can come from US imperialist world domination but total international political chaos plus society's criminal degradation.

The fundamental inhumane flaw in the exploitation of people by immense conglomerations of privately-owned and privately-directed monopoly finance must create intolerable class-war alienation ultimately, - initially in the form of murderous nationalist wars.

Bush's humiliation in Panama is symbolic of many aspects of the complex and lethal crisis into which 'free-market' anarchy, greed, and bullying must eventually degenerate.

Panama itself is the very essence of imperialist hegemony, - ripped arbitrarily out of Colombia at the turn of the century by US colonial might and money to allow the American ruling class to build its 'own' canal for easing trade and military-strategic objectives in the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Americas.

Ever since, Panama has been effectively a US client state, dominated by the huge and wealth-creating Canal Zone under massive American military control.

The December 1989 invasion was just the latest in a never-ending record of US imperialist interference to tell nominally 'independent' Panama just what sort of government it should have, and how it should behave.

The American CIA's former chief stooge in Panama (especially during the period when George Bush was running the Agency), - Manuel Noriega, - had to be ousted because he had begun to show some of the same spirit of genuine independence from Washington tutelage as was pioneered by former President Omar Torrijos who was killed in a mysterious aeroplane 'crash' in the early 1980s just after his insistence on Panama reclaiming ownership of the canal had begun to really irritate Washington.

Noriega's independence was particularly galling to US imperialism when it began to offer friendship towards socialist Cuba, the concentration of all the American ruling class's fears, hatreds, and viciousness in the region.

Noriega was brutally overthrown on ridiculous charges of 'drug-running', - a huge business with heavy American financial involvement which Noriega had in fact helped the CIA to manipulate and control in its own subversive interests.

Since then, Panama has sunk back into its worst-ever period of mafia-run sleaze and criminality under the hopeless bourgeois buffoons shoved into office by the American invasion forces. 

Some flavour of this despicable and totally unstable decadence is contained in subsequent pages.

Bush's comeuppance in Panama City last week was richly deserved and will have electrified the entire continent in its anti-imperialist contempt for endless American manipulation and bullshit.

Even the tame capitalist press, which has been remarkably reticent about the dramatic significance of Bush's repudiation, - scorned instead of fêted as the conquering hero, - cannot but capture some of the rich flavour of national revenge which the crowds in Panama gained over their hated American bourgeois masters:

A US-Panamanian friendship rally in central Panama City turned into a riot last night, trapping President Bush and his wife Barbara in a frightening shambles of teargas clouds, gunshots and screaming people.

Mr Bush, who was due to make a speech at the rally in Porras Plaza during the four-hour visit to Panama, seemed rooted to the spot as he sat on the podium, watching thou
sands of people apparently running for their lives.

Riot police fired volley after volley of teargas at anti-American demonstrators trying to break into the square, as secret service helicopters and snipers watched helplessly.

As the panic grew, Mr Bush and his wife rose slowly to their feet, surrounded by their guards. The Panamanian president, Guillermo Endara, standing next to the Bushes, also seemed transfixed.

Suddenly, close by the press platform, a man went down in what sounded like a round of gunshots. He crawled frantically trying to get off the pavement and on to the road. People who were not already running panicked at the sight. Meanwhile, a group of about 15 US secret servicemen rushed into a nearby building, apparently looking for a gunman.

As the gas thickened, irritating eyes and mouths, the president and his wife were led away towards their motorcade. But with the surrounding roads blocked by demonstrators, onlookers, police vehicles, barbed wire and the remains of burning American flags, the presidential limousine was unable to pull away.

Women were screaming and crying, and schoolchildren who only a few minutes before had been rehearsing a happy birthday song for Mr Bush stood bewildered, painfully rubbing their eyes.

After what seemed an eternity, but what was in fact about 10 minutes from the original incident, Mr Bush's car finally streaked off down the road.

Meanwhile fighting continued between the police and the demonstrators who had begun the attempt to break up the rally.

The shambles in Porras Plaza came as Mr Bush was about to declare in a prepared speech that by ending the dictatorship of General Manuel Noriega he and President Endara had embarked on a new era of democracy, freedom and partnership between the two countries.

From Panama's perspective, yesterday's visit appeared to have had a destabilising effect, the opposite of what Mr Bush had intended.

On Wednesday, a US serviceman was killed by unknown gunmen in an attack 30 miles north of Panama city.

Mr Bush was taken to the US air force's Albrook base, which had earlier been fired upon, where he gave the speech which he intended to make to the rally. "No little tiny left-wing demonstration is going to set your democracy back," Mr Bush declared, looking grim.

He said he and Mrs Bush would "never forget the warm welcome" they had received in Panama.

"Democracy doesn't come easy. But I could sense in that crowd today and amongst the leaders today the determination to perfect and see Panama's democracy come to total fulfilment ... the day of the dictator is over," he said.

Despite Mr Bush's remark about leftwingers, the demonstrators were relatives of the hundreds of civilians killed during the 1989 US invasion, according to sources here. 

They came mainly from the Chorillo slum razed by US forces. They were joined by other groups, possibly including Noriega sympathisers, whose theme is "national dignity" and who are opposed to the US military presence, the sources said.

Tension had been growing in the centre of the city all day. Columns of smoke rose into the air near the plaza, caused by tyres, bunting and flags set alight by protesters.

The trouble erupted when Mr Bush arrived and the demonstrators tried to break into the plaza, which was blocked off by police and paramilitaries. The protesters, chanting and singing, threw mangoes, bottles and pineapples. Police used batons to beat them
back, but then resorted to gas and chaos ensued.

A money-dominated racket just like anywhere else, bourgeois democracy in Panama is particularly corrupt, recently manipulated by the bizarre petulant child-bride of the gross, incompetent presidential crook Guillermo Endara, in a scandalous situation which makes the Rasputin-run court of the Romanovs (just prior to their revolutionary overthrow) look like a model of altruistic reason.

The staggering ineptness of Bush blundering around Porras Plaza blinded by his own side's teargas while getting derision instead of cheers for America's latest big-stick repression in Panama, coincided well with Washington1 s discomfort over Rio (see subsequent story).

The conditions for easy domination of the planet by the American ruling class are rapidly disappearing economically and politically. And with that is also evaporating the very authority which US imperialism once automatically commanded worldwide, - an extremely intangible quality but one which was extremely important to the whole style of the American imperialist epoch (which managed to rule without some of the obvious stigmas of direct colonial domination which had marked all previous reigns of dominant world imperialist powers.

The collapse of this authority is of crucial importance to the entire anti-imperialist struggle.

It is obvious that the loss of American financial and trading pre-eminence to the superior competition of German and Japanese imperialism is by no means the end of US determination to ruthlessly continue stamping its authority on the planet by hook or by crook.

But that it can no longer do so because of an automatic and natural domination arising out of the unprecedented military and economic pre-eminence which the USA previously enjoyed for so long, - is crucial.

It marks a significant boundary between the years of phony 'peace' under the vicious and murderous Pax Americana post-1945, and a period of brutally open inter-imperialist conflict to come which will utterly transform all of the idiotic petty-bourgeois prejudices about the 'new world order' and all of the other nonsense which has been deluding public opinion that the 'triumph of capitalism' has ushered in a new age of reason, cooperation, and democracy.

Just the opposite. The inevitable toppling of US imperialism from its unchallengeable role of automatic top dog by the relentless processes of uneven monopoly-accumulation and cut-throat competition, is unavoidably driving the planet towards its greatest-ever warmongering slump-crisis, potentially dwarfing inter-imperialist World Wars I and II in importance and scope.

Bush staggering from his humiliation in Panama to being scorned in Rio has completed a remarkable week of signalling the completely new constellation of international imperialist forces and relationships under which the whole world's attitudes to all of society's problems will begin to shift and change significantly more rapidly than before.

Without realising it, the US ruling-class bombast has indeed put its finger on things with its boasts about a 'new world order'.

But it is not the age of US imperialist triumphalism over all its rivals and over communism which the decadent American bourgeoisie had fondly imagined.

It is a new age of ruthless all-out inter-imperialist competitiveness with the unavoidable aim of bankrupting each other as the logic of all trade-war competition, imposing terrifying fascist-slump everywhere, and unleashing an avalanche of proletarian revolutionary struggle from the Third World to the First World.

Assumptions made about how the world is organised (and has to be organised in an epoch when, without thinking, most people automatically regarded overwhelming US imperialist power as being in the lead) will become totally different when
complete uncertainty and anarchy is the umbrella over 'freedom'.

Nothing that happens under one leadership can ever be the same again when either new leadership sweeps aside all the old assumptions, - or, even more chaotically, - when no leadership at all is capable of asserting its power over the world, -
as will happen now.

The Rio concerns bring this out splendidly, resulting in one of the biggest leaps in world cynicism levels ever recorded, and a major step in entirely remoulding how people think about trying to solve some of the world's problems.

Environmental issues are a real worry; but this collision in Rio with the unstable realities of world imperialist power struggles and the merciless dictates of the monopoly-capitalist market, will do far more for waking people up to the stark truths about the international class struggle, opened up by the nastiness of imperialism's pathetic rivalries.

As even the capitalist press had to admit, the real concerns of the major powers at the Earth Summit were all about knifing each other in the back, and not at all related to the urgent requirements of environmental protections:

A senior administration official, naming Japan and Germany and implying a criticism of Britain, said the summit was in danger of turning into a circus notable for the developing world's anti-American rhetoric and the bad faith promises of US allies.
 
"There's been too much focus on rhetoric and not enough on actions," the US official in Washington said, accusing countries such as Germany and Japan of pursuing "international decision-making in a politically correct fashion". He said that other countries, including by implication Britain, were not acting in complete good faith in agreeing to sign summit accords such as the biodiversity convention.

The US is concerned about the open-ended financial commitment European countries completed the encirclement of the US at Rio yesterday by coming to an agreement on the global warming accord, as well as the biodiversity convention. Britain is to sign both treaties in common with other EC members, and is party to an EC-led move to call for tougher measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions despite US opposition. Japan has also indicated that it will line up against the US at the summit. The official said Mr Bush would stress the importance of the private sector and the role of free markets in defining exactly what summiteers meant by "sustainable development".

Doubts about saving the planet's ecology will, of course, soon be giving way to mass concern about avoiding the armageddon of a Third inter-imperialist World War.

American colonialism is obviously not going to be deterred by a few catcalls in Panama. Washington is actively safeguarding a dollar-dominated worldwide fortress-America in preparation for expanding the existing low-key trade war, fought politely around the conference tables of the GATT organisation, into an all-out cut-throat competition of currency unions, tariff barriers and trade embargoes, well on the way towards shooting war.

The sordid brutality of US domination over Panama and the incurable interconnection of criminal degeneracy with the thug-like stoogery needed in local mercenary politicians bought up by American money, - is the shape of all things to come, - not changing past realities of capitalist decadence and exploitation, but no longer needing to cover it over either.

Mexico provides another example of how capitalism itself sees future US imperialist aggression going, - openly revealing the de facto colonial relationship at the heart of all imperialist influence:

In the days preceding Easter Week, the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari activated a decree according to which the country's exchange houses now have exclusive rights to all buying and selling of foreign currency above a $3,000 limit. All transactions below that will be able to be carried out in any kind of commercial establishment. Retail stores, pharmacies, hotels, supermarkets. and so forth, will be able to accept dollars in payment for goods or services.

The government took advantage of one of the most important vacation periods in the country to impose its "monetary opening," which the dollar can now circulate as common currency. And on the first day of Holy Week, PRI Sen. Jesús Rodríguez y Rodríguez announced that for the new congressional period, the government would present a bill to eliminate three zeros from the peso (1,000 would now equal 1), and thereby establish the Aztec Plan announced in 1986 by then Finance Secretary Jesus Silva Herzog.

The Aztec Plan is designed to eliminate the nation's monetary sovereignty, leaving it under the "tutelage" of the dollar. The move was precipitated by threats of a run against the peso, itself the result of delays in signing the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Thus far, it isn't clear where the peso-dollar parity will be fixed, but it is known that the plan includes a devaluation of the peso—which could be as high as 30%—after which the parity would be set.

The objective of the Salinas "monetary reform" is to establish that the Mexican government be prohibited from issuing any national currency that is not entirely backed by the dollar. For example, for every 3,000 pesos (current parity) that circulate in the economy, the central bank should have $1 in its possession. All surplus "retail" dollars in circulation inside Mexico will have a life of their own and will be legal tender.

This will eliminate the existence of a sovereign monetary, credit, and financial system, and will turn Mexico into an economy addicted to dollars, like Hong Kong and Shanghai, historically known as drug-money laundering paradises controlled by British finance. It will also put Mexico just one step away from what happened to Panama's monetary system. In Panama, the balboa is the name of the legal currency, but it is nothing other than a U.S. dollar bill.

President Salinas had already given indications of his plan. Last March, speaking before the National Association of Mexican Importers and Exporters (Anierm), Salinas maintained that the solidity of the peso is measured by the fact that international reserves then accumulated at the Bank of Mexico "represent a figure superior to all money in circulation" in the national economy. This means that the government already has more dollars than pesos.

But the mastermind of this plan, who has been working on it since 1983, is the director of the Bank of Mexico, Miguel Mancera Aguayo.

Last year, during a presentation organized by the New York Federal Reserve on "Currency, and Trade," Mancera spoke of the conditions that would be required to be able to establish a "fixed parity." One of those conditions. insisted Mancera, is that "the country whose currency is to be used as reference, be an important trade partner, or that the country that is linking its currency, conduct its foreign trade in the reference currency."

Another of Mancera's conditions was "to establish legal limits to the primary expansion of credit. In extreme cases, the statutes of the central bank could permit currency to be issued only against the purchase of a specific foreign currency.... This rule would equal, in a certain sense, adopting the reference currency as the domestic currency."

Mancera's commitment to the virtual annexation of the Mexican economy to that of its northern neighbor couldn't be clearer.

In September 1982, when President José López Portillo nationalized the country's banks, he fired Mancera as central bank head because the latter had proposed the creation of a new monetary unit to be called the "Mex-dollar," through which every peso in the banks would be automatically converted into dollars. According to the former President's memoirs, he snapped his fingers at Mancera and told him, "You're out, Mancerita, you're out."

Nonetheless, "Mancerita" returned to the Bank of Mexico in December 1982 with the Miguel de la Madrid government, and not only remains with the Salinas administration but is now on the verge of achieving his dream: the establishment of the dollar as legal tender in Mexico. If that dream succeeds, Mexico's national economy could be turned into a formidable drug-money laundry, along the model of Britain's Asian dependencies.

And what can Germany or Japan do about these enormous colonial-power advantages which American imperialism had already effectively provided itself with while Germany and Japan were still obliged to limit their horizons under the stifling postwar moral and political curbs placed on their expansion by US military occupation?

All they can do is repeat, virtually the same old military expansionism which German and Japanese imperialism had to conduct pre-war because of the same total colonial control of the planet which the big Western imperialist powers had established then just as now.

Mesmerised, the Western capitalist press can hardly believe this is all happening again, - and is certainly closing its mind to contemplating what these developments might ultimately add up to:

A SMALL group of angry demonstrators gathered outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul yesterday to protest against the passing by the upper house of the Japanese Diet of a bill.

Similar hostile reactions were heard from other parts of Japan's former empire, reflecting unhappiness at the prospect of seeing Japanese armed troops abroad again.

China's official Xinhua news agency has declared that the despatch of Japanese troops abroad will contravene Japan's constitution, which renounces war. South Korean political parties, remembering their country's suffering under Japanese rule from 1910 to 1945, have warned that the law will open the door to remilitarisation.

Its Asian neighbours' fears have been increased by Japan's slowness to apologise and niggardly payment of reparations for the atrocities committed by its armies.

Yoshiuke Tajima, a political journalist with Asahi Shimbun, contrasts Japan's meanness in paying the equivalent of only £100 million with Germany's generosity in paying £42 billion in compensation to the victims of Nazism.

But the criminal fascist nature of the basic capitalist system has never altered, and the free market must inevitably continually revert back to open warmongering nazism and colonial tyranny the moment that its grave international and internal contradictions begin to approach all-out trade-war and shooting-war crisis.

The capitalist system itself provides all the evidence needed of the basically criminal character of the private-ownership 'free market'. 

Mafia protectionism is endemic, and when quiet profiteering-terror and 'benign' colonial tutelage are not sufficient to keep a basically anarchic system under some kind of order, then more deliberately-organised state-nazi ruthlessness is required, - and is always on hand, secretly prepared for well in advance, - as these astonishing capitalist-press revelations about the 'free-world' Gladio fascist network demonstrate:

IT ALL started at the end of the last war. On 27 January 1949 Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, set out the grand strategy in a top secret and personal letter to Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian Socialist Prime Minister who was later to become secretary-general of Nato.

Under the aegis of Britain and the US, a secret network of recruits was to be set up all over the continent. They were to be provided with caches of radios, money, and weapons.

If the Red Army did overrun Western Europe and Western armies were defeated and forced to flee, there would be someone left with intimate local knowledge who could receive orders from abroad, send out information and go into action against the Soviet occupation forces.

Their role was to be serious and totally clandestine. They were to be known as 'stay-behinds'. This continent-wide operation, which became known as Gladio, also had the task of keeping an eye on what were considered domestic threats to Western democracies by agents of the Soviet Union. In the post-war years when Moscow-line Communist parties were strong, particularly in France and Italy, that task was challenging. It was to lead to particular abuses. Although the networks were initially set up at the initiative of democratically elected national leaders, they soon took on an independent life of their own so that even commanders- in-chief, defence ministers, prime ministers and presidents were unaware of what they were doing.

The network and their caches were to remain ultrasecret until 1990. General Bernard Rogers, the former US commander of Nato, for instance, says he was unaware of the details. 'The organisation of any stay-behinds must have been at the national level and not at the Nato levels' he comments.

The lid was lifted a little in November 1990 by the Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who had strongly denied the existence of Gladio for well over a decade. In a statement to parliament in Rome, Andreotti became the first major politician to talk publicly of the project.

At the same time the letter, a copy of which is in The Observer's possession, throws light on what became an increasingly important factor in the Gladio operation — the rivalry between the British and the Americans.

Menzies continued: I have always regarded American participation in the defence of Western Europe as a matter of capital importance. I am, however, convinced that all effort, American not excluded, must be integrated into an harmonious whole. Should, therefore, the Americans wish to pursue with your Service certain preparations to meet the needs of war, I regard it as essential — and I understand that I have your agreement — that these activities should be co-ordinated with my own. Such co-ordination, moreover, will prevent undesirable repercussions with the Western Union Chiefs of Staff. I have already indicated to the Head of the American Service that I am ready to work out plans for detailed co-operation with him on this basis, and I therefore suggest that any projects formulated by them should be referred back to Washington for subsequent discussion between the British and American Services in London.

The correspondence should, Menzies suggested, be regarded as 'highly secret'. Early the following month Spaak wrote back to Menzies agreeing with his ideas but begging Britain and the US to get their act together.

"I agree with you that it would be highly desirable that the three services (British, American and Belgian) should collaborate closely. If two of them, the American and the British, refuse that collaboration, the situation of the Belgian service would be extremely delicate and difficult."

As the years went by, the stay-behind network, which ended up as a semi-detached operation of Nato, extended across Europe, the British taking the lead in Belgium, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and the Iberian peninsula, the Americans elsewhere. The fact that various powers involved were not members of Nato — such as Switzerland — did not hinder Gladio being extended to their territory. The names of all the stay-behinds were lodged for safekeeping in London and Boston, Massachusetts.

THE extreme secrecy and lack of supervision of the Gladio networks by elected governments meant that time and again they were to fall victim to right-wing extremists inside and outside the Western security services, who set their own political agendas and acted on them.

The way down that slippery slope was typified by the attitude of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's chief of counter-intelligence. According to his biographer Tom Mangold, Angleton was convinced that Harold Wilson and Willy Brandt were Moscow agents. His black list of pro-Communists also included Henry Kissinger, the Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson and Averell Harriman, a former US Ambassador in Moscow and Governor of New York.

A US military field manual published for the guidance of its officers stated: 'There may be times when host-country governments fail into passivity or indecision in face of Communist or Communist-inspired subversion and react with inadequate vigor to intelligence estimates transmitted by US agencies...In such cases US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince host-country governments and public opinion of the reality of insurgent action and assess the counter-action.'

In Belgium, for instance, all evidence points to the fact that a US-born Gladio agent, Wood Gardiner, infiltrated the Belgian pacifist movement and persuaded some of its members in 1984 to steal shells from the missile base at Florenne. When the theft was discovered it did the pacifist cause no good at all.

More important were the apparently random shootings in Belgian supermarkets which ended with a particularly nasty incident in 1983 in the town of Aalst, a few miles from Brussels, which became known as the Brabant-Walloon massacres. Senator Lallemand has linked the killings to 'the work of foreign governments or of intelligence services working for foreigners, a terrorism aimed at destablising democratic society'.

■ One day in 1984 a party of US Marines set out from an airport north of London. Highly trained men, each fluent in one Eastern European language, they parachuted to their secret rendezvous and were met by an agent, a local bank manager, who offered them guidance. They lived off the land for a fortnight, hiding from the local civilian population as they stalked towards their prey. Stealthily they approached their objective and opened fire, killing a warrant officer. One of the Marines lost an eye in the operation.

Their language skills were not much use: the objective was the police station in the sleepy southern Belgian town of Vielsalm and none of the Marines spoke French.

Martial Lekeu, a former member of the Belgian gendarmerie who was close to the investigation of the atrocities, that members of his own force were involved in the murders and that official inquiries into it were aborted.

The British authorities, leaders with Washington in the scheme, are refusing all comment on Gladio.

Meanwhile, at least one British family still mourns a victim of the darkest chapter of Gladio, a series of bombings a decade ago which were at first attributed to the Red Brigades.

The largest, at Bologna railway station on 2 August 1980, claimed 86 lives. Harry Mitchell, a civil servant, and his wife Shirley, of Bloomfield Road, Bath, lost their daughter Catherine, who was 21. She died in the blast with her 22-year-old fiance John Kolpinski, from Bristol. Her body was so disfigured that it was identified only by the Miss Selfridge label on her blouse.

This explosion was part of a series of atrocities which left at least 300 dead as bombs went off in the Piazza Fontana in Milan, on trains at Brescia and on the Naples-Milan express in a tunnel south of Bologna. The Mitchells are outraged that Britain is refusing to extradite back to Italy one of those sought for questioning in Italy about the crime, Roberto Fiore.

Fiore, now 33, has lived freely here in Pimlico since 1980, running a prosperous accommodation agency and mixing in extreme right, anti-semitic circles. There is a strong suspicion that MI6 is grateful for information Fiore was able to give them about Lebanon, where he learnt some of his terrorist techniques, and is blocking efforts to question him.

The Mitchells got no satisfaction when they wrote about the Fiore affair to Mrs Thatcher in Downing Street in June 1985. But the other day they were been brought up to date on British government thinking. On 29 March, Sir Patrick Mayhew, then Attorney-General, explained in a letter to the Mitchells' MP, Chris Patten, how British justice could do nothing about sending Fiore back.

The Italian railway bombings were blamed on the extreme Left as part of a strategy to convince voters that the country was in a state of tension and that they had no alternative to voting the safe Christian Democrat ticket. All clues point to the fact that they were masterminded from within Gladio.

Francesco Cossiga, who stepped down from the presidency of Italy in April, helped to organise Gladio when he was Interior Minister. He recalls how Britain and the US collaborated in setting up the network in Italy in 1951, 'concerned with what might happen to Europe if it were invaded'.

He traces the official formalities at the inauguration of Gladio by the principal figures of the Atlantic Alliance. At the instigation of the Supreme Commander Allied Forces Europe, the first statute of the clandestine planning committee to oversee Gladio was approved.

'It was agreed that three countries, the US, France and Britain, would be permanent members and the rest would be associate members — that meant Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece and Turkey. Italy was invited to become an associate member. Italy turned down this invitation and instead asked to become a permanent member, but did not get an answer at the time. In 1956 Germany joined.' Cossiga adds: 'It was standard policy of Nato to deny the existence of anything that it had been agreed to keep secret.'

He described how he was Interior Minister when Moro was kidnapped. He contacted Merlyn Rees, then Britain's' Home Secretary, for help and together they visited the SAS headquarters in Hereford. Thus Gladio in Italy was seeking help from British forces involved in training Gladio personnel so that the Italians could put an end to an Italian terrorist action launched with the knowledge of Gladio itself.

Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a convinced Fascist who was a member of the extremist Ordine Nuovo organisation and had close links with Gladio, has testified to us of his personal involvement in such schemes. Now serving a long sentence in Parma prison for his part in the killing of three carabinieri in the village of Peteano, he talked despite the Italian authorities' efforts to prevent access to him.

'You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game,' he said. 'The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the State to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the State cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.'

Vinciguerra recounted how the authorities covered the traces after the killing of the three carabinieri.

'A whole mechanism came into action — that is, the carabinieri, the Minister of the Interior, the customs services and the military and civilian intelligence services accepted the ideological reasoning behind the attack.

'The commanders of the carabinieri foiled a thorough investigation of the Peteano affair for years' he claims. 

'It was more convenient to cover it up than to turn on those who killed their comrades. All the members of the Red Brigades were known by the police, the carabinieri and the intelligence bureaux and no one made any attempt to stop them. So you see, "revolutionary warfare" should not be seen as being directed against Western democracy but rather as the means of defence adopted by Western democracies and implemented cynically and indiscriminately.'

The gravest charge against the Gladio project is that it cooperated in — or at least did nothing to prevent — the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro, a former Prime Minister of Italy. Moro, a Catholic and Christian Democrat, was known for his view that the Italian Communist Party should be brought closer to government.

It is well known that Moro died in March 1978 at the hand of the Red Brigades. What is less understood, but borne out by a number of well-informed witnesses, is that the Red Brigades were deeply infiltrated by Western intelligence. At the time of Moro's killing the principal leaders of the Brigades were in prison. Colonel Oswald Le Winter of the CIA, who served as a US liaison officer with Gladio, goes as far as to say that the planning staff of the Brigades was made up of intelligence agents. From his prison cell, Vinciguerra agrees.

How was it that Colonel Guglielmi, a senior figure in Italian intelligence, was on hand in the Via Fani in Rome when Moro was kidnapped and his bodyguards were murdered? Why did Guglielmi say he was there by accident on the way to lunch with a friend when the kidnapping happened at nine o'clock in the morning? Why was it that the bullets which killed the bodyguards were of a type only used by the Italian special forces?

Decimo Garau, an army doctor and friend of Cossiga, told us how he had a week's training at Poole with British special services, practising parachute landings in the English Channel before visiting the SAS at Hereford.

No less important were the continuing concerns about the political strength of the Communists. Senator Libero Gualtieri, head of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into Gladio, told us: 'When Gladio was started, the Americans would often insist in their briefings, their meetings, that the organisation also had to be used to counter any insurgencies.'

Gualtieri explained how the secret service tail soon began to wag the government dog. He cites the case of Amintore Fanfani, Prime Minister six times, and Giovanni Spadolini, also Prime Minister and Defence Minister, neither of whom was informed of Gladio. 'To a large extent Gladio was hidden from the politicians because we allowed a situation in which the secret services had the task of informing those in power and not vice versa.'

LICIO GELLI, head of the P2 freemasons' lodge, who fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, was one of the greyest eminences in post-war Italy. He later became enmeshed with the Vatican in the Banco Ambrosiano swindle. After the war, he was recruited by Canadian occupying forces to work in the 'stay-behind' operation being set up throughout Italy. There were, he told us, 250 Gladio squads, each consisting of nine men.	

'Many came from the ranks of the mercenaries who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and many came from the fascist republic of Salo. They chose individuals who were proved anti-Communists. I know it was a well-constructed organisation. Had Communist strength grown in Italy, America would have assisted us, we would have unleashed another war and we would have been generously supplied with arms from the air.'

He is convinced that the Italian authorities let Aldo Moro go to his death. 'I think Moro could have been saved. Everything can be salvaged in Italy if someone wants to salvage it.'

As Gladio winds down and governments on the continent declare they have shut down their parts of the operation, the silence in Whitehall and the almost total lack of curiosity among MPs about an affair which Britain was so centrally involved are remarkable.

It is beginning to emerge in Britain how routinely ensconced in the normal run of things was the gross crook Robert Maxwell, the known criminal target of full authority surveillance which, however, did nothing at all about his bent money making rackets, - they were just routine for all business, and not the issue.

The only things that concerned the official surveillance was whether Maxwell's crooked businesses were marked by British loyalty or some other foreign national loyalty, - in which case they would be exposed as 'illegal' (i.e. unpatriotic). If he had been proved to be a true British crook, then the surveillance would have been called off.

What a bunch of crooks.
Gerry Mole

US imperialist leadership on the defensive in Rio

The latest spin of the Bush weathervane, towards petulant xenophobia against those "people at Rio" who don't understand the living the world owes to the consumerist lifestyles of (some) "American families", will be correctly understood by America's rivals as signalling a shambolic retreat on yet another aspect of the stricken giant's "world leadership" posturing.

The feeble dog-in-the-manger tactic of deciding to show up at Rio after all, instead of the planned sulk at home, solely in order to spoil the party for everybody else underlines better than simple absence would have done the startling weakness of the Bush regime's bluster when it has to deal with anything beyond officially designated "pariah states".

This retreat from leadership, and the likelihood that Germany and Japan will increasingly take the lead when it's a question of using "environmental" and "development aid" money and muscle as the chosen mode of political manipulation and economic exploitation, is what most needs to be grasped about Bush's Rio antics.
Other aspects of the story - the gross hypocrisy of the man who campaigned on a green ticket in the Eighties, and the willingness of the US ruling class to see countless Third World families go to hell rather than infringe the "consumer sovereignty" of "American families" (in LA's ghettos too, or don't they count?) - are worth noting too, as further damning evidence of the nervous vacillation of US ruling circles and the ruthless, selfish irrationality at the heart of all imperialism.

But the real news remains that, in a world in which imperialist crisis is mounting side by side with the renewed leadership challenge from Tokyo and Bonn, to such a pitch that only the most decisive and consistent leadership from Washington could offer any prospect, however temporary or fragile, of shoring up the precious "consumer sovereignty" of the lucky minority, Bush is choosing this moment to retreat from yet another arena of world leadership, pausing only to foul the nest before departing.

Of course, the stench of Bush's arrogant assumption that US consumer needs - (translate: the needs of US capitalism to shore up its profit rates and see off market rivals) - justify transforming the rest of the world into a toxic waste tip, is matched by the stinking hypocrisy and self-delusion of green reformism and the cover it affords for imperialism.

"Bio-diversity" regulations may look like a good way of slowing the wanton destruction of the planet's organic variety. But why would any section of imperialism want to throw its weight behind measures that could impede its one-sided commodity production efficiency, at the moment when increasing that efficiency (by turning the exploitation screw on workers and resources) is a matter of life-and-death survival?

One explanation must be the need to establish "responsible world leader" credentials - especially necessary if you are drawing negative comment by conquering traditionally Anglo-saxon-controlled market areas and discarding constitutional restraints on the free exercise of military muscle. And "greener-than-thou" restrictions on trade can also give a temporary protectionist advantage smelling sweeter than open anti-competition tariffs. 

Who could object to cleaner cars or safer meat?

Beyond that, the might of US imperialism is now looking to simply dictate terms to the Third World for the exploitation of their resources over the heads of the UN talking shops, abandoning the pretence of offering quid pro quo crumbs as bargained for by the "South" in the original "biodiversity" first draft. Although this contemptuous sidelining of "world government" illusions in favour of America First sets a tone which Germany and Japan are bound to follow themselves sooner or later, there could meanwhile remain serious advantage for these trade rivals for the moment to present themselves as selfless champions of responsible world environment policy.

But "bio-diversity" regulations and the like can be of more direct assistance in the imperialist exploitation of Third World resources, by treating those resources as some kind of supranational global reserve over which the green game-wardens of the developed world have the right and duty to exercise control. The sick joke of the "white man's burden" is reappearing in the form of the "onerous duty" of imperialism to "save the Third World from itself".

Ominously for imperialism, some of the less supine bourgeois opportunist leadership in the Third World is itself pointing out the hypocrisy of having ore rule for imperialism and another for local capitalist rackets. When resources are already claimed as the private property of imperialism, it is seen as heresy against the capitalist ethic to insist that the owners display social responsibility in their exploitation of those resources; but when the resources in question are not as yet brought directly into the net of complete imperialist and ownership and control, but are in the first instance being exploited by the no-less predatory, destructive and planless operation of local market forces - armed and hungry bands of gold-panners terrorizing local Indian populations, logging companies riding roughshod over native land rights to sell timber to the highest bidder, the poaching to extinction of wildlife species etc. - then suddenly the chatter about private property and national consumer sovereignty is hushed, and all the talk is of "our forests, our rivers, our earth, our common inheritance".

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical monopolies look to "bio-diversity" legislation to keep "our" forests stocked with enough variety of fauna to keep the medicine cabinets of the West profitably bursting, whilst primary health care goes to the wall for everyone else.

The lopsided relationship of the human species with the rest of nature is not going to be put to rights by imperialism faking a conversion to green values, with or without American participation in the farce.

Nor would the "if it moves, save it" hysteria of middle-class conservationism be any kind of solution, even if it were not doomed to impotence. A rational relationship for humanity with the rest of nature cannot be akin to that between curator and museum, or keeper and zoo.

The development of matter in motion is everywhere and always through contradiction, through unity and conflict. In the development of organic nature, this has taken the form of random variation within a developing genetic stock coming under the influence of step-by-step natural selection.

Long before the arrival of our species, countless other species have become first endangered, then extinct, as their ability to go on producing members capable of surviving long enough to reproduce came into contradiction with the changes in the rest of the natural world (other animals, climate etc).

With the advent of human social evolution, the transformation of the world through labour has accelerated the changes in the natural environment, hastening the transformation of some species (selective breeding) and the dispatch of others (destruction of habitat, overhunting).

The division of all productive human societies (after the false "primitive communist" dawn) into exploiting and exploited classes has culminated in the extremes of alienation of the final imperialist phase of class-divided human "prehistory".

For that reason, the present epoch sees the greatest ever human influence over the rest of the material world combined with the most alienated, lopsided and senselessly destructive exercise of that influence.

But this epoch is the epoch of war and revolution, the final agony of class-division, the revolutionary conclusion of human "prehistory".

Only the material triumph of Leninist science through the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism will finally make it possible to get beyond both the obscene waste and destruction of capitalism and the pernicious idealism of the green-reformist "solutions" to the problem. As the professor's remarks indicate, the hoarding mentality which wants to hang on to the evolutionary status quo like grim death and catalogue everything in sight is not only living in a morbid dreamworld but actually gets in the way of anyone trying to make rational choices about species preservation where it really counts.

Only with the revolutionary defeat of imperialism and the building of communism will the undoubted capacity of the human species as a whole to engage with the rest of matter in motion in a fully rational manner, drawing the unity-and-conflict relations into the light of science for all to see and act upon, at last begin to come into its own.

By that time, there will be nobody left to argue that original sin dooms man to destroy paradise, that the waxing of social productive capacity can only ever compound the sin, that "only man is vile", and that our only hope of forgiveness from God or Gaia is to keep very still indeed and minimize our material influence over anything - and penalize mightily anyone that tries to break ranks and carry on developing and changing. All these doomladen middle-class Canutes demanding that matter in motion stop moving will themselves be extinct.

Meanwhile, however, with imperialist crisis still deepening and the WW3 culmination of sharpening rivalries yet to be dealt with, this gloomy middle class idealism will still try to submerge the retreat from leadership represented by Bush's Rio tantrums beneath the shock-horror flutterings of the greens, and to hide the glee of America's rivals at this cack-handed performance beneath their official sanctimonious pose of "concerned world citizens".

But the sordid collapse of US prestige, and the inability of any section of world imperialism to offer real solutions to the deepening crisis afflicting the whole world, will soon be preparing the vast majority of mankind with no property stake in imperialism to demand and accept the only rational leadership possible: revolutionary Leninist science. So build the ILWP. Dominic Hull.

Bankrupt RCP Trots turn to violence to stop revolutionary debate

The old revisionist and reformist left which tagged along with capitalism is as bankrupted and paralysed by the third great imperialist crisis as the mainstream bourgeois leaderships. And like them it is ready to turn to violence to cover over its inarticulacy and to prevent revolutionary science developing.

Nowhere was this better demonstrated than at a supposed 'open forum' weekend 'school of Marxism' held by the RCP on June 15-14. Shouting down of speakers with a revolutionary view was then followed by open thuggery as the same were set upon by gangs of these petty-bourgeois 'politically-correct' monstrosities. 

Shirts were torn, punches thrown, kicks aimed and threats made to 'kill you if we hear any more'.

This was the result of a challenge to the smug middle class RCP's denunciation of supposed 'bad bits of Lenin' which were 'too authoritarian'. The RCP claimed to be in favour of 'open workers democracy' in the last speech — before virtually beating up the challengers.

Violence used this way, to suppress urgent and vital revolutionary discussion has got nothing to do with justifiable defence of workers meetings from fascist disruption. It is itself fascistic being used to stop debate. And it the more disgusting being done at a meeting posing as a public invitation to explore 'prospects for change' as the RCP pretentiously, and unrevolutionarily, titled its 'summer school'.

Growing use of fascistic methods can be expected from these small-brained scum because they have absolutely nothing to say as imperialism's crisis deepens and there is no room any more for the 'harmless play' of the pseudo-left pretending to alter capitalism for the better. Any real changes to capitalism, it is becoming increasingly obvious, are impossible, - except its complete overthrow by the revolutionary working class; and that is what scares the academics, dilettantes, left-posturing yuppy types, reactionary homosexuals, 'lifestylers' and opportunist bureaucratic careerists who make up the collapsing remnants of the Labour Movement left and its Trotskyist and revisionist offshoots.

Imperialism is more and more obviously once again on the same downward path into slump chaos, civil war squabbling, poverty, trade war and fascist reaction that preceded the eruption of the two previous great crises this century (and the Franco-Prussian war in 1870). The great monopoly triumph of US dollar imperialism which was established by the 1939-45 shoot-out, has been steadily eaten away by the vengeful and determined enterprise of the defeated Japanese and German bourgeoisies.

Despite all the 'great Labour Governments' and promises of the 'labour movement', and all the posing and militancy of the Trot and revisionist left, the fantasies of the great comfortable post-war boom have proved to be just that. Ordinary people have achieved nothing within the orbit of capitalism. Degradation, collapse and exploitation are still the promise for the future under the cutthroat law of market forces (ie. monopoly capitalism). And it is all that much more rotten and corrupt than ever before, promising a WW3 to outdo even the 1939-45 horrors.

As Marxist science predicts, the titanic monopoly competitors must crash repeatedly into each other in the 'free market' battle for ever diminishing markets where anything can be sold at a profit.

And war is the unstoppable end point, especially as capitalism overproduces, creating 'want in the midst of plenty' and ever greater mountains of commodities lying unsold.

So intense has the renewal of imperialism's cutthroat armsrace destructive competition become that the USA has had to ease back its Cold War posturing which, while a real-enough endless hostility to, and subversion of, the workers states, - was also a useful tool for keeping a 'foot on the neck' of the major rivals (including troop displacements permanently in Germany, Japan, UK etc). But the Cold War NATO posturing was too expensive in the face of the trade wax difficulties now facing US imperialism.

With the ending of this easy US world domination has come ruling class uncertainty and loss of confidence. All the old mechanisms of the 'democratic' system's apparent 'consensus' for the rule of the bourgeois consumerist order (in reality, dictatorship via press and television, education, police, secret security actions like the N. Irish Ml5 death squads, courts, control of finance, job blacklists, etc, etc) are collapsing, from apathetic elections to exposures of 'miscarriages' of justice (Birmingham 6, Judith Ward) and the chaos and loss of 'tradition' in the Royal circus. Internationally the old illusions in 'progressive' bodies like the EC and UN, or 'environment conferences' are equally under fire. US presidential authority is so undermined that a 'no policies' candidate like Ross Perot can fill the vacuum.

Most of all, the 1000 and one variants of class collaboration with the imperialist order, - with promises to effect 'change' by working within the system (or on its fringes) or in peaceful coexistence with it, - have been marginalised.

There is no room for costly democratic niceties in the middle of slump and developing war.

Open bourgeois diktat over the working class will become increasingly obvious as the US ever more brutally maintains its New Order 'right' to world domination. 'National interest' will be followed by 'emergency powers' and 'wartime necessities'
and fascistic 'do it or be beaten' in all the major imperialist rivals.

Ultimately this will provoke upheavals as the LA riots give a foretaste, though until a full revolutionary understanding is forged and fought for by the working class, chaos will not turn to overthrow of the ruling class.

Old class-collaboration 'reformism' will be squeezed out of existence. The only use for the Trots and the like will be ever more obvious suppression of revolutionary discussion.

Ironically the first victim to the New Order was the revisionist nonsense of Moscow peaceful coexistence, which without the phony 'balance' to prop it up with defensive necessities, has given way completely to bourgeois ideology and the consequent economic chaos and nationalistic hatreds that come with it.

Everything depending on that 'Cold War balance' has gone too, especially all the lefts who posited 'slow change' within the imperialist countries under the umbrella of 'Soviet strength' (e.g. liquidated CPs).

The hate-filled Trots have also been discredited. They endlessly put off revolution in favour of 'political revolution in the USSR' because 'imperfections' supposedly made communism unpopular elsewhere. Now it is clear that such calls only ever meant counter revolution they are in the open, as part of imperialism's armoury.

The issues are more sharply stated now; there are no excuses about imperfection; it is either argue for revolutionary change, — or try to stop it.

Which is why any real analysis or hint of it arouses such anger with the likes of the RCP.

Their only way forwards is to avoid drawing any attention to reality, and especially the dimwitted notions that Moscow was somehow simply capitalist 'just like the West' a position they share with the SWP. As Bulletin 651 most recently pointed out, it is impossible to explain why the Gorbachevite upheavals took place if what existed in the Soviet Union was already some kind of cleverly-worked capitalist order. Why change a going concern for uncertain 'market' prospects?

Building a 'revolutionary' movement, while standing against revolutionary theory is tough. For the RCP tricksters, the answer is a kind of left version of Thatcherite yuppiedom - all style, semi-official rallies, guest speakers like the Benns and others of the old Labour left, right-on discos, and lardings of 'politically correct' wording. Style in plenty but, no content at all.

Instead 'theory' is supplied as academic obscurantism taking as its basic assumption a hatred of all the real achievements of the working class from the 70 years of the Soviet Union to Cuba and China and Vietnam, though never directly spelt out.

At the £14 per head two day summer school the opening sessions confirmed this picture totally, with never a mention of the inter-imperialist crisis and warmongering (which dominates mankind everywhere at present), and most especially never a mention of the working class and the need for it to take power by revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

And far from celebrating the demise of the Labour party and the old reformist stranglehold on working class leadership (tying workers to the capitalist parliamentary framework which is as anti-communist under Labour as it is under the Tories), the scene-setting by Keith Thompson consisted of a long whingeing regret that the old days have passed away. 'The Tories 4th election result felt pretty bad to me' he whined, going on to declare that pessimism rules the day, and bizarrely 'the absence of change'. Why, the old certainties of the Guardian being left, and the Telegraph right, had disappeared in this stagnation.

In the real world the picture is of nothing but change and disintegration on a world scale; only for those who hanker after a niche in the capitalist order would the discussion
need to centre on 'recreating the left' to win change (reformism) as Thompson suggested.

And as for supposing that any of the capitalist press has ever been anything but reactionary, however 'liberal' its phrasing this too underlines the cosy petty-bourgeois soul of these anti-communists.

So does their whinge that there are no voices for the working class, or leaders, to be heard 'anymore'. But there never were - only the false misleadership of reformism, and class collaborating (anti-revolutionary) trade unions.

Small wonder that an ILWP intervention in the discussion calling for the development of a revolutionary perspective based on a living development of Marxist and Leninist understanding was the only one to receive a round of applause, - from the audience.

But small wonder too that with their shallow and basic anti-revolutionary nature so easily shown up, the RCP should start seeking to silence even the most basic debate on the maturing of the imperialist slump.

Plans ripened in the afternoon when a discussion on Marxism used a long almost incomprehensible academic thesis about 'bureaucratic totalitarianism's (!) versus 'national particularism' (!!) to smuggle in an 'explanation' for the West's triumphalism over Gorbachev and his liquidation of the Soviet Union. Western joy (and in fact its intense Cold War hostility for 45 years and anti-Sovietism since 1917 including two major wars) were apparently a 'mistake'.

The tricky Trots need this sophistry to explain away their endless calls 'for the overthrow of the Soviet Union throughout its hard-defended history, which in the RCP's case was always done under the 'explanation' that a new kind of 'Stalinist' capitalism had come into being.

But new type or not, the concerted western Cold War unanimity of hatred for the USSR would be difficult to explain if the USSR was a kind of capitalism too, just like the West.

(If a third kind of property was meant, other than private ownership of the means of production or communal working class ownership, then a challenge to all of Marxism is implied which the RCP declined to do).

It was when the ILWP challenged this nonsense with the much simpler idea that the West (which does still dominate the world) is very astute, especially about its own class interests, and knows a workers state when it sees one, that the eruptions occurred.

As the ILWP explained that it is the misnamed Revolutionary Communist Party's hatred of the dictatorship of the proletariat (admitted by the same speaker in an account of Lenin's "bad bits of authoritarianism") which requires such a convoluted notion as the idea that the USSR was not a workers state, - growing interruptions were made and the chairwoman stopped the contribution (even though it had come in the course of several, patiently waiting its turn) on grounds of 'time limitation'.

A protest when the next speaker then ran twice as long was used as an excuse to eject the ILWP - but violently, despite an indicated willingness to leave quietly. A five-to-one ratio of thugs then indulged themselves in an orgy of arm twisting, punching, kicking and shouted threats - down five floors of the City University and continued in the street outside.

A dim awareness of how this neanderthal behaviour exposes the RCP's bankruptcy of political response led the 'chair' to then come out and attempt to placate the situation, agreeing to ILWP demands for a refund of the anyway excessive £14 entrance fee and the cost of a shirt ripped up in the fracas.

But even without the violence, nothing can cover over the RCP's criminal and deliberate attempts to prevent the development of Marxist understanding.

To quote Bulletin 652 

'Imperialism's greatest safety valve lies in the hopeless disarray of the would-be leadership parties of revolutionary theory without which the socialist transformation can never be accomplished.

Revisionism and Trotskyism have played havoc with serious study of revolutionary theory, either taking it all for granted as the old Third International used to do when in reality its line was organising the total destruction of Marxist-Leninist understanding on the planet; - or else criminally exploiting spontaneous anti-communist sentiments among workers of limited trade-unionist (petty-bourgeois) consciousness to infiltrate such totally disorienting non-Marxist idiocies as the 'new Soviet ruling caste', or the 'new Soviet state-capitalist ruling class', and the non-existent 'political revolution' to bring down these monstrosities, etc, whilst all the time practising a parasitic 'entryism' to take workers even further away from a serious understanding of the need to fight for revolutionary theory as the only possible basis for a united proletarian struggle.

Total sectarian philistinism has ruled on the 'left' for far too long. 

And only a widespread resumption of serious constructive polemics will assist the labour movement in the West to start to grow up.'

But the last thing the RCP wants is for the working class to become clear about anything - for then what place would these petty bourgeois have to strut and pose? 

Hence the violence.

But the working class party will be built anyway - and revolutionary theory will be relentlessly developed as the concrete struggle against imperialism unfolds. Build the ILWP and its fight for revolutionary theory.

Don Hoskins.