Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
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No 1012 Sept 15 1999                                                                                                                10p 

Red scare stories and brutal reprisals are still the only sad political weapons in tottering capitalism's locker. Fascist butchery in Timor will hugely damage Western ideological self-righteousness. Blairism's propaganda crisis mounts menacingly, underlining the need for a complete ideological revolution to spark reorganised class war for socialism. The SLP's eager allegiance to traditional Revisionist muddle and anti-theory backwardness is the WORST service possible to the working class, - part of the long counter-revolution, and a deliberate obstacle to the revolutionary understanding of the future. Spark cover-up for Scargill plumbs the nastiest depths of museum-Stalinist rottenness. Anti-EU Luddism spells total confusion for workers. The EPSR's record demonstrates - on however small a scale - the power and influence of Marxist-Leninist science. Patten confirms the Marxist view of Irish national liberation triumph. By banning Leninism - the SLP digs its grave. All 'solidarity' work is a deathtrap without Leninism.

The sick rightwing hysteria wanting to jail 87-year-old Melita Norwood for loyalty to her class political convictions sums up the hate-filled viciousness of the imperialist system at bay.

Regardless of the West's supposedly "historic triumph over communism", the freemarket international rat-race for tradewar profits continues lurching from mini-crisis to mini-crisis, with the clear threat of an uncontrollable total collapse at any time.

Indonesian fascist savagery against the people of East Timor is the latest evidence of the utterly ruthless inhumanity of the bourgeois 'free world' once things start to go wrong in a big way.

The Jakarta military-gangster regime, the darling of the West for having mercilessly butchered communists for 35 years to keep the world's fourth-largest-state safe for international profiteering, and exploitation, could not quite keep all the corners of its vast territory sticking down after the recent jobs and living standards devastation of the economic meltdown in SouthEast Asia.

Powerfully armed by the West and never discouraged from its fascist ruthlessness, the military-gangster regime calmly drew up plans to slaughter or incarcerate the remaining population of East Timor (not already butchered by a 20-year repressive war) for having the temerity to vote for independence and separation from Jakarta in the UN-ordered referendum.

But the whole of the 'free world' is humiliated too, and possibly far more significantly. For the bourgeoisie's usual 'human rights' drum-beating against communism has only just been deployed to hysteria levels against the remnants of the Yugoslav workers state for refusing to instantly capitulate to the separatist stunt by armed Albanian mafia gangsters to rip from Serbia its 1,000-year cultural heartland of Kosovo province. 

Having recreated the German Nazi imperialist blitzkrieg from World War II in order to brutally devastate Serbia from the air (merely for having tried to police the separatist guerrilla war in order to protect Serbian sovereignty and the ancient Serbian population of Kosovo from the Albanian mafia land-grab), all under the screaming propaganda-nonsense about "protecting the human rights of the Albanian minority in Serbia", - now the same Western imperialist power sits doing nothing as its Indonesian fascist friends blitzkrieg East Timor just for daring to assert its human rights (to reverse Jakarta's illegal seizure of the territory 20 years ago).

Worse than just sitting doing nothing - while this barbaric carnage against a defenceless population continues, the hypocrite NATO powers,(led by the New Labour stooges for imperialist warmongering aggression who are fast becoming a new version of Germany's 'National Socialists' whose 'new movement' helped imperialism into war and out of insoluble economic crisis in the 1930s), - are continuing to defend arms sales to the Indonesian military gangsterdom, and refusing to even consider diminishing this cosy trade relationship with rampant fascism.

The foul humbug of Western 'humanitarianism' has suffered humiliating propaganda damage in the course of this reversal to the imperialist 'New-World-Order' hopes of always being able to cover difficulties up and murderously but quietly 'run things smoothly' without major upsets.

Manipulating and pacifying the East Timor self-determination revolt has gone far from smoothly. In fact, it has become a total public-relations disaster for the racket of worldwide Western-imperialist domination through its network of fascist-stooge 'friends', armed to the teeth and liberally supplied with endless billions of dollar-aid in order to keep down revolt and above all to keep out communism.

Melita Norwood's exposure at this painfully sensitive time for the bourgeoisie's criminal-mafia way of running most of the Third World only reminds Western reactionaries of just how vulnerable, and PERMANENTLY close to catastrophic collapse into generalised war and revolution their rotten exploitation system really is. Hence all the pathetic vilification about how "betraying one's country is no joke, - especially to the most evil terror regime the world has ever known", etc, - i.e. the world's first workers state, the Soviet Union.

But spying has absolutely nothing at all to do with this outburst of poisonous flag-waving patriotism and vengeance-seeking. Soviet science would have developed nuclear weapons on its own to counter the attempted Western imperialist atomic-bomb blackmail of the USSR, regardless of how many spies did or did not succeed in keeping concealed in important positions in order to be able to warn the Soviet Revolution of the latest counter-revolutionary plots by the West against the building of socialism.
What the Colonel Blimp fogeys hate about Melita Norwood is her class-loyalty to communism's ideals (albeit sadly never updated to the struggle for contemporary Marxist-Leninist genuine REVOLUTIONARY understanding from the disastrous Revisionism into which Moscow and the Third International's British followers (typified by the Morning Star reformism and class-collaborationism) eventually led the movement)).
  
She remains proud that she worked to prevent Western imperialism from destroying the young Soviet workers state, and she would do it all again, if she had to, to protect Cuba from counter-revolutionary subversion, sabotage, and warmongering threats, she confirms.

And never did it occur to Melita Norwood to want paying for her services to the world's first workers state. It was the right thing to do, she says. After so much recent treachery to the heroic and epoch-making struggle of the world's first workers state to overcome sustained imperialist warmongering encirclement and economic/political hostility and Cold-War siege conditions, Melita Norwood's profound understanding of basic historic class-war truths is moving and instructive.

The spitting venom her story has drawn from reactionaries arises out of the same bilious frustration with "things not running smoothly" which has forced panicking Blairism into a renewed spin-doctoring overdrive only two years after New Labour's initial publicity gimmickry was launched to tremendous press fanfares in order to try to dazzle the discontented British electorate with....effectively nothing at all.

The PR bullshit has not only already worn thin. This government by brain-washing propaganda has begun to crumble irreparably, as it was bound to do. At some point, calling for 'ethical' foreign policy and for a new 'morality' in social standards and human relationships will simply explode right in Blair & Co's faces as the underlying reality of continuing capitalist exploitation domestically and imperialist domination internationally sinks home.

The desperate need, - in East Timor, the rest of suffering Indonesia, Britain, and everywhere else, - is for a clear Marxist-Leninist perspective of the overall REVOLUTIONARY/WAR crisis that the imperialist system is relentlessly dragging the world into yet again, - the third in less than a century.

As the Review was explaining last issue and as an EPSR philosophy seminar has just debated, the situation demands REVOLUTIONARY UNDERSTANDING and REVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVES above all else as the ONLY leadership for the world's working masses which ALONE can possibly counter the anti-communist and anti-revolutionary propaganda grip that the imperialist system survives by everywhere, fundamentally, (prior to having to impose actual fascist dictatorship openly as was tried currently in East Timor by the West's Jakarta friends).

Whether it wants to be or not, the overall influence and the leadership track record of the SLP is to be part of the notoriously massive fake-'left' in the West (composed of scores of different Revisionist, Trotskyist, social-pacifist, museum-Stalinist, anarchist, and single-issue reformists) which has always been of crucial assistance to bourgeois ideological control of the working class by its philistine muddleheadedness on the basics of Marxist-Leninist science's indispensability if the aim to 'abolish capitalism', - and therefore the aim to overthrow the ruling class, - is to be taken remotely seriously.

Scargillism is old-fashioned 'left' trade-unionist opportunism prepared to tolerate a bit of Trotskyist or museum-Stalinist academic 'theory' provided it does not try to interfere too much with Scargill's one-man-band way of running things. The fight for total Marxist-Leninist revolutionary understanding cannot be tolerated around the SLP at all because of its inevitable eventual absolute contradiction with Scargillism's consciously and deliberately small-minded political limited horizons.

In this sense, Scargillism is identical to all of the various Revisionist and museum-Stalinist remnants still creaking along futilely at the twilight of the era which was supposed to bring worldwide advances to socialism (many purely peacefully, based on a parliamentary majority coalition of 'left' Labour and Communist MPs) as a result of the triumph of longterm 'peaceful coexistence' which would ultimately 'prove the superiority of the socialist Soviet system in economic competition with the West's capitalism' to see which was best at providing the 'good life'.

Such anti-Marxist Revisionist nonsense has remained frozen as in a time-warp ever since, despite this anti-revolutionary (and therefore essentially class-collaborative and anti-communist) nonsense having self-destructed humiliatingly with the shameful self-liquidation by the Soviet bureaucracy when Gorbachev & Co decided that market economics was more successful after all.

Frozen alongside this 'peaceful road' bilge has been much else of original Stalinist anti-Marxist Revisionist rottenness such as the censorship or elimination of all polemical debate or alternative thinking (distinct from the Leninist intolerance of deliberately undisciplined factional disruption) which has meant virtual brain-death for these Revisionist remnants,(and the impossibility of re-explaining the REVOLUTIONARY nature, essentially, of ALL world developments until the imperialist bourgeois system is finally totally dismantled world-wide.)

Scargillist 'left' trade-unionism and lifelong 'left' Labourism (until very recently) is an inseparable and incurable part of this same Revisionist time-warp, AND WANTS TO REMAIN SUCH.

The SLP's ideological protection, such as it is, by museum-Stalinism and assorted other 'lefts', cannot possibly now divorce itself from Scargillism which in class terms has clearly willingly established itself party-politically as just another variety of Revisionist dead-endism.

Last issue examined Spark's ultra-Stalinist bravado (in declaring the NATO blitzkrieg and loss of Kosovo a "triumph for Yugo-slavia over imperialism") as a ludicrous, if novel, way of trying to conceal the Scargill apologetics needed to cover up the failure of the SLP's lame mixture of social-pacifism and Yugoslav defencism which not only could not stop the imperialist warmongering but could not avoid helping to thoroughly confuse and disorient the international working class either.

The Spark's defence of Scargillism over the SLP's shameful and abortive national-chauvinist stance against the European Union in the recent electoral campaign is even more blatantly culled from discredited Revisionist nonsense.

"Qualitatively different from the 'little Englander' bourgeois nationalist stance" 

the Lalkar-dominated SLP youth paper declared in a bold assertion of Scargillism's "firm internationalism". 

"Proletarians of all countries",

it goes on promisingly, followed by correct note-striking about 

"no future for the working class under capitalism", "revolutionary socialism", and even "dictatorship of the proletariat" to replace the "current dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", etc, etc.

The only problem is that the SLP did not campaign remotely on any 'overthrow capitalism internationally' basis; its electoral appeal was more than an epoch away from any such programme.

What the SLP said was: "Get out of the European Union, it is a bureaucratic bosses club which destroys British jobs and industry", roughly speaking.

Solution to this plainly anti-revolutionary, chauvinistic, class-collaborative, little-Englander stance that was ACTUALLY adopted by the SLP???? Old-fashioned, fake-'revolutionary' anti-monopoly REFORMISM from the 'Alternative Economic Strategy' period of Revisionist capitulation to petty-bourgeois parliamentary make-believe. Thus:

"This massive European bureaucracy can only function under conditions of monopoly capitalism as a giant capitalist super state to facilitate the more efficient extraction of surplus value. The EU could bring nothing other than increased burden of exploitation and misery to the working class." 

etc, etc. Allied to the slogan: 

"Vote Britain's SLP in to get Britain out"

(or "vote us in to get us out" as Scargillism more slyly put it), - this 'anti-monopoly' strategy is the purest Luddite arcadianism and capable only of stirring the greatest possible economic and political confusion and the worst possible national-chauvinism.

1. Monopoly capitalism is all there is anyway. NOTHING has ever been able to stop its relentless advance (read Marx), and nothing ever will. It is a comparatively simpler (!) and easier (!) project to OVERTHROW the capitalist system than to prevent capitalism's relentless monopolisation tendencies. The one is possible (1917, etc). The other is IMPOSSIBLE.

2. The 'giant capitalist super state' has been relentlessly developing for just as long. US imperialism, and its UN, IMF, World Bank, and NATO, etc, agencies have far more centralised monopoly-imperialist STATE power today than any capitalist (or any other) power in history has EVER had, - and by a colossal margin. The German and Japanese state-organised and directed conglomerations of monopoly-capitalist power are incomparably greater, potentially, too than ever before. In absolute terms, even the French and British monopoly-capitalist states are more powerful than ever before too, although obviously comparatively weaker now than their rivals.

3. The "increased burden of exploitation and misery to the working class" that all these monopoly developments bring needs heavily qualifying, for this is NOT the average worker's perception in the leading imperialist countries, where the majority mass of voters routinely elect pro-monopoly capitalist parties to state power, including in Germany, France, Italy, and Britain, etc INSIDE the European Union, - deliberately helping build up the EU because it has meant INCREASED INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIVENESS (and therefore higher 'living standards' (as crudely measured under capitalism)) against rival imperialist groupings.

As stated in "vote us in to get us out" to avoid falling more under the domination of specifically GERMAN monopoly-capitalist power (which rules the EU, effectively) in circumstances where there is no connection at all, implied or stated, between voting not to be in the EU and the overthrow of the capitalist system itself, - the only possible meaning of such a campaign is that British monopoly-capitalism is somehow BETTER for the working class, if British workers could have the choice back again between this or being in the 'European bosses club'.

This is PURE nationalism, - and the most benighted, class-collaborative, luddite, Mary Poppins-ish nationalism at that, - wishing to return to a completely non-existent "better" time before the evils of multi-national imperialist corporations took over, - which most laughably would NOT BE STOPPED anyway, even if Britain DID leave the European Union again. Ford, General Motors, the Japanese, and the Germans would STILL dominate the car industry with not a 'British' manufacturer in sight. The US-Australian Murdoch would STILL dominate newspapers and commercial broadcasting; American monopoly-corporate 'bosses' technology would STILL dominate the computer and software industries, etc, etc, etc, etc.

This electoral stance was just rotten little-syndicalist chauvinism and luddism of the most dismal ANTI-revolutionary kind. What 'international' revolution was called for? (the only meaning of 'internationalism' in Marxist-Leninist science which these Sparklets also pretend to support in this 'left' cover-up of Scargill jingoism)??? None at all. There is no 'revolution' anywhere in any scrap of SLP manifesto or policy.

But, it will be argued,'the Spark Youth do have a lot of rrrev-olutionary enthusiasm, and they mean well'.

Do they? This is 'Great Leader' apologetics of the crudest, most dishonest, cover-up kind, - gleaned straight from the annals of the most monstrous Stalinist-Revisionist voluntarist bureaucratic brainlessness imaginable, - directly out of the handbook of the most catastrophic and humiliating FAILURE and TREACHERY to the real International revolutionary interests of the working class worldwide that anti-Marxist REVISIONISM will ever have perpetrated by the same means of censorship, cover-up, assisted character-assassination, and blanket refusal to criticise the leadership "on principle". What a loathsome museum-Stalinist farce, typical of the Revisionist petty-bourgeoisie. The working class needs such 'leadership' like it needs a hole in the head.

Building a Revisionist-Centrist party as the SLP is and was clearly always going to be, was not a problem for Marxist-Leninists under the original Scargillite prospectus which openly encouraged communists to join and feel at home.

The whole game changed dramatically, totally, and irrevocably from the moment that Scargill decided that he could not coexist with an elected communist vice-president who was editor of a weekly Marxist-Leninist publication which had already 20 years polemical experience behind it, and which by its own constitution was obliged to comment on developments throughout the WHOLE of the labour movement the ENTIRE time. Nor would Scargill accept the retreat from editorial prominence of the elected SLP vice-president which was offered; nor even the resignation from the position of vice-president, which was also offered. Scargill, with no explanation provided, knew that he had to shut up any too-prominent influence inside the SLP of the EPSR's powerfully anti-Revisionist understanding. He reacted to the GENUINELY revolutionary analysis and agitation of the EPSR just like any fake-'left' syndicalist bureaucrat with Revisionist connections.

Far from retreating from the fray injured, the EPSR has done by far its best work ever in analysing the meaning and significance of Scargillism's break with New Labourism and what communists should do about it, and then in exposing the specific pattern of NUM-ist anti-theory philistinism once Scargill's treacherous attack on too-great a communist influence had begun.

Even better still was the subsequent follow-up work in tracing Scargillism's essentially anti-communist Revisionism and anti-revolutionism through the Euro-election opportunist chauvinism and then the abysmally-ignorant and shamelessly patched-together social-pacifism and Yugoslav defencism later on.

Marxist-Leninist scientific struggle has only ever successfully advanced through polemical conflict with alternative MIS-leadership being imposed to addle workers understanding. The EPSR, and what influence it can build, is at its most vital in undertaking such struggles, particularly as and when matchable or disprovable by the actual developments in real subsequent unfolding.

Uniquely, for example, the EPSR has been completely out on its own in successfully analysing for 20 years the essential British imperialist retreat from colonising part of Ireland because of l) the termination of Empire needs to control Britain's "Irish back door" or to subsidise any longer the colonial warmongering industries centred on Short Brothers and Harland & Wolff in Belfast; 2) the international acceptance of the self-determination rights of the national-liberation struggles which were dismantling empires all over the planet; 3)the supremacy of Sinn Féin's revolutionary understanding of all this and of the inevitability of the IRA's success in giving the necessary jolt to moribund Orange colonialism and the dithering paralysed British Establishment in London to finally impose some 'time for change' realism there; 4) the irresistible popular attraction in all these circumstances of the national-liberation and Irish reunification drives which Sinn Féin smartly kept alive and brought up-to-date; 5) the crucial working-class revolutionary orientation of Sinn Féin's broadly socialist political appeal in these particular circumstances; 6) the unbeatability of the heroism of the IRA volunteers and their increasing daring and expertise, matching growing Republican political maturity and confidence; 7) the unbeatability of the Republican movement's political prisoners in surviving the monstrous pressure and brutal tyranny of the concentration camps; the hunger strikes; the torture barracks; the shoot-to-kill terror; the supergrass treachery; the midnight raids and round-ups savagery; the inhuman plastic-bullet and baton-charge repression of any and every attempt at 'democratic' protesting; the cruel and endless deliberate disruption of all life for the nationalist Irish population; etc, etc, etc.

Against every rotten ratbag Revisionist and Trotskyist fake-'left' sneer and defeatism, belittling Sinn Féin's 'green nationalism' or its 'careerist opportunism', or its 'terror fetishism', or its 'bourgeois class-collaborationism', or its 'personal ambitiousness' among its leaders, etc, etc, etc, - the EPSR has consistently analysed the colossal importance to workers in Britain, Ireland, and worldwide of the REVOLUTIONARY anti-imperialist TRIUMPH, that the Sinn Féin and IRA struggles represented, and would eventually be SEEN by the whole world to represent.

Uniquely, the EPSR has analysed step-by-step for 20 years the deliberate snail's-pace retreat from colonialism in Ireland by DEFEATED British imperialism, the only basis on which it will finally become possible to break workers in Britain from their traditional jingoist nationalism, their imperialism-corrupted chauvinist arrogance, and their instinctive anti-Irish racism (or anti anyone else from a colonised background or other origins which can be patronised).

At the same time, the EPSR has never hidden its awareness of the obvious limitations (as far as a socialist revolution against British imperialist domination is concerned) of Sinn Féin's deliberately nationalist programme, and has not remotely fallen for the illusion that the defeat of the 'Northern Ireland' colonial tyranny, plus Good Friday Agreement steps towards Ireland's reunification, will make socialism instantly possible in Ireland. Exactly the opposite.

Only after completing the unfinished business of Ireland's national-liberation can the decks be cleared to begin seriously the final phase of class war in Ireland for a socialist workers state. The EPSR has never made any other analysis. False accusation have come from fake-'communists' desperate to cover-up their own defeatist and racist dismissal of the national-liberation struggle as "not being seriously anti-imperialist" as being "just a vehicle for Sinn Féin careerism”, and as''having now been abandoned as impossible by Sinn Féin and the IRA anyway" in "capitulating" to the "peace settlement imposed by the US imperialist New World Order", etc, etc (Weekly Worker & others).

The Patten Commission recommendations, virtually dismantling the colonial political standing of the RUC, is another nail in this incorrigible petty-bourgeois-defeatist coffin. There will still be capitalist-state rule all over Ireland, and it will still be a capitalist-state police force everywhere.

But crucially, there will no longer be two Irelands, except for continuing for a while in name only. The British colonised possession status of the Occupied Zone in the northeast corner is to be completely dismantled. Effectively, it means the end of the hated and criminally-unjust Partition of Ireland at bayonet-point, -(the rotten colonial legacy imposed on Ireland by a humiliated and vengeful British imperialism in 1921 for having been beaten by Sinn Féin and the IRA's first national-liberation war in modern times), - and the sole cause of all Ireland's difficulties since.

The influence of the EPSR's Marxist-Leninist scientific struggle is still tiny but it was powerful enough to prove just too successful inside Scargill's SLP. No other influence from the so-called 'left' had to be stabbed in the back so crudely, so hastily, and in such a degenerate lying manner. Inside the SLP, the EPSR's influence proved its point about the crucial role of Marxist-Leninist theory dramatically well, - in practical leadership, party-building, and spreading the most convincing socialist mass-understanding.

That is why it was stopped in its tracks.

Creeping around the SLP Lalkar-style, falling in with every scrap of Scargillist nonsense in order to avoid upsetting the Great Leader, is a mug's game. The further continuous development of a Marxist-Leninist scientific way of necessarily analysing all new events in the international class struggle, as they happen, is impossible if that is not the sole aim, - if a true analysis can only be put forward to see how it accords with further ongoing real developments PROVIDED IT DOES NOT UPSET THE LEADER. Such a joke is called museum-Stalinism, and in the long run historically, it has been an utter disaster for the working class.

Look at Russia now, for example. And even if it keeps the SLP together for a while longer, it will only be growing on sand, and will eventually crumble completely when facing major political difficulties. Without an agreed detailed revolutionary analysis of the world, any 'party' will be built on sand.

Nor is there any 'right time' to start speaking the revolutionary truth about the world. The revolutionary truth, - as best it can be hammered out and tested in practice, - is not only the ONLY means to ultimately successful party development. It is also the only real END of party development in the very long run. Building socialist revolutions and socialist states will be just episodic phases on the road to communism with its target of the triumph of reason, and what is rational. Start now.

The working class needs a mass party, but to begin building one with nothing in the cupboard but undebatable skeletons of Great Leader conceit and demagogy; museum-Stalinist lunacy; anti-communist single-issue hysterics from feminism to anarcho-ecology; etc, etc, etc, - all to be deliberately kept out of reach of any rational discussion wherever possible (by hook or by crook), - is only not a waste of time if it is being conducted with the fulltime conscious purpose of testing the SLP to destruction.

The increased solidarity-work opportunities which flow from the SLP being a larger more-identifiable party are best looked at from the angle of bewaring the notorious Revisionist death-traps such activities have fostered when unguided by strictly Leninist perspectives.

All political work is either the fight for Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory or it is rubbish. The haunting picture should never be forgotten of Fidel Castro, foully mis-educated by Moscow Revisionism, parading in Chile not just alongside Allende to celebrate the utterly illusory "victory for the peaceful road to socialism", but actually parading alongside Pinochet himself, who was deliberately brought into government while biding his time just waiting for the CIA's signal to launch the counter-revolution and massacre the cream of Chile's revolutionary working class, - a looming disaster obvious to any alert Marxist-Leninists the world over because of the persistent philistine ignorance by the Revisionists about the crucial role of the dictatorship of the proletariat, - something which the advanced working-class districts of Santiago were already spontaneously calling for.

The same catastrophe befell Grenada, with the same empty 'solidarity' visits and posturing going on all around, and then yet again in Nicaragua where it was again impossible to raise in these international 'socialist' solidarity circles the need for the Sandinistas to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and no bourgeois elections, - just like Castro wisely does in practice in Cuba, and long may the Cuban Revolution stick to it.

But how much of all this did the recent SLP delegation to Cuba discuss with the Castro party leaders??? Not one single word, it is guaranteed.

What is decisive for solidarity work, - like all political work, - is not party-size but Leninist understanding, which can only grow as a result of COLLECTIVE struggle. Build Leninism, not opportunist nonsense. RB

World Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles)

How the present generation of Republicans has fought for a New Ireland, and an end to the sectarian colonial Partition which left the Irish at the mercy of Orange discrimination and dictatorship, and British imperialist control mechanisms backing up that tyranny.

AS A YOUNG man, Michael Gaughan left Ireland to find work in England. Leaving Ballina in County Mayo he could not have guessed what lay ahead of him. The eldest of a family of six, he emigrated to England after finishing school at the CBS in Ballina. In London, he became an active Volunteer and it was while on a fundraising operation that Michael was captured.

Gaughan was sentenced to seven years imprisonment in the Old Bailey in December 1971 for conspiracy to rob £530 in a raid by republicans on a bank in Hornsey, London and possession of two revolvers. His first two years of imprisonment were in Wormwood Scrubs in London. He was then moved to Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight where his request for political status was refused and he was punished with solitary confinement for even daring to claim it. He was later moved to Parkhurst Prison.

In November 1973, the trial of the Belfast Ten for bomb explosions to London saw four of the ten begin a hunger strike immediately for political status and repatriation. Within days, the prison, authorities began force-feeding Dolores and Marion Price, Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly. They were brutally force-fed for 206 days. On 31 March 1974, Frank Stagg, Paul Holmes, and Michael Gaughan joined the strike.

Twenty-three days into his strike, Michael was force-fed for the first time. The method of force-feeding hadn’t changed from the days when Thomas Ashe died due to the brutality of it In 1917.

Another of the hunger strikers, Gerry Kelly, explained the process:  "Six or eight warders would enter the cell, pull the bed to the centre of the floor, surround me and then jump on me, pinning my legs and arms and grasping me by the hair. When they had control of my body they pulled me along the bed and up to the high metal bed end. At this point my head was forced backwards over the bar by pulling my hair until the neck was stretched straight...

“The doctor and the warder would then proceed to open my mouth. As time went by the methods changed little, but at first it was clumsy and crude; pulling my upper and lower tips apart in opposite directions; pressing down on my chin or pushing my nose upwards (this normally led to nosebleeds); pushing and grinding knuckles into my jaw muscles.

“If this didn’t work, large forceps were sometimes run violently along my gums to get me to open my teeth. They later discovered a subtle method by using a thin, hard plastic Ryles tube which pushed up my nasal passage. When it hits of the back of your throat it makes you want to vomit; once you dry-retch, your teeth part voluntarily; a wooden or metal clamp was violently thrust between my teeth.

‘When I overcame the urge to vomit and managed to keep my teeth closed, they discovered that by moving the Ryles tube back and forth, rubbing it against the sensitive inner tissue at the back of the nose, they could cause a searing pain. I can only describe this pain as like a hot knitting needle being pushed in between my nose and eye.

"Inevitably, they succeeded in opening my mouth on most days. They would then thrust in a wooden clamp, which contained a hole in the centre through which a rubber tube was fed into the throat. This part I always found the most frightening and it did not diminish through repetition. It is painful and if the tube goes down the wrong passage it can be fatal.”

The brutality of the force-feeding and resisting the doctors and the warders took its toll on the hunger strikers. It left them battered and bruised, drained physically and mentally. The physiological torture of this barbaric assault on a person also had an effect as one of the hunger strikers recounted to a relative at the time:

“The mental agony of waiting to be force-fed is getting to the stage where if now outweighs the physical discomfort of having to go through with it."

During his hunger strike Michael was force-fed 17 times, the last time on the evening of 2 June.

The physical toll on the hunger strikers is borne out by Michael’s brother John's statement of his condition when he last saw him: “His throat had been badly cut by force feeding and his teeth loosened. His eyes were sunken, his cheeks hollow and his mouth was gaping open. He weighed about six stone.”

Visitors to the hunger strikers were only allowed to see them through a glass screen, supervised by prison warders. In what must have been a very emotional visit Michael’s mother Delia saw him alive for the last time through this screen three days before his death.

On 3 June 1974, the prison authorities announced that Michael had died. They later explained that he died from pneumonia, a result of the force-feeding tube having pierced his lung and food lodging in his lung. Michael was 24 years old.

The manner of his death caused controversy in medical circles and the method of force-feeding was later abandoned by the British state. Ian Brady, one of the notorious Moors Murderers, claims in a document in Long Longford’s hands that he witnessed Parkhurst Prison's Senior Medical Officer and four other officers force-feeding Gaughan without the usual rubber tube shortly before his death. Brady had been in a cell near Gaughan and observed this brutal attack. When he threatened to give evidence at the inquest he was shifted to Wormwood Scrubs.

His death led to the British authorities making commitments to meet the demands of the remaining hunger strikers and the hunger strike ended shortly afterwards. 

The commitments made by the British were not fully honoured.

From the Isle of Wight, Michael’s remains were brought to London and on 7-8 June, thousands lined the streets of Kilburn and marched behind the coffin, which was flanked by an IRA Guard of Honour.

On Saturday 8 June, his remains reached Dublin, where they were met by tens of thousands of mourners. Under another IRA Guard of Honour, Gaughan's body was brought to the Adam and Eve's Franciscan church on Merchant’s Quay, where thousands more filed past as it lay in state.

The following morning, Michael began his long final journey home. From Dublin to Ballina, his cortège was met by thousands paying their last respects in every town and village en route.

After mass in Ballina Cathedral, the IRA paid its respects to a loyal soldier of Ireland, firing a volley above his coffin before it was taken to Leigh Cemetery to be buried in the Republican Plot.

In his last message to his republican comrades, Michael had said:  "I die proudly for my country and in the hope that my death will be sufficient to obtain the demands of my comrades. Let there be no bitterness on my behalf but a determination to achieve the new Ireland for which I gladly die. My loyalty and confidence is to the IRA and to those of you who are left carry on the work and finish the fight."

Michael Gaughan was killed by the prison and medical authorities of Parkhurst Prison on 3 June 1974, 25 years ago.

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

New Labour incompetence could still bungle the Irish peace agreement.

THIRTY YEARS on from the burning of Belfast’s Bombay Street, when the full sectarian force of the Orange state was unleashed on a defenceless nationalist population, the fundamental issues about the nature of society in the Six Counties have again been cast in stark relief.

The Orange Card is once again being played in an effort to block equality and justice for nationalists and to prevent movement towards a new society.

Thirty years on from the loyalist pogroms in the face of the demand for civil rights, the British government is faced with the same choices. Tony Blair's government can choose to capitulate in the face of unionist intransigence and aggression or he can support the widespread demand for democratic rights and political progress.

The former is the path which has been followed by all of his predecessors and which has demonstrably failed to bring peace. The latter is the promise which was held out by the Good Friday Agreement.

It is within this context that the current review of the implementation of the Agreement is taking place. The current state of crisis in the peace process should not be underestimated. The success of unionists in preventing the transfer of power and the establishment of the institutions weeks ago was a shattering blow to the Good Friday Agreement.

The unionists, who are clearly resisting any political change, have so far been successful in blocking the Agreement, but the primary responsibility for the failure to implement it lies with the British Prime Minister.

The peace process is doomed if if is subject to a unionist veto and the Good Friday Agreement cannot deliver equality and justice if its implementation is dependant on unionist approval.

Since the Good Friday Agreement was endorsed by referenda North and South, there has been no progress in its implementation and the entire political situation has begun to reverse.

There has been no progress on the equality agenda; no progress on demilitarisation; there is no freedom to live free from sectarian harassment; there is no new policing service.

Since the Good Friday Agreement was negotiated, David Trimble has reneged on one commitment after another. He reneged on the North/South institutions on 2 and 18 December, and on the establishment of the Executive in Downing Street on 14 May. He walked through one deadline after another, 31 October, 10 March, 29 March, 22 May, 30 June, 2 July and then collapsed the Agreement weeks ago.

Despite this, unionist politicians have has the audacity to attempt to portray republicans as the obstacles to peace and progress. In this, they have effectively been supported by Fine Gael leader John Bruton.

Gerry Adams slammed Bruton's approach to the peace process: "Mr Bruton's eagerness to attack Sinn Féin and to deny our electorate their democratic rights and entitlements is at odds with his alleged support for the peace process,” he said, adding that Bruton's attitude was "in stark contrast” to his attitude to unionism.

"The breaking of the Agreement and the breaching of the deadlines by the UUP, as well as the recent farce at Stormont, caused no outburst from Bruton.’

Adams accused Bruton of pandering to unionism while attacking republicanism. He went on: "It is this inability to see the big picture, to adopt inclusiveness and an acceptance of people’s democratic rights, which are the hallmarks of Mr Bruton’s approach to the peace process."

Adams was referring to Bruton's comments attacking Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s comments that Sinn Féin and the IRA are separate organisations. Bruton’s remarks came as unionists attacked Sinn Féin in the wake of the killing in Belfast of Charles Bennett. Several unionist spokespersons had blamed republicans for Bennett’s death. Following Charles Bennett’s funeral and reacting to the claims of republican involvement, Gerry Adams described the killing as a "terrible tragedy for the Bennett family. My thoughts are with them at this time."

The Sinn Féin MP for West Belfast added: "There has been a lot of speculation surrounding Charles Bennett's death. His family deserve to know the truth.

"For our part, Sinn Féin is against all killings.

"Regrettably there are those who are trying to use this tragedy to attack the peace process and subvert the Good Friday Agreement.

"They must not succeed.

"All of our efforts, our political will, must be focused on rescuing a peace process which is in serious trouble. That is Sinn Fein's commitment”

Responding to claims of republican involvement in, the Bennett killing by rejectionist UUP member Jeffrey Donaldson, Sinn Féin Assembly member for North Belfast Gerry Kelly said: Jeffrey Donaldson is no friend of the peace process nor of the Good Friday Agreement.

"He has used every opportunity to undermine the peace process. He is the clear leader inside the UUP of the rejectionists and the wreckers.

"Mr Donaldson’s track record is clear. He is not genuinely interested in the victims of conflict. He is not interested in resolving the conflict. He wants peace only on his terms and these are not acceptable to nationalists and republicans.’

Republicans remain deeply sceptical about the forthcoming review and Sinn Féin has stressed that it cannot be a cover for renegotiation of the Agreement by unionists or another stalling tactic.

At the end of the day, reviews apart, the onus to implement the Agreement lies with the British government. The Agreement is British government policy after ail.

The election of a Labour government in Britain in 1997 boosted hopes that there would be a change in British government policy in Ireland. While republicans have been critical of the British government, Sinn Féin has also acknowledged and commended the positive way that Tony Blair approached the peace process.

The ball is now firmly in Tony Blair's court. He holds the key to the success or failure of the peace process. The choices he faces are the same fundamental ones which faced his predecessors at the outbreak of conflict in 1969. The hope is that he has the courage and the will to succeed where they failed.

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

The RUC is part of the problem of civil unrest and rights abuse in Occupied Ireland, not part of the solution, - US Congressmen conclude.

The US Congressional International Relations Committee has called on the Patten Commission to back radical transformation of policing in the North of Ireland.

Ben Gilman, chairperson of the US International Relations Committee, called for “root-and-branch" reform. “The historic anti-Catholic/nationalist ethos of the current policing in the North of Ireland must be totally eradicated. A new police force must be strictly impartial, truly representative of the whole community, and fully accountable to all its citizens."

“One recurring theme," says committee member Chris Smith, from New Jersey, “of all our witnesses is the inescapable conclusion that the police force in the North of Ireland, the RUC, has been at the very core of the human rights abuses and civil unrest that has plagued Northern Ireland for the last 30 years, perhaps even longer”.

Congressman Robert Menendez from New Jersey questions the rationale of trying to reform rather than disband the RUC: "There can be no sense or rationale for the continuation of a programme which trains a force, which by the accounts of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, engages in gross violations of human and civil rights. Despite good intentions and good will, you cannot professionalise an organisation that is rotten to the core," says Menendez.

From New York, Congressman Peter King reiterates the point: “We’re not talking about incidental violations of human rights, we're not talking about accidents or mistakes,, We're talking about a police force which is rooted in bigotry, rooted in violation of human rights and which has systematically oppressed the nationalist community in the North of Ireland."

The RUC, says King, is a force which was ‘created for the sole purpose of oppressing the nationalist community, of keeping them down, of keeping the North of Ireland in effect, a unionist state, which does not understand the concept of human rights."

A covering letter accompanying the report reiterating the call for radical reform showed cross-party support and was signed by influential figures such as Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and Democrat leader Dick Gephardt.

“Never before has such a letter on the RUC been signed by the entire bipartisan top leadership of the US House of Representatives," said Fr Sean McManus of the Irish National Caucus. “If represents a scorching indictment of the RUC and leaves the British government in no doubt as to where the US Congress stands."

A delegation of American Congressmen arrived in Belfast to hand over a highly critical report on the RUC. The report follows hearings by the International Relations Committee held earlier this year.

The US politicians presented a transcript of their hearings, which included testimonies from the families of Rosemary Nelson and Robert Hamill as well as submissions from international human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and the British Irish Rights Watch.

Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams welcomed the report, describing it as “a significant and timely contribution to the Irish peace process. The hearings into the RUC, said Adams, represented a significant contributor to the policing issue and to the entire peace process.

"Through these hearings, held by the International Committee, people here in Ireland have had a democratic channel through which their views are heard. These hearings are a re-assurance to people who for years were silenced, that the necessity for real change is understood and supported by Congress," said Adams.

Responses by unionist politicians were less than welcoming. UDP leader Gary McMichael expressed disappointment at American “interference in internal Northern Ireland matters", sentiments echoed by Ulster Unionist Ken Maginnis who accused Congressman Peter King of being “partisan”.

In the Congress Committee report, the British government faced overwhelming criticism of the RUC as committee member after member highlights the human rights abuses perpetrated by the force.

The RUC is not only unacceptable, it is also unaccountable, acknowledges Congressman Smith. “The facts speak for themselves. Of the 2,540 complaints notified to the Independent Committee for Police Complaints in 1996 only one RUC officer was found guilty of abuse. Of the 16,375 complaints submitted prior to 1994 not a single one resulted in any disciplinary action.”

Recounting a meeting with the RUC Chief, Smith dismisses Ronnie Flanagan as an “obstructionist", suggesting no reforms could be implemented while Flanagan remains in charge. “Sir Ronnie is in deep denial about the problems in his police force and the international community’s general concern about RUC abuse," says Smith, adding that Flanagan “is either thoroughly uninformed about items under his supervision or he’s hiding what he knows. Neither possibility fills me with any confidence.”

Congressman Sam Gedenson from Connecticut criticises the British government. Noting that the system of law and justice in America derives much from Britain, Gedenson says: “It is disappointing to see that the British have failed to take their years and centuries of experience with due process of law and use that in Northern Ireland.

“If it was another country Involved in the situation, we I could probably excuse their failure to reform the system by saying they did not have the institutions. The institutions exist in England. They ought to exist everywhere,” says Gedenson.

Congressman Joseph Crowley criticised Mo Mowlam’s attitude when he expressed concerns about the RUC to the British Secretary of State, describing Mowlam as “quite miffed”. “She alluded to the fact that we have problems in our country, we should focus on them.

“I said, with all due respect, we do have problems but they pale in comparison to what's happening in the North of Ireland. The RUC is unfit to serve as a police force and I've continually called upon Mo Mowlam and the government of Prime Minister Blair to dedicate themselves to reconstituting the RUC to become a police force which all communities can be proud of.”

“Rosemary Nelson’s death is one of many that can be directly linked to the RUC and their lack of police protection of Catholics in Northern Ireland," continues Crowley, "The RUC has historically abused the human rights of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland and has a history of collusion with loyalist militias and other groups who target Catholics in Northern Ireland.”

Benjamin Gilman, chairperson of the International Relations Committee points out: “The RUC is not objective, is not impartial and lacks the support of many of the people it is intended to serve... Many in the North view the RUC as nothing more than an enforcement arm of the dominant unionist majority. Not long ago, a woman from South Armagh told our committee that the RUC, which patrols her community but does not live in or work with that community, is “a police force without a face”.

“The issue of RUC reform is not merely one of downsizing. Ninety three percent of RUC’s officers are Protestant. Just recruiting more members of the minority nationalist community is not enough. We need to see a new responsiveness and greater accountability to all of the people of Northern Ireland irrespective of tradition," says Gilman.

"Let there be no mistake, new and acceptable policing for the North of Ireland must come, sooner rather than later. It must be root and branch, not that which is politically acceptable to the ruling unionist majority."