Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions  £20p.a.    [P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.] 
No 1040 Apr 18 2000                                                                                                                       10p

Free-market economic crisis, preparing civilisation for all-out trade war and then shooting war, gets the immigration problem in proportion, – a pure diversion. Hypocritical concern about 'illegal land seizure' in Africa, 100 years too late, only emphasises rich powers' nervousness of the revolutionary struggles the world crisis will revive. The fake-'left' damns Mugabe too in a kneejerk anti-communist reaction. Manufactured panic over asylum seeking can only be dealt with as a class-war issue over economic power. 'Anti-racist' legislation under capitalism can only be a mockery. Bogus 'socialist' preaching on race just plays into the hands of this sick imperialist diversion.

Current bourgeois fears of a total global economic collapse could help put a perspective on the propaganda confusion being fed about asylum seekers, Zimbabwe, etc,. Workers are being misled by the fake-'left' on all three issues well as by imperialism's lying hysteria.

A new rush of Big Crash hysteria re-emphasises what the basic fundamentals of capitalist ideological brain-washing are always about, - fear of the question of class-power ever being raised, and relentless re-harping on the old anti-Soviet and anti-communist themes.

The nationalist Mugabe may well be as unreliable an opportunist and as phony an anti-imperialist as Saddam Hussein or Milosevic, but in all three conflicts, it is Western monopoly capitalist interests which remain the sole cause of the problem, worth identifying and worth fighting, from a world proletarian point of view, and 100% the personification of all the 'evil' and 'anti-democracy' involved.

The West's propaganda so venomously agitates against the Mugabe regime because of its own colonial guilt for African poverty and because Mugabe uses class-war rhetoric to expose and challenge the 'free world's' responsibility for continued grotesque inequality between a very rich tiny white minority on earth and the vast billions of black and brown poor.

It is not widely publicised that Mugabe has any more convincing plans for a complete and altruistic 'new world order' than Saddam or Milosevic for ending this international situation in the interests of the huge majority of mankind, or that he shows any great personal example of ending the exploitation which causes it, or that the seizure of white colonial farms is anything other than an opportunist political stunt.

But the conflict, as it stands, is between the Western imperialist exploiters of the world, who totally control all its financial, political, military, and ideological weaponry, - and one poor black nationalist regime, which at least had the courage, good sense, and outstanding fortitude and ability to defeat the West's white colonial dictatorship in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) in a remarkable revolutionary guerrilla war to claim its independence 20 years ago.

It is also the case that the West has done bugger-all for Zimbabwe, (or any other of the 100 or so Third World countries who do not get lavish aid treatment because they do not fulfil crucial regional geo-political stooge functions for the Western imperialists such as Saudi Arabia, Zionist-occupied-Palestine, Turkey, etc), and also left it saddled with an imposed Lancaster House agreement which still leaves the frequently massively re-elected Mugabe government hampered by all kinds of economic and legal restrictions in favour of the country's former colonial-era real-estate value. The 'rule of law' gobshite which is being hurled by the Western media now at the Mugabe regime in favour of the white colonial farmers who still occupy 80% of the best land in Zimbabwe, is hypocritically simply invoking this shackling, colonial-era constitution.

With the whole world still living under this disgraceful international exploitation racket, - which the bitterly-angry, mass protests in Washington against the WTO (world Trade Organisation) are also all about, the humbug of the disgusting bile and disinformation of the British bourgeois press is scarcely credible:

Those occupying white-owned land are not the poor, super-exploited farmworkers themselves but supporters -  many of them paid - of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front of president Robert Mugabe.

The truth is that Mugabe, presiding over a sharply declining economy, fuel rationing, rampant inflation, 50% unemployment and falling living standards is desperately seeking to cling onto power by diverting discontent against his corrupt, autocratic regime through stoking up a crude anti-white, anti-British, and anti-imperialist populism. Facing almost certain defeat in an imminent general election, ZANU-PF hypocritically claims to champion the rights of the peasantry and the poor. 

In February Mugabe suffered his first ever electoral setback, when his constitutional amendments were clearly rejected in a referendum. The majority saw through the attempts to increase his own powers despite the insertion of a proposal to seize and redistribute farm lands without compensation. In fact the previous 'redistribution' of one million acres resulting from compulsory purchase benefited only 400 of Mugabe's privileged cronies, including, for example, George Charamba, the presidential spokesman.

Clearly the present occupations do not represent an attempt to take over and run the farms in the interests of those who work them. They are a stunt, directed from the top, whose only effect on agricultural production is to further hold it back. And the violent attacks on the white-organised April 1 demonstration in Harare was not the result of the spontaneous anger and indignation on the part of the capital's workers against the 'settlers', but a carefully organised assault by Zanu-PF thugs in collaboration with the police.

The Movement for Democratic Change, led by trade union leader Morgan Tsvangirai, referred to colloquially as the 'Workers Party', is continuing to make rapid progress and looks likely to win the general election – if it is held. Already the election has been 'postponed' from this month to the middle of May, with as yet no firm date set.

With members of his own party calling on him to resign, Mugabe may be tempted to look to the army to help him stay in power. Troops have been recalled from the Congo, where they were used to prop up the regime of Laurent Kabila, and army officers have been appointed to head state agencies in the past few weeks. 

Tsvangirai commented: "Mugabe is clearly creating conditions of destabilisation. He is not campaigning for elections: he is campaigning for a state of emergency. I fear he is agitating to get the military to step in" (The Sunday Telegraph March 26).

The Daily Telegraph? The Daily Mail? The Hitler Gazette? No, it is from the fraud called Weekly Worker (bright red banner, and hammer-and-sickle prominently displayed), the organ of the equally fraudulent 'Communist Party of Great Britain'. Sinister 'communists' indeed!

But the fake-'left' middle class is an essential part of the bourgeois press (and petty-bourgeois press). What better way to shaft any kind of opposition at all to the West's total multinational domination of the world than to have the official bourgeois media endlessly vilifying any opponent as a 'bloodthirsty monster' and 'tyrant', and the supposedly 'dissident', 'anti-imperialist', and even 'communist' press denouncing the same opponent of the West at the same time.

These CPGB types are practised counter-revolutionary traitors to the working class, having for decades proudly postured as the 'official communist movement' while in reality helping Moscow Revisionism to totally confuse and corrupt the old Third International parties with its permanent class-collaborative degeneration of Lenin's purely temporary 'peaceful-coexistence' tactic. This originally-Stalinist non-revolutionary posturing, now finds itself more opportunistically at home among outright Trotskyist anti-communism, pretending that the nevertheless astonishing 70 years anti-imperialist achievements of the Soviet workers state simply never existed. The whole USSR history is now dismissed as one long disastrous catastrophe almost from start to finish.

It is with this fake 'revolutionary purist' mentality that the Weekly Worker stabs the Irish national-liberation struggle in the back whenever it can, just as Mugabe's anti-imperialist achievements are now being trashed and stabbed in the back. 

'The IRA have given up, sold out, and betrayed' is the sinister disinformation line from these 'super-revolutionaries' whose own anti-imperialist struggle on UK soil (the same conditions as face the IRA) amounts to no attempted defeat of imperialism's state-dictatorship (police, army, MI5, Special Branch), a task they chide the IRA and Sinn Féin with abandoning, – but consists instead of stooging for the reactionary-populist mountebank Ken Livingstone in the London Assembly elections. 

And from this cretinous parliamentary-opportunist position behind a dangerous demagogue who used his 'popularity' to cheer on the NATO fascist-imperialist blitzkrieg-destruction of little Serbia last year, – these hoax 'revolutionaries' help the MI5's twisted disinformation channels try to spread the Goebbels lie that 'Adams and McGuinness have sold out the national-liberation struggle in return for high-level soft bourgeois office', etc.

And how do these sinisterly bogus 'communists', who used to loudly proclaim their 'Leninist' accomplishments, further analyse the Zimbabwe situation? Bristling with anti-imperialism like Lenin? Alert to all the vast political arsenal of 'dirty tricks' that the immense might, money, and influence of the CIA and the Pentagon now dominate the politics of every country on earth with (or try to)?

To even half-trained minds, the sudden mushrooming of the 'Movement for Democratic Change' in Zimbabwe bears astonishing resemblance to countless anti-communist CIA fronts which have undermined anti-imperialist regimes since 1945, posing as the 'local democrats', etc. The Solidarnosc bogus 'trade union' is only the most notorious, which eventually brought down the Polish workers state, and ultimately the Soviet workers state too, indirectly. It has since been officially revealed as fully-financed, inspired, and organised with subversive printing equipment, etc, by the CIA (and the Vatican playing a subsidiary role in the conspiracy, having cleverly made the anti-communist Polish cardinal Woytijla the new Pope John Paul as its contribution, along with more millions of dollars). [see issue 639-ed]

These days, non-stop admissions leak out into the capitalist press itself about how every anti-imperialist voice raised since 1945 has had to face political, military, or disinformation subversion by the CIA, invariably resulting in huge carnage:

Two leading US news channels have admitted that they allowed psychological operations officers from the military to work as placement interns at their headquarters during the Kosovo war.

Cable Network News (CNN) and National Public Radio, (NPR) denied that the "psy-ops" officers influenced news coverage and said the internships had been stopped as soon as senior managers found out. 

...the fact that military propaganda experts were even present in newsrooms as reports from the Kosovo conflict were being broadcast has triggered a storm of criticism and raised questions about the independence of these networks.

"Maybe CNN was the target of a psy-ops penetration and is still too naïve to figure out what was going on," wrote Alexander Cockburn, a liberal newspaper commentator. "In the Kosovo conflict, as with other recent wars, CNN's screen was filled with an unending procession of bellicose advocates of bombing, many of them retired US generals." 

CNN hosted five psy-ops officers as temporary, unpaid workers last year, while NPR took three, all from the army's 4th Psychological Operations Group, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The army's psychological operations are prohibited by law from manipulating the US media.

After the existence of the CNN internship programme was published in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, the network immediately cancelled it.

Susan Binford, the head of CNN public relations said: "Is the whole thing embarrassing? Yes.

However, the independent watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting asked in a press release: "Even if the psy-ops officers working in the newsroom did not influence news reporting, did the network allow the military to conduct an intelligence-gathering mission against CNN itself?"

A secret CIA document shows that British intelligence played a pivotal role in a joint, covert operation to oust Iran's democratically elected nationalist prime minister in 1953.

The classified history, revealed in the New York Times at the weekend, is the first detailed US government account of the episode to be publicised. The coup consolidated the power of the "vacillating" young shah, whose authoritarian, US-backed rule lasted 26 years until he was deposed by a militant Islamic — and anti-US — revolution.
            
The government report, "written by the CIA's chief coup planner", according to the newspaper, showed that the 1953 operation's success "was mostly a matter of chance" and that the CIA "had almost complete contempt for the man it was empowering, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, whom it derided as a "vacillating coward".

The study of the CIA's first successful overthrow of a foreign government, written in 1954, was provided by a former official who kept a copy of it. Its author, Donald Wilber, a "gentleman spy" and expert in Persian architecture, died three years ago at 89.

The document shows the pivotal role that British intelligence played in planning the coup against Iran's prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, who sought to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

While negotiating with Iran, Britain won the support of the major oil companies in imposing an effective global boycott on Iranian oil. At one stage, US and British intelligence officials met in Beirut to put the finishing touches to their strategy.

CIA and British intelligence officers also visited Princess Ashraf, the shah's influential sister, and she told her brother to follow the coup plans. One of the palace staff was said to be a British agent.

Another man, Asadollah Rashidian, allegedly approached the shah and invited him to select a phrase that would then be broadcast at prearranged times on the BBC's Persian language service as proof that Rashidian spoke for British intelligence.

The CIA operation, code-named TP-Ajax, was designed to maintain the west's control over Iranian oil. But the agency found the shah "a reluctant warrior" when it came to issuing royal decrees dismissing Mossadegh and replacing him with the more tractable General Fazlollah Zahedi, the newspaper said.

"The history says agency officers ... worked directly with royalist Iranian military officers, handpicked the prime minister's replacement, sent a stream of envoys to bolster the shah's courage, directed a campaign of bombings by Iranians posing as members of the Communist party, and planted articles and editorial cartoons in newspapers."

Two days after that, CIA officials moved $5m into Iran to help consolidate the government's power.

San Salvador.  In the bright morning sunlight of March 24 1980, a car stopped outside the Church of the Divine Providence. A lone gunman stepped out, unhurried. Resting his rifle on the car door, he aimed carefully down the long aisle to where El Salvador's archbishop, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, was saying mass. A single shot rang out. Romero staggered and fell. The blood pumped from his heart, soaking the little white disks of scattered host.

Romero's murder was to become one of the most notorious unsolved crimes of the cold war. The motive was clear. He was the most outspoken voice against the death squad slaughter gathering steam in the US backyard. The ranks of El Salvador's leftwing rebels were being swelled by priests who preached that the poor should seek justice in this world, not wait for the next. Romero was the "voice of those without voice", telling soldiers not to kill.

The US vowed to make punishment of the archbishop's killers a priority. It could hardly do otherwise as President Reagan launched the largest US war effort since Vietnam to defeat the rebels. He needed support in Washington, which meant showing that crimes like shooting archbishops and nuns would not be tolerated.

The ordering of the murder was blamed on the bogeyman of the story, a military intelligence officer called Major Roberto D'Aubuisson who had, conveniently for Washington, recently left the army. In the weeks before the murder, he was repeatedly on television using military intelligence files to denounce "guerrillas". Those he accused were often murdered. Romero was near the top of the list

But US promises to bring justice came to nothing. With no triggerman, gun or witnesses, officials claimed lack of evidence. D'Aubuisson went on to become one of El Salvador's most successful politicians before throat cancer killed him at the end of the civil war 12 years later – the revenge of God, many concluded.

However, new evidence suggests that Washington not only knew far more about the killing than it admitted – but also did nothing to investigate for fear of jeopardising its war effort. Vital evidence was ignored. Key witnesses, including the most likely gunman, were killed by those supposed to be investigating.

Seven years and 50,000 deaths after Romero's murder, I was feeling out of my depth as a novice reporter sitting on a park bench talking to a young deserter from Major D'Aubuisson's death squads who called himself Jorge. In 1984, he told me, he had guarded a safe house for three former guerrillas nicknamed the Little Angels. They spent their days with prostitutes, smoking marijuana and playing rock music at full volume. At night, they sallied out to capture and kill their former rebel comrades.

The men received orders from a National Police detective, Oscar Perez Linares, "who came to the house. A man of few words, he was treated by the others with the respect reserved for those not afraid to kill. Several times, Jorge heard the others laughing at how Linares had shot Romero. Linares sat with a half-smile. "You should have seen the blood that came from that priest!" was his only comment.

At the time, Jorge's story was impossible to check – although the rest of what he said turned out to be true. After the war, I looked in declassified CIA files. Sure enough, in mid-1983,  an unusually detailed CIA report, quoting a senior Salvadoran police source, named Linares as a member of a four-man National Police squad which murdered Romero. Other Salvadoran officers said the same thing. And the man who drove the car which took the killer to the church also picked out a photo-fit of Linares. 

So why, if the CIA had such evidence, and solving the murder was such a priority, was nothing done? Linares was not just any detective. Nor were the Little Angels simple ex-guerrillas. Before the war, when D'Aubuisson ran El Salvador's intelligence agency ANSESAL – set up by the CIA to guard against Communist infiltration of its hemisphere – Linares was one of his most successful agents, infiltrating the fledgling rebel groups. One of his best spies inside rebel ranks was the head of the Little Angels, who Jorge knew as El Negro. This was not a death squad rabble, but rather a highly structured and effective dirty war in which the Americans were closely involved. 

The much-blamed death squads, like the White Hand and the Secret Anti-Communist Army, never existed as more than exotic names used to sow terror. Military and police intelligence, as CIA reports from 1983 make clear, did the killing. The CIA should have known. It helped the police throughout this period, contracting in urban intelligence experts. "They would sit next door and write out the questions, leaving it up to the Salvadorans to extract the information,"said Gerardo Le Chevalier, a senior Salvadoran official at the time. Neither was Major D'Aubuisson the boss. He played the bogeyman very well, leading political rallies to sing his party's anthem.

In 1980, when Romero was murdered, the major was coordinating closely with the small clique of rightwing generals and colonels struggling to keep the army under their control. D'Aubuisson may have ordered the killing. But it is very unlikely he did so alone.

Several US military men told me they could not get rid of the senior officers with the worst human rights records without risking the whole war. US officials said that to clean up the army would have fatally demoralised it. More to the point, it would have lost its eyes and ears.

By late 1983, however, the dirty war was running out of steam. The army was now losing a conventional war in the mountains – against well-armed guerrillas who could not be arrested and murdered in the middle of the night. Reagan desperately needed Congress to grant more military aid, which meant cleaning up the Salvadoran army's image.

Vice President George Bush and his aid Lt Col Oliver North were dispatched to El Salvador. Later Bush claimed he faced down the death squads. In fact, he met with the Salvadoran high command. Afterwards, North slipped them a list of nine names the Americans wanted removed from the army. Linares was one of the names.

Linares was arrested after fleeing to Guatemala by a special police unit the Americans set up to investigate human rights crimes – particularly Romero's murder. They killed him on the way back to San Salvador. El Negro Mario was also captured and killed. "They knew far too much to live," was the verdict of one top Salvadoran officer.

The details of Romero's murder, as well as thousands of others, went to the grave with them.

The plan was bold. According to Iraqi sources, in 1995 the CIA infiltrated Saddam's inner circle for the first time since the Gulf war in 1991. The plot represented Washington's "dream scenario": a palace coup that would remove the Iraqi president but leave the regime intact and the country stable.

The plan was hatched in talks between the CIA and Brigadier General Muhammed Abdullah Shahwani, an ethnic Turkoman from Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, who had retired from the army but retained Saddam's favour.

Shahwani was running an import-export business between Jordan and Iraq when he was recruited by Steve Richter, then CIA chief in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

The wealthy general agreed to recruit his three sons, all based in Baghdad with senior positions in the Iraqi special forces. One was a general in the Amn al-Khass, the security organisation responsible for Saddam's safety.

The Americans alerted the Jordanians and a special unit was set up in Jordan's mukhabarat, the domestic security agency, to assist the coup effort. It was isolated from other Jordanian forces because many officers and soldiers were sympathetic to Saddam.

But the plot went disastrously wrong. The CIA in Amman asked an Egyptian go-between to deliver communications equipment to Shahwani's sons. The Egyptian delivered walkie talkies and a satellite telephone programmed to dial only a CIA number. But he secretly denounced his contacts to the Iraqi mukhabarat.

Saddam appears to have played with the CIA for months, using the general as a conduit for disinformation, before rounding up the plotters.

He was aware of the plot by November 1995. A member of his security force who had secretly supplied information to the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a leading opposition group then based in Kurdistan, warned his INC contact: "Get out and tell your friends to escape. Pull out quickly."

It was the first the INC had heard of the coup attempt. The officer also said Saddam had intercepted CIA communications equipment. The INC passed the warning to the Americans, but nothing was done.   

In March 1996, Ahmed Chalabi, the INC leader, met John Deutch, then head of the CIA, and Richter, who was now running the Middle East division of the agency's directorate of operations in Washington.

Chalabi is said to have told them the coup plotters were known to Saddam, but again, the CIA took no action. Yesterday, Chalabi refused to comment.

The CIA offices in the US embassy in Amman subsequently received a fax from Baghdad, sent on the satellite phone that had been delivered to the rebels. The fax began with verses from the Koran and ended with a message: "Go back to Langley."

Up to 80 military officers who were arrested and interrogated may have been executed. An inner circle of about 12 dissident Iraqi military officers, including the three sons of the chief plotter, were imprisoned and most are believed to have been executed. Another 160 people were arrested.

The coup was crushed four years ago, but Iraqis close to the operation have only just agreed to reveal details. They have virtually given up hope the Americans will mount another operation against Saddam.

"The CIA went against Saddam and lost everything," an Iraqi source said.

Shahwani, who was in Amman, survived. The CIA sent him to Britain for debriefing, and has since moved him to a safe haven.

The CIA's bungling had wide-ranging repercussions. Emboldened by bis success, Saddam sent tanks into Kurdistan two months later, almost overrunning a CIA base in the city of Arbil. The CIA withdrew scores of people who had been working with the agency but Baghdad's forces killed hundreds of others.

The disaster may help to explain Washington's moribund policy toward Iraq, which now consists of rhetoric and a few symbolic airstrikes a month.

Of $97m in funds, training and military materials voted by the US Congress for the Iraqi opposition, only $250,000 has been released.

A REPORT purporting to show that Belgrade planned the systematic ethnic cleansing of Kosovo's entire Albanian population was faked, a German general has claimed. The plan, known as Operation Horseshoe, was revealed by Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, on April 6 last year, almost two weeks after Nato started bombing Serbia. German public opinion about the Luftwaffe's participation in the airstrikes was divided at the time.

Horseshoe — or "Potkova", as the Germans said it was known in Belgrade — became a staple of Nato briefings. It was presented as proof that President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia had long planned the expulsion of Albanians. James Rubin, the American state department spokesman, cited it only last week to justify Nato's bombardment.

However, Heinz Loquai, a retired brigadier general, has claimed in a new book on the war that the plan was fabricated from run-of-the-mill Bulgarian intelligence reports.

Loquai, who now works for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), has accused Rudolf Scharping, the German defence minister, of obscuring the origins of Operation Horseshoe.

"The facts to support its existence are at best terribly meagre," he told The Sunday Times. "I have come to the conclusion that no such operation ever existed. The criticism of the war, which had grown into a fire that was almost out of control, was completely extinguished by Operation Horseshoe."

Scharping reported in his wartime diary that he had received the intelligence report on Horseshoe from Fischer. But according to Die Woche, the German news weekly, the report was a general analysis by a Bulgarian intelligence agency of Serbian behaviour in the war.

Loquai has claimed that the German defence ministry turned a vague report from Sofia into a "plan", and even coined the name Horseshoe. Die Woche has reported that maps broadcast around the world as proof of Nato's information were drawn up at the German defence headquarters in Hardthohe.

The Bulgarian report concluded that the goal of the Serbian military was to destroy the Kosovo Liberation Army, and not to expel the entire Albanian population, as was later argued by Scharping and the Nato leadership. Loquai also pointed to a fundamental flaw in the German account: it named the operation Potkova, which is the Croatian word for horseshoe. The Serbian for horseshoe is Potkovica. "A state prosecutor would never think of going to trial with the amount of evidence available to the German defence ministry," said Loquai.

Nato sources rejected Loquai's claims, but admitted it was impossible to prove the origins of the Horseshoe story. "There's never any absolute certainty about these things," said one source. "But the idea that there was nothing prearranged is counter-intuitive. "Look at the speed with which the Serbs moved. It was systematic. Until we get into Belgrade and start tearing the files apart, we will never be certain — and that's never going to happen."

In Belgrade, government sources said several Yugoslav army officers had dismissed Operation Horseshoe as part of Nato's propaganda war.

All of that is just material from the British press alone, gathered at random over just the last four weeks. Multiply it by 12 months and by 50 countries where such leaks or admissions regularly surface, and the scope of the CIA's worldwide political manipulation becomes clear. Lenin's polemics would have been in their element exposing such illusion and reality.

What do the 'Leninists' at the CPGB make of this ferocious anti-Mugabe campaign in the 'free world' media? Like gullible children (or like practised stooges), they believe every word of it because it suits their own anti-communist biliousness down to the ground:

“What of the mdc itself? Set up by Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions activists, it is undoubtedly a working class-based grouping with its main support drawn from the urban centres. It contains revolutionary elements, including comrades from the International Socialists, one of the few Cliffite groups in Africa. Tendai Biti, a former is member, is responsible for the mdc's land policy.

However, more recently the leadership has sought to broaden its support, appealing also to business to back the party, and indicating that it would seek a more positive relationship with the imf and World Bank. In an interview with Green Left Weekly, paper of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party, Tsvangirai declared: "In our case the main characteristic is that we are driven by working class interests, with the poor having more space to play a role than they do now. But one of the components is participation by business, which is just not able to develop under present conditions" (March 22). Tsvangirai describes the leadership - accurately - as "social democrats".

Nevertheless, the mdc is undoubtedly an important site for revolutionary intervention, particularly in the current atmosphere. Unlike the National Constitutional Assembly, and perhaps despite the intentions of its leaders, the mdc is hardly a non-violent organisation. Its comrades have been engaged in clashes with Zanu-PF supporters and in Kwekwe there have been pitched battles. Mugabe's police have been rounding up mdc supporters in the town, including its election candidate.

The more the government denounces the mdc as a front for white interests and an "illegitimate puppet of the British", the more the party will have to prove the opposite is the case. The more Mugabe clamps down, threatening to ban peaceful mdc protests, the more it will feel the pressure from the masses for decisive action. The role of the small, but potentially influential revolutionary left will be crucial •”

Such fantasies and self-delusion about the MDC are scarcely credible. Their sole validation is that they boast trade union origins (so did Lech Walesa, the semi-fascist stooge of US imperialist Cold War subversion), attract bitter anti-communists like ex-IS members, and are opposed by Mugabe's ZANU-PF, the one Zimbabwean revolutionary-nationalist movement which all the treacherous might and guile of Western anti-communism could not buy-off, subvert, or defeat in battle (and still can't, it seems). 

What is more insane for any supposed 'communists' to be supporting, the MDC is openly the media darling of Western monopoly-imperialist interests, is dying to collaborate with the IMF international tool of multi-national capitalism's neo-colonial designs, and is unashamedly in league with local big-business agitation.

Even stranger, the Weekly Worker casually itself admits that this anti-Mugabe situation has very little of promise to socialism in it at all:

It could be that Mugabe, under pressure from imperialism, will eventually accede to the popular will, agree to hold the election and quietly step down if, as seems inevitable, he loses. In that case the new mdc government would be highly susceptible to the influence of imperialism and international capital.

In 1991 trade union leader Frederick Chiluba won an election in Zambia, where there was also mass discontent and where the union-based opposition also won the backing of business. Chiluba implemented pro-capital, anti-working class policies. 

Yet still they want to despise Mugabe, and take the imperialist media's side in the hate-campaign being deliberately artificially stoked up against ZANU-PF, all over completely justifiable land-seizures anyway, no matter what Mugabe's ultimate political perspectives might be.

This is the mentality of utterly demoralised renegades from the anti-imperialist struggle who have turned their disappointment at the Soviet Union's failure to fulfil their very subjective dreams for it (the book 'The God that failed' is still the most telling title of an ex-communist's memoirs) into hatred and denial of anything it ever stood for or actually was. This philistine petty-bourgeois defeatism then automatically dwindles away in fantasy-land about what 'perfect' revolutions they could lead, etc. 

Meanwhile, in practice, they drift into the most crass reformist opportunism imaginable behind such reactionary charlatans as Ken Livingstone.

Livingstone's utterly unprincipled and embarrassing opportunism, which stands out a mile as the issue for serious socialists to take up with the working class in London who will shortly be fooled into voting for this blatant careerist as Mayor, is 'dealt with' by the CPGB's candidate on the London Socialist Alliance slate, supporting Livingstone, in the following criminally deceitful manner. First savour the complete humbug about the need for "freely expressed differences in front of the working class" and the emotive claptrap about "we need the truth":

The unity of the left is excellent, but not just as an end in itself. We need a democratic centralist Communist Party, and the lsa could be an important step in that direction. So we should not aim simply for a united front, but for a party capable of organising the majority of workers around a revolutionary programme. For that we need and open and inclusive approach.

This question of the left's culture is something we have been challenging: differences are not something to be feared, but should be freely expressed in front of the working class. We are fighting very hard for such a culture. Workers need to know about those disagreements that divide us ‒ after all the working class is a class that has to liberate itself. For that we need the truth.

One thing that ought to have been learnt from the last century is surely the necessity of democracy. For us it's not an add-on extra, but the very oxygen of our movement.

Then look at the sum total of 'differences' expressed in a whole page interview about the farcical London Assembly elections and the even more farcical monstrous egotist and Labourite fake-'left' Livingstone who is the lynchpin for this costly bureaucratic elaboration of the same 'parliamentary democracy' garbage already imposed on the working class from Westminster:

I'm not talking about preparing for a workers' government of course. Nevertheless, with Livingstone turning accepted political notions upside down there is every possibility of getting gla members elected.

Despite my disagreements with the platform, it is one that is centred on the working class. Our lsA candidates are not only more committed, more serious, than those put up by Labour: they are for the working class. A space has opened up around Livingstone – we are doing our best to fill it from the left in order to galvanise discontent.

This demented tail-ending of Blair's appalling 'democracy' stunt (to take workers' minds off the fact that government remains just as dominated by imperialist interests under New Labour (or even more so) as under any other configuration of parliamentary cretinism), will cost the working class another arm and a leg in utterly useless 'parliamentary' jobs-for-the-boys-and-girls, Assembly-style, – but will be just as totally subservient to the real government over Britain by monopoly-capitalist dictatorship as its more senior (and even more expensive) Westminster model. Local 'government' in Britain is purely an administrative extension of bourgeois-dominated
Parliament, which in turn is just a toe-rag for big business and the ruling-class's international imperialist interests.

What dreadful reformist deceptions these LSA 57 varieties of fake-'left' anti-communism are perpetrating!

Communists and revolutionaries can by all means take part in bourgeois elections (when that is a better tactic than boycotting them), – but only participating in order to thoroughly expose at the hustings what a criminal fraud and humbug all bourgeois elections are without exception. Not one single word of warning to the working class that they are about to be conned rotten again by a bourgeois 'elections' fraud does this CPGB parliamentary cretinism contain. 

What 'revolutionary' role is this to actively help pull the wool over workers' eyes to keep faith with yet another exercise in totally empty electoral promises, none of which will be fulfilled? What dreadful treachery it is to help Blair pretend that 'new democracy' is being made regionally available to help 'better serve the people's interests'.

New Labour hype on every subject is the most odious brainwashing nonsense ever, – not yet fascistic in not yet being the hypocritical cover for naked imperialist dictatorship, but almost certainly the last stop before 'parliamentary democracy' is forced to practically abandon even any pretence of 'popular government' as the imperialist economic and war-crisis deepens relentlessly. 

Prattle about 'the necessity of democracy' and about an 'open' culture which 'needs the truth' for the working class to 'liberate itself' is just obscene when the actual outrageous 'regional democracy' stunts (imposed by Blairism the better to help workers swallow New Labour's actual subservience to monopoly-imperialism) are not even being exposed by these LSA bourgeois-democracy careerists. And what even more obscene prattle about 'democracy' when not one word of serious 'difference' is expressed about the utterly arbitrary antics of the raving demagogue Livingstone with his self-appointed one-man party. 

These hoax 'communists' from this sinister Weekly Worker are doing a skilled job in trying to totally disarm the working class to lead it hoodwinked into the obvious diversionary trap of demagogic presidential-style 'democracy' under a bourgeois-'elected' London Mayor.

This 'left' populist LSA drivel gets even worse on the question of asylum seekers.

"If capital is free to cross borders, then workers must be free to do the same". 

This declamation is so busy being self-consciously pompous and self-righteous that it disastrously misses the whole point, viewed from a genuinely revolutionary communist position. A sensibly planned socialist world needs 'capital' crossing borders 'freely' like it needs a hole in the head. 

It is precisely because "capital is free to cross borders" that the nightmare for asylum-seekers starts in the first place. The uprooted catastrophe of human life of having to flee one's home, family, culture, and homeland to become economic or political refugees, facing almost certain wretched immigrant or detainee status anywhere in the 'free world', is ultimately entirely due to capital being "free to cross borders". 

It is the uncontrollable export of capital from the impoverished Third World which causes ever greater impoverishment. It is that same harsh culture and poverty which enables gangster tyrannical dictatorships to be the rule in the Third World rather than the exception. It is the lucrative repatriation of capital "freely across borders" from the Third World to the First World which will forever keep the great imperialist powers deliberately maintaining the exploitation system ("free movement of capital") which will guarantee that hoped-for economic migration and refugee status will remain an ever-growing source of every-more-bitter conflict all over the world, with no possibility at all of any solution in sight all the time that the capitalist 'free world' order prevails.

So what is this demagogic slogan advocating? It seems to be saying that capital should remain free to cross borders, but that any migration difficulties due to exploitation and/or impoverishment caused by this endless arbitrary movement of capital should be 'solved' by a complete open-doors policy. 

The passage in full reads:

If, instead of fighting for what we need, your approach is one of putting forward 'realistic' demands, this can lead to caving in before populism and toning down. One example of this is over the demand in our platform for the abolition of all immigration controls. This is particularly relevant at the moment, given the wave of anti-immigrant hysteria, with the Tories going on the offensive and Labour wanting to be seen as tough on asylum-seekers.

It's very important for us to take a principled position – and the platform is principled on this issue. But this is not being pursued by the majority of swp candidates. They prefer facts and figures. They show that more people leave Britain than enter. The comrades also trot out figures about how spending on asylum-seekers is not so much, compared to military spending. This leads you away from the politics of principle towards cost-accounting.

Whenever I speak on this question from lsa platforms, I say no to all immigration controls. If capital is free to cross borders, then workers must be free to do the same. It seems that a plastic bucket made in China has more rights than a human being. People on the ground are open to what we have to say on this issue and we can persuade them that we are right. It's no use winning votes if we do so on the basis of liberal arguments.

It is a complete recipe for continued imperialist disaster on earth. There is not even a hint that there is anything wrong with domination of the planet by free-market capital. There is not even the slightest suggestion that what the world's masses really need is to get monopoly-capitalist exploitation off their backs so that their own homelands can be transformed into flourishing countries, all roughly equal the whole world over.

In reality, it reveals cynical contempt towards the struggle for international socialist revolution, faith in which gets an occasional routine airing as the redeeming grace of these 'left purists'. 

In practice, it amounts to the most demented 'reformist' nonsense imaginable. It implies that as world capitalist crisis relentlessly deepens, bringing with it inevitable increases in divide-and-rule racist tensions deliberately being stoked up by collapsing imperialist establishments everywhere as a last hope of political survival, - then simple altruistic urging on the doorstep by self-righteous 'lefts' such as the LSA will achieve instant racial harmony, and the fascist danger rampant in every imperialist slump in history, will simply disappear without trace. 

The working class will allegedly respond to growing mass unemployment and poverty by swarming forward to demand an end to all immigration controls as their most pressing anti-crisis demand. 

This LSA 'left' swamp is not just fake-'socialist' but is close to being mentally deranged. This is Jehovah Witness territory, and as remote from practical blood-and-guts Bolshevik revolutionary reality as it is possible to be.

Right round the world, racial conflict is escalating rapidly as crisis-induced class-war frictions explode uncontrollably. 

Indonesia, in flames from racial-conflict diversions almost from end to end, is the obvious way the whole world is going to go. Mere reformist preaching at this problem to make it go away is just playing into the hands of the imperialist ruling-class, gaining time for them. 

Only by taking the international economic and political system completely out of the hands of the free-market bourgeoisie will a real start even begin to be made to ending the racist nonsense in human culture once and for all. No class-exploitation mode of production (the free market) can possibly avoid systematic breeding of racist prejudices and backwardness of all kinds, no matter what reformist laws or altruistic examples are introduced.

Of course racist attitudes should not be tolerated anywhere, and racist prejudice should be constantly re-educated, and of course Bill Morris is right to accuse even this oh-so-politically-correct New Labour regime of creating "a climate of fear" by its "degrading, divisive, and stigmatising" asylum voucher system. 

And Margaret Jay's reply, Blair's minister, that Morris was just covering up for his lorry drivers whose professed ignorance that they had illegal immigrants stowed aboard "beggars belief", was a monstrous disgrace.

But the reality that mafia crime is already deeply established in the sordid exploitation of immigrant transportation (using the pattern of frequent container-transport changeovers, etc, and a thousand and one other ways of making money out of smuggling illegal immigrants past Customs) should help bring all sides to their senses. Like drugs and prostitution, if the free-market world wants it, the free-market world will get it. Despite all barriers, if people want to migrate, the free-market system will, for money, find a way to make it happen, legally or illegally.

But like all bourgeois law, agitating for 'no immigration controls', – with the implication that this will help defeat racism, – is almost as big an illusion as the Blairite deception that 'firm but fair' asylum controls will 'calm fears' and 'help enhance social harmony'. 

For as long as the capitalist system lasts with its free-market national rivalry and its periodic slump and unemployment catastrophes, the whole migration question will incurably remain a source of racist mischief. 

All immigration controls are obviously racist by their very definition; but educating the world out of those prejudices by trying to treat the immigration-control symptom, is as futile as trying to cure bubonic plague by offering someone a box of tissues to help with their sneezing. Far from achieving anti-racist re-education, the reformist pipe-dream of 'no immigration controls at all', while the capitalist free-market and national economic rivalry remains the way of the world, will simply add fuel to the fire of this deliberate imperialist diversion. 

Getting rid of capitalism is the only serious and practicable anti-racist policy. It is the same paradox as with revolution. It might seem simpler to just try to reform capitalism. In practice, that will prove impossible, and it will be easier, in fact, to overthrow it.

Build Leninism. EPSR

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

Dirty tricks are still the rule by British colonial dictatorship

EVIDENCE suggesting that the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) was involved in a burglary to gather information against a former member of the shadowy Force Research Unit (FRU), one of the most secret and controversial units within the British Army, is to be scrutinised by the United Nations. The details are included in a report currently being compiled by Jane Winters of human rights group British Irish Rights Watch.

The incident is believed to be linked to British attempts to identify and silence an FRU whistle blower, whose revelations appeared in the Sunday Times. The London newspaper was subjected to a gagging order shortly after a number of articles exposing Britain's "dirty war" in Ireland appeared last autumn.

The source, who adopted the pseudonym Martin Ingram, claims to be a former FRU member. British authorities are currently engaged in a massive search operation to locate and identify the former FRU soldier. 

Among Ingram's most controversial revelations was the claim that a British Army unit specialising in covert entry techniques attempted to sabotage the Stevens Inquiry into crown forces' collusion with loyalist death squads. The unit broke into the Stevens team's headquarters and set fire to investigation files. The office was gutted.

The FRU, which ran agents within loyalist death squad groups, was officially disbanded after the trial of a British agent infiltrated into the UDA by the FRU, Brian Nelson. Nelson exposed the role of British Military Intelligence in supplying information and selecting targets for loyalist death squads. The FRU is believed to have been reinstated under a different name.

The burglary was carried out in February of this year at a house where a former member of British Military Intelligence stays when he is outside Britain. A laptop computer, CDs, videos, two Swatch phones, a box of old cheque books and bank statements and an early draft of a memoir by the former soldier were amongst items taken.

Papers allegedly stolen in February from an address used by a former member of the FRU were in MoD hands less than two weeks after the burglary. The MoD used the documents to confront an ex-soldier they suspected of being Ingram. The MoD told the soldier's lawyers that the papers had been delivered to them anonymously.

Late last year, a former British soldier was arrested in Wales and taken to London where he was questioned by the Metropolitan Special Branch for two days. The former FRU member was accused of being Martin Ingram and was questioned in relation to the Official Secrets Act.

**◊◊◊◊**

THE stunning victory over the Sunday Times by film-maker Sean McPhelimy, author of The Committee, in his libel suit has left the newspaper and its journalists reeling in disbelief. After six days of deliberation, the jury decided that the newspaper had libelled McPhelimy (right) when it claimed in an article on 9 May 1993 that he had deliberately perpetrated a hoax in his programme The Committee, shown in October 1991 for the Channel 4 Dispatches series. The jury also decided that the Sunday Times had failed to prove that the committee alleged by McPheilmy did not exist and ordered that the newspaper pay him £145,000 damages. 

With legal costs, the final bill is likely to be in the region of £1 million. McPhelimy is also claiming for loss of earnings because of the devastating effects of the Sunday Times article on his company, Box Productions, and could be awarded a further £500,000 if successful.

In another twist, both David Trimble and the Sunday Times journalists have claimed, as part of their defence, that "even" Sinn Féin has not called for an inquiry into the allegations of collusion contained in both McPhelimy's programme and his book, – and Trimble further claims not to have met "anyone in Northern Ireland who takes this book seriously". 

Given the narrow range of people with whom Mr Trimble regularly mixes, this is hardly a surprise, and anybody paying even the scantest regard to the Six Counties will know of Sinn Féin's continued call for an independent inquiry into the allegations of collusion, although they will also know already that such collusion undoubtedly exists. But, as McPhelimy pointed out in his book, his detractors, both political and journalistic, have spent huge amounts of their time and energy attacking the programme as well as him personally, rather than properly investigating the allegations contained with it.

Since the court ruling, however, both the Times and the Sunday Times have been engaged in some serious whingeing, revisiting the arguments and coming very close indeed to repeating the libel. Further, the newspapers have repeatedly stated that the Sunday Times has been granted leave to appeal the verdict, as if this were some kind of vindication of the original libellous article or implicit acknowledgement of its innocence.

**◊◊◊◊**

FORMER MI5 operative David Shayler (right) has claimed that at least one member of the Gardai was on MI5's payroll and he has also confirmed a 1983 MI5 attempt to recruit Irish informers by means of a bogus holiday competition through a front travel firm.

In an interview with the Sunday Tribune, Shayler, on the run in France after breaking the imposed silence of the British Official Secrets Act to make explosive revelations about his time as an agent, claimed there were three channels of communication between the Gardai and MI5: An official channel through an MI5 officer whose specific role was to liaise with the Gardai. A more casual channel, where meetings took place between a number of MI5 agents and Gardai, most often in pubs and hotels. A third channel through Gardai recruited and paid by the British to pass on information about possible IRA suspects.

Shayler said he saw files on IRA suspects in MI5 headquarters with a recurring code number attached. He was told the information came from a Garda source. He points out that this might have referred to one Garda source or may have been coded as a reference to all Garda sources.                                 

In the interview, Shayler also refers to an elaborate MI5 plot to recruit a man they suspected of being in the IRA. "They set up this entire company to do a holiday competition which only one person was ever going to win, because he was the IRA man they wanted to get to Spain on a two-week holiday so they could pitch him," said Shayler. •

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

Clear British imperialist guilt for deliberate Bloody Sunday massacre.

DIRECT British Cabinet involvement in the planning of Bloody Sunday came to light this week when the Saville Tribunal heard evidence of a telegram sent by the then British Home Secretary Alec Douglas Home to the Stormont administration outlining how to handle public relations in the run up to the Derry march. The memo instructed the Stormont regime to issue a statement prior to the march which would "prepare people for violent scenes on their television screens".

During a meeting between the then British PM Edward Heath and Stormont leader Brian Faulkner three months before the events of Bloody Sunday, the British PM said he was prepared to face the political backlash of defeating the IRA militarily. Heath said the British public was losing patience and he could no longer risk the impression of being borne along by events. Heath's suggestion of a realistic political settlement was ruled out by Faulkner, who would not serve in a government which included republicans "whether or not they eschewed the use of violence".

A tape recording was also heard in which a British officer ordered a soldier to "shoot him dead" after a nail-bomb was thrown by a Derry youth. The soldier stresses that the youth is unarmed and offers no further threat. "Shoot him dead," the officer commands. The soldier fires but misses his target by "two inches", "Bad shooting," replies the officer. The incident took place just two days before Bloody Sunday.

An article which appeared in the Guardian newspaper just days before Bloody Sunday claimed that some British Army units wanted the Parachute regiment withdrawn from the North of Ireland because their aggressive attitude was disruptive. A British Army captain said the Paras were regarded as "thugs" in uniform. Another officer said paratroopers "seem to think they can get away with whatever they like".

A few weeks earlier, a group of Derry businessmen had urged a British Army commander to take tougher measures. In a memo by Major General Robert Ford to his immediate superior General Harry Tuzo, Ford reported that the traders had "wanted at a minimum, the Rossville Flats cleared and ideally the Creggan and Bogside occupied. They also wanted curfews and shooting on sight."

The British major general's view concurred with that of the businessmen. "I am coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary to achieve a restoration of law and order is to shoot selected ring leaders amongst the DYH." In a new statement to the Saville Inquiry, Ford denied that his suggestion to shoot did not amount to a recommendation to kill.

After the memo, Ford had 30 SLR rifles, adapted to use more accurate rounds, sent to 8th Infantry Brigade in Derry for training. Ford told Brigadier Pat McLellan to prepare a plan for the march which would take into account "the likelihood of some sort of battle".

McLellan supported the view of the local RUC commander Frank Lagan that a more softly softly approach in which the march would be allowed to proceed to the Guildhall, where participants could be photographed and arrested at a later date, should be adopted. Ford ignored their advice and informed Frank Kitson, commander of the 39th Infantry Brigade, that he would require 1 Para.

A British soldier, who was not a member of the Parachute Regiment, described being given a specific instruction not to open fire under any circumstances. The soldier described the order as "extremely unusual". "That was the only time I ever knew that to happen," he claimed. British soldiers usually operated under the Yellow Card, which allows a soldier to return fire if they were attacked or acting in self-defence.

The British Army warned journalists and photographers the day before Bloody Sunday that they were "going in hard". At a press briefing on the evening prior to the civil rights march, journalists were told to stay behind army lines. Another witness who delivered milk to Ebrington Barracks was warned by soldiers to "stay away from the Bogside". He was told "something big was going to happen" and "people could be killed".

At least ten British Army photographers and a cine camera team in a helicopter were deployed on Bloody Sunday, but the vast majority of the photographs could not be traced and were "probably destroyed".  Approximately 377 photographs were used during the Widgery Inquiry but of these only eight aerial photographs, taken afterwards, were supplied by the military.

A soldier, in a statement made in 1999, claimed a file of photographs had been kept by the Parachute Regiment but the inquiry has been unable to locate them. The tribunal has collected around 5,000 images, of which 1,500 were described as relevant, from other sources.