Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions £20 p.a. [P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]
No 1091 May 29 2001                                                                                                                                             25p

Just blaming 'white extremists' on the one hand, or 'multi-culturalist' excuses for minority nationalist sectarianism on the other, - lets capitalism's inadequacies and nastiness off the hook. Race relations have indeed been improving towards a more civilised adult maturity, but the rotten pressures of capitalist exploitation and slump-disruption are increasing faster now. Divide and rule is now the worldwide agenda of a Western-dominated imperialist economic system in crisis. Western privilege, prejudice, and colonising financial-military power, genocidally tyrannising the Palestinian nation, is the clearest example of a process that will have every ghetto in revolt before long. Only when Oldham's problems are seen as a class question, requiring the overthrow of capitalism's divisiveness, will some hopeful sense begin to be made of this unmissable pattern of increasing aggravation.

The Oldham disturbances are about the dying convulsions of a capitalist system which is utterly bankrupt socially, culturally, philosophically & politically, and which has begun to thrash about wildly in all directions as it economically approaches its terminal crisis.

Racist prejudice of all kinds, both ways, is clearly involved, as is hopelessly useless and inappropriate 'policing'; organised fascist provocations; rotten, insufficient, or unfair work opportunities; bad housing conditions; appalling backwardness arising from all this; plus all-round political ineptness and opportunism, all parties, which in its wretchedness dwarfs everything else combined.

But total paralysed chaos and confusion will continue to breed nothing but more and more trouble of the Oldham variety everywhere until the whole country can concentrate on the real problem, - that the entire collective relationships of capitalist society will from now on be doomed to ever-increasing sourness, violence, and breakdown because of the incurable inhuman contradictions built into the very way in which even the most 'successful' capitalism works.

The whole of Marxist philosophy is about the unchanging and unchangeable exploitation and alienation inseparable from how capitalism creates the productive 'economic miracles' it is credited with, condemning capitalism to periodic slump-disasters in which internal social violence and international warmongering catastrophes disfigure 
any claim to civilised progress.

The whole history of the 20th century is totally dominated by such war and revolutionary upheavals. But even all that will be totally overshadowed by the dramatic developments of the 21st century.

And once it becomes clear that it is the unalterable cut-throat competitiveness of the 'free-market' way of running society which is itself the unstoppable source of endlessly-repeated conflicts of all kinds in modern life, then the scientific Marxist understanding of the only possible way out of this crisis for civilisation will start to become clear, - the replacement of the economic and social anarchy of the 'free market' (effectively rule by the unchallengeable (dictatorial) power of the capitalist class) by the potentially far greater justice and humanity of a wholly socially owned economy, continuously developmentally planned for the ever increasing benefit of all, within workers states (effectively the dictatorship of the proletariat), - the only class which has the power and can find the cohesion (Bolshevik Revolution, Chinese Revolution, Cuban Revolution, etc) to overthrow bourgeois corruption and decadence when it drags capitalist society into its final degenerate stages.

Overcoming the brainwashing confusion in Western minds about the colossal real achievements of workers states since 1917, and about the real cause of their obviously many real failings as well (see EPSR Perspectives 2001 document) will be a major political propaganda task ahead for the workers party that will deliver the socialist revolution, - and it is this Cold War anti-communist brain-rot and cynicism which has so helped the capitalist establishment and society to impose divisive racist prejudices on workers now.

If class-war against the obvious injustices and unfairness of the capitalist system becomes generally regarded as pointless (based on the Western world's relentless anti-Soviet provocations and agitation) plus the ludicrous self-inflicted damage to socialism's credibility by the anti-Marxist Revisionist nonsense which prevailed in Moscow for 60 years), - then all that remains to provide workers with solidarity in the fight against oppression or life's inadequacies is ethnic and community understanding or the equally-limited mentality of trade-unionism.

But the petty-bourgeois weakness of all such nationalist or syndicalist spontaneity only lays workers wide open to every 'natural' prejudice going, and easily divided by every backwardness from racism and religion to trade-union 'who does what' disputes.

Once the working class is split, it can be ruled much more simply, and that, in the long perspective, is basically what Oldham is all about. Capitalism may not necessarily have always deliberately set up racial divisions within the proletariat, but it has always consciously profited from them when bad conditions (jobs, housing, community services, etc) are got away with because the working class is unable to unite and fight to get rid of them once and for all via the socialist revolution.

And it is the lingering joke of 'reformist' solutions, - the creation of class-compromise mentalities like trade unionism and race-relations do-gooding to cover-up their failure to ever really get rid of the causes of proletarian suffering and strife, - which ensures that the working class will be kept tied to the idiot class-collaborative daydream that 'one day', capitalist 'democracy' will guarantee 'true equality for everyone' and eradicate all social ills by economically uplifting everyone, etc. etc. etc.

Thus, bad conditions are bound to continue, forever protected by this 'reformist' nonsense; and racial strife will continue too, similarly untouched by all the do-gooding in the world from the race-relations industry. And the fake-'lefts' (Alliance, Trots, Revisionists, SLP, anarchists, etc) help keep these illusions going as much as any other anti-Marxist opportunism, pretending that their 'more serious' and 'more principled' anti-racism ("abolish all immigration controls", etc) will talk workers round from prejudiced strife via 'moral example.' This 'politically correct' race-relations industry is as useless as all the religious backwardness, preaching brotherly love but keeping people backward by denying them any serious Marxist-Leninist science.

Only the necessary disciplines of class action will unite all workers, not moral lectures; and the only level of action that could create the conditions for such an anti-racist transformation is the socialist revolution, which the proletariat is solely and uniquely fitted alone to lead and conduct. Without the proletarian dictatorship, the bourgeois system will keep capitalism, and racist divisions going indefinitely.

And the swamp of fake-'left' opportunism, which tries to placate, divert, and disarm workers just like New Labour with 'reformist' demands but just a little more 'left' sounding, yet always finds excuses for avoiding straightforward agitation for revolution, - is helping the rest of petty-bourgeois politics to do it.

So-called 'anti-racist' reformism just plays into capitalism's hands, - for example by endlessly encouraging ethnic minorities to help campaign against police 'racism' when there is an ethnic death in police custody, as frequently is the case.

But police brutality is not there because the capitalist state wants it in order to preserve racism. It wants the police there to preserve CLASS domination, -  against the whole proletariat, to preserve the state laws protecting the rights of monopoly private property against allcomers. The frequent minority ethnicity of police brutality victims merely suits the incidental added bonus for the capitalist state of sowing race-divisions at the same time as effectively asserting its power to be a law unto itself, as effectively being above its own law-and-order, and not unhappy that everyone should know it and therefore be afraid of it.

What does challenging police 'racism' do in cases of brutality against ethnic minorities??? Precisely conceals the essential class-domination role of the police, the one thing which can (and eventually will) unite the entire proletariat against them.

And does just singling out the mere racist symptoms of the police's essential class-domination role at least help 'cure' that racist blight??? It is an obscene 'reformist' joke. It lets the state's class domination role off the hook, meaning that the conditions creating racism will go on for ever; it helps divert ethnic workers into futilely agitating obsessively against only the racist aspects (symptoms) of their persecution, but not against the class-divided capitalist-system CAUSE of ALL their injustices; and it gives self-righteous anti-Marxist philistines the chance for some mighty petty-bourgeois 'revolutionary' posturing against some forms of imperialist exploitation but ignoring the essential capitalist-system content of all state repression and its CLASS basis.

The evidence that the racist problem is inseparable from the continuation of the capitalist system comes in the capitalist press itself as well as from the Marxist scientific understanding (from Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859) that it is mankind's social existence which determines consciousness and not consciousness which determines social existence:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show, that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.

The capitalist press has no great appetite for reprinting Marx’s devastating analysis of its system's insoluble contradictions and clear guide to the only way out (through proletarian revolution) but it does, willy nilly, provide anecdotal evidence, from ethnic contributors themselves, of how racist small-mindedness is symptomatic of EVERY community locked into capitalism's backwardness, frustrations, and grotesque 'reformist' political provocations and hypocrisy:

It's instructive that one of the "white" protagonists in Lidget Green was black. It will be interesting to see how the race relations industry, which has traditionally airbrushed over inter-racial tensions between minority groups, will explain this. Whatever its conclusions, there is no escaping the history of inter-racial tension between Pakistani Muslims and Afro-Caribbeans in the city, especially in Manningham. In September 1999, vigilantes firebombed a cafe known to be a centre of drugs dealing. Not too long before, the residents had made it clear (often through intimidation and violence) to the mainly Afro-Caribbean pimps in Lumb Lane that they should take their trade elsewhere.

The ethnic exclusivity of certain areas only aggravates matters. In Bradford this has taken on an extreme dimension with the Pakistani community fragmented further along ethnic lines. Lidget Green is predominantly Pathan, as is Bradford Three (Bradfordians know their city by its postal divisions). Manningham on the other hand consists of mainly Kashmiris. Of course within these ghettos, the Bangladeshis have their own little clusters, as do Sikhs and Hindus.

Much of the blame lies with race relations policies that have promoted ethnic insularity at the expense of integration. Money for ethnically exclusive centres and language support projects has poured into Bradford. Muslim critics say this has done nothing but create a whole strata of people whose livelihood depends on being linguistic intermediaries between minority comunities and local authorities. But on the contrary, it has helped bigots for whom Asians and Muslims should not and cannot be British and therefore should not speak English. And it has helped the race sector employees stay in work.

Some might accuse me of beating the Muslim drum here, but I see no reason to apologise. To be Asian, Punjabi, Pathan, or Kashmiri is to adopt an ethnically particular view of the world which does not go beyond the confines of the ghetto you inhabit. You see this most clearly during political conflicts when ethnic groups tend to circle the wagons.  Most Muslims will know of the endemic tension that exists in some mosques between ethnic groups and which even three generations on from immigration is still deep enough to become violent.

To be a Muslim, on the other hand, is to have a racially and religiously inclusive outlook, one which does not seek to efface ethnicity but which is not imprisoned by it either. At the moment we have a generation of young people whose notional and twisted attachment to their faith allows them to carry out an arson attack on a defenceless shopkeeper simply because he happens to support the rightwing Hindu nationalist party, the BJP. These boys are neither Asian, black or particularly Islamic; they're just confused.

The crisis of identity is exacerbated by a leadership vacuum. One conspicuous change in the aftermath of the Bradford riot was that them was no knee-jerk recourse to the Council of Mosques. Not that these bushy old men who speak Bradistani were ever held in any esteem, but their absence had expose a gaping void. Who are the community leaders? As to who they were not, one answer in an unattributed leaflet was quite emphatic: "We don't need self-proclaimed community leaders or council officials who have never cared about the area before trying to raise their status - they are all here with their own hidden agendas:'

Deprivation is another factor. I was in Bradford Three earlier this year and could not but be astonished by its Dickensian poverty and squalor. Parts of east Lancashire such as Burnley and Nelson, and the north Manchester satellite towns of Rochdale and Oldham are just as neglected. The conditions breed crime, much of it drug related. It might sound cliched, but for many youths in Bradford it's the choice between a job in a call centre down the M62 in Leeds (if you're talented you end up in the bloated race services sector) or a career dealing crack or smack.

This, despite the million-pound regeneration grants showered like confetti over Bradford. In January, three inner city districts were allocated £50m from the government's New Deal for Communities and in 1998 Manningham won £10m from the single regeneration budget.  One is entitled to ask where this money is being spent. Cash has gone into improving housing and recreational facilities, but seems to have yielded little in the way of long-term employment prospects.

This has grave knock-on consequences for integration. For many Muslim youngsters the workplace is the only window into life outside the ghetto. Without this, their social and mental horizons remain bounded by their spatial confinement. With no relationships beyond their immediate environment should it come as any surprise if they take on an insider-outsider, us and them, mentality? These turf wars and riots are a cry for help from people who are, in every sense of the word, trapped.

Rukhsana, who is going to Oxford to read law in the autumn, spoke of attacks on both Asians and whites. "Asian people do not trust the police as much and don't report these incidents. But it's not just about race. It's about violence."

Catherine Creaner, another 17-year-old A level student, said the reporting may have increased tensions but those tensions had been present for a long time. "Perhaps the issues needed to be brought to crisis point before they can be solved," she suggested. "But our lives are not built on racial tensions. This does not reflect the Oldham I know."

What is happening here is based on ignorance in the literal sense of a lack of knowledge. Of Oldham's current population of 219,000, around 24,600 are Asian, 14,000 Pakistani, 9,000 Bangladeshi, and 1,600 Indians. But it is largely split between white, Pakistani and Bangladeshi areas. Primary schools are mostly dominated by one of these communities, so often the first time young people of different races mix is at secondary school.

The divides are historic. Oldham's Asian population came here in the postwar decades to work the unpopular night shift in the cotton mills. They were skilled workers, recruited from textile factories in the Sylhet area of Bangladesh, parts of Pakistan, and Gujarat in India. They settled in the cheapest parts of town.

When the cotton business began to suffer, the Asian nightworkers were first to go. With no language or social skills because they had worked at nights, times were extremely hard in the tough economic climate of the late 1970s. White families were going through hard times too, and then as now the National Front swaggered through the town blaming these hardships on the immigrants. A generation grew up watching their cowed parents being subjected to abuse:-This history sometimes becomes an excuse for present-day attacks on whites, but is only one ingredient in the mix. Some of it is more about puberty than racism; teenage males staking out their turfs and picking on boys of a different colour in dim-witted acts of bravado. There is also a criminal element. Drug dealers sometimes employ teenagers as lookouts, briefed to scare off anyone who looks like a stranger.

The whole of this is overlaid by a cultural divide which can lead to trivial run-ins escalating out of control. Dogs are a good example of this. Fido is an Englishman's best friend, but many people from the subcontinent regard them as dirty and dangerous animals. While the Guardian's reporters were in Oldham they were given two separate accounts of arguments that started over dogs running off their leads and ended with blood-curdling threats.

Some white people, particularly young men, hold genuine fears about walking through Asian areas on their own. Asians feel the same about walking through some predominantly white areas.

There has been a loss of pride among Asian elders, and a breakdown of parental discipline. "Parents used to encourage their children to do well at school so they could brag about it,"said Mr Rafique. "I think that's gone out of the window. With a lot of families, if their son hasn't done well, they say 'so what - so and so's son has done the same. '  "

Millions of pounds have been channelled into the deprived areas of Oldham and the results are visible in the builders busy all over the Glodwick estate, and the new Tesco and B&Q on the mainly Bangladeshi Westwood estate. But the parts of Oldham where many Asian families live remain among the poorest places in Britain. The smaller Indian community has been assimilated more successfully, but there is high unemployment within Pakistani and Bangladeshi quarter; 16% and 25% respectively.

But no matter how much 'reformist' cash is poured in, the very mechanisms of the capitalist economic system itself cannot help but create more and more frustrations and an ever-greater sense of injustice, no matter how far the general level of living standards has progressed; because exploitation, cut-throat competitive rivalry, and property inheritance or old-school-tie freemasonry, continue to play a key role with all their bottomless opportunities for unfairness, hypocrisy, and corruption.

How can people always on the wrong end of the rotten systemic racket called capitalism not tend to reproduce some of its viciousness themselves???

Some of the capitalist press's own coverage of 'race' issues almost despairingly admits that it is a nasty world out there, and that disadvantaged people will tend to react accordingly, and with not much hope that anything can be done about it:

Investigators said they were deeply shocked by the culture of violence, drugs and poverty in which many of the suspects lived. During the questioning, detectives failed to break the resolve of a small group of 'terrifyingly alienated' teenage gang members.

A senior Scotland Yard source told The Observer that many of those arrested in connection with the murder suffered from anomie, a psychological term for a total lack of social or moral standards.

Officers working on the case had discovered a level of alienation and lack of respect for authority that many of them had never previously encountered.

Last week, police were stationed outside all secondary schools in Southwark, which includes Peckham, but many local people believe it was too little, too late.

This view is backed by Camilla Batmanghelidjh, director of Kids Company, a south London charity which feeds, clothes and educates more than 200 children.

She said: 'The police relied on the kids cracking but they were so gone psychologically that this was never going to work.

'These children are dangerous, what I would describe as suicidally uncaring. You cannot appeal to them in the normal way because they don't feel guilt. What the police failed to realise was that when you live in really appalling conditions, it's sometimes better to be in jail.'

'To get to the root of this case you have to understand that the gang acts as a pseudo-family. They lend each other money and look out for each other. It is a bunch of kids surviving on their own. The original police strategy of treating them like members of an adult gang was insane.'

When a teenager was killed, outside a local branch of McDonald's earlier this year, the handful of community workers who attended the victim's funeral were horrified to find they were the only adult mourners. The rest were dozens of child gang members, coming to pay their respects to a comrade.

Although it is not a word local people would use, experts say anomie describes perfectly the minds of north Peckham gang children, who are homeless and live as orphans, playing truant from school school. Southwark council does not know how many there are, and amid growing concern, it has commissioned an audit of children who are at risk in the borough to find out.

Anthony is typical of those the police are accused of failing to understand. Last week he fled his home after stabbing his mother's boyfriend in the chest. The man was left with a punctured lung and is recovering in hospital.

Now the 17-year-old is 'on the roads', spending the nights with friends and days at Kids Company. 'Sometimes I think that if it wasn't for me getting arrested nobody would know I was on this planet,' he said.  'I wake up in the morning and I just want to hurt someone,' he said. 'I've been in more fights in a year than most people have in a lifetime.' 

A few streets away, less than half a mile from where Damilola was killed, another mother is terrified for her children's safety. Leone, 50, lives with two of her seven youngsters. Her 12-year-old daughter met the murdered boy at the local library.

'Nobody will ever tell on those kids,' she said, shaking her head. 'Everyone knows who they are but nobody wants trouble coming to their door.'

A fresh and gruesome milestone has been passed. Britain's youngest female rapist, 18-year-old Claire Marsh, has been jailed for her part in a gang rape last year. Delphi Newman was walking along a London towpath when she was set upon by a gang of youths, including one aged 12. She was hurled into the Grand Union canal and, when she climbed out, Marsh hit her and held her down while Newman was raped.

Alarm bells should be screaming from this case. Violent crime by girls is shooting upwards. Although most such crime is still committed by men, psychologists estimate that, if the rate of increase continues, in eight years' time more females than males will be committing violent offences.

In part, the reason is obvious. Girls think of themselves as one of the lads: not just equal to, but the same as boys. So they're more likely now to go round in gangs, smoke, drink, do drugs and have casual sex. 

But this can't be the whole explanation. Marsh not only encouraged the rape but laughed and joked about it. What is terrifying is the amount of wholly gratuitous violence, cruelty and sadism being perpetrated by young offenders of both sexes. Last month five teenagers were found guilty of raping a mentally handicapped girl. 

Last year two teenage sisters were jailed after beating to death an elderly widow who had befriended them. The same year a 16-year-old girl was one of a gang of six that beat unconscious two young men and hurled them into the Thames, where one drowned. The year before, three girls tortured to death a mentally ill teenager whose hair was torched and who was beaten and locked in a cupboard before being strangled by a 17-year-old in the group. Meanwhile, in Birkenhead, child gangs have been pouring lighter fuel into tunnels dug by workmen to try to set them on fire.

And the nature of this violence appears to be changing. It is increasingly displaying a startling absence of basic human sympathy.  It is dehumanising its victims, treating them as insensate things, as rubbish, and sometimes - through the language that is used - as excrement. 

And it's starting younger and younger. Teachers provide graphic evidence that even very small children are out of control. Growing numbers of children express their feelings by kicking, biting, scratching and screaming. One Nottingham teacher has said that one in 10 children aged 3-4 is so uncontrollable as to need one-to-one help outside the classroom. 

Parents in all types of family seem increasingly unable or unwilling to set the boundaries that civilise and socialise children. Tony Burden, the chief constable of south Wales, has observed that some parents give their 14 and 15-year-olds six-packs of beer to take to parties. Marsh's mother is reported to have blamed the rape victim for being intoxicated and in the "wrong place at the wrong time".  

For children left intensely vulnerable by wholesale family neglect, popular culture can serve as the match to the tinder. Rap lyrics, computer games and videos normalise violence and sadism. Sex no longer has a spiritual dimension but is reduced to a source of instant gratification to be demanded as of right, like drugs. Cruelty is now the most lucrative form of mainstream entertainment. The Weakest Link gets viewers to enjoy the humiliation of contestants, who are then made to turn on each other to win. For this debasement of human nature, Anne Robinson is now the hottest property on television.  

Maybe the most significant connection of all is the one that is becoming the most difficult politically to make. It is no coincidence that violence among the young is increasing along with drug use. Home Office statistics show that drug users aged 12-17 are five times as likely to commit crime as non-drug users.

It's not just that users are robbing people to pay for their habit. Drugs cause young people to commit crime because they remove any moral inhibitions they may have. Young violent criminals behave in ways that seem hardly human because very often they are off their heads with drugs.

And we're not just talking here about crack cocaine. We're talking about cannabis. The towpath rape occurred after Marsh and another gang member invited Newman to smoke a cannabis joint. Supporters of drug legalisation assiduously promote the myth that cannabis just makes users giggly and happy. But the evidence suggests that, while this might be the case among some well-balanced people, it can have the opposite effect on those who are full of rage and for whom social codes have otherwise broken down.

American research has shown that the more teenagers smoke cannabis, the more likely they are to attack people and property, to play truant and to steal. A recent paper in the Journal of Addictive Diseases says cannabis is associated with attempted homicide and reckless endangerment offences. A Swedish study reports that, of a sample of 58 dead bodies in which cannabis was present, not only did 54 meet a violent death either by suicide or homicide but, of the eight who were killed, five were the victims of cannabis users. 

Yet debate is now dominated by those who wants "soft" drugs like cannabis decriminalised on the grounds that they cause no harm to others. These arguments, apart from being dishonest, have created a climate which positively encourages young people into the drug culture as an act of protest against adult "hypocrisy". That drug culture is helping to promote crimes of sickening violence. The adult world has made a fetish of youth and no longer grasps what parental responsibility entails. It smokes and gets drunk in front of the young and, undermining the law once again, puts alcohol on supermarket shelves where teenagers can illegally buy it. It gives its children no discipline, puts its own freedom first and blames everything but itself for the abandonment of the young. Is it any wonder then that savagery among them is on the inexorable rise?

It becomes clearer and clearer that 'politically correct' feminism and anti-racism are part of the problem, not part of the solution, - confusing everybody so that the capitalist system's clear responsibility for creating nasty, backward, or vicious consciousness gets hidden, and the real way out through communist revolution, to give human society a chance of slowly restored health, is driven even further from the frame. 

But why should society under twilight imperialism turn so violent???

Because of the examples of international persecution and brutality which the 'Western way of life' has effectively always condoned whilst hypocritically dressing it up as something other than what it is.

The colonial savagery by Zionist imperialism (originally a tool of US and British foreign policy) which first brutally expropriated the Palestinian nation, and then ruthlessly has sought since to genocidally wipe out its nationhood altogether, is an obviously topical example.

Reluctantly, the capitalist press itself is beginning to admit what a monstrous barbaric injustice has been inflicted on the Palestinian nation by Western policy, and systematically condoned and covered up for more than 50 years. Only a fraction of the horrific persecution is revealed here, but it puts into context the grotesque hypocrisy of the NATO allies in muscling their way into the Balkans for geopolitical counter-revolutionary longterm and long-range reasons (see countless past Reviews) but done under the guise of preventing 'ethnic cleansing' (supposedly by the Serbs who were eventually more sinned against than sinning, it has recently emerged) while for more than 50 years a truly barbarous ethnic-cleansing colonisation programme has been systematically inflicted on the Palestinian people with the West's full connivance and military assistance.

Even Western authors with Jewish connections are beginning to admit in their own imperialist newspapers what colonist horrors are still being committed in the name of the 'free West' which is supposed to have turned its back on such primitive racist degeneracy:

At some level, I suspect, feelings like these animate the attitude of most diaspora Jews, however disillusioned or assimilated to Israel. You may despair over its idiotic invasion of Lebanon, its complicity in atrocities such as the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, its countless human rights abuses, its reckless and frequently disproportionate use of force, its paranoia, its sheer bloody-mindedness. But somewhere inside there is always a small, persistent voice saving: these people are putting their necks on the line, making sacrifices, doing ugly things so that there will be a sanctuary for you if ever you need one. Who are you to criticise?

Nothing you have read quite prepares you for the provocativeness of the settlements, the sheer one-in-the-eye, fuck-you-ness of them. There are the familiar statistics, of course: some 200,000 settlers hogging a wildly disproportionate share of the land (20% of Gaza alone), with 2.9m Palestinians squeezed into the rest. But you don't quite get it till you see it: the boxy orange-roofed homes plonked on to hilltops like Monopoly houses, little patches of greenery dotting the drab brush of the Judaean hills, shiny black roads leading down to the broad, smooth highway, specially constructed to allow settlers to travel through the West Bank without having to pass through Palestinian areas.

As we speed past, our Palestinian guide points out the ones that have been built since the Oslo agreement in 1993, and you can't help wondering: why? Why, when peace was so close, did Israel continue to poke these concrete fingers in the Palestinians' eyes? Yossi Beilin, the former Israeli minister who was instrumental in the Olso negotiations, says settlement expansion was a price Labour felt it was worth paying for the support of its rigbtwing coalition partners. Now he's not so sure: "We believed peace was so close that talking about settlements that were not going to be there seemed irrelevant . . . What happened was that we don't have peace but we do have settlements."

Poorer and more concentrated, Gaza, is far more instantly shocking than the West Bank. The stench hits you first -  the area's only sewage plant has long been out of commission. Then the claustrophobia. With more than a million people packed into an area roughly the size of the Isle of Wight (20% of whose land is occupied by 6,500 Jewish settlers) Gaza would be a claustrophobic place at the best of times. Sealed off, as all Palestinian territories have been since September, it feels like nothing more than a self-governing prison camp. In the West Bank, thousands of Palestinians defy the Israeli cordon, walking over the hills to get to work each day in Israel. In Gaza, much of which is surrounded by an electric fence, closure means closure.

On one day in Gaza, we meet a man whose home has just been bulldozed by the Israeli army, visit a part of the Khan Yunis camp where 32 homes were flattened by the Israelis a few weeks earlier, and witness a rocket attack on a Palestinian Authority building in Gaza. But somehow these are less shocking than the everyday degradations and indignities of life under closure. We have seen the bulldozings and the rocket attacks on TV; the sheer brutality of closure only emerges  from the steady stream of stories you hear as you travel through Gaza and the West Bank.

Stories such as the one told to me by a Palestinian woman, call her Sarah, I met over dinner in east Jerusalem. Since the intifada, her mother, who lived in Ramallah, had been unable to travel to east Jerusalem to see her or her children. So Sarah and her husband had moved to Ramallah to keep the family together. There was just one problem: since Sarah and her husband were technically Israeli Arabs, they were not supposed to be in Ramallah. Any time they travelled into Jerusalem, they risked being turned back when they tried to go home.

As someone who grew up under apartheid, I have always resisted the glib comparison with South Africa. But hearing stories like this, it's hard to avoid the parallels. "It's worse than apartheid, actually," one Palestinian said when the analogy inevitably came up. "Right now it's apartheid without the pass system." Travelling through Gaza, hearing stories like Sarah's, seeing the settlements, you can't help asking the same question: how can Jews behave like this? How can a people that has for so long been oppressed allow itself to become an oppressor? It's a naïve response, of course; at the core of Israel's identity has always been the idea of the muscular New Jew, determined never to allow a repetition of the catastrophe that befell European Jewry, even if it meant treading on others to make sure.

Talk to any Israeli about why Israel behaves the way it does, why it is a nation that feels it is fighting for its very existence despite its overwhelming military and economic superiority over its neighbours, and pretty soon you come back to the Holocaust. Over dinner, an Israeli novelist described how the Shoah defined every aspect of Israeli life: "We survived to live and now we live to survive. We cannot escape it and it's very destructive."

If the Holocaust is one overwhelming influence on the Israeli psyche, the other is the deeply held suspicion that the Arab world will not be satisfied until it has pushed the Jewish interlopers into the sea. It's a view that frequently slides close to paranoia, as when one Israeli sympathiser pointed down from a hilltop vantage point at east Jerusalem and told me: "It's not the Palestinians we're worried about, but how would you feel if there were Iraqi troops down there?" But it's not entirely paranoid. When I pressed Hassam Khader, a senior Fatah figure in Nablus, on whether Palestinians would ever be completely happy with the return of only the West Bank and Gaza, his reply would not have reassured Israelis: "Sooner or later the Palestinian people will liberate their homeland. Now Israel is supported by the United States and Europe, but that will not continue for ever and sooner or later there will be a big battle between the Palestinians and Arabs and Israel."

What next? Even before last week's spiral of atrocities, no one in Israel thought the two sides could return to the brink of peace - from which they tumbled so disastrously last year - anytime soon, "It will be two or three years, at least," said Nimrod Novik, a former aide to Shimon Peres. "Both sides need to shed more blood." A Palestinian academic, arguing that the Palestinians should pursue a policy of attrition rather than negotiation, thought it would take much longer. "We can stand this for a long time. The Israelis are used to the European life and they will not want to live like this. The only question is who will break first, and we are already broken. We have been broken for 50 years."

In Gaza, the Jewish colonies break up the tiny strip into three parts. Elsewhere they form a barrier between Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and between numerous Palestinian towns and villages on the West Bank. They and the interconnecting roads slice up the territorial continuity of what Palestinians hope will be an independent sovereign Palestine.

Such a state - should it emerge - would cover only 22% of the Palestine under British mandate during 1922-48. It would be less than half of what the Arab inhabitants of Palestine were offered by the United Nations partition plan of 1947.

Taking a long view, therefore, the battle between the inhabitants of Palestine since 691 (when the Dome of the Rock was built in Jerusalem), and the post-1922 Zionist colonisers from Europe has always been about land.

Though Israel has existed as a sovereign state since 1948 on 78% of British Palestine, its top leaders, be they rightwing or left, have yet to declare a whittling down of the original Zionist aim of all of Palestine as the Jewish homeland.

After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, it was the Labour government which initiated the policy of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.

The example of Kiryat Arba, a settlement near Hebron, is illustrative. After its 1967 victory, the Israeli military setup its camp on 40 hectares (100 acres) of Palestinian agricultural land, something it was entitled to do as the occupation army.

What it was not entitled to do was to increase the confiscated land 10-fold, to 400 hectares (1,000) acres, over the next two decades and create a complex of four Jewish settlements inhabited by some 6,000 civilians. In the process the Israeli army deprived Palestinians of two-thirds of their cultivated land in the area.

In its various resolutions, starting with 252 in 1967, the United Nations security council has repeatedly affirmed that the fourth Geneva convention relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war (August 1949) is applicable to the Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967. This convention expressly forbids the occupying power to change the demography of the territory under its occupation through such means as deportation or transfer of "parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies".

"The transfer, the installation of the occupying power into the occupied territories is considered as an illegal move and qualified as a 'grave breach'," said Rene Kosirnik, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation to Israel and the Palestinian territories, last week. "It's a grave breach, formally speaking, but grave breaches are equal in principle to war crimes."

But Israel has ignored this. For a long time Jewish Israeli leaders refused to accept the fact that Palestinians were as much a nation as Israeli Jews. It was the eruption of the intifada in 1987 and its longevity that broke that myth.

The signing of the Oslo accord in 1993 signified Israel's official recognition of Palestinians as a nation represented by the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

But that had no impact on the colonisation programme. Since the Oslo accord, the number of settlements has risen from 157 to 200, and nearly 40,000 new houses have been constructed. The number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza has shot up from 125,000 to 200,000, and in Arab East Jerusalem, from 150,000 to 200,000.

The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has refused to accept the Mitchell report's recommendation of an immediate freeze on settlement activity, arguing that the enlargement of settlements is the result of the "natural growth" of the population. It is hard to attribute a 70% rise in seven years in the West Bank colonies to "natural growth".

Sharon forgets that when his Likud predecessor, Binyamin Netanyahu, aired the same reasoning it was shot down by the Clinton administration which leaked the information gathered by US satellites that a quarter of the houses in West Bank settlements were empty.

The source of Sharon's obduracy lies elsewhere. "Many Israeli people today are not much excited by the idea of gaining a hectare and then another hectare [of Palestinian land] for Israel but for me, that's still exciting," he told Ha'aretz (The Land), an Israeli daily, recently. That is the view of a 73-year-old Zionist pioneer, who grew up on a Jewish kibbutz during the British mandate; committed to colonising all of the British Palestine.

The fact that such savagery in the name of the 'free world' goes on possibly largely beyond the immediate specific political consciousness of capitalist society's violently rebellious poor or disadvantaged, only adds to the West's criminal hypocrisy, not diminishes it. It is precisely what foul corruption people sense lies behind the face of 'democratic justice' which NATO power likes to present to the world, which causes people the most frustrated and deepest resentment, knowing that capitalism is run by a bunch of crooks, but humiliatingly frequently unable to quite detect and expose exactly how bourgeois ideological propaganda continues making 'anti-communist' fools of everybody.

And in case the Zionist example of colonial tyranny should be dismissed as a serious negative influence on the whole mentality of the colluding West 'because it is a one-off special case' (as the uncomfortable Jewish capitalist voice tried to argue above), let the next potential Vietnam-holocaust-revisited convince the world that US imperialist barbarism is far from finished, not only not learning any lessons from its Vietnam humiliation and disgrace, but currently preparing an even more vicious blitzkrieg against socialist-minded revolutionaries in Colombia with even less plausible 'justification' than ever before, in fact with the wholly ludicrous 'excuse' that it wants to blitzkrieg Colombia in order to 'stop drugs reaching America's youth'.

But since America's youth take all kinds of drugs, most of them manufactured in the USA's own underworld laboratories, and are only marginally dependent on the coca leaves from Colombia (which they can and will get from a variety of other sources immediately the Colombian supplies run out), then it would make more sense to just blitzkrieg America’s youth if Washington was really serious about ending the nation's universal drugs habit. 

But of course, this ridiculous front about 'ending cocaine addiction' has nothing whatever to do with the real reasons for the Western 'free world' leaders to again demonstrate that bullying violence, hypocrisy, and treachery are really what 'capitalist democracy' stands for, - as can be read in the imperialist system's own newspapers as they temporarily continue their pretence of running a 'free and uncensored' press:

To control drugs, the US insists, first it must control the country. To this end, it has supplied 104 combat helicopters and trained three Colombian army battalions. But the army is not exactly the instrument of peace that Mr Pastrana has claimed. As Amnesty International has recorded: "Colombian army personnel, trained by US special forces, have been implicated... in serious human rights violations, including the massacre of civilians."

The army works alongside Colombia's ultra-right paramilitaries, who are responsible for the assassination of thousands of trades union and peasant leaders and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. As one of Colombia's official human rights ombudsmen has noted: "The paramilitary phenomenon... is the spearhead of Plan Colombia: to create territorial control and to control the civilian population. This is a terror tactic." The US, with the help of the Colombian government, is waging yet another dirty war in Latin America.

Far from eliminating drugs production, this war will only make it worse. Plan Colombia funds the aerial spraying of coca and opium fields with Roundup, the broad-spectrum herbicide patented by Monsanto. Roundup destroys almost everything it touches, wiping out legal crops alongside illegal ones, poisoning rivers, shattering one of the most fragile and biodiverse forest ecosystems on Earth, precipitating both acute and chronic human diseases. It is the Agent Orange of America's new Vietnam. (Agent Orange, interestingly, was also a Monsanto product.) Now the US administration wants to take this ecocide a step further, by spraying the jungle with a genetically engineered fungus which produces deadly toxins.

When their livelihood has been destroyed, the peasant farmers and indigenous people have no means of survival but to flee further into the jungle and start growing drugs. Since the aerial spraying programme began, the area devoted to drugs cultivation in Colombia has tripled.

But Plan Colombia is not a war against drugs: it is a war against people. Its ultimate purpose, as several international observers have pointed out, is to eliminate both leftwing guerrillas and grassroots democratic movements, in order to facilitate the seizure of the country's most valuable land. The US envisages a new inter-oceanic canal through the north of the country, to bypass the congested Panama canal. Its companies have identified billions of dollars' worth of oil and mineral deposits. So, for the past five months, soldiers and paramilitaries have been murdering community leaders and expelling local people. The places identified for economic development by Plan Colombia are the places now being savaged by the paramilitaries.

The European Union is well aware of these atrocities and of their coordination by President Pastrana's plan. At first sight, it appears to be contesting them. At a meeting on April 30, the EU resolved to spend 330m euros on "political support" for the "peace process" in Colombia. The money will be used to establish "peace laboratories", contest human rights violations and "relieve the social impact of conflict": The package looks uncontroversial and it received no significant coverage.

But the public statements issued by the EU, the European commission and Chris Patten, the British commissioner who brokered the agreement, contain a number of curious omissions. "Plan Colombia" is mentioned nowhere. Nor is the US government. Nor are the atrocities committed by the army and coordinated by the state. The killings in the country are blamed solely upon paramilitaries.and guerrillas.

Only when you read an account of the same meeting by the Inter-American Development Bank do you stumble across several interesting features missing from the European statements. The first is that the funding package is not a European initiative, but was provided at the request of the Colombian government. The second is that it will be supplemented by extra money from the US. The third is that Marc Grossman, a US under secretary of state, was sitting in the meeting.

Trawl the European commission's archive, and you discover a further interesting feature: that the 'peace process' to which the EU was referring is none other than Plan Colombia. The new funding represents the plan's "social component" attached to the US invasion in the hope of making it look like something rather different. Spain is prepared to go further still, and help the US to finance the Colombian army.

The new European funding, in other words, provides the political credibility which President Pastrana and the US administration have desperately been seeking ever since they initiated their plan. Wittingly or otherwise, the European Union has helped the two governments to disguise a programme of state terror as humanitarian aid.

Mass killings, ecocide and the seizure of resources do not have a financial solution, but a political one. You cannot buy human rights, least of all from a scheme that's responsible for their abuse. The only help foreign intervention can offer the Colombian people is intense diplomatic pressure, exposing the atrocities of their government and army, denouncing the scheme which coordinates them and isolating its supporters. Instead, we have chosen to collaborate. At its best, the EU's funding is a waste of money. At its worst, it amounts to complicity in crimes against humanity. How many of us would have agreed that our money should be used like this?

But are there still not 'white racists'in Oldham and elsewhere who 'should be ashamed of themselves' and 'made to shut up' according to the barmier fake-'left' posturers??? (and Blair!!!) This is quite lethal 'reformist' insanity. Of course organised fascists are out stirring up more and more trouble, - but it is the most criminally self-defeating delusion to pretend that for the imperialist state to ban the BNP and the National Front would end racism. It is the imperialist state, defending capitalist exploitation and international colonialism, which CREATES violent racist mentality in the first place, and which breeds every cause of racist division, splitting the working class and giving fascist backwardness its opportunity.

The disarming diversion of racist reactions to the rottenness of capitalist society will continue to spread as the imperialist-system crisis deepens, no matter what hypocritical 'justice' bourgeois society can be persuaded to posture with, such as the MacPherson report accepting that the Met Police are 'institutionally racist'.

It is the petty-bourgeois fake-'lefts', posturing around this & pretending that capitalism can be 'reformed' into something nicer (even while posing as 'real revolutionaries'), that merely opens the door wider to fascism because of their own anti-communist and anti-proletarian-dictatorship prejudices, thinly concealed behind the scab exterior of Trotsky's theoretical bankruptcy (worse than Stalin's).

By rejecting any serious Marxist revolutionary analysis of imperialist crisis, the self-righteous posturing against racism in the working class by the fake-'left', pretending to be able to drive it out, will only add to widespread disgust against all 'reformist' posturing of any kind.

The impractical and empty-gesture politics of "end all immigration controls" and "welcome all asylum-seekers from everywhere" teach the working class absolutely nothing about the disruptive stunts, rackets, and breakdowns indicative of the whole imperialist system in terminal crisis, but only tend to add to local communities' immediate worries or confusion, playing right into the hands of the fascists.

Immigrant refugee floods and opportunist economic migration are both safety-valve features of imperialist economic-crisis-management which can only continue to help defuse Third-World revolution while yet adding to the already grotesquely belittling and intimidating imbalances in wealth between the First and Third worlds. People big enough and determined enough to abandon their own homelands and cultures in order to suffer the constant humiliation of being unwanted immigrants in backward imperialist countries need every encouragement to become anti-imperialist revolutionaries either here or back home, but hardly need it for stimulating individualist betterment or immigrationist reformism.

Opportunist reactionaries do not cease to be such just because they become immigrants somewhere, and while opposing anti-immigrant prejudices could close off one avenue of racist backwardness, adopting the purely reformist challenge to the imperialist state to drop all immigration controls could just as easily help the establishment to play into fascism's hands, creating fresh 'racist' grievances ripe for exploitation.

Nasser Hussain has taken a swipe against 'multi-culturalism' - (against immigrant communities keeping themselves to themselves and refusing to become British) but he will be dismissed as an uncle Tom by struggling communities too hard-pressed to be worried about giving unconditional support to England's cricket team; or, better still, he will be derided by class-conscious workers who would love to cheer for the home team but who despise the class-ridden hierarchy of the MCC at Lords whose arrogant incompetence and remote ignorance has helped produce such inferior cricket in England for so long and would only survive even more sclerotically hidebound for longer if an England team started to play like world-beaters.

Greater international cultural integration is the obvious long-term future for the world; but pushed forward as a 'reformist' solution which can never succeed for as long as capitalism lasts (and its incurable periodic crises), and as a diversion from the class-war understanding to overthrow the outdated and dying British imperialist hierarchy (which alone can open the door to real social progress for all), - it just stinks, and makes Hussain merely look like someone's foolish stooge from the decrepit establishment running Britain.

Bigoted multiculturalism clearly plays into the fascists’ hands but the wretched national-chauvinism of the BNP and NF would continue to exploit the divisions created by endless social and economic grievances even if every ethnic minority in Britain queued for a week outside the Oval to watch England plod to a scrappy draw in freezing drizzle and 'bad light'.

Every 'reformist' approach, and even a 'revolutionary' approach armed with 'tactical reformist demands' which then fails to make it clear that only the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism can end the prime source of racism in the world and begin to create conditions, within a publicly-owned planned world economy, for racist backwardness to finally disappear completely from civilisation, - an approach favoured by the more ultra-left posturers around the Socialist Alliance such as the CPGB, - is worse than useless. Without any explanation of the revolutionary perspective facing Britain (and the whole world of imperialist economic crisis), then calls for such as black and white vigilante self-defence patrols, the 'democratic election' of all judges, and a trade-union right to strike for all policemen and a public boycott of the force, - are agitational notions which simply make no sense or get seen as likely to get anywhere. Explained in a revolutionary context however, an endless variety of such agitational tactics could draw more response. Build Leninism. 
EPSR supporters.

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

A lot of tribes have been wiped out, but there are also people who survived, like us, and what we want to show is that we are firm in our resistance and that we will never stop being Indians

FIVE hundred years, ago, the first Portuguese arrived to the shores of Brazil and started a process of genocide of the indigenous population. At the time, in 1500, the indigenous inhabitants of Brazil numbered an estimated five million. Today, after 97% of the indigenous people in the area have been wiped out, there are only 350,000 indigenous people left, (who constitute only 0.2% of the total population), representing 215 different ethnic groups, speaking 175 different languages.

Nowadays, the question of land rights is the single biggest issue affecting indigenous peoples in the Latin American country. The distribution of the land in Brazil is one of the most unequal in the world. Approximately 1% of the population owns 49% of the land. The indigenous people at the moment have no collective land ownership rights.

The 1988 Brazilian Constitution recognises the rights of Indian communities to their own social organisations, customs and beliefs and to the exclusive occupation and use of their traditional lands. All Indigenous areas were supposed to be demarcated by 1993, but FUNAI,  the government organisation that deals with Indian affairs, estimates that 47% of Indian territory has still not been demarcated and that many of these territories have been invaded by land speculators, cattle ranchers, forestry companies and mineral and gold prospectors.

Marcos Vernon and Leia Aquino, two representatives from the indigenous Guarank Kaiova groups, came to Ireland to explain the desperate situation they are suffering because of the lack of land. It is a major scandal that 500 years on, still not one Indian tribe is allowed recognition as the owner of. its traditional and sacred land. Their lawyer, Enereu Schneider, and Fiona Watson, from Survival International, who launched the book Disinherited, Indians in Brazil, accompanied them.

The Guarani people are one of the largest indigenous groups in Brazil. They number nearly, 30,000 and live in the South-West of Brazil in a savannah type area, which several hundred years ago was known as Mato Grosso do Sul, which means thick forest.

Unfortunately, the process of colonisation and destruction of their land has been incredibly intense. The policy of the government over the past 40 years has been to evict the Guarani-Kaiova Indians from their land and to dump them in a number of large reservations, rather like. the US government did last century with Native Americans. This policy has been disastrous, as the reserves have been completely overcrowded.

"The biggest problem that we face in our village is the complete tack of land in the area we live in to build our houses, to cultivate our fields and our gardens; in fact, to have the full way of life that we need to survive," explains Leia, who is a teacher in one of the Guarani-Kaiowa villages. "We really feel this inside of us, because we are literally corralled in, as animals put into a corral by the ranchers.

"We do not have the freedom that we need to have our own education, our own schools and to have better health; everything that we need to live in a community. We do not want to be dependant. It is very hard for us now to leave the villages in search of money and health.

We know that it is our right to have our land and we also know that there is absolutely, necessary for all indigenous families to have their land."

Overpopulation of the reservations is a huge problem - in the case of Leia's village, Cerro Marangutu, they still only have 15 to 20 hectares of land shared among 500 Indians. This overpopulation means that most of the men have to leave the village to look for work. "Many of them end up in ranches that are very far away because the local ranchers do not like the Indians and do not want us to work for them," said Leia. "So that means that they go out, and they end up working also in the alcohol distilleries, cutting up the sugar cane and here they really suffer a lot, because this is really hard work."

Fiona Watson, from Survival International, described how Mato Grosso is famous for cattle ranches and sugar plantations. "The sugar cane is harvested mainly by Indian labour. So it is not uncommon to go to one of the big sugar cane plantations and to interview Guarani children that are working under the legal minimal age of 16 and I have interviewed children of eleven or 12. They can work up to a ten-hour day in a heat of about 35 degrees and then all they own at the end of the week is a couple of dollars. This is slave labour."

For a people whose land is not only property but a way of life, the defence of their sacred land ownership rights is the most important issue.

Ava Taparandu (Marcos Vernon) warned that they are ready to fight. "At the moment, there are 8,000 Indians in Mato Grosso do Sul state who have come together and we are really warning people, because if the cattle ranchers start treating us worse, we are going to face up to them and we will have to expel them from our land", he said.

What Ava Taparandu, Leia and their people and other indigenous people are calling for is the demarcation, regularisation and ratification of their land. "I want the government .to send in a technical team and to literally map out our area and to make the ranchers leave, because if the rancher does not leave of  his own accord, then things are going to turn out badly," warned Ava Taparandu.

"This land is our land; it belongs to the indigenous people. The problem is the ranchers came in and built their ranches on top of our land. When we were evicted from our village in 1953, there were 2,500 Indians in the area. They threw 2,000 Indians off the land."

Despair has caused many Guarani to take their own lives. The Guarani-Kaiowa have one of the highest suicide rates in the world, 40 times higher than the Brazilian national suicide rate. As Fiona Watson points out, - "almost all the indigenous people that I have interviewed say that this is because of the desperation they feel that there is no future for them without land. It is mainly young people killing themselves. There have been documented cases of children as young as nine or ten killing themselves."

Today, indigenous groups are carrying out land occupations, driving by despair and hunger. However, the occupations are a dangerous process, because the indigenous people are up against people who have incredible economic and political power. The process of occupation means that often the communities that take back a little bit of land are hustled by hitmen employed by the cattle ranchers.

Obviously, the Guarani-Kaiova have not many reasons to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Portuguese. They joined other indigenous ethnic groups on marches and demonstrations against the celebrations. "For us, the 500 years were about resistance," explains Leia. "It was really to show the government and everybody in Brazil that we are alive and we still live an indigenous way of life. Unhappily for them, their desire to literally finish us off has never been realised. So the whole idea of the protest was to show our resistance to many things in the past, but also our resistance to things in the future. The fact is that a lot of tribes have been wiped out, but there are also people who survived, like us, and what we want to show is that we are firm in our resistance and that 'we will never stop being Indians."