'Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I. Lenin
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
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No 1095 June 26 2001                                                                                                                              25p weekly
Bristol Seminar Sat 2 pm (prompt).(Reserve venue). Rcpts pse.

Fears of capitalism's breakdown launch Labour's joke 'reformist' revival and urgent new twists to the Western media's relentless anti-communist campaign. But dismissing China as of no importance is hardly credible in the light of the Indian sub-continent’s unending economic and political torments which have persuaded Nepal's masses to back a Maoist revolution. And trading Milosevic to the Hague for $1 billion blood-money scarcely hides the stench of NATO's Serbian blitzkrieg in view of ongoing civil-war/land-grabbing/ethnic cleansing in Macedonia and Kosovo but without any hope of being able to blame Belgrade, and in view of BBC revelations of longstanding, separate-agenda, CIA civil-war provocations in the region. The constant media trashing of tiny Zimbabwe’s democratically chosen anti-imperialist gestures compared to the condoning silence over the monstrous military dictatorship in Pakistan and Zionism's nazi-level tyranny to genocidally take over the entire Palestinian homeland shows Western propaganda is preparing for non-stop warmongering brainwashing as the worldwide imperialist economic crisis deepens. The smoke from Burnley, Oldham, Bradford, etc, is spelling out a capitalist society collapse, - caused not by any of its parts but by a whole rotten system. US Balkans treachery to its UN and NATO allies confirms imperialism heading for revolutionary upheavals. Fake-'left' anti-Marxist philistinism is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Right on cue, - with the Blair regime, (having been re-elected), now heading nowhere but towards paralysed breakdown levels of farcical incompetence, lying corruption, and revolt-inducing propaganda nonsense within the next few years, - the great confidence-trick has begun to pretend that New Labour can in fact be "re-won" for its alleged "traditional values" of supposedly "humane socialism and publicly-owned social services and utilities, accountable to Parliament", etc, etc, etc.

Hattersley wants everyone to "rise up against the coup d’état which overthrew the legitimate philosophy; - denouncing in particular Blair's embrace of the heart-and-soul of conservative ideological viciousness, the meritocratic society (to allow everyone, regardless of origin, to do really well provided they have the talent and enthusiasm to make the effort); and the trickle-down effect as the means of financing it, meaning no high taxes on the rich so that their wealth-creating greed and inventiveness can "pull the whole economy along, for the benefit of all" etc.

The pro-Labour IPPR 'think-tank' has joined in, warning that on reflection, the craze for PFI (private finance initiative) funding of the PPP (public-private partnership) way of running the crucial social services of the country (education, health, transport, etc) was delivering poor quality and poor value-for-money.

And the TUC barons have started covering their backs as well by demanding more dialogue on policy in New Labour's second term, and threatening to review their funding of the Labour Party if things are not changed or do not improve.

The fake-'lefts' complete the picture, calling inside the bogus 'Socialist Alliance' for cooperative support and dialogue for such 'left Labourites' as Diane Abbott, Dennis Skinner, etc, and for possible renewed affiliation to the Labour Party (see last week's EPSR report).

This might all be termed the most diabolical historical conspiracy ever, if the whole idea was not so obscenely stupid. But the anti-communist world is growing very agitated about how badly things are now going everywhere for the free-market system, despite the supposed "victory for all time over communism", in 1990/1991; and a huge ideological brainwashing offensive is building up which can only be dealt with seriously.

Right in the front line are the rancid old myths that a) a lot of Labour MPs are "nice people, our natural allies, who want only what is best for the working class"; and b) that the "legitimate philosophy of Old Labour made for a stable, healthy society despite all its leaden-footed bureaucratic faults", etc, etc.

These are both utterly ludicrous garbage, but even worse, firstly, is the fact that they are both utterly irrelevant.

The British imperialist economic system is in a jam because of very long-term international historic forces which have nothing whatever to do with any 'mistake' in "abandoning Old Labour values and Old Labour Parliamentarians", whose 'return' (impossible anyway) could not make any difference but could only be the vehicle for the relentless steadily worsening of the country's situation.

As seen from the Lenin quotes last week, the notion of "imminent collapse" will inevitably play a central part in this propaganda struggle because it is the understanding that the imperialist world economic system cannot now proceed without an ever-deepening crisis (of armageddon proportions) which most effectively and quickly demolishes this joke 'reformist' revival, and which alone at the same time agitates the working class towards the very different kind of class-war battles which will eventually be called for, - a revolutionary political struggle rather than a trade-union reformist struggle.

Whatever the period of history, it will always be pedantically correct to say that with something so vast and complex as a global imperialist-system crisis, there can never be any certain knowledge of an 'imminent collapse'. Such things clearly are not 'knowable' in the strict meaning of words. But with this current global imperialist economic boom cycle having started 56 years ago, to talk about the system facing "imminent collapse" (in view of the economic, political, and social breakdown now so rapidly escalating worldwide, and expected to suffer a markets crash on top almost any month now) is the only logical propaganda way to get across the most serious crisis facing capitalism in 600 years, and the most serious crisis ever facing international civilisation.

If anything, "imminent collapse" is rather too pale an expression to briefly convey exactly what order of historical development is facing society.

The structure of routine periods of Labour Government 'reformism' came from the period of still continuing relative British imperialist superficial stability (the 20th century) but that historical epoch has now passed for good and will not be back. It was totally dependent on the century-and-a-half of vague international 'equilibrium' when the world was carved up for shared exploitation by just a handful of Western powers, with everyone else utterly powerless to do anything about it or challenge it in any way. The 'welfare state liberalism' periodically introduced by 'reformist' governments (Labour among them) in the metropolitan countries was derived from the crumbs off the table of the vast imperialist corporate super-profit; being made all the time out of this worldwide colonial tyranny.

But that 'stable epoch' was itself one giant fraud which was periodically interrupted by the appalling horrors (for the metropolitan countries too) of routine inter-imperialist wars for supremacy at times of regular economic and trade-war crisis.

The relentless inevitable accumulation of 'too much' monopoly-imperialist economic power (the whole basis of Marx's analysis of the capitalist system as incurably flawed and collapse-prone) made the world unstable enough in that period of 'stability'.

But now, the undermining faults have reached cataclysmic proportions. Instead of just a handful of Western imperialist powers being able to inflict massive destruction in arguing the toss about economic supremacy and trade-war rights, etc, - now half the world is of a mentality and in a position to at least damage or disrupt imperialist domination (following the bringing down of the West's physical colonial empires post-1945 in the wake of the further massive jolt to history given by the Bolshevik revolution's ability by 1945 to triumph over the worst warmongering savagery that supreme imperialist power could at that stage amass in Nazi Germany).

This next cut-throat inter-imperialist trade war and economic collapse will no more be dominated by just the usual handful of advanced imperialist industrial powers plus the Soviet workers state. It will feature the NATO gangsters plus more than half the rest of the world. Nothing will ever be remotely the same again, and the collective weight of not just millions this time, but billions, - all demanding that the system must go which drags mankind down into such periodic tyranny and degeneracy - will dwarf the revolutionary uproar of 1917 and post-1945.

It is only by the most idiotic and wilful blindness to the crisis-nature of the broad historical framework of the imperialist era that this ridiculous notion of a "return to Old Labour reformism" is still flapping around in the gutter outside 10 Downing Street at all; and, sadly, it is partly the attitude of the fake-'lefts' ("we all know about crisis but we don't need to go on about it", or "fight capitalism with sound all-round arguments, not with crisis-ism", etc,) which allows this lunatic "back to reformism" ideology to survive at all. It is a form of sceptical retreat from the full implications of Marxist philosophy, - in a way playing down the reality (that Marxism is essentially a philosophy of capitalist collapse) by saying: "let's worry about it when it happens".

The-wished-for roping-in of 'dissident Labourites' by the fake-'left' Socialist Alliance prolongs the same clubby spirit, wilfully ignoring reality. Of course any Labour Party celebrity is only human, as an individual. And of course as individuals, a few will possibly join the revolution rather than become the likely gauleiters of the counter-revolution.

But they are not acting as individuals in the role they are playing in society NOW. Collectively, they are a stage stooge army playing a CRUCIAL role in the great capitalist fraud called 'democracy'.

Collectively, if the Labour Party were not there (or some historically-evolved equivalent), then there could be no effective fraud of "capitalist parliamentary democracy" at all.

And any occasional bits of 'left' rebelliousness not only do not make the slightest difference to this crucial reactionary performance that this 'reformist' collective carries out, it actually enhances the great delusion which permanently pulls the wool over the eyes of the working class. It is the 'left' Labourites who for a century have always kept the working class hanging on to Labour in the hope that one day, a programme of 'real socialist' policies would be introduced, etc.

It is ludicrous to be fooled by bits of maverick 'left' Labour behaviour now; and the worst imbecility of all would be the CPGB anti-communists proposal for the fake 'Socialist Alliance' to agitate for affiliation to Labour. The Labour Party needs only ever to be seen collectively as a very very serious component in the bourgeoisie's subtle long-term class war against the proletariat. It was, and always has been, a deliberately-constructed vehicle for eliminating or overcoming all communist inspiration and Marxist understanding in the workers movement, and it will remain so, permanently. Any notion that 'Marxist entryists' were ever close to capturing the Labour Party is just the most obscene deception imaginable. A) none have ever come remotely close; and B) far worse and far more sinister, none of them were remotely 'Marxist' anyway.

It will be ten times worse now in any repeat of this entryist farce. If any real communist understanding ever did capture any existing party in Britain, either bourgeois (like Labour) or petty-bourgeois (like the 'Alliance', the SWP, the CPGB, etc), - the ostracism and isolation would be clamped down in an instant, - ferociously unmissable.

As for the supposed maverick 'left' Labour individuals, without exception they all remain as wedded to the bourgeois parliamentary system as any careerist in the Commons. They love the opulent lifestyle, they love the sense of importance, and they have no real problems with the fact that ALL government in Britain, whether Tory, Labour, Lib-Dem, or Nationalist, - is only ever going to play a marginally tinkering role on the fringes of the general Western imperialist state policy still largely prevailing for the moment throughout the major capitalist countries.

Without exception, these maverick 'lefts' are all Establishment figures, essentially. They will expose bits of wrongdoing here and there. And they will pretend to maintain overall ideological scepticism about capitalism. But when it matters, they will be disastrously ineffective in leading a working class revolt against serious degeneracy in the international imperialist crisis, and they would never ever totally denounce the 'western democracy' way of doing things in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They would all serve the counter-revolution. The very 'leftest' of them is no better than a Kerensky or a Kautsky. Even the wretchedness of Scargill's social chauvinism would be far too 'left' for most of them, such is the degeneracy of anti-Marxist philistinism in the British labour and trade-union movement.

It is the greatest illusion imaginable to think that any individual Labourites or guru-led sect can be 'saved' or 'won over' for a revolutionary communist role, either. Once a clear philistine agenda has been established and stuck to, then it is only the historical collapse of the ideas themselves which then releases people for further development.

Labour 'leftism' is a fixed class ideology, for example. Such petty-bourgeois 'mavericks' feel truly justified and rewarded, - deeply fulfilled - from hovering on the fake-'left' fringes of the Labour Party, waiting for nothing to happen. Only when the final nail is hammered into the coffin of Labour counter-revolutionism will such types finally accept that 'something might be going wrong here'.

Waiting for Scargillism and the SLP to deliver is just as sterile and just as entrenched a petty-bourgeois position, anticipating that hordes of well-meaning 'socialist' supporters of Labour and the trades-unions will be bound to get sick of Blair's rightwing reactionary nonsense eventually, and must then inevitably turn to the NUM leader's well-known martyrdom for the cause of Clause IV.

But Clause IV was a fraud to start with. Parliamentary 'socialism' was always the most idiotic deception going, and only the most profound and self-regarding philistines could ever have feigned 'belief' this nonsense in the first place, and all the added knobs on "extra-parliamentary action" savers in the world will not prevent this mentality from being labelled fairly as parliamentary cretinism.

And it is not the standing for parliament itself which is necessarily anything at all to do with the problem. It is precisely what is said, - and written, - about standing, and about the crisis of capitalism in general, and about the crisis of all anti-communist philosophies (or PREVENTED from being said and written) which makes all the difference.

Don't play the working class for fools. The SLP Manifesto was imbecile, half-digested CRAP, and everyone knew that it was intentionally so. Hopefully, the derisory vote meant that the working class saw through the bollocks. It should deservedly mean that anything called SLP should be treated with contempt for ever more. Blaming the working class for being too backward to vote SLP is even beneath contempt. There is admittedly much ideological confusion throughout the world. But Socialist News can only add to it. Publishing a thin selection of two-month-old trade-union branch reports six times a year plus a few bits of desultory, inconsequential, contradictory political shallowness is getting no-one anywhere. And when the hoped-for 'Scargill vote machine' starts firing only useless blanks as well, it could be suspected that the writing is on the wall.

Coming from the totally opposite direction, a totally different brand of anti-Marxist philistinism thinks so too. The unserious good-bloke of television intellectuals, Clive James, has been wheeled out to considerable publicity to reassure everyone that although capitalist democracy is now looking extremely sick despite having 'won the battle of history against communism' a decade ago, it will not do any harm if democracy is seen as nothing better than what you have to have, no matter how embarrassingly flawed, if you don't want totalitarianism back (i.e. 'communist or fascist').

This sad cynical 'wisdom', however, is so uncertain (not surprisingly) about its ability to calm fears (that capitalism is going wrong again), that James adds some gobshite Cambridge University 'erudition' to casually put down Marx for added measure, hoping no-one would notice or take offence:

Capped by its masterpiece, political correctness, the irrationality in the universities clearly had its provenance in the classic left. Other rampaging viruses just as clearly had their provenance in the classic Right: specialisation, atomisation, niche-marketing, the transformation of tabloid journalism into a sort of plain-clothes police state - they all worked the sadly recognisable trick of erecting opportunism to the status of a principle. Whatever their origins, it seemed more realistic to treat these developments as malignant strains bursting with their own vitality, rather than as a mere symptom of a benign system grown weary. As a corollary, the main discussion from now on would have to be about what values would prevail in bourgeois democracy, and not how bourgeois democracy would be replaced.

But by now everyone was acting that way, even if they could not yet bring themselves to declare it. The tendency was well established by the time I published Snakecharmers in Texas in 1989. The Soviet Union was on its last legs and the End of History was already being proclaimed. (For the quarter of the world's population who were still up to their necks in history, this was one more insult than they needed, but by some trick of the mind, the Chinese as individuals have never mattered much more to us than they did to Mao.) It was at last being generally accepted that the only struggle for power that counted would take place within the society we already had.

In the eye of eternity, such an acceptance had only ever been a matter of time. What Lassalle tried to tell Marx was always going to be true: the free-market economy, as an economic system, had a much greater potential for development than Marx ascribed to it, whereas the command economy had much less...

Despite the perennial suspicion of the totalitarian Left that the totalitarian Right was capitalism's logical offshoot, and natural ally, the bourgeois democracy so despised by both extremes inexorably proved, by its power to defend itself, that it was capitalism's natural host; and, by its power to go on developing a supervening structure of liberal institutions, that it was the only political system with a plausible claim to the future, because it alone could accommodate the unexpected.

Bourgeois democracy has never been susceptible to exhaustive analysis: it has always grown beyond the limitations ascribed to it by its critics because it is capable of listening to them. It doesn't always listen, and scarcely ever at the right time: but the possibility of listening is not ruled out, and that's enough.

An interestingly low-key summary of modern world history, but crucially bent on some very vital questions indeed. James is aware that capitalist society just stinks to anyone with half a brain. But if the point can be got across dismissively enough that no serious-thinking person can now believe any more (after the Soviet workers state's ignominious self-destruction) that there is any realistic basis for discussing any alternative systems to sick sad capitalist democracy, then the easy life for those who have made it might be prolonged for a decade or two, his type must reason.

But it is fascinating that it is in not being able to resist airing his non-existent knowledge (when he had no real need to for establishing his basic shallow theme) that the TV philosopher shoots himself and his cause in the foot. The arguments on Marx are just crass; and whether or not this James propaganda cynicism is a runaway success or not, or a thousand other shallow works like it, the stupid misrepresentation of Marxism is eventually going to become the burning question society will demand an answer to.

And jeering at 'Marxist faith' doesn't work. It is how world developments keep on confirming the one and only scientific understanding of history (the very developments that are interrupting the drinking pleasure of others of this ilk) which will bring the world back to purposefulness and reason.

Only a total cynic could seek to take advantage for his own argument of the stock Western racist dismissal of China’s workers state, and at the same time use it to shaft the communists with as well. There will be plenty of time to grieve in the future about whatever tragedies Mao's voluntarist version of Third International Revisionism inflicted on China's struggle; but it all pales into insignificance set against the truly colossal transformations for the people of China that the communist revolution brought about, replacing more than a century of Western (and Japanese) imperialist tyranny, exploitation, humiliation, and butchery.

And much much more to the point, the whole world still watches and waits with interest to see what the Chinese workers state does next, - the US imperialists horrified and full of fear; the rest of the world (even including some of the lesser imperialist regimes) with some pleasure or even hope.

The crude James simplification of Marxism is very much the issue. Using controlled capitalist management methods for limited economic aims of speed of development was Lenin’s fully Marxist understanding of scientific necessity during the NEP (new economic policy) period of the 1920s. Hopefully still under control, the Chinese workers state has introduced similar measures. And surely it is precisely still that workers-state control, coupled with the remarkable successes of the Chinese economy on world markets, that is giving Washington such sleepless nights, - Beijing ideological Revisionist weaknesses notwithstanding. And it is even more surely the possibility of the international imperialist market system's economic and trade-war collapse serving to jolt the Chinese workers state back to a re-adoption of Marxist science on the warmongering crisis-ridden flaws of capitalist anarchism which haunts Washington (and Clive James?) even more.

The CIA's non-stop counter-revolutionary subversion campaign against China exposes fully the naïve wishful thinking in the phrase "the only struggle for power that counted would take place within the society we already had".

No. US imperialism's deadly war to restore bourgeois-imperialist power in Beijing is taking place within the Chinese workers state, and it is precisely because it potentially represents a form of society with a far more secure, enlightened, and ultimately economically more developmentally productive future than crisis-ridden capitalist anarchy that the American imperialists are so worried (and Clive James so cynical).

In his wordy cleverness, James then commits the silliest howler of all, assuming that it is mistaken for Marxism to identify all imperialism with recognised fascist excesses. Wrong. It is precisely Revisionism (anti-Marxism) which for class-collaborative reasons came up with the laughably unscientific nonsense that there was a 'good' imperialism (the US, British, and French World War II 'allies') and a 'bad' imperialism (the German, Italian, and Japanese WWII 'axis' powers). This lunatic faith in the capitalist 'democracy' fraud paved the way for the 'peaceful coexistence' and 'peaceful roads to socialism' garbage which finally led to Soviet workers state, socialist camp, and international communist party mass self-liquidation.

It is precisely Marxist science which has remained clear that the Nazis came to power through 'democracy'; that it was precisely the cowardly ineffectiveness of parliamentary bourgeois 'democracy' that let in Franco fascism in Spain (thanks in part to the Revisionist 'Popular Front' class-collaborative delusions); and that the colonial tyranny record of the great 'democracies' (led by Britain, France, and the USA) utterly dwarfs the atrocity record attributed to Nazi imperialism (holocaust and all).

It is precisely all anti-Marxist fake-'left' philistinism which makes a ludicrous distinction between 'fascist' state tyranny and 'ordinary' imperialist state tyranny, - thereby endlessly allowing the imperialist system as a whole to pretend that it is 'opposing' fascism in general (when all the time in the 1930s, for example, the West was encouraging the build-up of Nazi German warmongering aggression as blatantly as possible, including allowing fascist political sympathies to spread throughout the West unchecked).

Bourgeois 'democracy' always capable of 'growing' because always capable of 'listening to its critics'???????????

Consider this just-published research in the capitalist press (the same Guardian that gave the James garbage such publicity) on the PERMANENT TORTURE AND DEATH REGIME WORSE THAN ANYTHING NAZISM COULD EVER HAVE DREAMED OF which British 'democracy' inflicted on campaigners for Indian independence from 1857 to 1939, lasting through two governments of Labour's "legitimate philosophy" (1924 and 1929) for the benefit of the fake-'left' and other 'reformist' wishes to re-affiliate to old Labour's "traditional socialist values"; and predating Hitler's tyranny by 75 years, and running contemporaneously with the Nazi concentration camps:

Chowdhury is one of the last survivors of a British penal experiment inflicted upon more than 80,000 political prisoners. He joined the Indian freedom struggle against the Raj at 19, like many others recruited into Anushilan Samiti, a covert Bengali organisation. On October 2,1931, he had taken part in a robbery to raise funds for bombs and guns, and the CID had intercepted his getaway car. At the age of 24, he received an unusual sentence.

Prisoner 147 was shipped to the British version of Devil's Island. Like tens of thousands of political prisoners before him, Dhirendra was manacled in the hold of a liner and carried to a remote archipelago in the middle of the Bay of Bengal. Over the past threequarters of a century, hundreds had tried to escape from the Andaman Islands. Those who remained were routinely tortured and experimented upon by British army doctors who administered the colony, in which thousands died.

"We are forgotten victims," says Dhirendra. "Back then, all we wanted was food, and you gave us gruel that was riddled with white threads of worms. We demanded an end to work gangs, and we ended up chained like bullocks to oil mills, grinding mustard seed, around and around. We wanted medical aid for our fevers, and your doctors signed papers stating we were fit enough to flog. That's why 28 of us went on hunger strike."

Among the records of the Government of India's Home Department, we found the Empire's response in its Orders to Provincial Governors and Chief Commissioners. "Very Secret: Regarding security prisoners who hunger strike, every effort should be made to prevent the incidents from being reported, no concessions to be given to the prisoners who must be kept alive. Manual methods of restraint are best, then mechanical when the patient resists."

Now, 68 years later, spread-eagled on his bed, Dhirendra re-enacts the scene. "They rammed a tube down my nose and I tried to catch it with my tongue when it passed down my throat. Several times I succeeded, clenching the end between my teeth, but they just kept pushing harder, and eventually I felt the cool gush of liquid." An Indian Medical Committee report confirms his story. "Recommendation, 24/1629/1: A rubber catheter should be inserted through the nostril and into the gullet and so to the stomach. A solution of milk, eggs and sugar should be poured via a funnel. In certain cases rectal feeding should be tried."

"Then the screaming began," Dhirendra whispers. "We were all being force-fed simultaneously, but there was something terrible happening in the cell next door, where Mahavir Singh had been locked. The doctors at the Cellular Jail hated him." According to his case file, Prisoner 68 – Singh - was transported for driving a getaway car, his part in the killing of Lahore assistant police superintendent Saunders in December 1929. The penal colony's hospital log contains some clues as to what Dhirendra had heard.

"11am: Mahavir Singh resisted violently," Dr Edge, the British senior medical officer, had scribbled on the last page of his case notes. Two hours later, he wrote, "1pm: Patient showing signs of evident shock." By now, his handwriting was noticeably frenzied. (A government dispatch circulated to medical officers earlier that month might explain why Dr Edge had cause for concern: "In the absence of circumstances creating a right to administer food forcibly, the authorities in charge of hunger strike are liable criminally and civilly for assault.")

Dhirendra eases himself off the bed. "It took a while for the whisper to reach the Yard Five Wing. By then it was 8pm." The bell rang again. Every prisoner shuffled to his locked gate. "The feeding tube had gone into Mahavir Singh's lungs. They were filled with milk. Doctors were now fighting to revive him. So we shouted 'Inquilab Zindabad' - long live the revolution. 'Inquilab Zindabad'. Twenty-one warders ran out of the Central Tower. 'Inquilab Zindabad'. Truncheons were drawn, a gun was cocked.'

"Midnight," Dr Edge noted in the penal colony's hospital log. "Mahavir Singh - dead."

Dhirendra turns his back on us. "Drowned in milk," he sighs. "Twenty-six more men on Levels One and Two now joined the strike, and nine days later more news came, tapped out on the bars in our special code with our manacles and fetters. Prisoner 89, Mohan Kishore, had also been killed. Drowned in milk. The British doctors didn't know what they were doing and yet they kept on going. Two days on, and another rat-a-tat-tat. Mohit Mitra. Prisoner 93, was gone the same way. How did the doctors manage to make the same mistake three times? We heard the bodies were weighed down with stones and sunk in the black water. Inquilab Zindabad? I cried and cried.

The British military doctors had admired the penal settlement unveiled by the French six years earlier on a rocky islet off Guyana. But their Devil's Island would be far more ambitious. The doctors consulted Hindu texts and decided to create a psychological gulag based around the Sanskrit term kalapani. It literally meant "black water" but kalapani was also a myth, an ancient Indian story that told how the faithful were parted from their souls by crossing the sea. The doctors knew that kalapani would be feared across the Empire as a godless place, a journey that would strip the transported of their caste, community and creed.

On December 11,1857, Doctors Frederick Mouat and George Playfair reached an island chain that they knew was the ideal location. Their search for a seat of revenge against "deserters and rebels" was by now all the more pressing: British Rule was paralysed by the Indian Mutiny: Three weeks earlier, Sir Colin Campbell had relieved the Residency at Lucknow to find that only 980 Europeans had survived a five-month siege. Mouat and Playfair knew, as they surveyed the terrain, that British troops were burying 2,000 dead. No one came to these islands, the doctors noted in their logs, but the half-drowned or truly desperate. For nine months a year, the Andaman islands were caught in the crosswinds of competing monsoons, and they remained uninhabited apart from pockets of "unearthly and ferocious tribes". A better place to exile the "gigantic evil" of rebellion could not be found.

On March 10,1858, Dr James Pattison Walker arrived at the Andaman Islands with the first batch of 200 "grievous political offenders" sweating in his ship's hold. Transportation to Australia was outlawed in 1850, but there had been no furore when the doctor's shipment had got under way from Calcutta eight days earlier.

"The jungle is so dense, and its entanglement by gigantic creepers so complete, as to render it impassable," Dr Walker wrote. Into the jungle he dispatched men in chains with orders to build their own shelters on islands Ross, Havelock and Chatham. From Calcutta and Madras, from Karachi, Singapore and Burma, the ships disgorged yet more prisoners, their crime and punishment carved on to wooden neck tickets, "so sick and debilitated that they cannot be now employed":

So many died on the voyage over that Dr Walker asked for another 10,000 to be shipped. From "sunrise to sunset", Walker wrote in his diary, "I stood uncomplaining". At the makeshift pier, he greeted new arrivals, "impressing on them the utter hopelessness of all attempts to escape". And he frightened his charges by reading to them from Marco Polo's journals an account of the indigenous tribes, dispersed across the 200 or so islands. "Every man not of their own nation," Walker declaimed, "they can lay their hands on, they kill and eat."

Within four days, the new transportees were bolting. Prisoner 61, Narain, sentenced for "having excited sedition in the cantonment at Dinapore" was the first to set out. As he was fished from the black water, hauled up before Dr Walker and executed on the approval of the medic's superiors, another convict, Prisoner 46, Naringun Singh, "guilty of desertion at Nuddea" hanged himself. By mid-April, 288 inmates, one third of those who had survived transportation to the islands, were on the run. When, on May 13, 81 of them, "driven by the murderous attacks of the savage aborigines", limped back into Port Blair pleading for mercy and medicine, Dr Walker hanged them all in a day.

When news of the summary executions reached Calcutta, JP Grant, President in Council, dashed off a letter deploring the result: "I cannot recognise any of his [Walker's] considerations as justifying the executions." But Walker escaped official censure, and on Grant's orders every inmate capable of escaping was now locked into an iron collar, so that prisoners would never again be able to flee and "excite public attention".

The doctor was finally removed from the penal project on October 3,1859, shortly after he had proposed branding the convicts' forearms with their crime and sentence. Conditions worsened. Within four years, 3,500 out of 8,000 transportees had been killed or had died of fever, a staggering mortality rate that prompted an investigation. When Sir Robert Napier arrived in Port Blair, he found the scene "beyond comprehension". An "air of depression and despondency" clung to the islands. Why did the prisoners have no shelter, clothes or food?

Eight years later, Lord Mayo, the Viceroy of India, arrived at the Andaman Islands on an inspection tour. As the sun set over Mount Harriet on February 8,1872, and the Viceroy descended from the highest point on the island chain, he announced: "This is the loveliest place I think I ever saw. Plenty of room here to settle two million men." But his vision was instantly cut down. Major General Donald Stewart, the islands' superintendent, described the scene at a subsequent inquiry. He heard the cry of "kill, kill" and then a convict "fastened like a tiger on the Viceroy's back". Major Byrne, Lord Mayo's private secretary, reported to the same panel that his superior cried out, "They've hit me." The Government of India concluded that the killer, Sher Ali, had no known motive. They hanged him on March 11. For Irishmen who remembered Lord Mayo's tenure as their chief secretary, Prisoner 15557 became a martyr, a member of "the warrior dead". Any hope that the Andaman regime would mellow was throttled.

By the late 1870s, the monthly dispatches from the island were reading like pathology returns. "May: 20 inches of rain. Sixteen dead from diarrhoea at Aberdeen... June: 13.4 inches of rain. Convict suffering from ulcer hanged himself at Perseverance Point...July: 17.1 inches of rain. Emaciation at Bamboo Flat so extreme...men appear like veritable skeletons. Thirty-five dead."

And tucked between the pages are government approvals for secret pharmaceutical trials: "From the Secretary to the Government of India, Simla, June 24th 1880, despatch 197, to Dr J Reid, Senior Medical Officer, Port Blair: Regarding a new drug, cinchona alkaloid, the experimental use is very desirable... and should be confined to 1,000 convicts."

Dr Reid's sample group was force-fed "three grains a day" until they started to sicken. "Convict 25276. Observed on 22 March 1881. In a weak state. Bloodless. Tongue large, pale and flabby. Diarrhoea. Dead in two days."

But the rough preparation and dosage experimented with by the prison doctors caused acute side effects: nausea and diarrhoea. It was also a depressant. In monthly reports for the period of the test, the chief commissioner, Lieutenant-Colonel T Cadell, observed "a remarkable increase in suicides. Convicts "weary of life" were literally hacking each other to pieces, hoping to secure the death penalty. But Cadell had a solution: "Flogging and a reduced diet. Everyone under the age of 22 was now required to sleep in "a sort of trellis-work cage".

Escape from kalapani was surely on all the inmates' mind, and Prisoners 12819, Mehtab, and 10817 Choitun, came the closest to succeeding. They stole away from the islands on March 26,1872, rowing out into the Bay of Bengal on home-made rafts across a 750-mile stretch of turbulent water, dodging schools of bounty hunters who fought over 250-rupee rewards (then £25). Picked up by a British vessel, they persuaded the crew that they were shipwrecked fishermen and eventually pitched up, free, at the Strangers Home for Asiatics in London. The two were fed, clothed and given a bed. But while they slept, Colonel Hughes, the home's proprietor, took photographs that were circulated around the Empire. One morning, Mehtab and Choitun awoke to find themselves shackled and frog-marched aboard the Mofassilite. They were bound for India. 

A tougher regime was needed, the British government concluded, than the one that had to date processed 49,592 prisoners. At a Society of Arts lecture at London's Imperial Institute, on February 24,1899, Richard Carnac Temple, now chief commissioner of the Andamans, unveiled a half-million rupee vision to crush once and for all the mutinous spirit. Prisoners would no longer live in barracks scattered across the malarial islands. Instead, a 698-cell panoptican was now rising out of the mangrove swamps on a promontory called Atlanta Point, overlooking the main town of Port Blair. From its Central Tower radiated seven 150-yard wings that rose to three levels, each level fitted with 52 cells, 13.5ft by 7.5ft, each supplied with a 6ft by 3ft wooden slat bed and ventilated by a barred 3ft by 1ft grate. Here was a "huge, practical reformatory" that would carry the work of the Andaman Islands' authorities into a new age. Every arrival would be forced "to bend his rebellious nature to the yoke"; Carnac Temple promised them a fate "even more dreadful than the hangman's noose".

It was not just the prisoners who suffered. From the inception of the project, the indigenous inhabitants of the islands, who had migrated on the trade winds from Africa, at least 30,000 years before, acted out "a pantomime of defiance", emerging from the impenetrable jungle only to rain down arrows on British settlers.

In 1863, island chaplain the Rev Henry Corbyn, a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, had captured 28 Andamanese, 10 of them children, and held them hostage at the authority's headquarters on Ross Island. He wanted to "restore them to a place in the human family" and teach them to respect the British. The patrician cleric wrote in his journal of how he took eight "scientific curiosities" on a tour of India and Burma.

Only a small entry for the following month reveals what happened to the women and children left behind. "They appear," he wrote, "to have been assaulted, suffered the unwanted advances of a naval rating in charge."

By 1866, the penal colony’s authorities recorded that the Andamanese tribes were "dying in large numbers". By 1870, the cause was found to be syphilis, introduced by the rapist. Eight years later, after measles, flu, tobacco, opium and whisky had swept out of the European settlement and into the jungle, more than half of the 5,000-strong tribal population was dead.

Vinayak Savarkarwas aboard the SS Maharaja which docked on July 4,1911, bringing prisoners to the brand new Cellular Jail. The wooden ticket around his neck declared that he was here to serve a 50-year double life sentence. "I felt that I had entered the jaws of death. The high wall was adorned with a festoon of manacles and several similar instruments of torture were hanging down from the well," he wrote.

Prisoners in chains were equipped with two blankets, a kurta and tar-covered piss-pot balanced on their heads. Before them stood the jail overseer, "a stout, corpulent Irish officer, carrying in his hand a big stick".

Savarkar scratched out his story with a nail on to the walls of his cell (No 52, Level Three, Yard Seven Wing. It had a view over the gallows that could hang three men simultaneously). Five years previously, in 1906, Savarkar had been admitted to chambers in London. It was at a time when India was on the cusp of another mutiny. The 50th anniversary of the Lucknow massacre loomed and Lord Curzon's decision to partition Bengal was threatening to destabilise the province. Savarkar, aged 23, took digs in a student hostel in Hampstead; he found it had become the headquarters for the newly-formed Free India Society. He turned his hand to translating Russian bomb manuals, and hollowing out copies of The Pickwick Papers to be filled with guns for India.

The smuggled munitions found their way to student activists such as Indu Bhushan Roy. Others - like Calcutta student Ullaskar Dutt, who stole chemicals from his father's university laboratory - made their own bombs. In the summer of 1907, the newly armed undergraduates combined forces in an abandoned bungalow in the city's rundown suburb of Maniktola, which was now a revolutionary school run by Barin Ghose, a dilettante born in Upper Norwood.

The following spring - April 30,1908 - one of Ullaskar Dutt's home-made bombs exploded inside a carriage in Muzaffarpur. Instead of assassinating Douglas Kingsford, the chief presidency magistrate, as intended, they killed his bridge partners, Mrs Pringle-Kennedy and her daughter, Grace. Within days, the CID, Britain's fledgling foreign intelligence service, threw a dragnet over Bengal and began arresting the garden conspirators.

Meanwhile, in London, on July 1,1909, Sir William Curzon Wyllie, political aide de camp to the Secretary of State for India, was gunned down on the steps of the Imperial Institute. Vinayak Savarkar, who had been sending arms to the Bengali student revolutionaries, was accused of providing the weapon. He was deported to India and then transported to the new Cellular Jail, where he found himself incarcerated alongside Prisoner 31549, Barin Ghose, Prisoner 31552, Ullaskar Dutt, and Prisoner 31555, Indu Bhushan Roy.

They recalled how every day, from 6am, David Barry would sit puffing on a cigar, watching them yoked to a press that they turned until they had produced 30lbs of mustard oil. And if the college boys fell sick, there was no sanctuary in the prison hospital, where a new recruit, Dr FA Barker, certified patients fit for flogging.

Shortly after 2am on April 29,1912, the alarm went up on Yard Three Wing. Warder Gulmir had shone his hurricane lamp through the barred door of cell 82 and found an empty bed: “I saw the deceased hanging to the window.” It was another six hours before Barker, the prison doctor, arrived.

A telegram giving news of the death was intercepted by Bengali revolutionaries. They published it on the front page of their newspaper, the Amrita Bazar Patrika. Indu Bhushan Roy, they said, had hanged himself with a strand of tom kurta, “exhausted by the unrelenting oil mill”.

“I lay on my bed, my eyes riveted on the barred window,” Savarkar scratched on his cell wall. Down the corridor, “troublemaker” Ullaskar Dutt was hanging by his wrists from a peg hammered into the wall above his head, one day into a seven-day punishment for accusing Dr Barker of aiding Roy’s death.

Savarkar was the first to hear the cries on June 15 as warders dragged Ullaskar down the Yard Five Wing. “Ullaskar Dutt’s gone mad,” the shout went up and, according to his log, Dr Barker was waiting when the patient arrived at the jail hospital. He used a device to check if the prisoner was acting up. “I could feel the metal clips and then his battery playing on my body. The electric current passed through me with the force of lightning,” Ullaskar would recall many years later.

News soon reached India, and in a police archive in Calcutta we found a flurry of despairing letters sent to “His Excellency the Viceroy” by Ullaskar’s father, Dvijadas Dutt, a retired professor of agriculture. “It would afford both me and my wife great relief if you would be so kind as to enlighten us on some points: when, how and why did our son go mad?”

Eight more letters from Dvijadas Dutt followed, and then one brief reply from Lt Col HA Browning, chief commissioner of the Andaman Islands. “Patient’s insanity is due to malarial infection. His present condition is fair.” The next day, Ullaskar Dutt was transferred to the island’s lunatic ward at Haddo. He would be held in an asylum for 14 years.

That some members of the government were now concerned by the Andaman Islands’ regime is evident from a handwritten letter sent in June 1912 by Harold Wheeler, Secretary to the Government of India, to Sir Reginald Craddock, Home Member, Governor General’s Council. “I am inclined to think that the punishment of standing hand cuffs is brutal and it would be well to inquire the desirability of its continuance.” But Sir Reginald was having none of it: “Handcuffing to a staple is in my experience as effective on the recalcitrant as flogging. It undoubtedly causes great discomfort but Ullaskar Dutt is nothing more than a murderer and it seems to me a mistaken indulgence that he was not hanged.”

It would be a hard line sustained for another eight years. Finally, in 1921, the Indian Jail Commission concluded that transportation to kalapani was “demoralising and unreasonable”, and after pressure on the government transportation to the Andaman Islands was abolished in 1922. It was too late for Prisoner 38360, Chattar Singh, who had been suspended in an iron suit for three years. Too late also for Prisoner 38511, Baba Bhan Singh, who had been beaten to death by David Barry’s men, and for Prisoner 41054, Ram Raksha, who had starved himself in protest at the removal of sacred Brahminical threads from around his chest.

On July 13,1932, Sir Samuel Hoaxe, Secretary of State for India, announced in the House of Commons that political prisoners were once again to be transported to the Andamans project.

Haripada was a 17-year-old Calcutta student in the winter of 1929, seditious leaflets raining down on his head. “It seemed as if the entire province was on the run or in prison,” Haripada tells us. ‘Then my orders came. Silence Alfred Watson. I got hold of a pistol. My comrade was the shooter.” On October 15,1932, they cornered Watson who, as editor of The Statesman, had called for all terrorists to be hanged. “One shot winged him. Charles Tegart’s men found me. Hiding at the safe house, 7/28 Telipara Lane. Before I knew it, I was locked in the SS Maharaja's pens.'

It was June 1933 when he set sail, and Haripada knew that he was steaming towards a devastating hunger strike in which three men drowned in milk and dozens more had catheters forced down their throats. On the top deck of his boat was Dr Barker, the jail's former medical superintendent. (We found evidence of the doctor's intentions among the New Delhi files. "Recommendation of FA Barker, to Secretary to Government of India, 20 June 1933: If the medical authorities can be assured of immunity they should be given absolutely a free hand.") "We landed. Barker ordered us to strip." We can now barely catch Haripada's stuttering voice. "Soldered us into crossbar fetters." In his mind, the 88-year-old is now locked into heavy cuffs, his legs forced apart by a one-and-a-half foot iron rod that made standing almost impossible. "Then the doctor took away our drinking water rations. Three more inmates collapsed unconscious. No more to say now," he says. "Find Bankim Chakraborty - if he's still alive."

Bankim, when we tracked him down, was almost too sick to talk. Hauling himself to the edge of his chair, he grips the table with one hand as he palms away his son-in-law with the other. "I just got out of hospital. Lungs bust." He bangs his chest with open hands.

"I was a 19-year-old student in the northeast of India, when I was recruited to Jugantar, the covert New Age society. We could have licked the boots of our rulers and prospered, but I chose to fight and I'm glad that I did," Bankim says. "I could repair any weapon. I was carrying two pistols when I was caught after a post office hold-up. Shot me in the leg to slow me down. Case was heard inside jail. Sentenced to 15 years' transportation."

He sips on hot sweet tea and then launches off again. "I had been in an Indian prison for a year, but it was like a Begum's palace compared with the Andaman Islands. I arrived with Haripada and the hunger strike was in full swing. It would go on for 46 days in all. We only stopped after Dr Barker persuaded us that we had won. No more torture or the oil press. We would get bed sheets and mosquito nets. Fish for dinner. It didn't take long for us to realise that Dr Barker had lied. Three men had died and nothing was won. You promised us concessions and gave us nothing."

Silence fills the room. "We started dying. Fever. Dropping off, one by one. Now doctors Barker and Todd refused to treat us. They pushed the men to the edge of madness. Tied us naked to a frame. I was trussed up out in the yard. Flogged until our skin split. Or we were half-drowned, bound like chickens and dunked in salt water until I was gasping." Bankim cups his hands over his head. "Standing handcuffs. In 1935,1 was hung for weeks at a time from a peg, high above my head, my face pressed against the bricks. So many things. Every day the Tommies swinging their lathis."

We show him an entry from the New Delhi files. "Major LH Marshall Upshon, Superintendent, Cellular Jail, to Chief Commissioner, Port Blair: I have the honour to forward herewith proceedings in the case against P.1.97 Chakraborty for assaulting Dr Todd, medical officer, with a shoe on the 12th inst. I have awarded him 20 stripes. Recommendation of Dr Todd to Major LH Marshall Upshon regarding punishment: Convict malarial. Too ill to be flogged. Suggest seven days in cross-bar fetters."

Bankim Chakraborty rubs his ankles: "I had nothing to lose. you see. I had read my history and I thought you would never let us out alive.

It is Bimal Bhattacharjee who fills in the missing years. although when we find him he is fighting for breath, gripping his wife's hand when he recalls his past.  "I swore an oath over the Bhagavad Gita" he says. "If asked to lay down your life you will have to do so. I survived for only three years on the streets before Charles Tigard’s men caught up."

The 89-year-old’s chest rattles as he places a finger before his lips. "I said nothing to my captors." And around us at every window and door of his ground-floor bedroom, neighbours and second cousins now strain to hear. "Beaten up. Taken before English magistrate Johnson. No evidence, but transported to the Andaman Islands in August 1936. I was sailing towards a holiday camp, according to the British papers. I had nothing to fear, the British authorities said."

On April 28, 1936. Sir Henry Craik, Home Secretary to the Government of India, finally visited Port Blair after persistent rumours of torture and brutality were published. Sir Henry listened for days to the inmates' complaints before filing a report to Simla. The penal project was "a prisoner's paradise".

Bimal sinks into the bowels of his bed. "I arrived at the Cellular Jail and men were dying on their feet: dysentery, TB and malaria. "We got up a petition, 239 of us," he says. "Doctors made this penal colony and they decided to break us. There was no response to our petition. We called another hunger strike on July 24,1937. Three days in, a tube was forced down my throat. I was terrified. You cannot even imagine it. Remember that we all knew about Mahavir Singh. But soon there were 230 men refusing food. We were in a desperate state. The news spread like fire through Bengal. The country was behind us. We were on the verge of death and a telegram arrived on August 28 from Gandhiji  himself. "

"Nationwide request to abandon the strike... trying best to secure relief for you. NIK Gandhi."

It was on September 22, 1937, that Bimal and the first group of prisoners were repatriated. The Cellular Jail was forced to empty in 1939. Two years later, the Japanese seized the islands, transforming the penal settlement into a prisoner of war camp, incarcerating the British warders. In 1945 the Andamans would become the first piece of India to be declared independent.

All no longer relevant? The West has apologised for colonialism after listening to its critics and moving on?????

At this very moment, the Zionist stooges of US imperialism are being fully armed, financed, trained, and protected to carry on an even worse regime than the Andaman Islands to genocidally terrorise (towards national extinction) the entire Palestinian people of 6 million, fully condoned by the whole civilised world of Clive James.

And in Colombia, against the rebellion there, US imperialism is gearing up to inflict ecologically destructive slaughter on peasant areas which will exactly replicate the Agent Orange chemical warfare, and napalm and high-explosive devastation of Vietnam and the rest of Indo-China (which butchered three million people at least and maimed tens of thousands more in subsequent generations), - aided and abetted in the vast North Amazon jungle by local whose demented brutality far exceeds anything inflicted by local imperialist stooges in Indo-China.

Countless more examples could be given of the West's tyranny (to maintain economic domination of the planet) being as savage now as any time in history, or potentially even more so. But brain-washed anti-communism, - either of the fake-'left' or the Clive James variety, - just will not want to know.

The anti-communist press is screaming triumphantly just now, thinking that there are finally some genuine atrocities to pin on the useless Revisionist Milosevic whose defiance of the cynical balkanisation of the former Yugoslav workers state singled him out for the most vicious Goebbelsian vilification campaign during the defensive civil-war struggles forced on all the Yugoslav federal republics by the West's deliberate 'self-determination' break-up of the Federation.

"We told you he was a monster" screeched one particularly obscene propaganda rant in the Observer, dismissing the "shrivelled rump of the British Left" for denying it.

Well the fake-'lefts' did many things, including most of them accepting the ludicrous brain-washing propaganda that the murderous mayhem in the remnants of the Yugoslav workers state was all down to Milosevic and the other Serb remnants of the former regime of the destroyed socialist federation.

Those struggling for a Marxist scientific understanding (of what Western imperialism was up to) were totally sceptical, and justifiably so, it is really now emerging.

The deal then was that NATO must blitzkrieg Serbia into totally destroyed rubble because it was "genocidally massacring hundreds of thousands of innocent Kosovo Albanians", etc, after having supposedly done the same to "Bosnian Muslims and Croatians before that", etc, etc, etc.

Vast "mass grave areas", identified from "western satellite photos", were subsequently investigated. Hardly any bodies were found at all, originating from both sides, and not at all inconsistent with the brutal civil war that the West had helped deliberately foment to aid the final destruction of the Yugoslav Socialist Federation and former workers state.

Now at last, some victims of Serb savagery may have been unearthed, but again the numbers are completely consistent with the savage civil war which all sides fought just as viciously and determinedly as the Serbs.

But Croat on Serb, and Croat on Muslim 'war crimes' have featured just as much at the Hague Tribunal as anything.

And to stop the persistent genocidal massacre of the remaining Serbs in Kosovo (after the NATO blitzkrieg invasion virtually annexed this ancient Serb province for the local Albanian mafia to dominate), NATO itself had to invite the Serb army back into the Kosovo border area to order to maintain some semblance of civilised justice.

And the BBC Correspondent series showed only this Sunday on television how the long-running covert US imperialist subversion operation in the region had for two years deliberately undermined both the UN and NATO's own peacekeeping operations in Bosnia (to keep the combatants apart and disarmed, and to stop the fighting) by secretly and illegally arming the Bosnian Muslim forces throughout the emergency, pursuing the CIA's own agenda for establishing more and more regional armed stooges in critical geo-political areas of the planet exactly as they have set up the Zionist-colonist thug domination of the Near East.

And on top of all that is the problem of unrestrained Albanian mafia 'self-determination' warmongering-disruption now being waged on Macedonian territory (with the Milosevic Serb regime now long gone and nowhere to blame), - the Albanian mafia also being covert thug stooges for long-term CIA subversion of the region, just like the Bosnian Muslim forces.

 But it was the totally fake hysteria about the "genocidal massacre of hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians" etc (following similar CIA-Goebbels propaganda about the Bosnian Muslims, etc) which paved the way for the West's Nazi blitzkrieg to destroy Serbia; and all to get NATO in there to oversee more and more havoc and misery, as now in Macedonia, and currently still terrorising the Serbs in Kosovo, etc, etc.

It is the stinking corpse of Western 'free-press' democracy which needs to retract and apologise, - plus the fake-'lefts' who all fell for the nonsense that any genuine self-determination could be justly achieved and quickly restore peace and justice for all, in such a nightmare situation of warmongering crisis as collapse and trade-war-threatened imperialism was bound to impose, (as the EPSR alone explained from the start of this renewed balkanisation misery, the traditional divide-and-rule tyranny of the Western 'democracies').

It is the 'democracy' lovers who wish to cover up their mistakes and forget, but never anyone genuinely struggling for Marxist science.

Years earlier, a similar campaign of vilification and armed subversion was waged on the Afghan workers state to destroy it, just as the remnants of the Yugoslav workers state have now been (oddly enough aided and abetted, in fact, by Milosevic's Revisionist-nationalist idiocy. He was victimised simply for not dancing quickly enough to Western imperialism's imposed new 'free-market' tunes, - or dancing to his own dynastic-corruption version).

The tragedy for Afghanistan was even worse since at that time there was no obvious necessary reason why the outstandingly progressive transformation (which the 1978 revolution had introduced into the traditional feudal and tribal backwardness) should not go from strength to strength.

It never got the chance, brought down by relentless CIA armed subversion using local reactionary stooges, ultimately shamefully accepted as 'unbeatable' by the Soviet Revisionist leadership and capitulated to, helping undermine the Soviet workers state itself in due course.

But even in reactionary Pakistan now, the frontline staging post for the CIA's criminal subversion, they are having second thoughts about the destructive degenerate imperialist intervention which all the varieties of 'democrats' in the West (Observer, Guardian, fake-'lefts', etc) all cheered on as offering 'self-determination to the Mojahedin' etc (any excuse for anti-communist prejudice):

Pakistan should never have helped to force the Russians out of Afghanistan 20 years ago, Abdul Sattar, its Foreign Minister, said yesterday (Michael Binyon writes). 

"I often think that maybe we should have allowed the Soviets to stay there," he said. "Afghanistan is now a nightmare: If Pakistan had decided not to oppose Soviet entry, Afghanistan would not be in the state it is now in." Afghanistan was now a "destroyed state" on the brink of "the greatest. humanitarian disaster in history". Thousands were fleeing drought, hunger and poverty.

Mr Sattar denied Pakistan was helping the Taleban: "We live next door, so we have to find means of coexistence''

But the mess of the 'free world' system continues to pile up everywhere. It will soon be impossible to keep walking away from it and ignoring it. The revolutionary crisis of the entire imperialist-economy world system is drawing relentlessly closer, exposing the 'democracy' fraud more and more at every new stage. Build Leninism.

   EPSR supporters.