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 
Subscriptions (£25 p.a.) and circulation 0786 799 6074 P&P Bulletin Publications PO Box 50, London SW 17 9NL [Post Office Registered.)    www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk    
No 1124 Feb 19 2002                                                                                                                                               25p                           
Northwest seminar Sat 2pm. Rcpts pse

Blair sleaze damaging, but international imperialist war splits are far more lethal to capitalism's rotten game, with trade-war skulduggery at the vicious heart of both. Divisions and defeats are the key to seeing how crisis-racked imperialist warmongering is going to end in catastrophic failure. The Zionist colonisation historical anomaly is already deep in trouble. But fake-'lefts' still back Western philosophy on all vital issues, thus selling out the international working class. Domestic reformism is a conscious deliberate diversion by anti-theory 'lefts', continuing the treacherous counter-revolutionary traditions of Revisionism and Trotskyism. But Marxist science will not be denied.

The farcically corrupt mess Blair & Co have got into so as to get a rake-off from a Romanian privatisation racket gets justified headlines, and the full story of these scabby little degenerates is worth putting on record (see below); but the West's fascist-war chaos in the Middle East damages the crooked imperialist system even more.

Nothing will stop crisis-ridden US-imperialism from going to war in a hopeless bid to avoid slump-driven trade-war collapse and economic humiliation; but the domestic and international splits over the blitzkrieg-aggression tactics Bush is promoting (mimicking German and Japanese 1930s blitz initiatives to try to get out of the deep slump-crisis paralysing the imperialist world then) are crucially revealing of how and why this renewed fascist warmongering by monopoly-capitalism must end in total catastrophe.

Planning murderous destruction and domination of Iran, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Palestine, etc, etc, could prove disastrous enough (see below).

But the trade-war splits and the real confrontational contradictions that such costly, lethal, and far-reaching mayhem will inevitably cause throughout the whole capitalist world will guarantee that Washington's World War III and recolonisation-of-the-planet plans can only end in appalling chaos and failure, provoking world revolution.

Blair's sordid little Romanian earner provides one of the links in this tale of global capitalist disaster and shame.

One of the priceless revelations in the bourgeoisie's own press propaganda, struggling to limit the stench of this corruption to avoid damage to the West's imperialist system as a whole, is that the Lakshmi Mittal operation, which bribed New Labour with £125,000 for political favours, has elsewhere in its global racketeering been putting up even bigger sums to persuade Washington to launch a steel-goods trade war with Europe and Britain. So much for Blair & Co's lies that they sold political favours to Mittal "because it was helping the British economy and industry".

This one tiny trade-war story tells little about the imperialist system's global cut-throat conflict for survival at the moment, and much more about the local scandal of New Labour graft and dishonesty.

But the whole point about such a contradiction between the 'allies' of the Western war alliance is that this clash for steel-industry survival is the absolute ESSENCE of ALL inter-imperialist relationships. There is no 'alliance', nor can there be. There can only be the most desperate struggle for survival as a bourgeois ruling class, in country after country as the world-slump destruction gets steadily worse, - capitalist establishments against their own working class, and against rival powers, - to the death.

The imperialist warmongers will occasionally combine their competing strengths out of short-term expediency, - as recently to maintain Western domination over Middle East oil, or to gang up against any Third World country like Zimbabwe which threatens to challenge imperialist exploitation and resume the search for a national or a socialist road to development.

But the endlessly shifting pattern of alliances over the long history of inter-imperialist world war for supremacy tells its own story, and the shafting of each other even when 'allies' (e.g. the USA robbing Britain blind in return for American aid during World War II) is legendary.

And it is the splits in the imperialist camp which alone map the path to civilisation's salvation out of this grim nightmare of global capitalist crisis turning everywhere to warmongering aggression mode as the stink of corruption and failure rises relentlessly.

Only because the imperialist powers will seriously split and fall out over which bits of surplus worldwide capacity to destroy (to try to end the slump and restore general profitability) and which bits to preserve; and which particular regimes or regions should be listed for destruction by inclusion in the "axis of evil" and which should be spared, etc, etc. will the warmongering thieves come to blows among themselves, weakening them severely and humiliating them, thus spontaneously creating revolutionary crises as the intolerable conditions of imperialist slump and war continue worsening relentlessly.

It is just a side issue that one of the trade-war advocating US steel corporations is Mittal's firm, politically financing the destruction of Britain's steel exports to America while simultaneously persuading the Blairites to say "Mittal bats for Britain" with a cheap bribe of £125,000, purchased political support, incidentally, which will only enable Mittal to even further damage Britain's steel trade by producing extremely cut-priced products from impoverished Romania.

The big issue is these yet further signs that the greatest and most devastating trade war in all capitalist history is about to explode onto the world.

This is the background to the increasingly agitated divisions inside each imperialist power, and between the powers as separate countries, over the Bush corporate mafia's determination to start world War III-scale destruction now, threatening everyone in their path.

"You are either with us, or you are against us," the thuggish oilrag for Texas big business (motto: 'Enron is our business') muttered distinctly enough. The brazen telling of Congress to go to hell over its efforts to even ask questions about that gigantic swindle, confirms the serious ruthlessness.

The big bourgeoisie know a thousands times more about the global crisis wrecking the whole imperialist corporate system than has been acknowledged so far in the capitalist press admissions, which are startling enough nevertheless (see all past EPSRs).

This 'New World Order' knows that the game is up for its fabulously opulent lifestyles and world domination if humiliating global economic collapse and suffering, not to mention popular revolutions, are just allowed to happen.

These dominant imperialist circles are determined not to let it happen.

World War III is the only diversion big enough to hide such a historic global economic catastrophe.

The cut-throat rivalry and trade-war hatred will play the leading propaganda roles once the idiotic 'war on terrorism' has played itself out as just a ridiculous and vicious stunt.

But objectively, the sole explanation in history for the murderous mayhem being steadily stoked up is so that the capitalist system can survive yet another periodic slump-collapse and warmongering debacle.

The key thread for following this most sickening degeneration in the whole record of civilisation is the prospect of DEFEATS and SETBACKS for the main protagonists, military, political, or economic disasters which will be inseparable from the DIVISIONS between the imperialist powers and from the SPONTANEOUS REVOLUTIONARY UPRISINGS which will be driven to the surface by the unbearable dislocation, pain, and injustice of these imperialist catastrophes and will not easily let them be recovered from.

In all this destruction, tyranny, and chaos the only hope for the working masses of the world is to build support for a new international Leninist movement which will be capable of giving successful anti-imperialist revolutionary leadership in every circumstance, based on a Marxist scientific understanding of all the movements of the whole international balance of class and national forces, - a party of a new type completely unlike the fake-'lefts' whose 57 varieties look only inward to interminable festering nonsense about the Socialist Alliance constitution or its election participation rules, or to the endless class-collaborating squabbles about correct pay differentials on the railways, or about the right mix of private or state-capitalist enterprise in the hospitals or on the Underground, or about the fair levels of compensation for industrial injuries or redundancies, etc, etc, etc.
Workers fight spontaneously for their rights anyway, and always have and always will.

Why a consciously-organised socialist POLITICAL movement is needed is to challenge bourgeois philosophical domination over world ideology which tells workers that the unfairness of other nations in trade competition is the whole cause of economic breakdown; that job shortages are caused by immigrant workers; that the 'free world' must keep nuclear-armed to the teeth to save the planet from 'rogue states' and 'communist tyranny', etc; that Western military control needs to be plastered all over the Earth in order to 'ensure the rule of law, the rule of commercial obligations, and the rule of democracy', etc, (with the unstated premise that the teeming brown-skinned billions in the Third World cannot really run their own affairs successfully); that Sept 11 was nothing but a damnable barbaric atrocity by reactionary Islamic fanatics necessitating instant blitzkrieg 'justice' on anyone who might remotely be connected with that outrage, etc; and that all the reforms demanded by trade unions to the way that everything is run in this country will certainly be forthcoming once a Labour Government is elected.... or re-elected... or as soon as pre-commitments to certain public spending controls are fulfilled...or as soon as economic recovery gets under way....or as soon as the Government stops getting blown off course.....etc, etc, etc, etc.

The fake-'lefts' want no such challenge to that 'democratic' philosophy. They always fall for one or other parts of it at crucial turning points. An alternative to capitalism is not built by petty-bourgeois minded 'lefts' writing academic 'perfect socialist party constitutions and rule-books'. It is built by making workers conscious of the revolutionary class and national forces which can cause the imperialist juggernaut to trip or stumble, and conscious of how historically such failures alone have made it possible for revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat only, to take advantage and start constructing a new socialist order,- the sole path towards real democracy eventually.

Only a party of infinitely more profound training in revolutionary theory and practice than even the Bolsheviks achieved will be adequate to these tasks.

The ludicrous and grotesque anti-theory philistinism and tyrannical anti-polemical parties, universal throughout the fake-'left', are the obvious and unshakable total historical obstacles to the building of such a revolutionary party.

But as the 57-variety swamp of Trotskyite and Revisionist class-collaborators and opportunists continues all its private reformist obsessions of scoring anti-monarchy points for 'republican constitutional reforms' over Princess Margaret's death (properly totally ignored by the public); debating security provisions for workers in benefit offices (why have benefit offices at all, given world productivity levels in this day and age?); or arguing the merits of a 'no' vote or an abstention if a referendum on the Euro ever takes place (what a total diversion such academic tactical trivia are from the real issue facing workers in all imperialist countries of the unstoppable slide into all-round all-out inter-imperialist trade war coming rapidly down the line), - the crucial DIVISIONS in the imperialist camp are becoming more tetchy, as capitalist press reports themselves are admitting:

A senior Pentagon adviser confirmed last night that the US was prepared to topple Saddam Hussein with or without the backing of Washington's allies, despite a chorus of criticism from around the world.

Richard Perle, the chairman of the defence policy board and an influential Washington hawk, made the defiant remarks in an interview with Channel 4 News amid increasingly clear signs that the Pentagon and CIA are preparing to remove Saddam.

Mr Perle said: "Naturally, we hope that our friends who recognise the danger that he presents to us will join with us:"

He added: "But I think this president has made it clear that if it comes to a choice between action to protect the American people without allies or [with] allies but no action, we'll go without allies:'

Mr Perle is on the extreme hawkish wing in Washington, but since a war cabinet decision was taken in principle to eliminate Saddam's regime in January, other members of the administration have echoed the hawks' unilateralist tone.

The secretary of state, Colin Powell, said US allies would be consulted when a decision was made on how to force a change of regime in Baghdad, but he added "we have to preserve the option to act alone".

However, Chris Patten, the EU's external affairs commissioner, who criticised US policy in the Guardian on Saturday, returned to the fray yesterday, saying that the US "instinct" for unilateralism was profoundly misguided.

He told the Financial Times the US success in Afghanistan "has perhaps reinforced some dangerous instincts: that the projection of military power is the only basis of security; that the US can rely on no one but itself; and that allies may be useful as an optional extra".

The Canadian foreign minister, Bill Graham, who met Mr Powell in Washington yesterday, added his voice to the expressions of concern from Europe and criticised the bellicose tone he had found within the US administration.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, also warned the US. "We know which nations' representatives and citizens were fighting alongside the Taliban and where their activities were financed from," he said. "Iraq is not on this list:"   

In Britain, a spokesman for Tony Blair did not "rule out" action against Saddam but the point had not yet been reached where it should be taken.

US and diplomatic sources have said that the Pentagon and the CIA had begun preparations for overt and covert action against Saddam in anticipation of an Iraqi refusal to allow weapons inspectors back into the country in May.

The president will face a sceptical audience on his six-day tour of Asia, postponed from last Autumn as a result of the September 11 attacks. The Japanese defence minister, Gen Nakatani, said: "I think North Korea is not on an equal footing with Iran and Iraq because it has no links with al-Qaida or the Taliban."

But the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said there was clear evidence that North Korea had been selling ballistic missile technology to an array of states and groups .that Washington considers threats. She refused to provide names but said: "We believe the North is exporting to just about anybody who will buy... The North Koreans have been known to go around with glossy brochures about their ballistic missiles." 

White House aides said yesterday that widespread anxiety over growing tensions in the region would not make him tone down his rhetoric. White House echoed a distinction made by the secretary of state, Colin Powell, suggesting that one member of the "axis of evil", Iraq, was more evil than the others, Iran and North Korea.

But the president's national security team believes that taking a tougher line with Tehran and Pyongyang will prove effective in curbing their weapons sales to terrorist groups.

The South Korean government is unlikely to criticise Mr Bush's remarks openly, but officials in Seoul have expressed anxiety that the denunciation of Pyongyang as part of Mr Bush's "axis of evil" had undermined the "sunshine" policy of dialogue with the north that President Kim Dae Jung has made his trademark policy.

The US president inflicted damage on Mr Kim's standing last year when he abandoned Bill Clinton's policy of engagement with North Korea while Mr Kim was in Washington.

The hawks in the US administration are in a mood of supreme confidence following the Afghan war. One of the leading hardliners, Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser, struck out at America's critics in the EU such as Chris Patten, telling the Sun newspaper that the EU commissioner was "patronising" and "unelected"

He also attacked the UN, which he said had behaved in relation to Iraq exactly as its impotent predecessor, the League of Nations, did with Hitler's Germany in the 1930s.

In Washington, meanwhile, the administration took steps to counter European criticism of its policies. The state department yesterday said the French ambassador, François Bujon, had been called in to discuss critical remarks made recently by the country's foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine.

French officials denied the talks at the state department were out of the ordinary, but Reuters quoted an official as saying Mr Bujon "has been called in".

The summons comes after Mr Vedrine said US foreign policy was simplistic, and did nothing to address the causes of terrorism. The secretary of state, Colin Powell, ridiculed his French counterpart's reaction, saying Mr Vedrine was "getting the vapours".

Those who have argued that America's war on terror would fail to defeat terrorism have, it turns out, been barking up the wrong tree. Ever since President Bush announced his $45bn increase in military spending and gave notice to Iraq, Iran and North Korea that they had "better get their house in order" or face what he called the `justice of this nation', it has become ever clearer that the US is not now primarily engaged in a war against terrorism at all. Instead, this is a war against regimes the US dislikes: a war for heightened US global hegemony and the "full spectrum dominance" the Pentagon has been working to entrench since the end of the cold war. While US forces have apparently still failed to capture or kill 0sama bin Laden, there is barely even a pretence that any of these three states was in some way connected with the attacks on the World Trade Centre. What they do have in common, of course, is that they have all long opposed American power in their regions (for 10, 23 and 52 years respectively) and might one day acquire the kind of weapons the US prefers to reserve for its friends and clients.

With his declaration of war against this absurdly named "axis of evil", Bush has abandoned whatever remaining moral high ground the US held onto in the wake of September 11. He has dispensed with the united front against terror, which had just about survived the onslaught on Afghanistan. And he has made fools of those, particularly in Europe, who had convinced themselves that America's need for international support would coax the US Republican right out of its unilateralist laager. Nothing of the kind has happened. When the German foreign minister Joschka Fischer plaintively insists that "alliance partners are not satellites" and the EU's international affairs commissioner Chris Patten fulminates at Bush's "absolutist and simplistic" stance, they are swatted away. Even Jack Straw, foreign minister of a government that prides itself on its clout in Washington, was slapped down for his hopeful suggestion that talk of an axis of evil was strictly for domestic consumption. Allied governments who question US policy towards Iraq, Israel or national missile defence are increasingly treated as the "vassal states" the French president Jacques Chirac has said they risk becoming. Now Colin Powell, regarded as the last voice of reason in the White House, has warned Europeans to respect the "principled leadership" of the US even if they disagree with it.

By openly arrogating to itself the prerogative of such leadership - and dispensing with any restraint on its actions through the United Nations or other multilateral bodies - the US is effectively challenging what has until now passed for at least formal equality between nations. But it is only reflecting reality. The extent of America's power is unprecedented in human history. The latest increases will take its military spending to 40% of the worldwide total, larger than the arms budgets of the next 19 states put together. No previous military empire  - from the Roman to the British - had anything like this preponderance, let alone America's global reach. US officials are generally a good deal more frank about the situation than their supporters abroad. In the early 1990s, the Pentagon described US strategy as "benevolent domination" (though whether those who have recently been on the receiving end of US military power, from the Middle East to Latin America, would see it that way seems doubtful). A report for the US Space Command last year, overseen by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, rhapsodised about the "synergy of space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority" that would come with missile defence and other projects to militarise space. This would "protect US interests and investment" in an era when globalisation was likely to produce a further "widening between haves and have-nots". It would give the US an "extraordinary military advantage".

In fact, it would only increase further what became an overwhelming military advantage a decade ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the experience of Bush's war on Afghanistan has rammed home the lessons for the rest of the world. The first is that such a gigantic disproportion of international power is a threat to the principles of self-determination the US claims to stand for on a global scale. A state with less than one 20th of the earth's population is able to dictate to the other 95% and order their affairs in its own interests, both through military and economic pressure. The issue is not one of "anti-Americanism" or wounded national pride (curiously, those politicians around the world who prattle most about patriotism are also usually the most slavish towards US power), but of democracy. This is an international order which, as the September 11 attacks demonstrated, will not be tolerated and will generate conflict.

Many doubt that such conflict can amount to anything more than fleabites on an elephant, which has demonstrated its ability to crush any serious challenger, and have come to believe US global domination is here for good. That ignores the political and economic dimensions (including in the US itself), as well as the problems of fighting asymmetric wars on many fronts. In economic terms, the US has actually been in decline relative to the rest of the world since it accounted for half the world's output after the second world war. In the past few years its share has bounced back to nearly 30% on some measures, partly because of the Soviet implosion and Japanese stagnation, and partly because of America's own long boom. But in the medium term, the strain of military overstretch is likely to make itself felt. More immediately, the US could face regional challenges, perhaps from China or Russia, which it would surely balk at pushing to military conflict. Then there is the likelihood of social eruptions in client states like Saudi Arabia which no amount of military technology will be able to see off. America's greatest defeat was, it should not be forgotten, inflicted by a peasant army in Vietnam. US room for manoeuvre may well prove more limited than might appear. When it comes to some of America's richer and more powerful allies, the opposite is often the case: they can go their own way and get away with it.

Interesting that even the bourgeois Guardian thinking has concentrated on the question of DEFEAT as being a crucial throughout the history of imperialist and class-war conflict.

But beyond those above generalised reflections about vital possible turning points and development assessments for the turbulent events now facing the world, proof that DEFEAT is "the only language these imperialists understand" has arisen in a current international conflict in spite of (interestingly enough) the apparent elephant-versus-gnat dimensions of the struggle which anti-Marxist 'straightline logic' thinking, dominant within the fake-'left', routinely accepts will ensure that the whole present world will always dance to the 'New World Order' tune of 'unassailable' US imperialism and its stooges.

In the Middle East, a phenomenon which the EPSR has long been repeatedly explaining seems at last to be coming to fruition.

The inevitable eventual organisation of spontaneous Palestinian hatred for, and resistance to, Zionist brutal occupation and domination into effective guerrilla-war blows against their tormentors is finally taking shape.

And the effect on the Zionists of this realisation is utterly devastating.

Against all the odds, David (symbolically still mostly armed with a sling and stones) is ultimately (as in the biblical fable) getting the better of Goliath with the aid of the unavoidable technological progress to which the whole world, willy nilly, is subject in one of the strangest and most contradictory realities of capitalism, whether anyone likes it or not.  

Beyond all doubt, the sick Zionist society, - aggressive colonial cuckoos occupying the nest of the Palestinian nation, not only doesn't like it one bit but could be rapidly on the way towards complete traumatisation by it. But let the words of the dementedly pro-Zionist lobby in the Western capitalist press describe the scene. Note that the first despairing comments are from an openly-admitted colonist, come from New York to help drive the Palestinian nation totally out of their whole country by going off to pioneer in a West Bank occupation settlement. Note that the authoritative newspaper Ma'ariv is declaring: "Israel is losing the war".

Note how the inevitably growing technological guerrilla-war expertise of the Palestinians, now allied to their utterly indomitable spirit and now incapable of being 'unlearned'  again, is a decisive last point haunting Zionist colonist minds, even though these Western press reports try to help these pro-imperialist butchers to play down this significance so as not to let on how shattered the Western game-plan is by this development, keeping it to the small print at the close as much as possible:

A devastating wave of Palestinian attacks on the symbols of Israeli military occupation - a Jewish settlement, an army base and a roadblock struck Israel to its core this weekend, badly shaking its faith in the warrior prime minister, Ariel Sharon.  In the Jewish settlement of Karnei Shomron yesterday, sobbing girls linked arms and quietly sang at a vigil for two teenagers blown up by a suicide bomber. But the adults of this West Bank outpost were overcome by anger - much of it directed against Mr Sharon, who they say has failed to live up to his 50-year legacy of crushing Israel's Arab enemies.

"As of right now, what I see from the results is that this man has failed; said Bob Duchanov, a builder from New York who has lived in Karnei Shomron for 17 years. "There is no security in the country."

As if on cue, three hours later came another suicide bombing which, though thwarted, deepened a feeling of unease amid a spate of attacks that have killed seven Israelis since Thursday night.

"Ariel Sharon's strategy is collapsing," said the Ma'ariv newspaper. "At this stage, as difficult as it may be to say so openly, the Palestinians are losing the battles to a superior force, but Israel is losing the war."

In Ma'ariv's weekend opinion polls, some 49% of Israelis agreed, saying the "national leadership has lost control of the security situation"

However, 44% disagreed, reflecting what the paper's political analyst, Hemi Shalev, called "steadily growing confusion" as Mr Sharon fails to deliver a political or a military solution to 17 months of bloodshed.

Three policemen were injured in yesterday's foiled bombing of an army base in Pardes Hanna. Two Palestinians - the bomber, who blew himself up after a police chase, and another man - were also killed.

The two suicide attacks follow the killing of an Israeli soldier at a roadblock near Ramallah on Friday night.

The attacks suggest new levels of sophistication by Palestinian militants, targeting soldiers and Jewish settlements - which are considered illegal under international law rather than civilians in Israeli cities in an apparent attempt to mute international criticism.

Saturday night's attack was also a double first: the first time a suicide bomber has penetrated a heavily guarded Jewish settlement, and the first time the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has used a suicide bomber, usually the preserve of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The force of the explosion embedded nails in walls 25 metres from the pizza counter where a house painter from the West Bank town of Qalqiliya - himself a teenager of 18 - blew himself up, shattering the windows in seven nearby shops and killing Keren Shatsky, aged 14, and Nehemiah Amar,16. The mall, built less than a year ago, is a magnet for teenagers: Keren was waiting for her mates after planning a surprise birthday party for a friend.

In destroying such innocent pleasures, Palestinian militants magnified doubts about Mr Sharon's strategy which includes assassinations, tank invasions of the West Bank and-Gaza, and the bombing of Palestinian security installations by F-16 warplanes.

Israeli helicopters fired missiles on security installations in the West Bank city of Nablus early yesterday, and tanks roared into the el-Buriej refugee camp in Gaza on Saturday, killing three Palestinian police. In the West Bank city of Jenin, a Hamas commander was blown up by a car bomb.

For the adults of Karnei Shomron, it was not enough. "After more than a year of this, we should have been able to see results," said Yitzhak Shwartz, whose photography shop was gutted by the blast. "Sharon has no plan. The job of this government is to defend its citizens and it is not doing that. It doesn't solve our problems to blow up empty buildings. It does not do anything"

For many here, there was a disturbing synchronicity to events. As Keren Shatsky waited for her friends at Karnei Shomron, barely an hour's drive away in Tel Aviv the Israeli left was mustering for a peace demonstration.

The turnout by past standards was hardly impressive charitably placed at 5,000 people - but it was the largest since the start of the Palestinian uprising, and a sign of the growing radicalisation of the Israeli left as well as the right.

Opinion polls at the weekend showed 35% of Israelis support "transfer" - the wholesale expulsion of the Palestinians and there is a growing clamour to re-invade and re-occupy the entirety of the territories.

But the Ma'ariv poll of 590 people, with a 4.5% error margin, showed majority support for contradictory radical solutions: two-thirds supported a unilateral pullout from Palestinian areas.

The SETBACKS cause DIVISIONS. And the worse the SPLITS become, the more DEFEATS are likely, - and spreading throughout the whole rotten imperialist camp too that created Zionist colonisation in the first place, and is now having grave doubts about where this terrifying turn of events might be heading:

The Israeli army suffered a double blow to the symbols of its military prowess yesterday when the head of a crack commando unit was killed hours after Palestinian militants blew up a tank for the first time in the 16-month uprising.

Lieutenant-Colonel Eyal Weiss, 34, was the fourth Israeli soldier killed in 12 hours, and one of the army's best men, a military spokesman said. He was the commander of the crack Duvdevan unit the most feared by Palestinians - whose troops often dress as Arabs, storming West Bank villages to detain or assassinate suspected militants.

The death of the commando -  who was killed when a wall collapsed beside a house that had been rammed by an army bulldozer minutes earlier - comes as senior military officials are openly voicing their disquiet over the effectiveness of Israel's mighty army against ragtag militants.

Weiss was killed when the roof of the bulldozed house collapsed as he was interrogating a captive. The loss of a high profile soldier comes only days after senior military officials bitterly criticised Israel's strategy of thundering into Palestinian controlled areas. They said this week's invasion of Gaza, after Palestinian militants fired homemade rockets into Israel, had failed.

Such disquiet peaked after a 100kg (2201b) bomb blew up a Merkava 3 tank and killed three soldiers in the Gaza Strip on Thursday night.

For Israel, the ambush near the Netzarim junction invokes its bloody, two-decade occupation of southern Lebanon, when Hizbullah guerrillas immobilised their forces with roadside bombings.

Commentators described the bombing - the device was apparently planted several days before - as a huge blow to military prestige and a boost to Palestinian morale.

"It is as if the terrorists, with their Kalashnikov rifles and homemade rockets, had succeeded in shooting down an F-16 warplane," the Ma'ariv newspaper said.

The army launched an inquiry into the bombing, but commentators said the military must review its strategy of using heavy armour to enter Palestinian areas.  

As a reprisal, Israeli jets attacked a Palestinian police compound at Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip yesterday, killing a police lieutenant and wounding 25 others, including a four-year-old girl.

A Palestinian militant was, also killed in yesterday morning's incursion into Saida, near the West Bank town of Tulkaram, and the army said five suspected members of Islamic Jihad were arrested. 

Israeli officers said that it was clear that Palestinian militants had studied army procedures and planted the bomb where they thought that the tank would pass after it way summoned when a convoy accompanying Jewish settler was ambushed.  The tank, the most advanced in the Israeli armoury and nicknamed "the mothers' tank" because of the supposed protection for its crew, had never been badly damaged in battle, even throughout Israel's guerrilla war in Lebanon, which ended in May 2000.

The death of Lieutenant-colonel Eyal Weiss, 34, was a severe blow to Israeli counter-terrorist operations. 

In Beirut Islamic Jihad described the death of one of Israel's top commando fighters as "a new defeat for the Zionist enemy."

A leading member of Gaza's  7,000-strong settler community said after the tank attack:  "This puts us in a new and much more difficult stage. If a Merkava tank was hit, then no vehicle is armoured, and no armoured bus is invulnerable."

The Popular Resistance Committees, a combination of militants from Yassir Arafat's Fatah organisation and Hamas, claimed responsibility for the attack in a leaflet circulating in the Gaza Strip yesterday. There were suspicions among Israel's military intelligence that- they may have had assistance from the Iranian backed Hezbollah.

Ismail Abu Shanab, a senior official in Hamas, the main Palestinian Islamic terror group, said: "This is a new development in resisting Israeli tanks. The resistance will continue until Israeli troops withdraw from Palestinian lands."

Foreign military experts based at embassies in Tel Aviv had been expecting that, as Israel began to deploy tanks more often to try to suppress . the second intifada, now in its sixteenth month, the Palestinian terrorists would find some way, of resisting them.

The use of the newly developed anti-tank weapon came less than a week after Hamas had fired Qassam-2 rockets from Gaza at Israeli targets. They have a range of about five miles and are capable of hitting Israeli cities from Palestinian-held territory in the West Bank and Gaza.

Rafi Mann, a leading Israeli military commentator, said of the attack on the Merkava 3: "It is as if the terrorists, with their Kalashnikov rifles and home-made rockets, had succeeded in shooting down an F16."

As an investigation began, one Israeli military source said: "The problem is that not only tanks drive on the road where the bomb exploded, but also civilian convoys. That such bombs exist changes the rules."

"The first step that has to be taken is to make the lives of the people of Israel much more secure and that means clamping down on the terrorism coming out of the occupied territories; Mr Straw said at the Jerusalem press conference after talks with the foreign- minister, Shimon Peres, and the defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer.  

Amid the confusion, what was apparent yesterday was that Britain is in no mood to entertain a French peace initiative discussed by European foreign ministers on Tuesday  - that could open a rift with Washington's policy in the region.  The French proposal calls for the immediate declaration of a Palestinian state; the Bush administration is adamant about enforcing a cease-fire as a precondition for any diplomatic endeavours.

And so was Mr Straw yesterday, just hours after dozens of Israeli tanks and troops drove into the Gaza towns of Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun and Deir al-Balah as well as the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza City.

Three of the Palestinians killed were policemen who died when their post in Deir al-Balah was shelled, officials said.

In the longest and most extensive operation, troops imposed a curfew on Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, and conducted house-to-house searches, rounding up more than 15 men. Israel barred journalists from the territory.

The Israeli cabinet minister,  Efraim Sneh, said the troops could remain in Gaza for several days, hunting down the rockets deployed by Hamas militants this week for the first time in the 16-month uprising.

The rockets are notoriously inaccurate and caused no casualties on Sunday, but Mr Sneh told Army Radio: "This is a threat we can not tolerate:'

The disgusting fascist ignorance of Jack Straw in lining up with the most vicious Nazi minds in Zionism's colonisation domination racket who openly advocate just killing off genocidally the 7-million Palestinian nation so as to complete the conquest of their homeland once and for all, - is even put to shame by nearly half of Zionist public opinion where the penny is beginning to drop (though only for the most wretched self-preservation reasons) that in this tyrannical game of hounding a whole nation to death, it could just end up that it is the bastard Zionist cuckoo nation which is going to be booted out, - as exactly must inevitably happen.

Everyone's 'nice' sentiment of "sharing the land" is simply anti-history (as well as being sick sentimental gobshite founded on the most monstrous imperialist hypocrisy, far worse in sustained propaganda disinformation on world understanding and brutal tyranny on the terrorised local population than anything German imperialism under the Nazis ever even dreamed of).

Imperialist warmongering is now the main enemy of all civilisation. It is now the hated target of all that is worthwhile in human society. The whole Zionist 'Israel' racket is an ESSENTIAL element of Western imperialism's entire warmongering course, set in stone way back in the middle of last century after capitalism's last great slump-warmongering tyranny (World War II) ended in a degenerate, cynical and stupid stalemate,(thanks to the ludicrously blinkered Revisionism of the Soviet bureaucracy), leaving the imperialist warmongers to start laying their long-term plans for total world domination all over again, - beginning, interestingly enough, with the establishment of the gun-thug state of 'Israel' to have as a permanent stooge battering ram for terrorising, humiliating, and cowing Arab nationalist aspirations everywhere throughout the crucial oil-rich Middle East, (a plan for a permanent nightmare-world which class-collaborating Revisionism criminally went along with at the United Nations and actually helped the first Zionist colonisation-expansion militarily).

But that period of history was also the start of the unavoidable dismantling and revolutionary overthrow of all the direct colonial empires on Earth. The whole Third World had grown up sufficiently and matured technologically to no longer be prepared to tolerate such direct imperialist humiliation and domination ever again.

With the exception of the colonisation of the land of Palestine. It is a ludicrous historical anomaly which was obviously doomed from the start.

The dismantling and overthrowing of this cynical colonial nonsense now will form an ESSENTIAL part of the whole planet's battling triumph to end world-domination by imperialism and its crisis-driven warmongering once and for all, of which Zionist colonisation and tyranny is a crucial expression. 

Whatever 'nice' ideas Zionist peaceniks now have for finally settling for 'just a share of the Palestinian homeland by colonising just 75% of it and sticking there (and whatever 'nice' capitulation to this continued tyranny Arafatites might wish to settle for), no such grotesque anti-historical racket is remotely on. 

Zionism IS warmongering, and can never stop warmongering. The moment Zionism stops its warmongering, it will be finished in Palestine. The expelled million people must eventually return home. 

The most ruthless Zionists understand this well, as do the most degenerate imperialists like Bush, Blair, and Straw. 

The following 'peace movement' story, from capitalist press admissions, acknowledges the tit-for-tat hopelessness of all the above-reported Zionist smiting and failures, and reveals the crucial DIVISIONS in the imperialist camp getting deeper and deeper. But its reformist class-collaboration 'peace' hopes are now in the wrong epoch entirely. It won't happen:

THE PEACE movement in Israel is gathering momentum again in defiance of expectations. Thousands took part in a rally in Tel Aviv's Robin Square last night to demand that the government withdraw from the occupied territories even as yet another explosion devastated a shopping centre in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank.

The demonstration was the largest by Israel's peace movement since Ariel Sharon was elected Prime Minister a year ago. It represents another breach in the so-called 'consensus of fear' he has marshalled behind his military solutions for ending the Palestinian intifada.

Last night Sari Nusseibeh, a leading Palestinian official, told the rally of 20,000 that Yasser Arafat remained committed to the idea of a Palestinian state living in peace beside Israel.

In January, 52 Israeli reserve officers publicly refused to serve in the occupied territories. Insisting that they were 'raised on Zionism' and 'ready to serve in the defence of Israel', they vowed 'not to continue to fight beyond the Green Line [Israel's pre-1967 border with the West Bank and Gaza] for the purpose of dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people'.

A month later, their ranks have swelled to 231, with polls showing 26 per cent of the Israeli public supporting them, a colossally high figure in a political culture where the refusal to serve is often equated with treason.

It is not difficult to fathom the cause of Sharon's decline in support. 'No Israeli seriously believed by electing Sharon it would bring peace. But they did believe he would deliver security. He hasn't,' said Lily Galili, who covers the Russian community for the liberal Ha'aretz.

Instead, according to Israel's chief of police, Shlomo Aharonishky, he has brought 'a year of violence and terror the likes of which we have not seen in the history of the state'.

Last week the Islamist Hamas movement fired two home-made rockets into Israel, despite warnings from Sharon that such an 'escalation' would be deemed 'an act of war'. He responded by dispatching F-16 fighter jets to drop 1,000lb bombs on Gaza City (home to about 500,000 Palestinians) and tanks to, reconquer areas in the Gaza Strip controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

The Israeli Defence Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, pledged that the army would stay until there was no more risk of rocket fire. But 24 hours later the forces left, with officers and politicians admitting the invasions had resulted in neither the capture of those who fired the missiles nor the disabling of their capacity to do so.

On Thursday, Palestinian guerrillas killed three Israeli soldiers in Gaza by blowing up a tank with a roadside bomb, as 'sophisticated' and deadly as those once planted by Hizbollah against Israel in Lebanon, said army officials. In retaliation, Israeli aircraft bombed a Palestinian Authority police post and tanks entered Gaza's Bureij refugee camp, killing two Palestinians and leaving 33 injured, including a four-year-old girl. Within hours a Palestinian rocket was again fired from Gaza into Israel.

Yesterday a leading Hamas activist was killed when his car exploded in the West Bank town of Jenin. Hamas said it was an Israeli assassination and vowed revenge. Hours later two Israelis died and 27 were injured when a suicide bomber exploded his device among diners in a pizza restaurant favoured by teenagers in the settlement of Karnei Shomron, 24 miles north-east of Tel Aviv.

This endless cycle of armed combat is not the only reminder of Lebanon. Last week the Palestinian death toll from the intifada reached 1,000, 248 of whom have been children. The Israeli death toll reached 256. As Israeli analysts noted, this is the same number of Israelis who lost their lives during Israel's post1985 occupation of southern Lebanon. The difference is the Lebanon war lasted 15 years, and most of the Israeli casualties were soldiers. The intifada has lasted 15 months, with the death toll including 164 Israeli civilians.

For years movements like Peace Now - which called last night's demonstration - made full withdrawal from the occupied territories conditional on a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

But many among the protesting reservist officers as well as new grassroots movements, like 'The Green Line - students for a border', are championing more unilateralist solutions. 'They believe the priority for Israel is to leave the occupied territories, with or without an agreement with the Palestinians,' said Arie Arnon, a leader of Peace Now.

He said the call for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal was gaining ground within the peace movement and Israeli society, akin to the protest movement that helped pull Israel out of Lebanon.

Noam Kuzar, 18, typifies the new generation-the first Israeli soldier to refuse to serve in the occupied territories in the present conflict and one of the youngest, he believes it is time for ordinary Israelis to take action.

Some of the more 'left'-posturing academicism within fake-'Marxist' ranks sometimes tries to embroider that last point into the notion of 'Israeli' workers ending Zionism's part in doomed imperialist warmongering by a socialist revolution just like everywhere else; but Zionland is not a proper society at all but just a permanent armed front-line in the historical international class-war struggle. 

Any proletarian-revolution-minded Jews in Palestine willing to dismantle the whole Zionist colonisation would be unlikely to find even any expression of their understanding, let alone act upon it, until well after the total DEFEAT of Zionist warmongering, that is, if any genuine Jewish proletarian revolutionary socialists could be found at all in such degenerate artificial circumstances as this permanent front-line colonisation war in the heart of Palestine called 'Israel'.

Meanwhile, the current New Labour officeholders for British imperialist racketeering are now drowning in domestic sleaze almost over their heads.

Their only insanely-parroted answer to the Government's unbelievably bizarre series of favours for a dodgy international steel trader from India running a worldwide cut-price trade-war scam via a company registered in a West Indies tax haven, is that "the ambassador in Bucharest told us to do it".

Predictably, this geezer turns out to be a dodgy item too, the pro-Labour capitalist press itself is admitting.

But what a sordid little tale of crookedness, greed, and stupidity, even if he was a trade-keen ambassador pure as the driven snow.

Nothing adds up. Mittal is being financed by British state loans to produce cut-price steel output from Romania which can only sharpen world steel trade competition, crippling already, even more.

And if Mittal's campaigning in the USA for tariffs on steel imports goes through, not only will exports from Britain be hit directly, but the international cut-throat trade war will be escalated even more as thwarted low-cost Asian producers kept out of American markets seek to offload their products at a cut-price elsewhere, again in competition with British jobs.

The "we must help Romania privatise" argument is equally demented. Encouraging lethal trade war in the name of anti-Ceausescu measures is only going to give the West's reactionary anti-communist bigotry an even worse name than ever.

Even the bourgeois press is scathing about the quite mindless folly of New Labour's grubby little deals with flamboyant tycoons:

The Conservatives called yesterday for an inquiry into the role of the British ambassador to Romania, Richard Ralph, as the Labour party donations affair threw up fresh questions.

Downing Street is determined to block any investigation. The row is over a letter drafted by Mr Ralph and signed by Tony Blair on behalf of an Indian businessman, Lakshmi Mittal, seeking to take over a steel plant in Romania. Mr Mittal donated £125,000 to Labour.

It was disclosed yesterday that Mr Ralph had a link to Downing Street. He knew the Downing Street chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, as the two had overlapped at the British embassy in Washington.

It also emerged that Mr Ralph's partner, Jemma Marlor, worked for the Romanian arm of the British legal firm Linklaters and Alliance in Bucharest from last September after the closure of her previous employer. Linklaters and Alliance was involved in the Ispat-Sidex takeover.

Her employment began after the signing of a draft contract between Mr Mittal and the Romanian government in July, but before the signing of the deal in London last November.

The shadow Cabinet Office minister, Tim Collins, said: "There are now very serious. questions surrounding the role of the British ambassador to Bucharest.

"His personal links mean that it is now imperative to establish exactly what conversations he has had with whom and when. Conservatives are now of the view that he should be summoned before the foreign affairs select committee in order to get to the truth."

The Foreign Office insisted there was no conflict of interest between Mr Ralph's relationship with Ms Marlor and her work with the legal firm.

Mr Ralph is one of the more colourful ambassadors, having ridden a Harley Davidson across Europe to take up his new posting. His previous posting was to the Falklands, where he was governor from 1996. His marriage of 30 years ended after he met Ms Marlor, a Falkands resident.

Mr Ralph, 55, and Ms Marlor, who is in her late 20s, are regulars on the Bucharest social scene and often appear in the pages of society magazines.

The British embassy refused to comment yesterday. "We have been ordered by London to keep our comment to zero," an embassy spokesman said. 

This week the embassy issued conflicting statements to those of Downing Street, saying that a letter sent by Mr Blair to his Romanian counterpart helped to secure the biggest privatisation deal in Romanian history for Mr Mittal. Downing Street had insisted the deal had already been done and Mr Blair had only been sending a thank you note.

The natural forum for a Commons inquiry into the row  is the cross-party select committee on foreign affairs. But` its Labour chairman, Donald Anderson, yesterday rejected the idea. "The committee has more important things to do than inquire into what might be at worst an error of judgement or an excess of zeal. It is not likely to attract our attention."

The letter from Mr Ralph was sent to the Foreign Office, where it was initially dealt with by its central and east European desk. The letter was not sent upwards to the minister for Europe, Peter Hain, but instead went directly to the private office of the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and then on to Downing Street. 

Mystery continued over who inserted a line into the letter claiming that Mr Mittal was a friend of Mr Blair and who subsequently excised it. Downing Street, even more sensitive than usual, was yesterday trying to maintain a black-out on information. 

The Foreign Office said this week that the changes to the letter had been made by officials, apolitical civil servants. 

MINISTERS were accused last night of a cover-up over the terms of British backing for a controversial £70 million taxpayers' loan for the Labour donor Lakshmi Mittal to buy Romania's national steel works.

Tory leader accused ministers of a "trail of cover-up and deception" over their support for the Indian billionaire who donated £125,000 to the Labour Party.

The dissent over Tony Blair's personal support for Mr Mittal deepened when it emerged that Mr Mittal had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds lobbying for tariffs on imports in the United States, where he is the sixth largest steel producer. That would damage the British steel industry, which has a £250 million American export market

The disclosure blows a hole in the Prime Minister's claim that his letter supporting Mittal's business interests in Eastern Europe would be good for the UK and has provoked fury in the British steel industry.

The Observer has learnt that Mittal  - who has fewer than 100 British employees - has paid $600,000 (£420,000) to a campaign group, Stand Up for Steel, that is pushing President George W. Bush to slap tariffs of 40 per cent on all steel imports to the US.

Mittal's Chicago-based company, Ispat Inland, which is America's sixth largest steel producer, has also made nearly $100,000 in political contributions to both the Republican and Democratic parties to push its case in Washington, as well as spending tens of, thousands of dollars hiring powerful US lobbyists

The news emerged as a poll taken following 'Steelgate' and the departure of Labour spin doctor Jo Moore showed. 60 per cent of voters now regard Labour as 'sleazy and disreputable' -  compared to only 41 per cent who think the same of the Tories. Nearly eight in 10 voters think Tony Blair 'often' or 'sometimes'  helps out business donors to his party, according to the poll by Internet pollsters You.Gov for the Sunday Times.

Last month Ispat Inland's US boss, Peter Southwick, along with other steel company leaders, wrote to Bush urging him to impose import tariffs of at least 40 per cent to prop -up the US market.

If these are introduced next month as expected, the British steel industry's £250 million export market to the US could dry up with the potential loss of thousands ,of jobs. Corus, the former British Steel, wrote to the Prime Minister last autumn warning of the risk.

The letter arrived just a few months after Blair had written to the Romanian Prime Minister, Adrian Nastase, praising a deal by Mittal's LNM company to buy Sidex, the country's previously state-owned steel industry.

In the letter, which triggered last week's row, Blair said that LNM was a British business despite being registered in the Dutch Antilles and Rotterdam. Critics claimed Mittal was getting preferential treatment, because he gave £125,000 to Labour before the last general election.

But Downing Street dismissed the latest welter of accusations as "hysteria overload" and the Prime Minister's official spokesman said that he controversy over the British taxpayers' £6 million contribution to the E70 million loan was "boring".

Labour's difficulties nevertheless intensified when Peter Hain, the Minister for Europe, said that the Government had backed the loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to give Mr Mittal's British-based LNM Holdings an advantage over a French competitor in the race to buy the £300 million Romanian steel industry.

Mr Hain told the BBC: "The facts are clear. This was a company [LNM] with British connections up against a French company in a bid for a privatised contract It's better for a company with British staff, and British connections ... to get a contract ahead of a French company. Would you have wanted a French company to get this contract, yes or no?"

But Mr Hain was contradicted by the EBRD which said:' "There was only one bidder for the steelworks, LNM Holdings. All negotiations for the £70 million loan were conducted with LNM Holdings and the Romanian Government.  The loan was initiated by LNM Holdings. The French company fell out months earlier. That was widely known."

British taxpayers contributed £6 million to the loan when Clare Short's Department for International Development (DFID) instructed John Kerby, the British director at the bank, to support the loan application. In a further twist DFID yesterday issued an alternative explanation to Mr Hain's for its decision to back the loan. A spokesman said: "It was nothing to do with Mr Mittal. We were supporting the loan to help the principle of the privatisation, which we thought was a good deal."

The EBRD board meeting that approved the £70 million loan took place in October 2001, three months after LNM Holdings had publicly signed papers for the steelworks.

Weeks later the purchase was formalised with Patricia Hewitt, the Trade and Industry Secretary, in attendance.

Asked to explain the conflicting government accounts, the EBRD spokesman said: "All I can say is, there was one bidder, and only one for many months and it was LNM Holdings. They even proposed the figure of £70 million which the British Government backed."

Labour backbenchers last night joined the growing criticism of the Government's handling of the revelations about Mr Mittal, whose £125,000 donation to Labour in May last year was made two months before the Prime Minister signed a letter endorsing his steel bid - Mr Mittal, whose company is based in a Caribbean tax haven and employs 91 people in Britain out of a 125,000strong international workforce, met Mr Blair at a party at the home of Lord Levy, Labour's chief fundraiser, weeks after the loan was paid over.

A number of senior backbenchers contacted by The Times were scathing about Mr Hain's counter-attack and said that the affair was beginning to damage the Government's credibility. Kate Hoey, a former minister, said: "There is a feeling that there's something not right about this. I think there's a real, real danger. So although we will ride the storm over this, cumulatively it's doing us damage."

A spokesman for Mr Mittal, who is abroad, said that the £70 million loan was not essential as the finance could have been raised elsewhere. "It seemed an appropriate place to secure the loan from."

The Mittal outfit pays no taxes in Britain, has VAT debts, and its company culture is stigmatised as a bad payer.

It bought up Ireland's steel industry a few years ago in order to deliberately close it down months later (to reduce international competition) leaving millions of pounds of debts behind.

Its one claim to fame is reviving the privatised Soviet steel industry in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, but this was turned into a 'model plant' because of a huge £500 million capital injection which the West loaned Mittal to play with.

With that amount of fresh capital, and with more inspired management not demoralised by Revisionist bureaucratic paralysis coming out of Moscow, the Soviet socialist steel industry could had performed such a transformation itself ten times better for half the cost.

The Mittal racket is routine capitalist spivvery, the same graft and corruption the whole world over.

And the so-called 'efficiency' and 'innovative drive' of private enterprise is the biggest joke of all, - as will become painfully clear to the whole world's population when the entire anarchic global 'free market' structure comes crashing down in economic collapse, tradewar, slump, and subsequent warmongering recriminations, which American imperialism this time round has decided to take the initiative over and start early, not waiting for Pearl Harbour as on the last occasion of insoluble capitalist economic crisis. (See last week' EPSR).

But covered in Mittal sleaze corruption; and fresh from declaring monstrous solidarity with totally undemocratic, Zionist fascist tyranny; and now rapidly smuggling suspected war criminals AWAY from the scene of the crime and from possible 'democratic' and 'legal' so-called 'justice' in court as far as the apparently mindless butchery of the pregnant young Afghan woman's family is concerned, shot up in Kabul by the Parachute Regiment for making an emergency taxi dash to hospital after curfew (and completely contrary to the pretended 'democratic' spirit in which Milosevic has been kidnapped to 'face the music' in a blatant Western show trial on the other side of Europe from where the 'crimes' are supposed to be being investigated), - British imperialism's New Labour camp guards have the gall nevertheless to keep up a relentless propaganda blitzkrieg against Mugabe's national-liberation revolution in Zimbabwe for its "lack of democracy", now followed up by outrageous financial sanctions.

The real scandal of Zimbabwe's crooked 'opposition', total stooges for Western imperialist subversion actually involved in criminal conspiracies against Mugabe (see subsequent EPSRs), is meanwhile totally covered up by Britain's cowardly capitalist 'free' press.

And all this vicious colonially arrogant filth, poured on Zimbabwe by "upholders of democracy" whose own Parliamentary government is now a byword for sleaze, corruption, opportunism, and total dishonesty, - as the capitalist press itself is obliged to admit from time to time:

THE woman appointed to root out parliamentary sleaze condemned the  "corruption" at the heart of Britain's political system yesterday. She said it allowed senior ministers to evade scrutiny and punishment for wrong-doing.

She told The Times that her verdicts on five past or present ministers had been watered down by MPs on the Labour dominated Standards and Privileges Committee. In cases involving John Prescott, Peter Mandelson, John Reid, Keith Vaz and Nigel Griffiths, the committee had either amended her conclusions or recommended lenient punishments.

Mrs Filkin suggested that the system of "political preferment within the very narrow confines of one party in power" had hampered her investigations because people who wanted promotion felt that they would be "done down" if they gave evidence. Her words are the latest blow to the reputation of the Government and the standing of politicians.

"There have been instances where it appears some individuals who hold office have not been treated on the same basis as other people," she said. "I do have concerns about why that should be the case. It looks like more than coincidence. I think it's about how power works in the House of Commons." 

Although she said that some members of the committee had been able to overcome their party loyalties and personal friendships,'"the process is vulnerable to corruption and some people have not been robust enough to resist that corruption".

Mrs Filkin left her job as Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards this week after three years marked by repeated clashes with the political establishment She refused to reapply for the post, saying that the decision not to give her an automatic second tern had undermined its independence.

She said that her reports into Mr Vaz, the former Minister for Europe, Dr Reid, the Northern Ireland Secretary, as well as Teresa Gorman, the former Tory MP, were instances, in which she believed MPs tried to intimidate witnesses.

In the case of Dr Reid, the Standards and Privileges Committee had cleared him after changing the burden of proof from the "balance of probabilities" to "beyond reasonable doubt" because of the seriousness of Mrs Filkin's conclusions. She said she found that decision "bizarre and very hard to understand".

She also claimed that the committee had in some cases failed to use its power to see papers and call witnesses. "That gives a very serious message to MPs who want to avoid being scrutinised"

Mrs Filkin said that she had investigated only 39 of more than 300 complaints during her time in office. " While most MPs responded perfectly fairly, some fought tooth and nail to avoid scrutiny," she said. "Politicians are like the rest of us. Most are perfectly decent, some are saints and some are up to no good."

The charges made by Elizabeth Filkin, in an interview with The Times, cap a torrid week for the Government It culminated yesterday in the sacking of Jo Moore, the controversial spin-doctor,

Stephen Byers, the Transport Secretary, decided that Ms Moore, castigated for her suggestion that bad news should be "buried" on the day of the attacks on America; had to go because her continued presence was making it impossible for his department to function.  Mr Byers said there had been a "breakdown of trust" within the department which could not be allowed to continue. His department faced major challenges and "it will need the undivided attention of ministers and civil servants".

And the fake-'lefts'?  They back the Blairites' Nazi stooges over Zimbabwe, denouncing Palestinian 'terrorists', and 'deploring' the Sept 11 attempt to fight back by the Middle East against Western imperialist tyranny, - and in return, the SWP now 'earns the right' to have its Socialist Worker sold on display in W H Smith's, and the Socialist Alliance 'new crop of real socialist trade-union firebrands', etc, get celebrity treatment in the capitalist press and television.

The real anti-imperialist cause of the real international proletariat is meanwhile being stiffed rotten by "this wonderful world of Western 'democracy'", and the global economy is about to explode like a gigantic shitheap. Build Leninism.

EPSR supporters.