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 

No 1151 September 10 2002

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SW seminar Sep 21.  Rcpts pse. 2 pm

As the vast misery from ever-deepening global economic crisis continues to mock capitalist 'civilisation', petty-bourgeois 'lefts'  and scribblers continue to pour out grotesque ideological confusion to make it easier for imperialism's warmongering 'solution'  to everything to gain acceptance. But although Western monopoly-capitalist world domination is not yet threatened by fake-'lefts'  with the revolutionary overthrow which is the only future, insoluble inter-imperialist differences and spontaneous anti-imperialist revolt around the world are confirming class-war as the only way ahead. Trot and scribbler anti-Sovietism and ludicrous re-writing of history is on its last legs as the "freedom" from the dictatorship of the proletariat brings far worse results than even the foulest bourgeois lies and distortions against the workers states have been able to invent.

The anti-human and foully reactionary book by Martin Amis, sneering at all attempts by massed working-class resistance to curb imperialist rottenness in history, emerges to meet US ruling-class needs at a very delicate time for the West.

Never before, since capitalism began 800 years ago, has colonial-warmongering adventurism to cover over domestic economic crisis been such a difficult stunt for the bourgeoisie to unleash.

The Amis attempts to improve on the 1930s  Hitler-Goebbels levels of anti-communist propaganda (in the interests of a general imperialist war-drive to help the capitalist racket survive the system-threatening slump, the Great Depression, then spreading economic disaster), are designed to take the world's mind off the coming US imperialist war-crimes by (a) philosophically pretending that it is a total delusion anyway to even think of trying to "improve" civilisation in any way through deliberate political struggle; and by b) recycling ludicrous Nazi lies that all plans for "socialism" have easily been the worst things ever inflicted on mankind anyway.

This disgusting gibberish on behalf of Western monopolists' preparations to blitzkrieg Iraq and to step up the genocidal slaughter of the Palestinian nation, depends (for any 'logic' it pretends to) on Amis imposing a child's level revision on history so as to imply that "violence" was never a threat to civilisation until the Bolsheviks invented and perfected it; and on one-sidedly arguing against all revolutionary struggle as though Western imperialism simply has no violent history (or perspectives) at all.

Such an extraordinary display of ignorance, class-hatred, and philistine biliousness from a supposed "man of letters" shifts all of the attention immediately onto what must be eating this pampered posturer.

One can only assume that his petty-bourgeois anxiety about capitalism's insoluble crisis reflects the despair and gloom of the whole rotten upper-class system, used to getting its ludicrously vast wealth and social privileges exploited out of the Third World and the proletarian billions, who are now seen as moving towards total revolt everywhere against Western imperialist domination.

What else could explain the following typical samples of Amis Junior's shallow sourness as he reinterprets the history of the world for us:

Bolshevism presents a record of baseness and inanity that exhausts all dictionaries; indeed, heaven stops the nose at it.

Isn't unpunctuated self-righteousness, in a man presiding over the less than perfect world of the Soviet Union, 1917-24, automatically not not hypocritical? Off the record, Lenin was capable of telling the truth, blandly conceding that certain policies had had certain (unpleasant) results. But nothing here qualifies Bunin's judgement, with which I increasingly concur: Lenin that congenital moral imbecile.

Seen in terms of freedom alone, October 1917 was not a political revolution riding on the back of a popular revolution (February). It was a counter-revolution. The "unrest" of 1921 in the armed forces (mutiny at Kronstadt and elsewhere), in the-post-Civil War remains of the proletariat (strikes, demonstrations, riots), and in the countryside (peasant rebellion involving millions) - constituted a popular revolution far more thoroughgoing than those of 1917 and 1905. The Bolsheviki called this a counter-revolution, and bloodily suppressed it. Whereas, in fact, their revolution was the counter-revolution.

What they had in mind was vanguard violence: a violence "not seen for centuries" (Conquest); a violence, said Martin Malia (in The Soviet Tradegy: A History of Socialism in Russia), "whose scope and inhumanity far exceeded anything in the national past".

To glance quickly at a crucial dissonance: it has always been possible to joke about the Soviet Union, just as it has never been possible to joke about Nazi Germany. This is not merely a question of decorum. In the German case, laughter automatically absents itself. Pace Adorno, it was not poetry that became impossible after Auschwitz. What became impossible was laughter. In the Soviet case, on the other hand, laughter intransigently refuses to absent itself. Immersion in the facts of the Bolshevik catastrophe may make this increasingly hard to accept, but such an immersion will never cleanse that catastrophe of laughter . . .

Is that the difference between the little moustache and the big moustache, between Satan and Beelzebub? One elicits spontaneous fury, and the other elicits spontaneous laughter? And what kind of laughter is it? It is, of course, the laughter of universal fondness for the old, old idea about the perfect society. It is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million.

This isn't right: 

Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetsky.

Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky.

Everybody knows of the six million of the Holocaust. Nobody knows of the six million of the Terror-Famine.

Russia. 1917-53: what is its genre? It is not a tragedy, like Lear, not an anti-comedy, like Troilus and Cressida, nor yet a problem comedy, like Measure for Measure. It is a black farce, like Titus Andronicus.

And the black farce is very Russian, from Dead Souls to Laughter in the Dark .. . It seems that humour cannot be evicted from. the gap between words and deeds. In the USSR, that gap covered 11 time zones. The enemy of the people was the regime. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a lie; Union was a lie, and Soviet was a lie, and Socialist was a lie, and Republics was a lie.

Comrade was a lie. The Revolution was a lie.

In the real record of human civilisation, the bourgeois-capitalist growth of society had swelled the coffers and the egos of the "winning" nations to unstable monopoly-imperialist war conflicts by the end of the 19th century, giving rise to mass socialist movements to end ruling-class domination and its system of arms-race colonial injustice; and to the Marxist-Leninist science which explained the ineradicable cause of regularly-recurring monopoly-imperialist economic crises, and made conscious the class revolutionary basis for all major social transformations hitherto in history, which the now-international working class would eventually have to support in order to halt capitalist warmongering tyranny for good.

The Bolshevik Revolution quickly forced the major imperialist powers to curtail the mindless slaughter of World War I for fear of further spreading communist insurrections.

That world's first workers state survived the intervention and massive destruction by the invading armed forces of the 14 leading capitalist-imperialist states after 1917, and then survived the renewed imperialist warmongering conspiracy built up around Hitler's rearmed German imperialism plus 7 other Axis powers, designed by the Munich Agreement (signed by the West in 1938) to destroy the Soviet workers state once and for all in WWII.

The World War II triumph for the USSR and the ideas of self-financed non-imperialist development then led to the spread of proletarian revolution (most significantly to China) and to the spread of national-liberation revolution which used similar mass guerrilla-war tactics to bring down one physical Western colonial empire after another.

Against continued imperialist disruption, the Soviet Union, on the contrary, generously aided scores of the newly-independent countries in the world, laying the basis for the delusion that an entirely new era had dawned for mankind of a United Nations democratic and peaceful resolution of all civilisation's problems henceforth on Earth.

It was the "violence" objected to by Amis which had alone made that delusory dawn possible - by defeating imperialist counter-revolution everywhere, and by making continued anti-imperialist development possible everywhere.

The Amis diatribe is all directed against the many grotesque distortions and mistakes in that violence, obviously and inevitably committed by this first wave of workers states in history, desperately and inexpertly trying to stabilise themselves in appalling war-destruction conditions and in the face of ferocious imperialist counter-revolutionary subversion aid disruption.

To achieve this effect, Amis totally ignores the monstrously inhuman and indescribably despotic violence of Western imperialism's colonial-war-controlled world which gave rise to history's first great communist revolutionary movement and sustained it for more than a century of bourgeois abuse and vilification. 

This routine "democracy" brutality is admitted freely in many current capitalist press articles but systematically ignored when anti-Soviet polemics are required, - and ignored by Amis:

Complacency about Britain's imperial record lingers on. In the post-September 11 orgy of self-congratulation about the west's superiority, Blair's former foreign policy guru, Robert Cooper, and a host of journalistic flagwavers were urging us not to be ashamed of empire. Cooper insisted empire was "as necessary now as it had been in the 19th century". The British empire was, we were assured, a generally well-intentioned attempt to inculcate notions of good government, civilised behaviour and market rationality into less well-favoured societies. Is such a rosy view of British imperialism justified? Many argue that it is. After all, surely the British have less blood on their hands than the French and the Belgians? Wasn't the British . addiction to the free market a prophylactic against the horrors of forced labour?

While the complex consequences of colonial economic policy require extended analysis, it is possible to dispel more swiftly the myth that the British Empire, unlike King Leopold's, was innocent of atrocities.

It has become a modern orthodoxy that Europe's 20th century was the bloodiest in history and that atrocities just be recorded and remembered by society as a whole. But while a Black Book of Communism has been compiled and everybody is aware of the horrors of nazism, popular historians have been surprisingly uninterested in the dark side of the British Empire. There are exceptions, such as Mike Davis's powerful Late Victorian Holocausts, but much else still lies buried in the academic literature. Davis and others have estimated that there were between 12 and 33 million avoidable deaths by famine in India between 1876 and 1908, produced by a deadly combination of official callousness and free-market ideology.

But these were far from being a purely Victorian phenomenon. As late as 1943 around 4 million died in the Bengal famine, largely because of official policy.

No one has even attempted to quantify the casualties caused by state-backed forced labour on British-owned mines and plantations in India; Africa and Malaya. But we do know that tens of thousands of often conscripted Africans, Indians and Malays  -  men, women and children - were either killed or maimed constructing Britain's imperial railways. Also unquantified are the numbers of civilian deaths caused by British aerial bombing and gassing of villages in Sudan, Iraq and Palestine in the 1920 and 1930s.

Nor was the supposedly peaceful decolonisation of the British Empire without its gory cruelties. The hurried partition of the Indian subcontinent brought about a million deaths in the ensuing uncontrolled panic and violence. The brutal suppression of the Mau Mau and the detention of thousands of Kenyan peasants in concentration camps are still dimly remembered, as are the Aden killings of the 1960s. But the massacre of communist insurgents by the Scots Guard in Malaya in the 1950s, the decapitation of so-called bandits by the Royal Marine Commandos in Perak and the secret bombing of Malayan villages during the Emergency remain uninvestigated.

One might argue that these were simply the unfortunate consequences of the arrival of economic and political modernity. But does change have to come so brutally? There are plenty of examples of wanton British cruelty to chill the blood even of a hardened Belgian. Who, after all, invented the concentration camp but the British? The scandalous conditions in British camps during the Boer war, where thousands of women and children died of disease and malnutrition, are relatively well known. Who now remembers the Indian famine-relief-cum-work camps, where gentlemanly British officials conducted experiments to determine how few calories an Indian coolie could be fed and still perform hard labour? The rations in these camps amounted to less than those at Buchenwald.

There is Churchill's assiduous promotion of schemes to cut the costs of imperial defence in India and the Middle East by using aerial bombing, machine gunning and gassing for the control of rebellion, political protest, labour disputes and non-payment of taxes. There is the denial of free food to starving south Asians on the grounds that it would simply hasten a population explosion among India's "feckless poor": There is the extraordinary British justification for bombing Sudanese villages after the first world war: Nuer women were, officials claimed, of less value to their community than  cattle or rifles.

These facts and figures are not easily culled from textbooks on empire. We don't have a dedicated museum of empire, but our nearest equivalent, the new Imperial War Museum North, would leave the impression that Britain's colonial subjects had been enthusiastic participants in its wartime crusades to rid the world of want and evil.

Does it matter that the British are smug about their imperial past, that British atrocities have been airbrushed from history? One can't help thinking that Jack Straw's pious missions to India to broker solutions to the Kashmir crisis might have more credibility if the British had the good grace to apologise for such imperial crimes as the Amritsar massacre. But a more worrying symptom of this rosy glossing of the imperial past is the re-emergence of a sort of sanitised advocacy of imperialism as a viable option in contemporary international relations.

The point of cataloguing Britain's imperial crimes is not to trash our forebears, but to remind our rulers that even the best-run empires are cruel and violent, not just the Belgian Congo. Overwhelming power, combined with a sense of boundless superiority, will produce atrocities - even among the well intentioned. Let's not forget that Leopold's central African empire was originally called the International Association for Philanthropy in the Congo.

Maria Misra is lecturer in modern history at Keble College, Oxford.

In one of the most shameful episodes in British history, more than 2,000 British subjects were deported from the Channel Islands to Nazi-controlled France and Germany. Sixty years on they are still waiting for compensation, yet today all they hear is a deafening silence.

In September 1942, under German orders, the Channel Islands government made deportation lists of British passport holders and foreign nationals, while native Channel Islanders remained safe. The deportation of foreign born Jews had started in April 1942. Four months later it was the turn of the British. Their lives were uprooted and some died, yet after the liberation the subject was closed and any mention of compensation ignored.

The Channel Islands' war history was one of almost total collaboration with the Nazis. It has taken decades for the islands to admit their role in the Jewish deportations, which took place when Guernsey and Jersey absorbed Nazi Germany's anti-semitic laws into their own legal system. Today there is still shame about the issue, and the islands' governments are uneasy about revealing what happened during the second wave of deportations. As a result, the occupation has been bleached out of British history. How many students know that the Channel Islands -British territory-were occupied? 

How many know that Jews were deported from Guernsey and Jersey to Auschwitz with full Channel Islands collaboration? 

And if this Jewish story, is just seeping out, what about the largely hidden history of these British deportees who were sent to prisoner-of-war camps? If Jews and the British were deported during different waves and for different reasons, questions might be asked about who remained safe. The rulers of the Channel Islands, known freemasons, were protected from deportation, whereas in other Nazi-occupied countries, masons were sent to concentration camps. Many on Guernsey believe that the Channel Islands government willingly served their Nazi masters, only protesting when freemasons' lives were threatened.

It looks as if a deal was struck. After the deportations, old Channel Islands governing families remained untouched. After the war they were to be rebranded as the heroes of the occupation. Victor G Corey, who collaborated with the Nazis as the bailiff of Guernsey, was knighted by the Queen for his war services. Many feel he should have been hanged.

Certainly them was no postwar acknowledgment of the suffering of the British deportees. They were arrested as a reprisal for German nationals taken by the British in Iran. The Nazis judged it useful to have British prisoners for possible hostage exchange. The deportees included pregnant women, mothers and babies. Officially exiled as prisoners of war, they were removed to concentration camps. The majority were sent to Biberach, Wurzach and Laufen. Conditions were grim. Some people died en route. Forty five of the deportees later perished in Biberach. When the first post war settlements were organised in 1964, the Anglo-German compensation agreement excluded these British deportees. After German reunification, the British government ignored the issue of the Channel Islands deportations at the Moscow Treaty talks when other second world war claims were discussed. 

A final peace treaty still has to be signed between Germany and the Allies at which final reparations are negotiated. Will the Channel Islands deportees be included? The prognosis is not good. Britain wants to sustain the myth that the Channel Islands were victims of the Nazis, rather than admitting that the bailiffs of Guernsey and Jersey collaborated. History has been ignored. After the war, discontented locals started to question the non-party semi feudal system of island government and records show Whitehall feared that, if the truth about the islands' war history became known, it might provoke a socialist or even communist rising. Consequently, in the postwar rush towards "normalisation", the islanders were described as "plucky resisters" and discussion of the complexity of collaboration then was taboo. If, today, the former deportees begin to demand their rights too openly, it will reopen all these controversial issues. Up to now, semantics has let the British government off the hook. Whitehall insists on describing the deportees as "internees". An internee does not get compensation; a deportee does. But this is pure revisionism. Frank Falls, a Biberach survivor, criticised the Channel Islands government for refusing to "discharge even the civic duty owed to those unfortunate English people as citizens of these islands".  

The deportees rightly feel aggrieved. They ask why 800 British civilians, interned by the Japanese in China, were compensated when they have received nothing. In Guernsey, no government official has ever taken up the deportees' case.

The British government, the Germans and the Channel Islands government hope that, by ignoring the problem, it will disappear. Files on the occupation are closed and many former deportees are fearful of raising their voices against a feudal government that still discriminates against UK passport-holders. Those who collaborated with the Nazis have families in the Channel Islands government, and the reputations of the guilty are being protected. The only British government file which can reveal the truth about the Channel Islands deportations should have been released to the Public Records Office. But it has been "retained by department" indefinitely. It is time this story was open to the public view. British people have the right to know about their own wartime history, and the remaining deportees should be offered compensation as a symbol of regret for ruined lives.

Julia Pascal's play about wartime Guernsey, Theresa, is part other The Holocaust Trilogy (Oberon Books).

And Amis, unashamed trampling individualist totally ignores the even greater volumes of inhuman despotic warmongering violence which the imperialist system is imposing even now, and plans to extend even more dramatically in the very near future, in order to maintain its capitalist class-rule system over the planet, as even Cabinet members admit:

It is hard now to see how George Bush can withdraw his bellicose words and also save face, but I hope that that is possible. Otherwise I fear greatly for the Middle East, but also for the rest of the world. What is most chilling is that the hawks in the Bush administration must know the risks involved. They must be aware of the anti-American feeling throughout the Middle East. They must be aware of the fear in Egypt and Saudi Arabia that a war against Iraq could unleash revolutions, disposing of pro-western governments, and replacing them with populist anti-American Islamist fundamentalist regimes. We should all remember the Islamist revolution in Iran. The Shah was backed by the Americans, but he couldn't stand against the will of the people. And it is because I am sure that they fully understand the consequences of their actions, that I am most afraid. I am drawn to the conclusion that they must want to create such mayhem.

The many words that are uttered about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, which are never substantiated with any hard evidence, seem to mean very little. Even if Saddam had such weapons, why would he wish to use them? He knows that if he moves to seize the oilfields in neighbouring countries the full might of the western world will be ranged against him. He knows that if he attacks Israel the same fate awaits him. Comparisons with Hitler are silly - Hitler thought he could win; Saddam knows he cannot. Even if he has nuclear weapons he cannot win a war against America - The United States can easily contain him. They do not need to try and force him to  irrationality.

But that is what Bush seems to want to do.  Why is he so determined to take the risk? The key country to the Middle Fast, as far as the Americans are concerned, is Saudi Arabia the country with the largest oil reserves in the world, the country that has been prepared to calm the oil markets, producing more when prices are too high and less when there is a glut. The Saudi royal family has been rewarded with best friend status by the west for its cooperation. There has been little concern that the government is undemocratic and breaches human rights, nor that it is in the grip of an extreme form of Islam. With American support it has been believed that the regime can be protected and will do what is necessary to secure a supply of oil to the west at reasonably stable prices.

Since September 11, however, it has become increasingly-apparent to the US administration that the Saudi regime is vulnerable. Both on the streets and in the leading families, including the royal family, there are increasingly voices. Osama bin Laden is just one prominent example. The love affair with America is ending. Reports of the removal of billions of dollars of Saudi investment from the Untied States may be difficult to quantify, but they are true. The possibility of the world's largest oil reserves falling into the hands of an anti-American, militant Islamacist  government is becoming ever more likely - and this is unacceptable.

The Americans know they cannot stop such a revolution. They must therefore hope that they can control the Saudi oil fields, if not the government.  And what better way to do that than to have a large military force in the field at the time of such disruption. In the name of saving the world, these vital assets could be seized and controlled. No longer would the US have to depend on a corrupt and unpopular royal family to keep it supplied with cheap oil if there is chaos in the region, the US armed forces could be seen as a global saviour. Under cover of the war on terrorism, the war to secure oil supplies could be waged.

This whole affair has nothing to do with a threat from Iraq - there isn't one. It has nothing to do with the war against terrorism or with morality. Saddam Hussein is obviously an evil man, but when we were selling arms to him to keep the Iranians in check he was the same evil man he is today. He was a pawn then and is a pawn now. In the same way he served western interests then, he is now the distraction for the sleight of hand to protect the west's supply of oil. And where does this leave the British government? Are they in on the plan or just part of the smokescreen? The government speaks of morality and the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, but can they really believe it? .

Mo Mowlam was a member of Tony Blair's cabinet from 1997-2001.

We are told a war on Iraq is needed to pre-empt a threat to the region and to free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's tyranny (Blair: Saddam has to go, September 4). We, as Iraqis already free from that tyranny, living outside Iraq and in the western democracies, say that both these claims are false. As professionals, writers, teachers and other responsible and concerned citizens, many of whom have personally experienced the persecution of the dictatorship in Iraq, we say "No to war; not in our name, not in the name of the suffering Iraqi people".

Generations of Iraqis have endured a succession of tyrannical regimes, two devastating wars, and 12 years of "the most pervasive sanctions ever imposed on a nation in the history of mankind" (Sandy Berger, US national security adviser, November 14  1997). On the arms issue Iraq underwent seven and a half years of intrusive inspection and its proscribed production facilities were controlled or destroyed, while the most threatening power in the region, Israel, refuses inspection of its nuclear, chemical and biological facilities.  In Iraq, the regime of Saddam Hussein has nothing left but bombast. Hence it tries to exploit the genuine explosive rise of anger in the whole Middle East at the unbelievable suffering of the Palestinian people. It is the inhumanity of the civilised world in letting Sharon's atrocities continue in defiance of scores of UN resolutions that leaves the Iraqi regime with any credibility at all. 

In the meantime, the sanctions have been catastrophic for the welfare of the people of Iraq. They have made the lives of Iraqis dependent on the state machine rather than on free production and distribution. The fabric of society is barely holding out under the brutality of UN siege, manipulation by the regime and unscrupulous regional intrigues. Sectarian and ethnic politics has displaced modern civil political activity, and intellectual and cultural life is in accelerated decline, with the flight of creative talents and , technically qualified people. Another war will crush a vulnerable society and may mean civil war, with unpredictable spill-overs all over the Middle East and potential destabilisation to Europe and the world at large. Already, Iraqis form a large proportion of those risking their lives while seeking asylum in the west.

Our aspirations for Iraq and indeed the whole of the Middle East - is for nations that respect human rights, guarantee the national rights of the Kurdish people, universally apply international law and are free of weapons of mass destruction. We believe Saddam's regime is responsible for leading Iraq from a situation of great promise into one of unmitigated catastrophe, and this regime must be held to account for its abject failure and for the crimes it committed against Iraqi people, Arabs and Kurds, of all beliefs and persuasions.

But the remedy must not cause greater damage to the innocent and to society at large. Real change can only be brought about by the Iraqi people themselves within an environment of peace and justice for all the peoples of the Middle East. A change of this kind, combining truth and reconciliation with legal processes of punishing offenders is being espoused all over the world. Why shouldn't that be the case for Iraq?

We call on the UN to put together a timetable for the lifting of the economic sanctions and do all it can to halt the drive for war that will only plunge the region into the abyss. We also call on everyone to challenge the dangerous and irresponsible war plans of the US 

Mundher AI-Adhami Kings College, London Kamil Mahdi Exeter University Haifa Zangana (novelist) and 97 other Iraqi exiles 

But not Amis. So what sort of despicable reactionary history-forger is this?

Here is some of his own political history, and verbal diarrhea, the philosophy of a dysfunctional and aloof weirdo:

Fate had it that one evening I was alone in the house with my six-month-old daughter. (Another curious statement, perhaps, at this juncture, but I am slowly getting to the point.) Without preamble she embarked on a weeping fit that began at the outer limit of primordial despair, and then steadily escalated. Far from soothing her, my kisses and murmurings might as well have been molten pincers, skilfully applied. After an hour I was relieved by the nanny I had summoned from her home. The weeping ceased at once. I staggered into the garden and started weeping myself.

"The sounds she was making, -  I said unsmilingly to my wife on her return, "would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki prison in Moscow during the Great Terror. That's why I cracked and called Catarina."

The death throes of the New Left took the form of vanguard terrorism (the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Weathermen). And its afterlife is anarchistic, opposing itself to the latest mutation of capital: after imperialism, after fascism, it now faces globalisation.

But red wasn't dead, in 1968. During my time at Oxford they used to come to your room: the believers, the steely ones -the proselytising Communists. One might adapt the old joke. Q: What's the difference between a Communist car and a Communist proselytiser? A: You can close the door on a Communist proselytiser.

At the New Statesman in the mid-1970s we used to argue about Communism. I was unaligned, but I was, in a sense, a congenital anti-Communist, inoculated not at birth but at the age of six or seven, in 1956, when my father, Kingsley, left the Communist party after 15 years and the Amises settled into honest atheism with the Labour Party and, anyway, the argument was surely all over with the publication, in 1973 and 1975, of the first two volumes of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. 

In the New Statesman, we had published a review of volume two, by VS Pritchett, beautifully and (to me) unforgettably entitled "when we Dead Awaken". Pritchett's piece ended: "[Solzhenitsyn] is not apolitical; he is without rhetoric or doublethink; he is an awakener." When We Dead Awaken: yes, I thought, that is the next thing now... And it hasn't happened. In the general consciousness the Russian dead sleep on.

Observer:   When did you decide to do , this book?

Martin Amis Well, I never did decide to do it. In fact, 'decide' is nearly always a misleading word in the business of writing,  because the decisions are way back in your spinal column arid they dawn on you slowly. I just wanted to write something about this stuff.

Obs: Did you realise that there was going to be a memoir framing the more researched element?

MA. I didn't know my sister was going to die. I'd done all the early stuff, before you get to Stalin himself, and I was halfway through that when she died. If it had been a novel I wouldn't have dreamt of putting it in. You don't really think - is this going to work? You think - are there thematic connections? And I was writing about my family, and about death, and there were connections, I thought. My respect for death is really climbing at a huge rate. 

Obs Respect - rather like fear or something different?

M.A. That, too. But respect for its complexity and its power. The definition of youth is the belief in your own  immortality; the minute that goes it's a full-time job looking the other way.  I've even come, since finishing the book, to suspect that we will extend the human lifespan really dramatically, quite soon maybe, but we'll never be immortal because it's the death of others that kills you. Takes so much out of you. The death of a father's something else, but the death of a sibling, a younger sibling is a different kind of experience. It demands of you a little death yourself. Your body kind of rehearses it, you feel that you are dying. You don't want to be feeling that too much. Can't be good for you. It's one of the experiences that when you get there, you think, Christ, why didn't literature warn me? Of course, literature probably did, but you weren't listening. 

Obs Is that increasingly what you're setting out to do - to warn?

M.A. It's certainly stimulating to think that you're seeing things in your own writing that you haven't seen in print, ever. Perhaps they are out there, perhaps they're in Shakespeare, perhaps They just didn't t catch on you, but if you can say one new thing about death, then that is exciting. 

Obs For yourself, presumably, as much as for other readers? 

M.A. Both. A part of you is almost indivisible with your readers after a bit.

Obs An American critic has said that he sensed lots of anger in the book.

M.A. I didn't feel angry. I was rereading [Robert] Conquest today on the asymmetry of indulgence of the atrocities from the Left, and it was a massive phenomenon. Not just intellectuals, and not just Jean-Paul Sartre, but businessmen, scientists, academics, and every kind of artist. And there was of course no rational reason for it.

Obs A sense of idealism?

M.A. No, I don't think it is idealistic, I think despair and hatred are the emotions involved in utopian thought. Political belief strikes me as alien and destined for violence because the human material just won't do it.

Obs Is that a change in your belief from circa 1970 at the New Statesman?

M.A. I'm just a little bit-more militant about not being militant. But I didn't like it then; I didn't like the kind of herd rectitude. Because you could see what they were after was to be violent and right at the same time, and I feel that those are incompatible, and violence is itself meaningless.

Obs Why did you want to write about Stalin?

M.A. It's a heavy call to want to even more deeply demonise an historical figure. I haven't been reading the reviews, but already I get the sense that if I'd written a book about Hitler it would have been a completely different atmosphere.

Obs But that's why you wrote this book.

M.A. Yeah.  

0bs Some readers have taken offence at the 'laughter' of the title. 

M.A. It is a paradoxical idea. 

Obs It is, and it's perhaps not entirely resolved in the book.

M.A. I talked to someone I thought had read the book very well the other day. He said that even the section on Stalin is often comic, the reality was so farcical. As I say at the end, the joke is on human nature. How quickly it all turns to nightmare.	 

Obs You mention once or twice the idea that if you put two people together, and give one absolute power over the other, torture quickly ensues.

M.A. Yes, the thoughts of torture will be more or less automatic, I think.

Obs How much was the Fred West element of Experience still in your mind? 

M.A. This convulsion in my writing life is a lot to do with that, with my cousin, and having a horrible, inverted kind of link with this little oneman death camp. Both Experience and this are kind of wrestling with that.

The understanding of individual personally significant death and of mass politically significant death are matters competently coped with by dialectical materialist philosophy for a long time, and are only a theme for PRINTED psychobabble of this kind in the hands of a commercially-exploited brat, son of a Thatcher-loving famous, father who was even more of a political, psychological, and philosophical degenerate by the end of his life than his offspring.

Amis Junior's individualist scale of values is the real 'joke' in all this nonsense:

In 1910 a political opponent said of Lenin that you couldn't deal with a man who "for 24 hours of the day is taken up with the revolution, who has no other thoughts but thoughts of the revolution, and who, even in his sleep, dreams of nothing but revolution". The actual revolution, of course, had no effect on this habit. As the young secretary Khrushchev said to a cheering audience of party members, A Bolshevik is someone who feels himself to be a Bolshevik even when he's sleeping!"   That's how a Bolshevik felt about sleep.

But that is what they want, the believers, the steely ones, that is what they live for: the politicisation of sleep. They want politics to be going on everywhere all the time, politics permanent and circumambient. They want the ubiquitisation of politics; they want the politicisation of sleep.

This is from a letter addressed to Maxim Gorky concerning the status of intellectuals under the new regime: "The intellectual strength of workers and peasants grows in the struggle to overturn the bourgeoisie and their acolytes, those second-rate intellectuals and lackeys of capitalism, who think they are the brains of the nation. They are not the brains of the nation. They're its shit:"

That isn't Stalin. (That is Lenin.) Stalin hated intellectuals too, but he cared about what we call creative writing and had an uneasy feel for it. His famous and much-mocked remark, "Writers are the engineers of human souls", is not just a grandiose fatuity: it is a description of what he wanted writers to be under his rule. He didn't understand that talented writers cannot go against their talent and survive, that they cannot be engineers. Talentless writers can, or they can try; it was a very good thing to be a talentless writer in the USSR, and a very bad thing to be a talented one.

Stalin personally monitored a succession of novelists, poets and dramatists. In this sphere he wavered as in no other. He gave Zamyatin his freedom: emigration. He menaced but partly tolerated Bulgakov (and went to his play Days of the Turbins 15 times, as the theatre records show). He tortured and killed Babel. He destroyed Mandelstam. He presided over the grief and misery of Anna Akhmatova (and of Nadezhda Mandelstam). He subjected Gorky to a much stranger destiny, slowly deforming his talent and integrity; next to execution, deformity was the likeliest outcome for the post-October Russian writer, expressed most eloquently in suicide. He endured Pasternak; he silenced him, and took a lover and a child from him; still, he spared him ("Do not touch this cloud-dweller").

The "election referred to on October 22 1937 ("Irina came home from school and said, They told us there are mass arrests going on right now. We need to rid ourselves of undesirable elements before the election!") was a charade designed to celebrate the new Stalin Constitution. On December 12 Lyubov Vasilievna Shaporina went along to cast her vote:

"Queue blague! I went into the booth, where supposedly I was going to read the ballot and choose my candidate for the supreme soviet. "Choose" means you have a choice. There was just one name, already marked. I burst out laughing uncontrollably, right there in the booth, just like a child. It took me a long time to compose myself. I leave the booth, and here comes Yury, stony-faced. I lifted my collar and ducked down into it so that only my eyes were visible; it was just hilarious.

Outside I ran into Petrov-Vodkin and Dimitriev. W was going on and on about some irrelevant topic and laughing wildly. Shame on them for putting grown people in such a ridiculous, stupid position. Who do we think we're fooling? We were all in stitches."

There has never been a regime quite like it; not anywhere in the history of the universe.  To have its subjects simultaneously quaking with terror, with hypothermia, with hunger and with laughter. 

Rule by yobs, incidentally, or the dictatorship of the proletariat (an outcome only academically entertained by the Bolsheviks) provided the flavour of the superficial and temporary rearrangement taking place in England then: the transfer of wealth, as the Labour party put it, to the working classes and their families. I was partly going with the culture, perhaps, but this idea (with 99% income tax in the top bracket, etc.) so little offended me that I too supported the continuation of Labour policies at the 1978 general election. Meanwhile, the social effect of trade union   - they used to say trades-union - ascendancy was everywhere apparent And profound and retroactive. It made me believe that the people of these islands had always hated each other. And this isn't true. The hatred, the universal disobligingness, was a political deformation, and it didn't last.

Amis obviously gets better mileage out of the tragic quotes from writers and others who paid the penalty for opposing the Stalinist regime; but the inference drawn that everyone who ever opposed the development and security of the Soviet workers state was automatically innocent of any counter-revolutionary intent (or of seditious propaganda in difficult emergency circumstances for the socialist revolution's survival) is so infantile as to be hardly worth comment.

Denouncing such grotesque lies and hypocrisy from someone so entrenched comfortably within the current murderously warmongering perspectives of Western imperialism is hardly the point.

What is driving this imbecile and demonic despair is more the issue, plus what sort of degenerate "society" is it which has turned this infantile charlatan into "the leading man of letters of our time", etc, etc.

The problem for civilisation about the world's first workers state is nothing to do with Amiss fantasy about it being nothing but a ridiculous slaughterhouse for depraved psychopaths from start to finish, - but why did it bureaucratically fade away after its historically astonishing achievements had totally dominated and haunted backward bourgeois thinking throughout most of the 20th century. The oaf Amis himself admits that every civilised and intelligent person on Earth, without exception, was drawn to sympathise with the Soviet workers state's heroic struggles and achievements for decades, even despite its known Stalinist-Revisionist defects and weaknesses, - an obviously sensationally-significant phenomenon in history which the onanistic scribbler just casually drops without explanation.

Elsewhere, it is asserted that only "artists" devoid of any talent whatever could continue to paint, write, compose, sculpt or build while in the service of an ideology.

It needs a bit of arguing in places, but the bald statement that Soviet music, literature, cinema, theatre, recreation, public art, and education of all kinds, succeeded in transforming Tsarist illiterate backwardness into the most community-minded, safe, and generous, advanced literate world-power on Earth, has enough uncontestable historical truth behind it to make Amiss gross insults not worth discussing.

How could something which was little more than "mass murder tyranny"  for its entire existence have created the towering geniuses of world music in the 20th century, Shostakovitch and Prokofief, plus many of the better minor composers like Khatchachyurian, Kabalevsky, Glazunov, Gliere, Myaskovsky, etc, plus the endless stream of the greatest concert performance artists of the era and the greatest symphony orchestras, etc, all of whom were endlessly subjected to huge cash inducements to 'defect' to the West to make political propaganda against the workers state's egalitarianism, and some of whom left to take the money, but the vast majority of whom stayed loyal to the Soviet socialist plan, - some, like Prokofief, actually returning to live in the USSR during the 1930s at the height of the supposed "universal terror, famine, and slaughter, after long life in the decadent West, and composing his magnificent Romeo and Juliet ballet music right in the middle of the 1930s, plus much openly Soviet 'political' music, as did Shostakovitch. Just Russia's cultural tradition unstoppably coming out?? But what did the even mightier German cultural tradition produce during German imperialism's Third ('Thousand Year') Reich under Hitler, apart from 'Wir bomben nach England'??

Even more revealing was how the Soviet "evil empire" faded away. No "ruling class" in history has ever voluntary walked away from political power, which is just exactly what the vast Soviet bureaucracy did, tens of millions strong. Some "new ruling class"! The fake-'left' has much to answer for here.

Amis's lifelong Trotskyite companions and bosom pals politically flourished in the West off a slightly lesser level of anti-Soviet sneer than Amis is now peddling, "limiting" themselves to such crap as playing up the "escapee" racket of fortune-seekers allegedly "fleeing for their freedom" and "risking their lives on the Berlin Wall to gain their liberty and democracy", etc, etc, etc.

The truth was more humdrum.

The "prison-house of nations" in East Europe is currently producing TWENTY TIMES the volume of "fleeing liberty seekers", facing MANY
TIMES the degree of technological difficulty in border-jumping that their predecessors faced in trying to get from workers-state	 egalitarianism to the "get-rich-quick" delusions hold out provocatively in non-stop Western propaganda beamed into East Europe. 

And as this capitalist press piece itself acknowledges (but without openly addressing the fact, of course), it was the workers-state regimes themselves who dismantled their own border protections for stopping their skilled population being endlessly seduced away to the West),
even before they formally abandoned their planned economies, - no longer able to justify their security ideologically because of the by-then
total collapse of Revisionist philosophy's belief any more in the (always-stupid) delusion that planned humane egalitarian economies could "outperform" the slick international economies of Western imperialism (in the short run in pure consumer-goods terms).

Both sides of the AustroHungarian frontier are on the alert; Germany is a magnet for illegal immigrants, Austria is the gateway to Germany, so Berlin insists on tightening the border.

"Do ,you remember," Piotr asks, "how it was in the summer of 1989 - they walked through the same fields, so frightened, from East to West - but then, it was Germans going to Germany?"

Throughout that summer East Germans, having heard that the barbed wire had been rolled up on the AustroHungarian border, left their grubby Trabants and rucksacks behind and made their way past equally nervous Hungarian guards.

The history of the Cold War is full of daring-do: of secretly made hot-air balloons that carried East Germans over furious frontier police; of hollowed-out train compartments; of tunnels and of desperate, usually tragic, attempts to scale the Wall.

This mythology of escape faded in 1989-90. The Iron Curtain was replaced with nothing more threatening than a strict visa regime. Since then the mood has soured:: fear of illegal immigration has made the old East-West fault-line a neuralgic point. Yet again.

Along the frontier, especially during the summer when the crops provide cover, a game is played out every night.

The eastern candidates for the European Union have, been given funds and training as well as high-tech equipment to outwit illegal immigrants. "All the main borders now have infra-red machines to spot people crossing at night, but the people-traffickers have invested in these machines, too," Jonas Widgren, of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development, says.

Across Europe, people traffickers are ploughing money into their businesses. "Their aim is to get inside Schengen and they are pursuing this very systematically," Mr Widgren says.

Since the frontiers will shift east after EU enlargement, the people-traffickers are setting up clandestine organisations in the new fringe countries: Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine. Some police experts believe that traffickers may already have placement in the frontier services of these countries; the work is poorly paid and traffickers pay well, Typically, a Slovak frontier guard earns E300 a month, while a trafficker picks up about E500 each time he crosses a border with a bus load of clients.

The closing of the Ukrainian border with Poland and Slovakia, Mr Widgren says, will lead to hundreds of thousands of would-be migrants looking for a way into the EU. He predicts that the present illegal immigration routes through the. Balkans will diminish in importance and the focus will shift to Ukraine (and to the. Spanish-Morocco sea routes).

The European map is being redrawn. Hungary will be inside the European Union, neighbouring Romania outside. That raises questions not only about the treatment of the Hungarian minority in Romania but also about the two million Gypsy Roma who will be trapped inside Romania.

Will the Roma be bottled in, and if so, what tensions will erupt between them and the Bucharest authorities? Will they try to find new ways into Schengenland?  'Suddenly, big strains are being placed on the EU candidate countries.

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have serious asylum problems for the 'first time. The figures are increasing and no solid institutional mechanisms exist for repatriation.

Closing eastern borders is the necessary condition of opening western borders, yet this is robbing the new EU entrants of their ability to influence neighbouring countries such as Belarus.

Last year, 12.6 million people from Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian - enclave of Kalliningrad crossed into Poland. From next year each of these visitors will need a visa. Hungary already demands visas for Russians and Belarussians and will soon do - so for Ukrainians. The bureaucratic pressure on the countries is enormous. 

Cross-border commerce will suffer and so will attempts to create a new borderland culture. Crime is sure to flourish, as it always does around a closed frontier.

Illegal immigration is a potent factor in Western domestic politics. Seen through this prism, countries such as Slovakia, with its large Roma population and long, Ukrainian border, are a destabilising factor. Horror stories abound in the West European press, warning of millions of East Europeans desperate to escape poverty and share in EU prosperity.

Will the Trots all now hold up their hands and admit that their jeering at how difficult the workers states found it to halt the Western propaganda-seduction of migrating economic opportunists was a ludicrous historical nonsense???; that nothing could have stopped the opportunist trickle then, just as nothing could stop the opportunist flood now????; and that this makes for more telling, pro-workers-state arguments today than ever (in the light of the fact that "FREEDOM" as defined by Trots, Amis, and fascist-imperialist warmongering alike, has now had full rein for 13 years to "provide human aspiration with what it needs" in East Europe, managing in reality to only produce TWENTY TIMES the numbers (at least) who cannot wait to rip up all their local and national roots just to GET OUT???)

Will the fake-'left' and all the anti-communist "freedom" propagandists all now stand up and admit all this?????

Not a chance. As we see from the childish rant from Amis Junior rewriting "history", the only concern remains preserving self-righteous egoism.

Even in the pathetic Trot responses to Amis (who viciously insults his old companions and political collaborators, dismissing Trotsky as "a murdering bastard and a fucking liar... a nun-killer" and author of the police-state used by Stalin), Paul Foot can only cringe for Amis's pardon (on behalf of all Trots) to have been lifelong more biliously hostile to Stalin's Soviet Union than even "Britain's premier young writer" hysterically now is.

The vast bulk of Amiss grotesque distortions of modern human history are fine as far as Foot is concerned, just so long as Foot's own personal Trotskyite allegiance can be spared the sneers.

The "reply" by Foot's old SWP crony Hitchens to the even fouler abuse Amis directs against that particular "old college chum" and "New Statesman Trot colleague" sees this fake-'left' TV celebrity (who 'condemns' Sept 11 absolutely and cannot wait for Bush's war of destructive vengeance on the Middle East) wallow in even more cowardly abject anti-communism.

You demand that people - you prefer the term "intellectuals" - give an account of their attitude to the Stalin terror. Irritatingly phrased though your demand may be, I say without any reservation that you are absolutely right to make it. A huge number of liberals and conservatives and social democrats, as well as communists, made a shabby pact with "Kobe", or succumbed to the fascinations of his power:

If the moral and historical audit is to be properly drawn up, then I would unhesitatingly propose the members of this derided, defeated diaspora, whose closest British analogue and ally was Orwell, as the ones who come best out of the several hells of the last century. A pity that you felt them beneath your notice.

Your letter to me is addressed from what sounds like a pretty cushy spot in Uruguay, where you sometimes repair. You make it appear idyllic  - "a place of thousand-mile beaches". 

As you have probably heard, it has been calculated that during the 1970s, one tenth of the Uruguayan population was forced into exile, while one in every 50 of the remainder was processed through the military and police prison system and that in those prisons new heights of innovation - especially but by no means exclusively in psychological torture - were attained. (Behaviourism was involved; detainees were forced to watch Charlie Chaplin movies and punished if they laughed.) You can look it up in Lawrence Weschler's harrowing book, A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts With Torturers.) 

Quite an impressive number of Uruguayans are still looking for members of their families. The Uruguayan oligarchy was probably smart in making few claims for itself while it was doing this. It certainly didn't announce that it was truing to bring about a workers' paradise. The mere boast that it was doing it in order to ward off communism was enough to keep the weapons and "advisers" coming from my home town of Washington DC, and to procure an uncritical silence from most western "-intellectuals".

You scorn the sinister illusion of human perfectibility, as well you may. But - though I don't criticise you for idealising Uruguay as a counter revolutionary tourist - I do earnestly hint to you that there may yet be more scope for radical human improvement. And by the way, and since you linger too long on the subject of mirth, you say that nobody laughed at Hitler. Well, the fellow traveller Charlie Chaplin seems to have contrived it.

This whole exchange between us comes at an unsettling time for me, because I think that a huge section of the "left" has fatally condemned itself by flirting with, or actually succumbing to, a creepy concept of "moral equivalence" between the United States and its (actually our) enemies - whether Christian Orthodox thugs in the Balkans or Islamic fascists in Afghanistan or national socialists in Mesopotamia. Talk about wincing - I can scarcely bear to read the drivel and bad faith that is now emitted by some of my former comrades.

 However, and though I am now without allegiances, I still choose to regard the term "comrade" as a title of honour, and one which betrays itself rather than fulfils itself in such negations. It was always a sorrow to me - I can tell you this now - that my dearest friend showed no real interest in such apparent metaphysics, and I'm sorry all over again that you have written on the subject in such a way as to give pleasure to those who don't love you, as I do.

I see from some of the more vulgar and stupid responses to your book that the spectre of Trotskyism once again stalks the land and I think I am in a strong position to promise you that all such talk is idle. It's over.

What is "over" is all thought of a socialist overthrow of imperialism, - ever; (it only ever being middle-class Trot dilettantes who might have brought the world socialism in this twisted egocentric petty-bourgeois individualist outlook, but not now that the US imperialists are the only good guys left, - as Hitchens now gets well-paid to endlessly repeat on television and in Vanity Fair articles).

He is joking, of course; what is "over" is the ruse of ageing middle-class fake-'left' Trot intellectuals posing as the "socialist" conscience of the world when they are in reality more appalled by the prospect of violent proletarian revolution to overthrow Western imperialist world domination than even the fattest of fatcats and even the most fascist-minded monopolists.

The best final answer to all this hysterical rehashing of anti-Soviet "evil empire" propaganda will of course come when East Europe resumes its revolutionary workers state development after overthrowing failed 'free-market' capitalism (and its global imperialist warmongering domination reality) for a second time in history.

But the route to that eventual shattering blow to all bourgeois anti-communist propaganda probably lies through unimaginable Third World revolutionary turmoil meanwhile, - turmoil which could at any moment see geared-up Western imperialist warmongering preparations diverted from Iraq, say, to somewhere like Argentina in the event of communist revolution breaking out there, as the global capitalist economic crisis relentlessly worsens, and as bourgeois ruling-class reactionary repression turns all the screws to breaking-point everywhere.

It is a mistake to think that another 'special case' Hitler-Germany phenomenon (the persecuted victims of the scapegoating Versailles Treaty which put a temporary end to inter-imperialist warmongering in 1919 (WWI)) is necessary for justifying the monopoly capitalist system's return to a permanent all-out aggression footing.

Colonial-fascist arrogance against "inferior" Second and Third-World targets was far from just a German imperialist mentality. It was almost universal all round the 'free-market' Colonial empire system, backed by Japan, Italy, Spain and Portugal particularly strongly.

That specific cocky blitzkrieg mentality is proving more difficult to re-establish now in this new international imperialist economic crisis, which is what is making the finding of specific targets to assault first, more difficult to "justify" this time around for the monopoly capitalist system's acute warmongering needs (for trying to rescue the international 'freemarket' racket from humiliating collapse).

No lesser imperialist powers "lebensraum" demands will be easily tolerated or understood after the post1945 propaganda brainwashing onslaught universally against "evil empire communist expansionism".

But the "anti-violence" hysteria of the general "war on terrorism", - so helpfully being provided for imperialism by the anti-communist fake-' left', will serve a similar purpose, bouncing off inevitable chance phenomena such as Sept 11, and more than capable of entirely inventing and materially stunting up some totally fictitious "major provocation" by Iraq, or Colombia, or Argentine revolutionaries, or Gadaffi, or Mugabe, or whatever. 

An atmosphere of general anti-communist propaganda was all that the "world s greatest democracy" needed to allow the wholly imaginary "Gulf of Tonkin incident" to be hysterically responded to (1973) by pro-Western scribblers the whole world over, permitting the USA to start waging fullscale war on Vietnam, effortlessly replicating the "Gleiwitz radio-station incident" which provided Hitler with a fictional "cause" to whip the already (1939) war-crazed German public opinion into a patriotic frenzy for "revenge against Poland'", thus unleashing World War II. Violently conflicting inter-imperialist rival interests will, as always, carry any warmongering disruption to the 'international order' anywhere, easily onto whatever next stage of belligerent armed escalation or tradewar provocations is called for.

A key element to convince the working masses of, in all this destructive degeneracy, is the link between capitalism's insoluble 'over-production' economic crisis, wrecking profitability everywhere, and the monopoly imperialist itch to let warmongering 'emergencies' provide a get-out from state financial difficulties and the general widespread disillusion with the 'freeworld' system in general. 

The devastating collapse threats to America's economic well-being, relentlessly driving the Bush regime towards war, have been regularly well chronicled in the EPSR, invariably from the capitalist bourgeoisie's own admissions.

Now the turmoil driving the Sharon regime towards ever louder warmongering hysteria has been acknowledged by remaining glimmers of middle-class press "realism":

A senior Israeli commander, MajorGeneral Uzi Dayan, completed his tour of duty yesterday with a warning that the ailing Israeli economy will be unable to support tile military campaign against the Palestinians for much longer.

Gen Devon, who resigned yesterday morning as head of the country's national security council, estimated that the conflict was costing Israel about $3bn (£1.9bn) annually.

In a final report on Israel's relationship with the Palestinians, he urged Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, to decide between a secure border, reoccupation or the creation of a Palestinian state. 

A nephew of the legendary Israeli commander of the same name from the 1967 war, Gen Dayan told the Knesset foreign and defence committee earlier this week that the economy could not be revived and welfare requirements met unless security improved.

The economy could yet determine Mr Sharon's future, as well as the direction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Avraham Shochat, a finance minister in the previous government, had an even blunter assessment. "Without a peace process, the economy will continue to collapse," he said. "Our fate is intertwined with the Palestinians."

Even before the conflict began two years ago, the Israeli economy was distorted by an increasing number of full-time Jewish religious students cushioned by the state - they are exempt from military service, too, which further irritates the Jewish secular community and by large tax incentives for those living in the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

These distortions were not a problem in the times of plenty to which Israel had grown accustomed. But the war with the Palestinians, as well as requiring massive increases in defence spending, has seen international investors flee and tourists stay away.

Many Jerusalem hotels, normally full this weekend for the Jewish new year holiday, axe struggling. Such is their desperation that last month the Israeli hoteliers association filed  a suit claiming losses from the Palestinian Authority, blaming it for starting the conflict.

The threat of suicide bombers also keeps many Israelis from city centres. Some shops in the centre of Jerusalem are boarded up, as traders are fed up with the stop-go nature of business; just as streets which have been deserted for weeks after a suicide bomb see a gradual return of trade, there is another bombing.

On first reading the latest unemployment figures appear to buck the trend, showing a drop. A closer reading reveals that underlying .unemployment has, in fact, risen but is temporarily-disguised by the hurried recruitment of security guards: most shops, coffee houses, bars and restaurants now have fulltime guards checking bags.

Overlapping all this is the worldwide recession: Israel has fared especially badly because of its reliance on hi-tech industries. 

Mr Sharon plans to increase defence spending. Adva, an Israeli thinktank, said that every other departmental programme - health, education and, especially, welfare - will be cut, and low-income families will be the main casualties.

Mr Shochat, a Labour party member of the Knesset, acknowledged that his party has still to decide whether it will back the budget, and urged Mr Sharon in the Ha'aretz daily yesterday to take account of Labour's special interests. "For example, why are they cutting rent support for single mothers but not for yeshiva [religious] students?" he asked.

He added: "With the economic crisis on our hands, if the budget is not approved, the shockwave and the damage might be very serious".

As a reserve sergeant in the Israeli army, I have experienced the prolonged tragedy of the Palestinians at first hand. We soldiers and reservists have seen the eyes burning with anger, the children's faces filled with fear, the resigned elders, the gestures and glances of disbelief and indignation. We have witnessed the house demolitions, the uprooting of vineyards; the daily alienation of hope itself. We have seen a whole people pushed to the brink, penned in a corner, humiliated and denied basic human rights. As soldiers, we feel the pressure to disregard fundamental moral imperatives in our role as occupiers. Sometimes we give in to the pressures. We perform actions we would be ashamed of had we been in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.

I remember when a CBS crew came to visit the roadblock I was guarding as part of my duty as a reserve sergeant. The soldiers were angry, but the anger only poorly concealed their fear and apprehension.

The reality of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is disconcerting. We do not want to see and so we shut it out. Some of us escape into a kind of internal exile and pretend the occupation does  not exist. Many feel forced to reinterpret Jewish attitudes so as to explain or excuse the actions of the Israeli army. Others again use it as an excuse to leave Jewish life behind them.

The apparent paradox of more imperialist warmongering preparations to 'overcome' an economic disaster caused by too much monopoly-imperialist warmongering domination already, is merely part of the essential contradiction at the very heart of the capitalist-accumulation system of production which has taken the world forward for 800 years.

It is precisely the expansion of capital (and what its power can control) which ultimately leads to the problem of 'too much capital' in the world for all of the monopoly-bourgeois rival interests to all survive comfortably in a cut-throat competitive market.

In both political and commercial lucrative arenas where previous might has given the colossal sweetness of ruling-class power, fame, domination, and luxurious wealth, - - none of the more potentially capable big fish is willing to give up their own arrogant aspirations without a fight.

Imperialist military bullying is only another extension of commercial supremacy. Trade war and inter-imperialist shooting war are inextricably intermixed.

But a really aggressive war-strike might just turn the tables on an otherwise losing position in commercial, political or diplomatic interplay, every arrogant bourgeois economic imperialist that has ever lived fervently believes.

The epoch of economic imperialism is the epoch of unending world wars, as Marxist science long ago accurately explained.

With the most to lose, US imperialism is leading the charge towards war.

And the ignorant little fake-'left' middle-class scribblers are ideologically mindlessly paving the way there with their own arrogant philistine class confusion and anti-Marxist historical ignorance.

Build Leninism. EPSR