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 1181  April 22 2003

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History wholly against success for US imperialism's Project for a New American Century built on recolonisation and warmongering blitzkrieg. Monopoly-capitalist "overproduction" crisis is the problem,- not any amount of easy "rogue states" to be butchered. And controlling the people of the world throughout an endless slump worse than the 1930s' Depression will prove impossible. Desperation will eventually take the West's need to dominate into wars it will meet defeats in. Exasperation at capitalist devastation will finally bring social revolution as the only solution to this neo-Nazi nonsense.

Superficially, US fascist-imperialist aggression now totally controls the whole world, as demonstrated by leaked plans for four new permanent huge military bases to dominate Iraq and the Middle East (to add to the 148 already encircling the globe outside of the USA itself) and an oil pipeline direct from Iraq's occupied oilfields to imperialism's Zionist gangsters currently occupying Palestine.

But this obvious determination for a new "Thousand-year Reich" to yet again blast capitalism's "free world" out of the economic crisis slowly strangling it to death (repeating German and Japanese imperialism's efforts to break out of the 1950s Depression) can only be assessed against the historical background.

A back-to-basics analysis reveals the capitalist system more class-dominated, biased, and divided than ever before.

Its essentially UNDEMOCRATIC nastiness is more widely reviled than ever before.

Like the last great 'over-production" paralysis of imperialist greed in the 1930s, the initial warmongering skirmishes by the anxious Great Powers, throwing their weight about, have absolutely no effect at all on the economic CRISIS of there being far T00 MANY MAJOR PLAYERS in the international cut-throat trade-war competition. Regardless of "unbeatable triumphs" for an American diktat displayed in the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now Iraq, etc, etc, - the global economic gloom and panic continues rapidly escalating towards a fullscale worldwide COLLAPSE and then SLUMP.

Only serious INTER-IMPERIALIST war, once again (as in World Wars I and II), can end this stalemate paralysis of a global "over-production" crisis.

But the insane devastation of that route to a "solution" to capitalism's regularly recurring insoluble contradictions led to unprecedented new social revolutions in the world on each of the last two occasions (1917, end of WWI; and 1945 onwards, end of WWII).

The total triumph of world socialist revolution would be the almost certain outcome of a far more devastating inter-imperialist World War III.

America's so-called "complete military domination" guarantees absolutely nothing, either for the USA or for the survival of the system itself.

Such "superpower" delusions have existed before, and failed to survive. It is people who have to be controlled by imperialism in the end, and really determined guerrilla wars have never yet not succeeded in eventually wearing down the most ruthless colonial repression. The US "superpower" could be heading for another such historical example very soon in Iraq (and possibly Afghanistan too) if the current utter chaos and humanitarian catastrophe is not found some better organisational repairs from somewhere or other. 

And finally for a back-to-basics survey, the areas of the world which have already once abandoned capitalism in order to build workers states are not remotely "dead and buried" or "a thing of the past" as bourgeois propaganda desperately tries still to convince itself. And all of these above matters find their most persuasive proof in the admissions of the capitalist press itself.

The Bush-Blair regime grows more like the Hitler-Goebbels regime every day.

Poland was blitzkrieged in 1939 "because of" a totally fictional "Polish attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz".

The "free world" has been here before with the totally fictional 'Gulf of Tonkin incident" (a small Vietnamese motor-torpedo boat allegedly attacking a giant US battle-fleet vessel at sea to "justify" the  1960s American invasion of Indo-China.

Now we await first the surreptitious planting of "banned weapons of mass destruction" on Iraq and then their "fortuitous discovery" by the American military occupiers to "justify" their invasion, which was preceded by total Goebbels garbage such as this bourgeois press admission:

SO WHO forged the documents that sought to prove Iraq's involvement in making nuclear weapons? Some light has been shed on this by the US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in an article in the New Yorker on 31 March.

Hersh quoted a remarkable source - George Bush, president of the United States - who told congress in his state of the union message in January: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) looked into this allegation. The only documentary evidence it was given to support it was a batch of about half a dozen letters and other communications between officials of the government of Niger in Africa and Iraq. The letters, dated between 1999 and 2001, purported to prove that Iraq had sought to buy uranium feed material, known as "yellowcake" from the government of Niger.

Hersh revealed: "One letter, dated October 10 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Manadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked, and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior IAEA official said, that 'they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet'."

The IAEA quickly concluded - and announced - that someone with access to Niger government letterheads had cut and pasted and forged the incriminating letters. So who were the forgers? The IAEA won't say. When its officials asked US government officials about the forgery "they had nothing to say". Throughout his long article, Hersh points the finger at British intelligence - - M16 - -  as the source of the forgery. The CIA, he wrote, "refused to respond to questions about the role of MI6".

The tyranny in Iraq has not yet fully festered, but the "nicer" British state forces, - expected to be less brutal than the Americans for sole strange reason, - come to it fresh from the winding down-from and owning up-to their past murderous role in the colonial occupation of Ireland:

The cover-up of security force collusion with loyalist murder gangs in Northern Ireland may have reached the highest echelons of the army and even government ministers, Britain's most senior police officer revealed yesterday.

After publishing a 20-page summary of his findings so far, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir John Stevens, said he was aggressively pursuing new leads about who tried to systematically obstruct his 14-year inquiry.

He refused to rule out that he would question existing and former defence ministers, as well as army chiefs. "We are still investigating these matters," he said.

Sir John confirmed publicly for the first time the murders of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane.

He said loyalist paramilitaries had been helped by RUC officers and members of a covert army squad, the FRU (Force Research Unit), and that the cooperation between them included "wilful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence and evidence, and the extreme of agents being involved in murder".

The report, based on the review of 26 murder cases, adds that the unlawful involvement of agents in murder implies that "the security forces sanction killings. Informants and agents [were] allowed to operate without effective control and to participate in terrorist crimes."

Sir John said he regarded as extremely serious the deliberate misleading of the former Home Office minister, Douglas Hogg, who was briefed by special branch officers that "some solicitors were unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA': Weeks after Mr Hogg repeated this in a Commons debate Mr Finucane was shot.

Files on nine former FRU members and 14 police officers, at least two of whom are still serving with the new Police Service of Northern Ireland; have been sent to Sir Alasdair Fraser, Northern Ireland director of public prosecutions. There is also a possibility that charges could be brought against senior figures in the army and MoD whom Sir John suspects of hiding documents and lying to him about their existence.

Sir John is adamant that he can still bring Finucane's murderers to justice and that there are strong cases for prosecution against at least six police officers and soldiers.

But nationalists and republicans, who support calls for a full public inquiry, are horrified at what they are convinced were state-sanctioned murders of Catholics.

Paul Murphy, the Northern Ireland secretary, said the judicial process had to take its course, and that the final decision on whether there would be an independent inquiry rested with the Canadian judge Peter Cory, who has been asked to assess several controversial murders, and will report in October.

Sir John has faced criticism over the £4m cost of the inquiry and the length of time it has taken to produce this interim report, which has been severely truncated because of the risk of prejudicing any future trials.

But yesterday he highlighted how the army had deceived him over the existence of important documents that he received only a few months ago. "During my first inquiry [in 1989] I asked to examine particular documents but received written statements that they did not exist. My latest inquiry team has now recovered all these documents. The dates recorded on them show that they all existed at the time of my first request."

Finucane's family and friends have long been pessimistic about prosecutions, and a criminal case would not touch the political system that sanctioned his assassination. With no prosecution likely, the government last year conceded a preliminary inquiry by a judge of international standing. That Judge, John Cory, began his work last summer and he, too, is expected to recommend a public inquiry.

The story of Stevens' inquiries helps explain why. He has been ambushed and sabotaged by both the army and special branch. His current investigation was prompted by new evidence in a dossier compiled by British Irish Rights Watch in 1999, the 10th anniversary of Finucane's death. Although Stevens has been quarrying for evidence since 1990, it took the Canadian Judge Cory to guide him to "intelligence" files he had discovered after only three months. If it has taken Stevens so long to get to military intelligence, how long would it take him to get to the politicians, the patrons of the army's activities? 

There is talk of Stevens recommending charges against 20 members of the security services. But he won't. He will send reports to the director of public prosecutions, and the DPP has been notorious for not pursuing cases against the security forces. 

The only people the British government has taken to court in the Finucane case are potential witnesses for the prosecution.

Nicholas Davies - whose book Ten-Thirty-Three exposed the collusion between the army's secret force research unit (which harvested data on republican targets for the UDA), M15, the RUC and loyalists - was allowed no defence, no appeal and warned never to tell what had happened to him. Irish journalist Ed Moloney was taken to court for refusing to hand over his interviews with William Stobie, a UDA informer close to the killing. 

Stobie was the subject of a failed prosecution and then received loyalist death threats when he supported the campaign for a public inquiry. This government decided not to protect him. He was murdered by loyalists in 2001.

Stevens never seems to be doing what we think he's doing. We believe he is investigating the Finucane murder. But his report to Orde is thought to focus on ethics, practices and procedures. 

This will strengthen Orde in sorting out special branch, but it is not the Finucane story. He will criticise "rogue elements" at senior levels. But we should not be deluded the evidence accumulated by journalists, by the Finucane family and by investigative human rights organisations in Belfast, London and New York all points to institutional collusion and worse. 

As the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights said last year, behind Finucane's murder was "a system controlled by the UK government" The evidence prompts a fundamental question about the UDA's raison d'être: what was it if not an armed auxiliary of the state, "an extension of the UK government"?

Sir John Stevens' report on collusion, the darkest corner of Northern Ireland's "dirty war", is the most damning indictment ever made of British intelligence operations in the province. It paints a shocking picture of sections of army intelligence and RUC special branch not only out of control, but turning a blind eye to murder. What is astonishing is that it was compiled not by republicans, but by the country's most senior police officer, assisted by his chief investigator, Hugh Orde, now, ironically, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

The report confirms that the army's top secret agent handling unit, the Force Research Unit (FRU), used loyalist proxies to do the state's dirty work by assassinating republicans. Elements of special branch were also involved. There was no accountability and blind eyes were turned. 

Brian Nelson, head of intelligence in the loyalist paramilitary UDA and the FRU's double agent, helped them do it. It was Nelson who provided a key photograph of the lawyer Patrick Finucane, who represented many IRA clients before loyalists gunned him down. The DPP will have to decide whether certain officers, their colleagues in the FRU and members of special branch should face prosecution.

"Collusion"; interrogation techniques and "shoot to kill" were just some of the contentious issues that arose at the height of the conflict. Some pronouncements of the judiciary seemed to reflect the climate of the time and to give the green light to some of the excesses of the security forces. For example, in 1984 Lord Justice Gibson acquitted three RUC officers of the murder of three IRA men by commending them for bringing their enemies "to the final court of justice". No wonder there was moral confusion.

I have to treat Sir John's report, due to be published tomorrow, with some scepticism. He has a chance to expose what really went on in Northern Ireland, but I fear he will not seize it.

During his investigation, Sir John uncovered evidence about the army's top double agent within the Provisional IRA, a man with the codename Stakeknife. There is no law preventing the army from recruiting and running agents within terrorist groups, but there are laws preventing people committing murder. And take it from me, Stakeknife is a multiple murderer. 

I believe he should be withdrawn and relocated. Then Sir John could conduct a proper inquiry into collusion between terrorists and army and state agencies. I don't question Sir John's integrity, but I fear he will stop short of a full inquiry into Stakeknife. I urge him not to give up.

A Public-inquiry into what happened to Finucane would not allow the issue of collusion to be dealt with properly. The terms of reference would be so narrow, it wouldn't have the power to look beyond his death. That must be what the army and the police are hoping for. Did government ministers know about or sanction collusion between the security forces and terrorists? If they did, we will never find out.

The last four paragraphs were not just contributed by capitalist press reporters and commentators but by an on-the-run renegade from the actual FRU tyranny itself, urging a clean-up. Interestingly, this 30-year police military dictatorship on behalf of the fascist-colonial "unionists" occupying Ireland, is now a publicly-admitted TOTAL FAILURE. No less a Privy Council insider than the former deputy leader of the Labour party itself (always the imperialists' best friend) has had the smooth cheek to strike this novel new note in the British Establishment's continued attempted patronising and browbeating of the triumphant Irish national liberation revolution:

History is on the Sinn Fein side - and has been since long before the warring factions made the Good Friday agreement. Almost 10 years ago, James Molyneux, sometime leader of the Ulster Unionist party, told me that all John Major's Ireland initiatives were "edged with green": By that he meant that even the last Conservative government had come to realise that the passage of time and the arrival of the global economy conspired to unite the north and south. All the politicians can do is put a constitutional gloss on that reality. Yet Gerry Adams and company continue to quibble about the details of what one day will be seen as their enemy's surrender.

Gerry Adams knows (or at least he knew when I talked to him six months ago) that Sinn Fein is the party with most to gain from an immediate and unequivocal end to hostilities. My political loyalties are with the Irish Labour party in the south and the SDP in the north. But I accept that, once legitimised, Sinn Fein may drive them both into near obscurity.

With Ireland, the problem is always the past. The IRA talks about Ireland unfree never being at peace. That is what Adams meant when he told me: "There is no point in abolishing one IRA simply to see another grow up in its place." 

Grow up was an unfortunate verb to use in that context. The IRA is not sufficiently adult to understand that, for all the unionist huffing and puffing, the war is won. The sooner republicans get on with building a united peace, the better it will be for them and for all Ireland. Adams ought to say so. If he wants to play a major part in the democratic policies of a united Ireland, he has nothing to gain by acting as apologist for men he knows to be wrong.

The IRA has no intention of returning to what it still vaingloriously calls "the armed struggle": The dispute is over the way in which it make that clear. Their spokesman says that "they will do it on their own terms". The only people who benefit from that sort of playground behaviour are the intransigent Orangemen who do not want agreement now or later and want to blame the breakdown on republicans. 

Making a public show of destroying the Semtex would, the IRA complains, look like surrender. Why do they worry about the shadow when the substance is so different? As soon as Stormont meets again, there will be more progress on all those "crossborder institutions" which are the harbingers of Irish unity.

Sinn Fein is in the enviable position of a winner who has to save face for the defeated foe so that hostilities can be ended. As soon as that happens, Adams and Martin McGuinness can get back to the business of winning votes among people who admire their social policies, but do not like their friends.

McGuinness predicts that, after the next election, Sinn Fein may well become the biggest party at Stormont. Success, he says, depends on showing that it can make the power-sharing executive work. So why not get on with it, instead of complaining about an imaginary "unionist veto"? All that is asked of them is the fulfilment of the promise they made on a Good Friday five years ago.

Keeping that promise this week is so obviously in Sinn Fein's interest that allowing hubris to prevent the deal being done is absurd. If they go on haggling, the Stormont assembly elections will not be held on May 29.

Not knowing when you are beaten is an admirable sort of ignorance: Failing to realise you have won is ridiculous.

A silly counter-revolutionary myth prevails around the fake-'left' in Britain that the Sinn Fein/IRA revolution was no significant "victory over imperialism" at all, and never ceased to be "futile terrorism", because, allegedly, the British repression machine at no time unleashed "a fullscale onslaught".

This is firstly contemptible lies because nearly half Britain's available land forces were tied up on "anti-terrorism" repressive duties at one stage.

And, secondly, just a ludicrous mis-reading of all anti-colonial revolutionary history which has seen Iraq eventually triumph, for example, against longterm British tyranny (in 1958) in spite of BLITZKRIEG TERROR for decades which would have made even Hitler and Tojo go pale:

Iraq is the product of a lying empire. The British carved it duplicitously from ancient history, thwarted Arab hopes, Ottoman loss, the dunes of Mesopotamia and the mountains of Kurdistan at the end of the first world war. Unsurprisingly, anarchy and insurrection were there from the start.

The British responded with gas attacks by the army in the south, bombing by the fledgling RAF in both north and south. When Iraqi tribes stood up for themselves, we unleashed the flying dogs of war to "police" them. Terror bombing, night bombing, heavy bombers, delayed action bombs (particularly lethal against children) were all developed during raids on mud, stone and reed villages during Britain's League of Nations' mandate.

An uprising of more than 100,000 armed tribesmen against the British occupation swept through Iraq in the summer of 1920.

Winston Churchill, secretary of state for war and air, estimated that without the RAF, somewhere between 25,000 British and 80,000 Indian troops would be needed to control Iraq. Reliance on the airforce promised to cut these numbers to just 4,000 and 10,000. Churchill's confidence was soon repaid.

In went the RAF. It flew missions totalling 4,008 hours, dropped 97 tons of bombs and fired 183,861 rounds for the loss of nine men killed, seven wounded and 11 aircraft destroyed behind rebel lines. The rebellion was thwarted, with nearly 9,000 Iraqis killed. Even so, concern was expressed in Westminster: the operation had cost more than the entire British funded Arab rising against the Ottoman Empire in 1917-18.

The RAF was vindicated as British military expenditure in Iraq fell from £23m in 1921 to less than £4m five years later. This was despite the fact that the number of bombing raids increased after 1923 when Squadron Leader Arthur Harris - the future hammer of Hamburg and Dresden, whose statue stands in Fleet Street in London today - took command of 45 Squadron. Adding bombracks to Vickers Vernon troop carriers, Harris more or less invented the heavy bomber as well as night "terror" raids. Harris did not use gas himself though the RAF had employed mustard gas against Bolshevik troops in 1919, while the army had gassed Iraqi rebels in 1920 "with excellent moral effect".

Churchill was particularly keen on chemical weapons, suggesting they be used "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment". He dismissed objections as "unreasonable". 

"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes ... [to] spread a lively terror..." In today's terms, "the Arab" needed to be shocked and awed. A good gassing might well do the job.

Conventional raids, however, proved to be an effective deterrent. They brought Sheikh Mahmoud, the most persistent of Kurdish rebels, to heel, at little cost. Writing in 1921, Wing Commander J A Chamfer suggested that the best way to demoralise local people was to concentrate bombing on the "most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe which it is desired to punish. All available aircraft must be collected ... the attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle."

"The Arab and Kurd ... now know," reported Squadron Leader Harris after several such raids, "what real bombing means ... within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out, and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured, by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape."

In his memoir of the crushing of the 1920 Iraqi uprising, Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer L.Haldane, quotes his own orders for the punishment of any Iraqi found in possession of weapons "with the utmost severity": "The village where he resides will be destroyed... pressure will be brought on the inhabitants by cutting off water power ... the area being cleared of the necessaries of life:" He added the warning: "Burning a village properly takes a long time, an hour or more according to size:"

Punitive British bombing continued throughout the 1920s. An eyewitness account by Saleh Umar al Jabrim describes a raid in February 1923 on a village in southern Iraq, where bedouin were celebrating 12 weddings. After a visit from the RAF, a woman, two boys, a girl and four camels were left dead. There were many wounded. Perhaps to please his British interrogators, Saleh declared: "These casualties are from God and no one is to be blamed."

One RAF officer, Air Commodore Lionel Charlton, resigned in 1924 when he visited a hospital after such a raid and faced armless and legless civilian victims. Others held less generous views of those under their control. "Woe betide any native [working for the RAF] who was caught in the act of thieving any article of clothing that may be hanging out to dry", wrote Aircraftsman 2nd class, H Howe, based at RAF Hunaidi, Baghdad. "It was the practice... to take the offending native into the squadron gymnasium. Here he would be placed in the boxing ring, used as a punch bag by members of the boxing team, and after he had received severe punishment, and was in a very sorry condition, he would be expelled for good, minus his job."

The mandate ended in 1932; the semi-colonial monarchy in 1958. But during the period of direct British rule, Iraq proved a useful testing ground for newly forged weapons of both limited and mass destruction, as well as new techniques for controlling imperial outposts and vassal states.

The RAF was first ordered to Iraq to quell Arab and Kurdish and Arab uprisings, to protect recently discovered oil reserves, to guard Jewish settlers in Palestine and to keep Turkey at bay. Some mission, yet it had already proved itself an effective imperial police force in both Afghanistan and Somalia and (today's Somalia) in 1919-20. British and US forces have been back regularly to bomb these hubs of recalcitrance ever since.

At the time of the Arab revolt in Palestine in the late 1930s, Air Commodore Harris, as he then was, declared that "the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand, and sooner or later it will have to be applied". As in 1921, so in 2003.

Laid waste, a chaotic post-invasion Iraq may now well be policed by old and new imperial masters promising liberty, democracy and unwanted exiled leaders, in return for oil, trade and submission. Only the last of these promises is certain. The peoples of Iraq, even those who have cheered passing troops, have every reason to mistrust foreign invaders. They have been lied to far too often, bombed and slaughtered promiscuously.

An Irish author frequently in the bourgeois press, Kevin Toolis, has added up some of his own historical observations, and, unsurprisingly, has come up with the obvious anti-imperialist conclusions, brought right up to date:

Behind the door Frankie lay in bits in his coffin, a casualty of his own fumbling attempts to murder the Blues and Royals military band on a cold November night in 1991. But to his Irish republican neighbours, Frankie was a hero. Later that day they would all emerge from their British taxpayer-built houses and march in their thousands behind his cortege for seven freezing miles to commemorate a man who had plotted murder against the Crown in between trips to the British dole office and the lavishly funded local leisure centre.

Like Frankie, they bit with venom the hand that so lavishly tried to woo them. The bribes, the best public housing stock in Western Europe, the endless fake job schemes, the billions sunk without trace into the Northern Ireland economy by Her Majesty's Treasury, made no difference. The Irish hated the guts of every British soldier they encountered and rejoiced when Frankie's mates in the IRA managed to kill a squaddie.

	Frankie is unlikely to feature by name in cosy chats over the future of Iraq between President Bush and the Prime Minister in Hillsborough Castle. But Frankie is a salutary reminder of how difficult it is to rule a people, Irish or Iraqi, who see every action of your soldiers as the work of a malign, foreign occupation force.

Far from being the model for future peacekeeping operations in Iraq, Britain's own track record of winning "hearts and minds" in Northern Ireland is abysmal. For ever since British troops invaded the outer suburbs of Basra, "hearts and minds" has become the new war mantra. Handing out chocolates to kids in Basra and taking your helmet off in the vicinity of embedded camera crews might make great television pictures, but it is just cheap propaganda.

Ironically, none of the military spindoctors who invoke the concept so gladly has bothered to source the origins of their own catchphrase. If they did they might not be so happy to use it in Iraq. "Hearts and minds" comes from a speech given by President Lyndon Johnson at a dinner in Texas in May 1965 as he sought to justify his disastrous decision to escalate US troop numbers in Vietnam. 

"So we must be ready to fight in Vietnam, but the ultimate victory will depend upon the hearts and the minds of the people who actually live out there," Johnson said.

Like the rest of the US military establishment, Johnson misread Vietnamese nationalism as a form of Soviet expansionism and unleashed his B52s to blanket bomb North Vietnam. America did not win any hearts and minds in Vietnam. It killed a million people by brute military power and strengthened the resistance of the Communist Government. The people who lived under the American bombs, Vietnamese peasants, had no difficulty in deciding where their loyalty lay. As in Ireland, and as it will be in Iraq, it will never be with the alien occupier.

No amount of leaflets in Arabic signed by Tony Blair will overcome the chasm of suspicion between a conquering Western soldier and a wary Iraqi civilian. And every time a jumpy US Marine shoots dead a man, woman or child at a roadblock the civilian population will have another point of grievance against the occupier.

Perhaps the Americans are more honest. Their forces are in Iraq to make war, not peace. They are in the business of killing selected members of the local population. There will be good days and bad days but the only near certainty is that the victims, innocent or guilty, will be Iraqis. Nor will the Iraqis resent the Brits less because there area few more Arabists in the Foreign Office. No amount of psy-ops is going to alter the irreducible truth: a foreign "crusader" army has invaded a Muslim country and is now bossing its people around by threat of force.

There is another awkward political lesson both leaders can contemplate under the grey Irish skies. Sending the troops in is the easy part, as Jim Callaghan did in 1969 after rioting in Londonderry got out of hand. The tricky part is coming up with the political deal that allows you to pull them out again.

Ah yes, it may be agreed, more examples, past and projected, of stupid/nasty Western colonial bullying.

But what makes it fascistic????

Its historical purpose makes it the exact replica of Nazism.

And its utterly arbitrary terror against easily isolated or victimised, defenceless targets, - often uncomfortably breaching society's supposedly "normal and liberal" so-called "better values" unmistakably marks it as an interesting parallel with growing BNP support in Britain for genteelly promoting a chauvinist "national interest" against the "foreign-ness" of asylum seekers (greatly aided by the deliberately grotesque and inflammatory government policy switch backs on this and immigration issues, consciously encouraging racist splits so as to weaken the working class for the huge economic-slump battles ahead).

But would there not be an outcry in such bastions of "liberal democracy" as Britain and the USA if these Bush warmongering aggression plans, to pre-emptively blitzkrieg anywhere in the world "if necessary", really did amount to international domineering on a Hitler Germany scale???

It is already beginning, according to Hollywood celebrities, academic commentators, and straightforward (if naive) capitalist press reports of scandal:

And then came the speech: you are either with us or against us. And the bombing began. And the old paradigm was restored as our leader encouraged us to show our patriotism by shopping and volunteering to join groups that would turn in their neighbour for any suspicious behaviour. 

In the 19 mouths since 9/11, we have seen our democracy compromised by fear and hatred. Basic inalienable rights, due process, the sanctity of the home have been compromised in a climate of fear. A unified American public has grown bitterly divided and a world population that had profound sympathy and support for us has grown contemptuous and distrustful, viewing us as we once viewed the Soviet Union, as a rogue state.

Last weekend Susan and I and the three kids went to Florida for a family reunion of sorts. Amid the alcohol and the dancing, there was, of course, talk of the war. And the most frightening thing was the amount of times we were thanked for speaking out against the war because that individual speaking thought it unsafe to do so in their own community, in their own life. Keep talking, they said; I haven't been able to open my mouth. 

A relative tells me that a history teacher tells his 11-year old son, my nephew, that Susan Sarandon is endangering the troops by her opposition to the war. Another relative tells me of a school board decision to cancel a civics event that was proposing to have a moment of silence for those who have died in the war, because the students were including dead Iraqi civilians in their silent prayer. A teacher in another nephew's school is fired for wearing a Tshirt with a peace sign on it. A friend of the family tells of listening to the radio down South as the talk show host calls for the murder of a prominent anti-war activist. 

Death threats have appeared on other prominent anti-war activists' doorsteps for their views. Relatives of ours have received threatening emails and phone calls. Susan and I have been listed as traitors, as supporters of Saddam, and various other epithets. Two weeks ago, the United Way cancelled Susan's appearance at a conference on women's leadership. Both of us last week were told that we and the First Amendment were not welcome at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. A famous middle-aged rock'n'roller called me last week to thank me for speaking out against the war, only to tell me he could not speak himself because he fears repercussions from Clear Channel. 

In Washington (veteran journalist] Helen Thomas finds herself banished to the back of the [White House press briefing] room and uncalled on after asking Ari Fleischer whether our showing prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay on television violated the Geneva Convention. 

A chill wind is blowing in this nation. A message is being sent through the White House and its allies in talk radio and Clear Channel and Cooperstown. If you oppose this administration, there can and will be ramifications. Every day the airwaves are filled with warnings, veiled and unveiled threats, invective and hatred directed at any voice of dissent. And the public, like so many relatives and friends that I saw last weekend, sit in mute opposition and fear.

I am sick of hearing about Hollywood being against this war. Hollywood's heavy hitters, the real powerbrokers and cover-of-the-magazine stars, have been largely silent. Today prominent politicians who have decried violence in movies -the 'Blame Hollywooders', if you will - recently voted to give our President the power to unleash real violence in our current war. They want us to stop the fictional violence but are OK with the real kind. These same people that tolerate the real violence of war don't want to see the result on the nightly news. Unlike the rest of the world, our news coverage of this war remains sanitised, without a glimpse of the blood and gore inflicted upon our soldiers on the women and children in Iraq. Violence as a concept, an abstraction -it's very strange.

As we applaud the hard-edged realism of the opening battle scene of Saving Private Ryan, we cringe at the thought of seeing the same on the nightly news. We are told it would be pornographic. We want no part of reality in real life. We demand that war be painstakingly realised on the screen, but that war remain imagined and conceptualised in real life.

In the midst of all this madness, where is the political opposition? We need leaders, not pragmatists that cower before the spin zones of former entertainment journalists. And it doesn't take much to shift the tide. My 11-year-old nephew, mentioned earlier, a shy kid who never talks in class, stood up to his history teacher who was questioning Susan's patriotism. 'That's my aunt you're talking about. Stop it.' The stunned teacher backtracked and began stammering compliments. A bully can be stopped, and so can a mob. It takes one person with the courage and a resolute voice.

Our ability to disagree, and our inherent right to question our leaders and criticise their actions, define who we are. To allow those rights to be taken away out of fear, to punish people for their beliefs, to limit access in the media to differing opinions, is to acknowledge our democracy's defeat.

No one bothered to answer, but as the American military machine currently in Iraq stirs restlessly in other directions, these questions give urgency to the failure, if not the corruption, of democracy.

Let us examine what the US's Middle East policy has wrought since George W. Bush came to power. Even before the atrocities of 11 September, Bush's team had given Arie] Sharon's government freedom to colonise the West Bank and Gaza, kill and detain people at will, demolish their homes, expropriate their land and imprison them by curfew and military blockades. After 9/11, Sharon simply hitched his wagon to 'the war on terrorism' and intensified his unilateral depredations against a defenceless civilian population under occupation, despite UN Security Council Resolutions enjoining Israel to withdraw and desist from its war crimes and human rights abuses. 

In October 2001, Bush launched the invasion of Afghanistan. which opened with concentrated, high-altitude bombing (an 'anti-terrorist' military tactic, which resembles ordinary terrorism in its effects and structure) and by December had installed a client regime with no effective power beyond Kabul. There has been no significant US effort at reconstruction, and it seems the country has returned to its former abjection. 

Since the summer of 2002, the Bush administration has conducted a propaganda campaign against the despotic government of Iraq and with the UK, having unsuccessfully tried to push the Security Council into compliance, started the war. Since last November, dissent disappeared from the mainstream media swollen with a surfeit of ex-generals sprinkled with recent terrorism experts drawn from Washington right-wing think-tanks. Anyone who was critical was labelled anti-American by failed academics, listed on websites as an 'enemy' scholar who didn't toe the line. Those few public figures who were critical had their emails swamped, their lives threatened, their ideas trashed by media commentators who had become sentinels of America's war.

A TORRENT OF material appeared equating Saddam Hussein's tyranny not only with evil, but with every known crime. Some of this was factually correct but neglected the role of the US and Europe in fostering Saddam's rise and maintaining his power. In fact, the egregious Donald Rumsfeld visited Saddam in the early 80s, assuring him of US approval for his catastrophic war against Iran. US corporations supplied nuclear, chemical and biological materials for the supposed weapons of mass destruction and then were brazenly erased from public record.

All this was deliberately obscured by government and media in manufacturing the case for destroying Iraq. Either without proof or with fraudulent information, Saddam was accused of harbouring weapons of mass destruction seen as a direct threat to the US. The appalling consequences of the US and British intervention in Iraq are beginning to unfold, with the calculated destruction of the country's modern infrastructure, the looting of one of the world's richest civilisations, the attempt to engage motley 'exiles' plus large corporations in rebuilding the country, and the appropriation of its oil and its modern destiny. It's been suggested that Ahmad Chalabi, for example, will sign a peace treaty with Israel, hardly an Iraqi idea. Bechtel has already been awarded a huge contract.

This is an almost total failure in democracy ours, not Iraq's: 70 per cent of the American people are supposed to support this, but nothing is more manipulative than polls asking 465 Americans whether they 'support our President and troops in time of war'. As Senator Byrd said: 'There is a pervasive sense of rush and risk and too many questions unanswered... a pall has fallen over the Senate Chamber. We avoid our solemn duty to debate the one topic on the minds of all Americans, even while scores of our sons and daughters faithfully do their duty in Iraq.'

I am convinced this was a rigged, unnecessary and unpopular war. The reactionary Washington institutions that spawned Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams and Feith provide an unhealthy intellectual and moral atmosphere. Policy papers circulate without real peer review, adopted by a government requiring justification for illicit policy. The doctrine of military pre-emption was never voted on by the American people or their representatives. 

How can citizens stand up against the blandishments offered to the government by companies like Halliburton and Boeing? Charting a strategic course for the most lavishly endowed military establishment in history is left to ideologically based pressure groups (eg fundamentalist Christian leaders), wealthy private foundations and lobbies like AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. It seems so monumentally criminal that important words like democracy and freedom have been hijacked, used as a mask for pillage. taking over territory and settling scores. 

The US programme for the Arab world has become the same as Israel's. Along with Syria, Iraq once represented the only serious military threat to Israel and, therefore, it had to be smashed.

BESIDES, WHAT DOES it mean to liberate and democratise a country when no one asked you to do it and when, in the process, you occupy it militarily while failing to preserve law and order? What a travesty of strategic planning when you assume 'natives' will welcome your presence after you've bombed and quarantined them for 13 years. A preposterous mindset about American beneficence has infiltrated the minutest levels of the media. In writing about a 70-year-old Baghdad widow who ran a cultural centre in her home that was wrecked by US raids and who is now beside herself with rage, New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins implicitly chastises her for her 'comfortable life under Saddam Hussein' and piously disapproves of her tirade against the Americans, 'and this from a graduate of London University'. 

Adding to the fraudulence of the weapons not found, the Stalingrads that didn't occur, the artillery defences that never happened, I wouldn't be surprised if Saddam disappeared suddenly because a deal was made in Moscow to let him, his family, and his money leave in return for the country. The war had gone badly for the US in the south, and Bush couldn't risk the same in Baghdad. On 6 April, a Russian convoy leaving Iraq was bombed; Condi Rice appeared in Russia on 7 April; Baghdad fell 9 April. 

Nevertheless, Americans have been cheated, Iraqis have suffered impossibly and Bush looks like a cowboy. On matters of the gravest importance, constitutional principles have been violated and the electorate lied to. We are the ones who must have our democracy back.

IN THE shadow war on Iraq  - that of propaganda and media spin- no US media giant has been more supportive than Texas-based Clear Channel Communications. Last week, the company, which owns some 1,200 commercial radio stations and counts more than 100 million listeners a week, came under intense criticism for organising pro-war rallies, muzzling anti-war protests and blocking anti-war music from its broadcasts.

Clear Channel, which is owned by the Mays family of San Antonio, is not only by far the largest owner of radio stations in the US. It also owns the largest concert promotions business and the greatest number of billboards, including most of those in Times Square. It is the subject of congressional hearings into allegations that it has used its market dominance to skirt laws against pay-for-play, the practice once known as payola.

Critics accuse it of engineering cultural homogenisation by programming music and news radio (the company syndicates rightwing fixtures Rush Limbaugh and Dr Laura Schlessinger) to the extent that there is no longer any differentiation between what is broadcast in markets thousands of miles apart.

Clear Channel is accused of drumming up support for the war in Iraq, while muzzling those who oppose it. When Natalie Maines, singer of the Texas band The Dixie Chicks, commented that she was ashamed of the president, Clear Channel country radio stations were the first to drop the band from playlists.

Others who critics say have been blacklisted include Lenny Kravitz, Michael Stipe of REM and Ani DiFranco. DiFranco claims she was pressured by Clear Channel concert promoters to bar anti-war groups from speaking at one of her concerts.

Of course, the same argument is made against other media organisations. Rupert Murdoch's Fox News network has been accused of having the most unapologetically patriotic tone throughout the build-up to and execution of combat in Iraq. CNN, too, has found itself under attack for beating a pro-war drum.

Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, says Fox News 'has the most visibly ideological and politicised coverage you'll find on cable TV news'.

As the war winds down, the pro-war media has launched a fierce counter-attack against critics, such as the New York Times, who warned of a military quagmire in Iraq.

'On the whole, the media has been uncritically accepting of the administration's point of view,' says Michael Wolff, media critic for New York Magazine. 'The administration has entire control of the news cycle right now.'

But even Fox, the most actively pro-government TV network, has not gone as far as Clear Channel in pursuing an active pro-government agenda beyond broadcasting.

Two weeks ago, it was found that the radio giant had co-sponsored and promoted a dozen or so pro-war rallies across America. Rival radio executives say the rallies run counter to the government charter that regulates licensing the airwaves.

'It flies right in the face of the fact that the government has always said that radio stations should have a balanced view of what is going on, serve the public interest and not take sides,' said one.

Clear Channel is extremely vulnerable to accusations of bias because of its close ties to the administration.

The firm also stands accused of playing a role in the current desperation of the music industry. A convoluted and shadowy system by which record companies pay radio promoters who hold contracts with Clear Channel stations to get their music on air is nothing less than corporate payola, critics charge.

The system, they say, costs the industry more than half a billion dollars a year and has contributed to bland and repetitive music on radio, which has in turn contributed to the precipitous drop in sales of record music.

Clear Channel dismisses such claims and, with some justification, says it is widely feared and vilified simply because it is so vast. Charges of political bias are notoriously difficult to prove, but the controversy has been interpreted by many as further evidence that the Bush administration views government and business as one.

And the outcry ought to grow steadily louder, as it now emerges that next-to-nothing-at-all within this new lease of life for universal colonial-imperialist warmongering aggression has the slightest scrap of genuineness in it.

The entire operation is total manufactured propaganda nastiness, from start to finish.

Even the "heroic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch", the American woman soldier captured by the Iraqis, turns out to have been a complete advertising stunt, dangerously manipulating the wounded servicewoman and contemptuously alienating her Iraqi doctors who were consciously protecting her and saving her life, -  and all for the sake of some more Nazi-strutting, flag-waving, "master-race" nationalistic glory for the US monopoly-imperialist state power.

The Times of London pieced together the following revelations:

THE rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, which inspired America during one of the most difficult periods of the war, was not the heroic Hollywood story told by the US military, but a staged operation that terrified patients and victimised the doctors who had struggled to save her life, according to-Iraqi witnesses.

Doctors at al-Nasiriyah general hospital said that the airborne assault had met no resistance and was carried out a day after all the Iraqi forces and Baath leadership had fled the city.

Four doctors and two patients, one of whom was paralysed and on an intravenous drip, were bound and handcuffed as American soldiers rampaged through the wards, searching for departed members of the Saddam regime.

An ambulance driver who tried to carry Private Lynch to the American forces close to the city was shot at by US troop's.

Far from winning hearts and minds, the US operation has angered and hurt doctors who risked their lives treating both Private Lynch and Iraqi victims of the war. "What the Americans say is like the story of Sinbad the tailor it's a myth," said Harith alHoussona, who saved Private Lynch's life after she was brought to the hospital by Iraqi military intelligence.

"They said that there was a very strong defence of this hospital. But there was no one here apart from doctors and patients, and there was nobody to fire at them."

Dr Harith was on duty when Private Lynch was brought to al-Nasiriyah general by Iraqi soldiers a few days after her capture on March 23. She was a member of a 15-member US Army maintenance company convoy that was ambushed after taking a wrong turn near the city.

At the time, she was suffering from a head injury, a broken leg and arm, a bullet wound to her leg, a pulmonary oedema and her breathing was failing. In a hospital inundated with war casualties with few drugs; her condition was stabilised and she regained consciousness.

"She was very frightened when she woke up," Dr Harith, 24, a junior resident at the hospital, said. "She kept saying: 'Please don't hurt me, don't touch me.' I told her that she was safe, she was in a hospital and that I was a doctor, and I never hurt a patient."

Private Lynch's military guards would allow no other doctor to tend to her and Dr Harith formed a friendship with her. She talked to him about her family, including her arguments about money with her father, and about her boyfriend, a Hispanic soldier named Ruben.

Dr Harith went outside the hospital during the bombing to get supplies of Private Lynch's favourite drink, orange juice, and struggled to persuade her to eat.

"I told her she needed to eat to recover, and I brought her crackers, but her stomach was upset. She said as a joke: 'I want to be slim.'

"I see [many] patients, but she was special. She's a very simple person, a soldier, not well-educated. But she was very, very nice, with a lovely face and blonde hair."

The Iraqi intelligence officers told the hospital that Private Lynch would soon be transferred to Baghdad, a prospect that terrified her.

After her condition stabilised, they ordered Dr Harith to transfer Jessica to another hospital.

	Instead he told. the ambulance driver to deliver her to one of the American outposts 	that had already been established on the outskirts of the city. 

"But when he reached their checkpoint, the Americans fired at him," he said.

On April 1 the local Ba'athists fled al-Nasiriyah for Baghdad and arrived at the hospital looking for their prize captive. Dr Harith moved her to another part of the hospital, and other doctors told the soldiers that he was away.

"They said that they 'thought Jessica had died, and they didn't know where she was," he said.

The American "rescue" operation came on the night of April 2. The hospital was bombarded and soldiers arrived in helicopters and, according to the hospital doctors, in tanks that pulled up outside the hospital.

Most of the doctors fled to the shelter of the radiology department on the first floor.

"We heard them firing and shouting: 'Go! Go! Go! Go!"' Dr Harith said. One group of soldiers dug up the graves of dead US soldiers outside the hospital, while another interrogated doctors about Ali Hassan al-Majid, the senior Baath party figure known as Chemical Ali, who had never been seen there. A third group looked for Private Lynch.

US soldiers videotaped the rescue, but among the many scenes not shown to the press at US Central Command in Doha was one of four doctors who were handcuffed and interrogated, along with two civilian patients, one of whom was immobile and connected to a drip. 

"They were doctors, with stethoscopes round their necks," Dr Harith said.

"Even in war, a doctor should not be treated like that." 

Unluckiest of all was Abdul Razaq, one of the hospital administrators, who took shelter from the bombardment in Private Lynch's room, believing that he would be safe.

He was seized and taken with the US soldiers on their helicopter to their base, where he was held for three days in an open-air prison camp.

"When he left his skin was the colour of yours," another doctor, Mahmud, said. "When he came back, he was black."

Bizarrely, the rescuers cut open a special bed, designed for patients with bed sores, which had been provided for Private Lynch's use.

"They took samples of sand out of it," Dr Harith said. "It was the only bed like it that we have, the only one in the governorate."

Today, the hospital struggles on without adequate supplies of drugs and without running water or mains electricity.

"There are two faces to Americans," Dr Harith said. "One is freedom and democracy, and giving kids sweets. The other is killing and hating my people. So I am very confused. I feel sad because I will never see Jessica again, and I feel happy because she is happy and has gone back to her life. If I could speak to her I would say: 'Congratulations!"'

And any as-yet reluctant anti-imperialists who still think that none of this makes much difference since, as well as the uselessness of "democracy", nevertheless "communism has failed anyway", need to think again on that score as well. China's admissions of ludicrous bureaucratic failure over dealing with SARS are a GOOD sign that sensible polemics about world developments might at last be returning to the workers state. Compare this rapid correction with the months of covering-up, bad decisions, poor science, and corruption that marked British capitalism's handling of its foot-and-mouth crisis 18 months ago. Even more encouraging, the volume of opinion, thinking that the Soviet Union was better off under communism than under capitalism, is rising again even in the bourgeois press:

"In Soviet times I felt more freedom," he says. "The only aim of our company today is profit. It is the cruellest capitalism."

Under the Soviets there were many opportunities for work and we did not feel oppressed. Today there are staff cuts at the plant. Even now we have democracy, workers dare not say a word against their employers."

Norilsk, a Soviet penal colony turned multibillion dollar metal mine, is just miles from the Arctic Circle. Last winter it was minus 62C. It can be 23C in summer, but this only lasts a fortnight. Every day, according to local authorities, it blurts 5,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxides into the sky. The soot turns the snow black, the copper and sulphur provide the colour. In Norilsk, the air tastes sour from the sulphur fumes, and life expectancy for factory workers is 10 years below the Russian average. This gives Tuitin as little as five years to live.

Tuitin, like Norilsk, was born of survivors. The son of two gulag prisoners, his father was held by the Nazis as a prisoner of war, and sent here by Stalin as a "traitor". His mother's father was classified as bourgeoisie, and found guilty by association. They married on release. Tuitin has spent his whole life here - through the Soviet stultification of Brezhnev, and the giddy destabilisation of Perestroika- but today is the nadir. And the nearest thing to hope is the chance to vote in a new mayor this Sunday who promises to clean up the town.

Tuitin endures daily work in the electrolysis plant. Here, toxic fumes blind the senses, forcing him and his colleagues to wear respirators. Lists of dead workers adorn the walls of the plant's lobby, usually men "only 50 or 52 years old", Tuitin says. Many of his colleagues hide their illnesses to avoid losing shifts. "If I lose my job, then I won't find another place to work in this town. What will my family eat? We go to work despite knowing conditions are bad. Forced work like this is normally called slavery.'

The Norilsk Mining Company, owners of Tuitin's plant, produce one seventh of all the factory pollution in Russia- Each year they churn out over two million tonnes in waste gas, and 85 million cubic metres of dirty water, according to the few figures provided by the Russian government. Its impact, ecologists say, is felt in Norway and Canada, and is killing off the forest tundra for hundreds of miles. Locals say the snow is yellow for 30 miles around the town.

Since November 2001, Norilsk has been shut to foreigners, one of 90 "closed towns" in Russia; The authorities say they want to keep out Azerbaijani traders, flocking to the "economic zone" to sell goods to the comparatively well-paid miners, and prevent "spreading crime". 

Yet the measure has other obvious advantages, protecting the town from outside scrutiny. It took me a month to get the correct pass into the town from the local branch of the Russian security services, the FSB, and three attempts to get on a plane that could land in the arctic weather. On landing, the police boarded the plane to check my documents.

I arrived in a town in the grip of as much of an electoral frenzy as is possible in horizontal blizzards, minus 23C, and a quasi-police state. Sunday's choice is between the company man - a clean-cut businessman, Sergei Shmakov, keen on a prosperous industry - and the union's man - a wholesome rep called Valeri Melnikov, keen on pay rises, ecological improvements, and £20 extra compensation for the ills of the smog for everyone, each month.

The pair are unimaginative in their dismissal of each other. Shmakov is the "company stooge'; while Melnikov is "in the pay of Norilsk Nickel's competition", who strive to lessen the plant's profitability by adding to its daily costs. As the race heats up, the union's top bods have come up from Moscow to manage the campaign. The stakes are high. In Russia, big business runs much of the country, so few even raised an quizzical eyebrow when, last year, the co-chairman of Norilsk Nickel, Alexander Khloponin, was elected governor of the local Krasnoyarsk region. Last year, he declared his income to be £1m a month, but reportedly earned £30m in share dividends alone. A future Mayor Melnikov would be a thorn in a plump, very well-tailored side.

While Shmakov has plastered the town in billboard posters of himself, Melnikov's profile was instead raised when he and 54 other union workers went on a two-week hunger strike in January over conditions. As the rest of Russia puzzled over why Arctic miners living amid thick smog would choose to make their lives any more miserable by starving themselves, Melnikov and his colleagues locked themselves in their campaign office, and kept to the mineral water.

There were no lunch breaks, and Melnikov is now a scrawny shadow of the plump former sailor pictured on his campaign leaflets. "We got the attention of the country, showing them that life in Norilsk was far from perfect," he says. "But at the same time Moscow's TV screens show our bosses getting awards for responsible social behaviour." 

Local women still come to his office to shake his hand and thank him for his calorific and personal sacrifice. But most locals see Sunday's elections as still another battle between "company men". Gloom is the order of the day, and the toll on the workers is rising. Union reps told me that four workers had died in the past fortnight, two that weekend. They were aged 42, 49,52 and 55. The cause of death was unknown.

A Norilsk Nickel spokeswoman would not confirm the deaths, but said that if they died at home, it was not company business. She also declined to comment on the ecological situation, saying they were too busy: She thought nothing of giving me a report that said only 4% of adults in the town were healthy. Irina Pogrebenko, an ecologist with links to the company, said that many workers were born in other areas of Russia and not used to the Arctic climate, and that alcoholism was rife and exercise rare.

The company's pension policy speaks volumes. The hardest working 12% can retire at 45. AS one worker said: "You pay all your life towards a pension you don't live to collect".

And with the global "free world" economy heading for the most devastating, catastrophic slump in all history, relentlessly accompanied by ever increasing warmongering as usual, - the circumstances forcing reassessment of Bolshevik Revolution grow more powerful every day.

Build Leninism. EPSR

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

A strong campaign in Britain, demanding decolonisation, is the missing piece in the peace process. There is already a majority for withdrawal, including many who privately acknowledge the injustice of partition and of Britain's treatment of the nationalist people

Loyalist/unionist paramilitary murals venerate misguided heroes who saw their sectarian killing sprees justified in the light of colonial and imperialist battles of yesteryear. Nineteenth and 20th Century heavy industries, which once provided employment for the miscalled 'aristocrats of (Protestant) labour', crumble all around.

The slogans on the walls represent a time warp. This struggle is about nationality they scream - only the authors have not the faintest notion what nationality is or to which one they belong.

Gusty Spence, Billy Hutchinson - and David Ervine have travelled not enough politically, as yet, to be able to offer a solution to Protestant workers for the problems they now face or those impending,

Perhaps there could be more enlightenment to come. They now publicly eschew paramilitarism an wish to take the political road. Through the small political party which they have fostered, the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), they are looking for a left-wing alternative. They have supported the Good Friday Agreement.

None of this has prevented the UVF, their paramilitary associates, from continuing to kill Catholics and sometimes engaging in the ongoing pogroms against them.

But it is understood that weaning unionist people like this away from a sectarian mindset is no easy task. According to this book, Ervine has experienced some hairy moments with them when they doubted even his tentative steps in a seemingly novel direction,

Therein lies a conundrum for Ervine and his supporters. What use is a political leader who runs too far ahead of his pack? You don't get many votes that way.

This might be one reason for the political confusion at the heart of the PUP. For its venture into politics to succeed, it could be vitally important for it to make gains in a forthcoming Stormont assembly election, should one ever take place.

What it is attempting to sell is something not really credible - a left-wing unionism. This lands it with another problem. A great many unionist voters do not come from the deprived back streets. The self styled upper-and-middle-class Protestants consider themselves to have been well enough served by the UUP and the DUP in the past. Whatever the economic downturns looming, they expect that to continue.

Gusty Spence made known his contempt for these kind of self-serving unionists who keep well out of the picture after they have stirred up the sectarian hatreds, allowing people like him to spend the years in jail. And yet fundamentally he remains politically aligned with them.

Ervine also detects no massive contradiction at the heart of the species of labourism that the PUP is striving to propagate,
- an attempt to breathe life into the corpse of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP). 

The NILP won four seats in the old-style Stormont 'parliament' with the aid of considerable Catholic support. The party then split over the 'border question', moved into the unionist camp and subsequently went down the plughole, where it has remained.

British politicians are at their most smug, and least challenged, when condemning IRA violence and calling for republicans to follow the democratic path. Yet Northern Ireland as a political entity was founded by violence and the rejection of democracy.

In 1912-1914 the Ulster Unionists formed an illegal paramilitary force to defy the will of the Westminster parliament, and the Conservative Party urged them to do it, supported them and funded them - with impunity and with success.

In 1918 the Irish people as a whole voted overwhelmingly for independence, yet Britain's reply was to send in the notorious Black and Tans, official British terrorists who broke every rule in the book including the one about killing innocent civilians. In 1921 Irish 'agreement' to the partition of Ireland (after the event) was obtained by British prime minister Lloyd George's threat of "immediate and terrible war".

Since then (or until 1998 at least), Northern Ireland has never been ruled democratically and the killing of innocent people by the unionist and British authorities has continued. When, in 1968, people marched to demand 'one man one vote', they were attacked by the police; when, in 1972, they protested at imprisonment without trial, they were fired upon by paratroopers on Bloody Sunday.

In 1974 the Sunningdale Agreement and its power-sharing executive were brought down because the Wilson government caved in to unionist violence, connived at by the British army. So the IRA can justly say, "we leamt it all from you".

We should turn our attention to the crimes committed by our own government - that is where our responsibility lies. The problem is the injustice of partition, not the various responses to this injustice by its victims.

The Missing Piece in the Peace Process is a plea to the people of Britain to take responsibility for what our government is doing and has done. British governments created this Frankenstein monster called Northern Ireland. The sectarian hatred is British-made. The tendency to political violence is British-made. The problem is British-made, and we must make Britain solve it.

It is a curious fact that, whilst many Irish people feel guilty about the IRA's actions, with a consequent need to disown them, any equivalent feelings on the British side are largely absent.

Whilst there are many who decline to support British withdrawal because of their disdain for the IRA, there are few who decline to support the Union because of their disdain for the actions of the loyalist paramilitaries or British forces, even though these have included torture, indiscriminate killings, and collaboration between those two forces, the legal with the illegal.

This is because we accept the view that everything is the fault of the Irish, that Britain is a referee or peacekeeping force between irrational warring tribes. This is partly due to misinformation from politicians and the media, but it is also part of a long-standing prejudice about Ireland in the British mind, which affects even those on the left who are otherwise anti-colonialist.

There is very little campaigning in Britain for withdrawal. Surely every killing should spur us on to greater efforts to solve the problem, not sicken us into inaction and hand-wringing.

DECOLONISATION DEMAND

A strong campaign in Britain, demanding decolonisation, is the missing piece in the peace process. The possibility of building such a campaign is better now than it has been for a long time, and we must seize the time. There is already a majority for withdrawal, including many who privately acknowledge the injustice of partition and of Britain's treatment of the nationalist people.

There is also an underlying awareness that Britain has treated the Irish people very badly down the centuries.

I am urging British people to campaign for decolonisation, not just as an act of solidarity but because it is in our interests. The inclusion of this colonial remnant within the British state poisons our parliamentary democracy, poisons our system of justice, undermines our freedom of speech and threatens the civil rights of every British citizen. It impedes the forward march of democracy in Britain as well as Ireland.

Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement has lurched from one crisis to the next. The agreement created a new political battleground favourable to the campaign for a united Ireland, but its weakness (necessary to make it possible at all) is that it incorporates the unionist veto.

This weakness is made worse by the vacillating attitude of the government, which frequently panders to unionist intransigence. Yet the agreement was only possible because the government told the unionists they could not have what they wanted, and progress on implementing it will only be possible on that, basis.

Even if the Agreement fails, it is a turning point. If it brings a lasting peace, that will not only be infinitely better in obvious ways, but also because it will create more favourable conditions for truth to emerge, for the injustice of partition itself to be made the issue, and for British people to discuss these matters with Irish people and with each other.

If successful, it will create the conditions for the withering away of the sectarianism that is the basis of both unionism and of Northern Ireland itself. It is not a permanent solution, but a transition stage.

Does the Good Friday Agreement make a campaign for decolonisation unnecessary? That would be a dangerously complacent view. As long as Northern Ireland remains in the UK, it will pose a threat to the peace and stability of this state, to our democracy and our civil rights. It will be a hotbed of reaction and a means by which a crisis can be manufactured at any time. The danger of an alliance between unionism and right-wing forces in the British establishment is ever present. The unionist population remains armed with legally-held weapons. Many complex problems lie ahead.

The 800-year old 'Irish problem' is the old Vesuvius of British politics, erupting sporadically over the centuries. Our generation can solve it once and for all, and start to build a new, peaceful relationship with the people of our neighbouring island, to our mutual benefit.