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No 1658 04th July 2025

Imperialism's slide into ever more depraved fascist war horror, vicious racist migrant scapegoating and domestic police repression puts even more pressure on the fake-"left" to say something about the great world Catastrophe. But still they avoid the revolutionary significance of the colossal chaos and inhuman barbarity being imposed by a capitalist system which is out of time, deserving only total overthrow and replacement by worker controlled communism. Instead the same old useless "peace march" and protest reformism is pursued after 20 months of Zionist/imperialist extermination horror leaving popular dismay without direction or guidance. Workers need to see the significance of huge defeats hammering the imperialists, from still standing Gazan militants' resistance and reluctant but damaging Iranian defiance, to the steady setback of nazi-NATO provoked war in Ukraine all reflected in splits in the stinking hypocrisy of the Labourites, and in Trump's MAGA movement. Most of all they need Leninist scientific leadership

The mullahs’ claim of “victory” against the American bombing attacks and against the “12 day” Zionist-imperialist war might be stretching a point but Donald Trump’s B2 “bunker busting” raid on Iran still looks more like disastrous failure for the US Empire than glorious success.

“Triumphantly” destructive or not, the high-tech fascist bombardment by the US solves none of imperialism’s problems, not even in narrowest military terms, with Trump forced to threaten a repeat raid, despite the “mission accomplished” boast about “obliterating” Tehran’s nuclear programme.

And it certainly is not the success on the world scale needed for re-imposing US Empire dominance everywhere, to ride out the great Catastrophe of capitalist crisis.

However much it smashes down on the rest of the humanity, the monopoly ruling class can never return to its days of easy empire supremacy because the capitalist system is out of time and capable only of permanent destruction and brutal war chaos.

Trump's brittle and aggressive White House denunciations of the bourgeois press as “unpatriotic” for reporting a Defence Intelligence Agency assessment that the bombing raid had not guaranteed the arrogantly demanded end to Iran’s nuclear programme (why should it not have one?) – and the bullying of intelligence head Tulsi Gabbard to have the CIA report the opposite days later – only underlined the ruling class jumpiness.

The raid does rescue imperialism’s rabid Zionist stoogery occupying Palestine, but thereby reinforces the point; the sudden US intervention was needed not because the Netanyahu reactionaries successfully stampeded the Trump-US empire into joining their ever widening war mongering but because they needed an exit to pull back from the ill-judged 12-day war on Tehran.

It had left the Zionist monsters reeling from an unexpectedly effective unprecedented missile response from the Iranian “enemy”.

Despite initial heavy bomb and assassination damage done to the somewhat offguard Ayatollahs (a story in itself about the need for a Marxist perspective on the deadly, never-to-be-trusted war nature of imperialism), the impact of drone after drone and missile after missile eventually launched in return has hammered the morale of the “master-race” Jewish occupiers in city after city, as all but the heavily biased and censored mainstream Western media has reported (which in usual psyops-control style has played down the impact and made light of the casualties).

Even if the damage were halfway as severe as Tehran has claimed – and blanket media shutdowns in Zionland and bans on airline exit visas for big sections of a panicked Jewish population wanting to leave, would suggest it was significant – the Jewish colonisers are looking increasingly overstretched and vulnerable.

Never again will they have the invincible smiters reputation that has always helped keep the region in thrall.

For the first time ever they have been hit hard within the land “given” (!!) to them in the 1947 imperialist-serving United Nations partition plan, significantly so in cities like Haifa and Tel Aviv with telling damage on power facilities and refineries, and in many others too as well as at military bases, as the vaunted multi-layer Iron Dome and other defence systems were breached.

Despite the fanatical Zionist fascist belligerence of the 75 years since the “Nakba” expulsion of the land’s Arab people (resident over a minimum 1500-2000 years, far longer than most countries have existed), always genocidal and especially now in the latest 20 months of outright extermination onslaught on Gaza and the West Bank of such deliberately inhuman depravity that words fail, and despite the cleverness of their ruthless trickery and dirty dealing intelligence penetration and terror-subversion of the regional opposition, trampling wilfully across treaties, truces and ceasefires in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, they are suddenly revealed once more as defeatable (as was shown by Hezbollah’s 2006 victory pushing the IDF from Lebanon), but this time within “Israel” itself.

Even in Gaza the Zionist military is still failing to suppress the will and fighting spirit of the Palestinians and their regional supporters, at least a year (more in fact) after Tel Aviv had declared it would all be over.

The militants in Gaza continue to recruit and hit back from the middle of the most horrifying man-made apocalypse of civilian slaughter modern times. And that is only what is not hidden by the Zionist and Western lies:

Seven Israeli soldiers have been killed in a Hamas attack in the southern Gaza Strip, the Israeli military said on Wednesday, one of the deadliest incidents for the force in months. Meanwhile, Israeli attacks have killed 74 people in the Palestinian territory over the past 24 hours, according to local health authorities.

The seven Israeli soldiers, in the 605th combat engineering battalion, were killed on Tuesday after militants planted a bomb on their vehicle while they were driving in Khan Younis, causing it to catch fire. Hamas later claimed responsibility for the attack.

“Rescue forces and helicopters were dispatched to the scene and made attempts to extract the soldiers but were unsuccessful,” said Brig Gen Effie Defrin, an Israeli army spokesperson, on Wednesday. He added that the 605th battalion was finding and demolishing tunnels, as well as killing militants, in Khan Younis.

Their deaths brought the total number of Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza since 7 October 2023 to 879.

More than 56,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Gaza by Israel, according to the health ministry, since the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel[...].

At least 40 Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza were shot by Israeli forces on Tuesday, local medics and officials said.

The incident comes as Israel ends its war with Iran, agreeing to a US-brokered ceasefire on Tuesday.

Fighting started anew in Gaza in March, when Israel restarted its war after refusing to move to a second phase of a ceasefire, which could have led to a more permanent truce. Since then, negotiations for a second ceasefire have borne little progress, with Hamas insisting on a total end to the war in Gaza – a demand Israel has rejected.

Since March, humanitarian conditions in the beleaguered strip have deteriorated. Famine-like conditions reign after Israel imposed a nearly two-month siege on any humanitarian aid into the country. Unicef warned last week that 60% of water production facilities in Gaza were not functioning and that there was a 50% increase in acute child malnutrition from April to May.

More than 500 people have been shot dead by Israeli forces as they travelled to get food from a new US- and Israel-backed private organisation called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Chaos has reigned as hungry Palestinians have had to walk miles and navigate the complicated rules that the GHF and Israel have imposed to access food, with almost daily scenes of Israeli soldiers shooting dozens of people at the sites.

The GHF has been condemned as potentially being complicit in war crimes, for what aid groups have alleged are its violations of the principles of neutrality and independence, pillars of humanitarian work.

All of which obviously does nothing to reverse the US Empire’s slipping regional control of the strategically vital Middle East, now seething with even more anti-imperialist hatred than 20 years of war have already generated from the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions onwards (and brewing for years before).

On the widest scale of all, the unprovoked B2 bombing attack comes at enormous worldwide political cost as ever greater resentment and hostility is stirred up among billions across the globe by failing imperialism’s barbaric and deepening, greed-blinded, crisis rampaging and repression, including in the heart of the US and its allies themselves as the contradictions of bourgeois class domination ratchet up to unbearable levels.

The debilitating “freedom and democracy” illusions which have bamboozled and pacified the world class struggle for over a century and especially in the post-WW2 years of American imperialist domination (at least in its privileged Western “metropolitan” nations) are now even more shot to pieces, if that were possible after the fascist terrorising and inhuman civilian, medical and child butchery and maiming by the Zionist “master-race” occupation.

With the masking veil of the “United Nations”, international “justice”, Geneva conventions and the elaborate “anti-totalitarian democracy” pretences which fool the middle class all now ripped away, the warcrime culpability of the entire Western imperialist “community”, its ruling class billionaires, politicians, compliant media and class-collaborating trade union labour-aristocracy alike, is glaring.

All are caught up to their elbows in blood, gore and guilt, whatever the occasional cynical, nakedly hypocritical and quickly smothered murmurs of “protest” they put forth and whatever their diversionary, lying fingering of “terrorism” as the alleged cause (when that is nothing but the angry inchoate response of the world’s masses to the ever more intolerable tyranny and exploitation of imperialism itself, lashing out despairingly in the only way it can find).

But if the bourgeoisie is to stay on top, the necessary alternative to its valuable “freedom and democracy” scam, once it disintegrates, can only be the direct brute assertion of the bourgeois dictatorship which is what has always underlain the great parliament and voting racket, even in the best of “boom times” and which is its real nature.

That is not going well either.

Washington’s latest war-terror blast is not doing any more to cow the rest of the world than the previous two decades of “shock and awe” devastation imposed on Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria or Yemen (etc), all of which have rebounded as humiliating defeats on the Empire as Western troops and “special forces” deathsquads have had to withdraw from their endless massacres, torture and civilian butchery, while leaving behind a stinking mess of economic and social collapse, balkanised warlordism or feudal backwardness rather than delivering promised transformation into “democratic prosperity”.

The additional stirred-up NATO-Kiev-proxy stooge onslaught on demonised Russia (with a hidden anti-Europe inter-imperialist economic war agenda – see past EPSRs) has also fallen flat on its ugly Ukrainian-Azov-Nazi face.

It is a humiliating defeat, for all the efforts of the sinister MI6 British secret-police and other equally vicious Western European intelligence agencies to keep the eleven years of diversionary war distraction going from its opening with the violent 2014 Maidan coup.

Training, intelligence, weapons and operational help for endless murderous provocations, sabotage and vicious stunts against Russian-speaking Ukrainian and Russia’s own military and deliberately targeted civilian areas (city residences, villages, beaches, trains), have been combined with the most astonishing inverted one-sided Goebbels lie campaign and blanket censorship yet seen in all history about alleged bogeyman “Russian genocide” (screamed out by the Kiev Bandera-worshipping stooges after every raid, but which a quick look at the horrifying actual genocide in Gaza – or Yemen, or Sudan, – easily demonstrates is ludicrous hyperbole in the few cases where it is not flat-out fabrication).

Even some bourgeois press accounts occasionally have to concede the festering nazi-nastiness, as the New York Times did two years back and Le Monde does now:

Ukrainian soldiers continue to publicly display neo-Nazi symbols – including swastikas, SS tattoos, and Nazi salutes – according to an investigation by French outlet Le Monde.

In its report, published on Wednesday, Le Monde identified nearly 350 Ukrainian troops posting neo-Nazi imagery online, including Nazi salutes, swastika tattoos, Black Sun emblems, and Totenkopf insignias. According to the research, at least 200 of those identified serve in Kiev’s 3rd Assault Brigade.

Russia has repeatedly accused Kiev of fostering neo-Nazi ideology and glorifying WW2-era Hitler collaborators and has demanded the “denazification” of Ukraine as part of a negotiated peace agreement.

Formed in 2023, the 3rd Assault Brigade is a direct successor of the Azov Regiment – originally created in 2014 by far-right figure, Andrei Biletsky. Azov has been accused by multiple human rights groups, as well as the UN, of war crimes and torture and has been widely criticized for its use of symbols tied to the Waffen-SS.

According to Le Monde, the 3rd Assault Brigade has received military training from several NATO countries, including France, Spain, Germany, the UK and Canada, who have also poured in billions in military support to Ukraine. The paper noted that some soldiers sent to France in 2023 bore visible SS tattoos. When questioned, the French Ministry of the Armed Forces stated that it was the responsibility of Ukraine to vet the personnel.

The report also stated that a number of foreign volunteers who have joined Ukraine’s forces, including French nationals, have affiliations with far-right groups. Some were shown posting Nazi tributes and displaying related tattoos online.

Le Monde further stated that the 3rd Assault Brigade, now expanded into a full corps under Biletsky’s command, has been playing an increasingly central role in Ukraine’s military. The outlet reported that its units continue to use Nazi-associated emblems and feature commanders with visible far-right markings.

Moscow has long condemned Kiev’s elevation of Nazi collaborators to national hero status and has accused Western governments of deliberately ignoring continued neo-Nazi activity in Ukrainian ranks.

To which it should necessarily be added that there can be no “denazifying” of imperialism, a Putinite notion founded in his training by Stalinist post-WW2 revisionist philosophical nonsense declaring that there are “good” (non-aggressive) imperialists and bad ones, completely disarming workers from understanding that all imperialism has a monstrous history over centuries of tyranny and barbarity, often far exceeding those labelled “fascist” in the scale of atrocities and inhumanity they impose, including wiping out dozens of entire peoples across the continents.

Fascism is just the raw face of capitalism in crisis when it is forced to tear up its ”reasonable” demeanour and impose violent repression to whatever extent is needed as the EPSR has said many times:

Fascism merely makes an open virtue of its anti-communist colonial tyranny which believes in the right of one nation to dominate another, and believes in a whole hierarchy of class superiority. Imperialism believes in exactly the same reactionary nonsense, but is more discrete about it. All the supposed extra tyrannies of fascism’s colonial and class-war domination, – concentration camps, blitzkrieg, apartheid, hostage-taking, brainwashing, mass hidden medical and warfare experiments, lying propaganda, etc, – were all perfected by the Western imperialist system in the genocidal subjugation of the Americas, Africa, and Asia long before the newer imperialist powers had even got going in the 20th century. EPSR No887 21-01-97)

As such the only “denazification” possible is that of de-capitalising the world, i.e. ending the profit-system by revolution to install workers states to build socialism which Putin's oligarch pandering bonapartism is never going to do.

Further adding a stinking unprovoked two-week war against Iran (“illegal” for what that is worth according to the fraudulent bourgeois “rules-based freedom” system), waged on the West’s behalf by the monstrous Zionland settlers and colonists (in conjunction with US support), to the half dozen wars already, cannot rescue the system either, whatever further horrors the Jewish fanatics’ might impose with their non-stop Gaza butchery and psychotic torturing hatred, so glaringly and publicly inhumane that even blanket world psyops propaganda and media control cannot cover it up.

But the now non-stop warring of imperialism does further underline the desperation of the world ruling class, willing to go to any lengths of terrifying and hair-raising destructiveness and intimidation in order to stay on top of its ever more out-of-time system, just as it did in the previous crises of World War One and World War Two and now hurtling all the way towards planet-threatening nuclear world war once more (but on a far greater scale and depth than ever).

Its terrifying plunge is the only answer the monopoly capitalist system has to its intractable cataclysmic breakdown riven with contradictions and bitter trade conflict which has been heading into non-stop antagonisms and war ever since the NATO blitzing of hapless little Yugoslavia in 1999 and the tearing apart of a dozen countries since (and brewing for decades before in fact).

And this war drive is completely unstoppable save by revolution as Lenin repeatedly showed, especially in the wake of the 1912 Basel Declaration in which the entire Second International (socialism) had declared its resistance, only to renegue on it in 1914.

But still every shade of fake-“left” reformism, Trotskyism or revisionism is busily calling for unachievable “No to War” and “disarmament” and dangerously fooling the working class all over again by limiting the real enough dismay of mass opinion on Gaza to endless almost routine “protest sloganising” and “peace struggle” marches up and down.

Piecemeal anarchist “actions” have slightly more spirit but fall way short however self-sacrificingly done, and are mostly flawed by the same bilious anti-communism that saturates the rest.

Nothing save the complete overturning of the parasitical, profiteering, callous, and ever more incompetent ruling class, – meaning revolutionary class war to take over without "compensation" the whole of industry, finance, land and agriculture, – can be an answer for the working class to the desperate Catastrophe facing the whole imploding monopoly capitalist economic order.

Only public ownership for all the big corporations, banks, utilities factories and farms will allow rational development in society’s (and nature’s) interests, directed and planned by scientifically-grasped necessity, i.e. Marxist-Leninist leadership.

That obviously would never be “allowed” or conceded however much “left pressure” is exerted or parliamentary seats are won by new "left" parties.

Just the opposite. Coups and crackdowns are the bourgeois answer (already well underway), in even the rich countries, not least by the stinking bourgeois stooge Labourite treachery, pretending it has a “mandate” from the joke parliamentary fraud.

Even within this completely manipulated racket its "support" is the lowest ever with just a 17% vote (and that from mostly cynical petty bourgeois “not the Tories” contempt) and rapidly falling.

Only the great media pantomime of interviews and "analysis" earnestly discussing parliament as if it means anything, now props up the utterly hollowed out bourgeois "democracy" fraud, whose reality is increasing police state repression, "anti-terrorist" crackdown on all dissent and the most cynical opportunist lying by MPs and government ministers who mean not one word of their unctuous "concern", and pretences about "getting growth in the economy".

They cannot get any growth because the world capitalist system is screwed, not to put too fine a point on it, and the British imperialist component more screwed than most (with all the big companies off to America).

Working class interests must be established through the dictatorship of the proletariat, the only alternative state form there is to bourgeois class diktat.

Grasping this paralysing economic breakdown as the underlying cause of all the unfolding events is the most crucial thing for the working class but it is always underplayed or ignored completely by the “lefts”.

It is understandable only with a Marxist material dialectical perspective, the deepest grasp of revolutionary movement and development, constantly advanced by a leadership party of non-stop polemical theoretical development.

Crisis drives the tearing up of the world “rule of law” system (or rather its exposure (because no longer affordable) as the giant fraudulent ruling class racket it has always been); it drives the ever deepening austerity for the world’s great downtrodden mass majority, the 99%; the enormous widening of world inequality to insane levels of obscene posturing and pointless consumption (buying up the whole of historic Venice for a sick and grossly flaunted tasteless wedding eg) versus utter fascist-imposed starvation and butchery in Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Latin America, Africa etc, elsewhere in the Third World and soon everywhere else too); the evil and viciously barbaric concentration camp incarcerations, torture, maiming and massacre horrors throughout a capitalist world claiming to be “democratic and free” (Guantánamo, fascist Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador prisons, fascist Paul Kagame's Rwanda stooge camps for deportees, and torture camps throughout Zionist occupied Palestine); it drives the vile escalation of murderously racist and class-based scapegoating and societal division; the poisoning of nature choked with shit and pollution, plastics and forever chemicals, and ripped apart in land, air and sea for wasteful plundering; and the terrifying (and deliberately terrorising) threat of destruction on a planetary scale through species extinction, global warming and above all of nuclear, chemical and biological holocaust by an increasingly deranged bourgeoisie driven to a debauched frenzy by its own rapidly oncoming historical class extinction.

The capitalist system is poleaxed by the contradictions of its profit-making private ownership system and the relentless accumulation of “surplus” capital it leads to, more and more unable to find an outlet for profitable investment and choking the whole “free market” with “overproduction” (while millions starve), the "want in the midst of plenty" that Marx first analysed in the titanic Capital 150 years ago (see box page).

The capitalist way of doing things, the 800-year-long end point of 20,000 years of ever developing human society, climbing from scattered primitive (communist) hunter-gatherers into class-divided agricultural and then industrial civilisation, with ever more productive and inventive ways of organising things, albeit at devastating human cost (ancient slavery, feudal serf bondage, wage slavery – see Engels Origin of the Family, Private property and the State eg), has itself reached the end of the road.

Its staggering technological achievements are increasingly turned into tools for destruction and repression, stifling or threatening all progress instead of pushing it forwards, the whole ever more concentrated monopoly structure now a “fetter” on future human development (Communist Manifesto).

And ever more developed mass humanity, trained by capitalism for its own exploitation purposes, is increasingly making clear it can, and will, no longer tolerate its subjugation to hire-and-fire antagonistic alienation.

The world is exploding in revolt from “jihadist” eruptions across Africa’s Sahel and the Middle East to mass street actions like the Arab Spring, riot and turmoil against the corrupt Kenya regime, “gangs” rebellion in brutally exploited Haïtian slums; the Russian-speaking armed resistance in eastern Ukraine to the Banderite nazi-nationalist reaction; similar anti-EU sentiment in the former socialist states of eastern Europe (albeit populist nonsense itself); anti-Yankee nationalism in Latin America; Islamic or communist revolts in the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka; farmers strikes and Maoist insurgency in India, Maoism in Nepal; separatist upheaval in Kashmir, and a growing disquiet and discontent into the heart of even the richest countries, like the black lives upheavals in the US, strike actions, individual terrorist outbursts such as Luigi Mangione’s medical insurance CEO killing in New York, or the attack on two Zionist US embassy officials, and now increasingly organised resistance to the migrant scapegoating being imposed by Trump’s nazi-gestapo-like Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) service.

And of course the remnants of the post-war anti-colonialist anti-imperialist and communist wave continue to hold out, such as Zimbabwe, revisionist-nostalgic Belarus, Laos, anti-Yankee Nicaragua and Venezuela and still extant workers states like Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and colossal China, despite also being hampered with complacent or deluded notions of “multipolarity”, and revisionist-blind to the crisis, its unsolvability and its war drive (see EPSR Book Vol 21 Unanswered Polemics against Stalinism).

For the moment much of the anarchic turmoil, in multiple forms across the world, remains confused.

It is held back by inadequate or even sometimes reactionary notions filling the vacuum left by revisionism’s long Stalin-started retreat from revolution and its eventual counter-revolutionary Gorbachevite capitulation to “Western democracy”.

Its militancy is increasingly willing to take on imperialism.

But it can also be prey to manipulation and misleadership, not least by the imperialist intelligence agencies themselves where they can manage it, although this is far less than made out by fake-“left” petty bourgeois defeatism, in thrall to the ruling class and seeing the “all powerful” hand of the CIA behind every eruption, with a proliferation of absurd and ever more convoluted conspiracy theories to “prove” it from the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks on the US World Trade Centre and the Pentagon onwards (see eg EPSR 1123 12-02-02).

Genuine conspiracies there are aplenty all the way back through monopoly capitalism’s long hoodwinking domination, like the made-up Gulf of Tonkin “Vietnamese boat attack” used to start the B52 carpet bomb war on North Vietnam; the lying “generals assassination” excuse for Indonesia’s 1965 fascist coup by Suharto; the French/CIA coordinated assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo; the Blairite big lie hysteria about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction just 45 minutes from London” and perhaps currently most resonant, the complicated conspiracy by Britain’s MI6 and the CIA, to whip up paid demonstrators against Iran’s left-nationalist leader Mohammad Mosaddeq to topple him in 1953 and install the reactionary Pahlavi Shah, and his notorious Savak torture and murder secret police regime.

The list could go on and on – and does, not least in the decade plus civil war fomented in Syria to head off the Arab Spring by containing potential support for the huge 2011 Egyptian revolt from Libya’s erratic anti-imperialist Muammar Gaddafi and the just as unreliable anti-Zionist Baathists.

But to write off all of this great seething struggle as either reactionary “headbanging” in itself, or allegedly CIA or Zionist or MI6 (or all three and more) “manipulated” jihadism and terrorism – just “mercenaries for the West” – is complete misrepresentation, reflecting the opportunism and defeatism of the fake-“left” which has abandoned revolutionary philosophy or never grasped it at all.

It sees only “chaos” which has to be put down to “restore stability” (presumably so that they can proceed along a safe step-by-step path of “stable” reformist politics – and doubtless the “stable” career opportunities it brings in “representing” the working class, just like failed and useless reformism has always done).

But what kind of revolutionaries would want to restore capitalist imperialist stability anyway?

The world is breaking down because monopoly capitalism is collapsing – unstoppably and irreversibly – so let it go, opening up the huge debate about the only possible stability there can now be for humanity – proletarian class rule and its steady development of a new rational planned-production society.

Even where such revolt has been made use of by Western skulduggery, as was clearly the case in the Iraq civil war, whipping up sectarian hatreds to try and counter the massive local “terrorist” resistance which emerged in the years following the 2003 invasion; in Libya, and much more, in the decade long attempt to bring down Syria’s anti-Zionist Assad regime after the Arab Spring, it has delivered mixed results for imperialism.

The “left” always cites the infamous Afghanistan operation, where lavishly funded US CIA subversion, mainly working out of reactionary Western next-door stooge Pakistan, was able to train and arm thousands of backward mujahideen feudal tribesmen to fight against the Kabul socialist government of Najibullah which won power in the late 1970s.

It was a plot not just against the local revolution but to entrap the Soviet Union which gave Afghanistan huge self-sacrificing civil and military support (a communist solidarity which itself gives the lie to both Trots and revisionists who write off the USSR as already irredeemably “gone bad” for decades by then).

The wooden “left” and assorted nose-tapping conspiracists forever cite this as an imperialist template applied almost automatically across the board.

But the lazy or opportunist defeatist thinking (if any at all) which passes for theory in the whole fake-“left” spectrum pays no attention to movement and change, concrete circumstance and the crisis driving it; in fact Western imperialism has had far more problems with such schemes than success even before its great global Catastrophe broke open in 2008-9.

Even the ostensibly CIA-recruited Osama bin Laden in the Afghan training camps turned into a major opponent with some increasingly pertinent denunciations of Western imperialist domination and interference in the wake of 9/11 (albeit from a barmy fundamentalist religious moral position).

He became such a problem that vast numbers of the Afghan people were bombed, butchered and terrorised to “get him” and Obama White House finally had to “take him out” with a highly illegal and arrogant “special operation” into Pakistan’s territory (so much for “upholding the sovereignty of peoples”).

Multiple other groups have either “blownback”, as CIA jargon has it, on the West like the fanatical ISIS, seemingly “used” for anti-Assad sabotage initially in 2011 but turning into a major anti-Western problem which almost toppled the US stooge Shia regime in Iraq, and had to be put down with massive US and European-allied city-pulverising bombardment and brutal ground force massacring suppression using vengeance-filled Shia sectarian militias, and the opportunist Kurd separatists in northern Syria.

Many "terrorists" were never clearly under Western “control” in the first place as the Syrian war demonstrated, where Western efforts had constantly to recruit, buy out or even completely set up new groups in an endless alphabet soup proliferation amid expensive failed projects, like the CIA training camp installed across the border in yet another stooge monarchical regime in Jordan.

The new West/Zionist compliant HTS stooge “jihadists” who finally toppled a sanction-and-bomb weakened Assad at the end of last year emphasises the point.

The leader al-Jalani is frequently described as having origins in al-Qaeda or ISIS as if that defined his group.

But much more pertinently he had broken with those groups, taking sides with imperialism, his al-Nusra already obviously backed by the West during the “siege of Allepo” when it got non-stop bourgeois press coverage, full of individual and “family agony” sympathy stories “under Russian and regime bombing”.

That was in stark contrast to much media suppression of the Zionist atrocities in Gaza, unreported, played down and always “balanced” with flat-out big lie denials from the Zionist mouthpieces, reported without a murmur of scepticism at their obvious black-is-white propaganda, by journalists who would be non-stop ”terrier”-worrying any spokesmen for say, Russia, Syria, Zimbabwe, Venezuela etc and any other even halfway anti-Western regime or state.

That is if the few petty bourgeois critical realist reports get through at all and are not censored outright as the ultra-reactionary BBC “state run” propaganda machine has done, blocking its own commission of the horrifying documentary on the systematic torture and assassination targeting of doctors and deliberate demolition of all hospitals in Gaza – an act of wilful genocidal destruction on a par with anything the Nazis ever did.

So crude is this blockage by the BBC, and the pro-imperialist ultra-reactionary fossils embedded within its management, that the bourgeoisie has had to use its “liberal” safety valve in the Channel Four/Guardian wing of its anti-communist media to eventually show the film (in a suitably late 10pm slot when many workers have already had to go to bed) to let out the steam on a pressure cooker of public opinion outrage and indignation over the genocide, its agonising atrocities and the British ruling class backing and participation in it.

In particular articles have even appeared showing the ultra reactionary influence of the Jewish freemasonry within the ruling class, as some minority sections of the Jewish population have become increasingly agitated over government policy and BBC censorship too, the culmination of nearly two years of bias, propaganda and brainwashing:

More than 400 stars and media figures including Miriam Margolyes, Alexei Sayle, Juliet Stevenson and Mike Leigh have signed a letter to BBC management calling for the removal of a board member, Robbie Gibb, over claims of conflict of interest regarding the Middle East.

The signatories also include 111 BBC journalists and Zawe Ashton, Khalid Abdalla, Shola Mos-Shogbamimu and the historian William Dalrymple, who express “concerns over opaque editorial decisions and censorship at the BBC on the reporting of Israel/Palestine”.

Delivered on the eve of Channel 4’s airing of the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, which the BBC commissioned but shelved as it said it “risked creating a perception of partiality”, the letter alleges the decision to drop the film “demonstrates, once again, that the BBC is not reporting ‘without fear or favour’ when it comes to Israel”.

The letter accuses Robbie Gibb of having a conflict of interest on Gaza.

It also accuses the BBC of being “crippled by the fear of being perceived as critical of the Israeli government” and claims the “inconsistent manner in which guidance is applied draws into focus the role of Gibb, on the BBC Board and BBC’s editorial standards committee” as “we are concerned that an individual with close ties to the Jewish Chronicle … has a say in the BBC’s editorial decisions in any capacity, including the decision not to broadcast Gaza: Medics Under Fire”.

Gibb, Theresa May’s former spin doctor and a former head of the BBC’s Westminster political team, led the consortium that bought the Jewish Chronicle in 2020 and, up until August 2024, was a director of Jewish Chronicle Media.

The letter, organised by a group of BBC insiders, says: “For many of us, our efforts have been frustrated by opaque decisions made at senior levels of the BBC without discussion or explanation. Our failures impact audiences.

“As an organisation we have not offered any significant analysis of the UK government’s involvement in the war on Palestinians. We have failed to report on weapons sales or their legal implications. These stories have instead been broken by the BBC’s competitors.”

The statement alleges Gibb has a “conflict of interest” which “highlights a double standard for BBC content makers who have themselves experienced censorship in the name of ‘impartiality’.”

It adds: “In some instances staff have been accused of having an agenda because they have posted news articles critical of the Israeli government on their social media. By comparison, Gibb remains in an influential post with little transparency regarding his decisions despite his ideological leanings being well known. We can no longer ask licence fee payers to overlook Gibbs’s ideological allegiances.”

The letter concludes: “We, the undersigned BBC staff, freelancers and industry figures are extremely concerned that the BBC’s reporting on Israel and Palestine continues to fall short of the standards our audiences expect. We believe the role of Robbie Gibb, both on the board, and as part of the editorial standards committee, is untenable. We call on the BBC to do better for our audiences and recommit to our values of impartiality, honesty and reporting without fear or favour.”

Owing to their fear of repercussions, the 111 BBC journalists signed anonymously.

The BBC has never been anything but a reactionary tool of Western imperialist propaganda of course, and this wish to "return to past standards" is itself just petty bourgeois subjective idealism, fearful of the revolutionary future (as all fake-"leftism" is too) and trying to prop up with a "protest outlet" the delusions in "democracy and freedom" that the crisis is cutting away.

But the fact that even this much protest is forced to speak out, has an impact.

The same is shown by the heavy handed censorship imposed on the minority Jewish wing which challenged the official Jewish establishment:

Five elected representatives to the largest body representing British Jews have been suspended for two years after criticising the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza.

All 36 signatories to an open letter published in April have been found to have breached the Board of Deputies’ code of conduct after a two-month investigation.

The letter said “Israel’s soul is being ripped out” by military action that renewed in March, and that the signatories could no longer “turn a blind eye or remain silent” on the issue.

It caused a furore within the UK’s Jewish community amid growing divisions over the war and distress at the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

Statements from the Board of Deputies issued since the war began after the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 have been broadly supportive of the Israeli government’s actions.

The board released the findings of its investigation on Tuesday evening. It said “many media outlets, individuals and other community stakeholders initially understood [the letter] to be a statement of the board”.

Its code of conduct required deputies not to misrepresent the position of the board and not to bring the institution into disrepute, it added.

The investigative panel unanimously found the 36 signatories to be in breach of the code.

After considering the panel’s findings, the board’s executive body decided to send a “notice of criticism” to 31 of the 36 signatories.

But five deputies have been suspended from the board for two years and, where applicable, removed from elected positions. In three cases, the suspension may be reduced to six months “by way of apology to affected parties”, the board said.

Michael Wegier, its chief executive, said: “We are a democratic organisation that welcomes debate, diversity and free speech. Managing diversity of opinion within our organisation depends on our code of conduct. [...]

The letter, published by the Financial Times on 16 April and signed by about one in eight of the board’s elected representatives, said: “The inclination to avert our eyes is strong, as what is happening is unbearable, but our Jewish values compel us to stand up and to speak out.”

It added: “We know in our hearts we cannot turn a blind eye or remain silent at [the] renewed loss of life and livelihoods, with hopes dwindling for a peaceful reconciliation and the return of the hostages.

“This most extremist of Israeli governments is openly encouraging violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, strangling the Palestinian economy and building more new settlements than ever … Israel’s soul is being ripped out and we, members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, fear for the future of the Israel we love and have such close ties to.”

The signatories said: “We stand against the war … it is our duty, as Jews, to speak out.”

The board launched its investigation after receiving an unspecified number of complaints about the letter.

Well meaning as the protestors might be, they are still virtually all anti-communist and virtually all such Jewish freemasonry dissidents are what might be called "soft" Zionists.

That means, apart from a very tiny minority, none challenge the occupation of Palestine itself, – the so-called “right to exist” of “Israel” (whatever caveats some might advance about “opposing” Netanyahu’s government itself because it "goes too far") and the allied "right to defend itself" (as if thieves in the night would have the right to "defend themselves" against their booty being forcibly confiscated and returned).

An even tinier proportion of Western Jews actively campaign against it, i.e. for the ending of this artificial colonial cuckoo intrusion into the Middle East.

But historical logic and momentum gives no other answer; the forceful imposition of this land-stealing outrage can never stop generating the nationalist resistance until everything that has been stolen and appropriated is returned to its rightful owners, the Palestinian people.

The Zionist can never stop their fears, and ever expanding barbarities to “defend” against them, not because of some inherent "anti-semitism" in the world, but because of the very nature of “Israel” itself, and particularly its origin in the 20th century, the one question that nobody is ever allowed to mention.

And what is that origin? It is the implanting of a huge population of western imperialist settlers into the heart of another people’s land and at their expense, forcing them from their own lands, farms, cities, homes, shops, olive groves and water wells by terror and ethnic cleansing butchery from the very beginning.

That begins all the way back in the post-World War One period and the Balfour Declaration as Britain tried to control the Arab world with its own Ireland Ulster-style plantation of pro-Western Jews in the “Palestine Protectorate” it got as part of the secret 1916 imperialist treaty divvying-up of the collapsed Ottoman Turkish Empire (a big part of the colonial plunder the First World War was fought for).

That was extended with renewed intensity after the Second World War as the degenerate and just-as-brutal overall imperialist system tried to smooth over its guilt for the scapegoating Nazi Holocaust (a phenomenon arising from imperialist barbarity, which supported Hitlerism in the 1930s, and not specifically German anti-semitism) by officially handing over a huge part of the Palestinian lands to the Zionist project in restitution.

And its consequence is a never ending festering contradiction.

That cannot be resolved with some halfway house fudge "two state solution" (which offers far less than halfway anyway) leaving the Palestinians with less that 50% of their own land even under the original 1947 United Nations plan, and just 22% (and that scrappy semi-desert leftovers) after the Zionists had waged war and ethnic cleansing terrorism in a sequence of wars beginning in 1948.

And now even that fragment is denied, and mostly already "cleaned out" by the ongoing West Bank settlers' murderous intimidation, following the logic of the only possible alternative to endless revolt and liberation turmoil, namely the complete wiping out of the people, native American style – the genocidal extermination which is clearly in train in Gaza (and for which the attempted Gaza prison breakout in October 2023 was just an excuse – a specious Zionist/imperialist justification for an escalation of its non-stop brute oppression over the last 70 years which has been genocidal from the start).

Nor do the protestors call out the Jewish freemasonry's penetration of the establishment in all kinds of ways, obvious like the “Labour Friends of Israel” lobby numbering multiple MPs (including many in the Cabinet like Starmer himself, Rachel Reeves and others), or through various hidden influences subverting the establishment with numerous connections and string-pulling, that has now begun to be discussed more in the same “liberal” media.

Even to point to such influence immediately raises the catch-all cry of "anti-semitic" racism, now a blanket response to any and every criticism of the Zionist lobby, however disgusting and inhuman its action and currently used by Netanyahu to deny and defend against the obvious deliberate slaughter around the militarised "aid" system and continuing outright Gaza butchery as partially covered by the bourgeois press (of which a sample):

A Palestinian father who had lost nine of his 10 children in an Israeli airstrike has died from wounds sustained in the same attack, local health officials have said.

Hamdi al-Najjar, 40, a doctor at Nasser hospital, was critically injured when Israeli forces bombed the family house in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis on 23 May, killing nine of his children. He had just returned home after accompanying his wife Alaa, a paediatrician at the Nasser medical complex, to work when the building was struck. He had initially survived alongside his son Adam, 11, who is still in hospital.

Even by the terrible standards of the Gaza conflict, their deaths had shocked the international community.

Footage shared by the director of Gaza’s health ministry and verified by the Guardian showed the burnt, dismembered bodies of Najjar’s children being pulled from the rubble of their house near a petrol station as flames engulfed what remained of the family’s home.

Alaa had received the bodies while she was still at work. Sources at the Nasser hospital who transferred the children’s bodies one by one to the morgue said their mother was not able to identify them, so bad were the burns.

Doctors told the Guardian her husband was suffering from severe injuries – brain damage and fractures caused by shrapnel, along with shrapnel wounds and fractures in the chest. He was placed on a ventilator and fitted with medical tubes.

On Sunday, they said, he passed away from the severe wounds sustained in the attack.

 

Early afternoon was a busy time in the al-Baqa cafe, on the waterfront in Gaza City. Under the wooden slatted roof, seated at plastic chairs and tables, were dozens of Palestinians seeking respite from the relentless 20-month war that has devastated much of the bustling, vibrant town.

On one side was the Mediterranean, blue and calm to the horizon. On the other, battered apartment blocks, wrecked hotels and the close-packed tents of displaced families.

Founded almost 40 years ago, the family-run al-Baqa was for many in Gaza City a reminder of better, more peaceful times.

Then, at about 3pm, the peaceful scene at the al-Baqa cafe was transformed. Witnesses described a huge roaring explosion, flames, a plume of ash-grey smoke rising fast into the air. No one needed to ask what had happened.

In recent days, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has escalated its offensive across all of Gaza but focused much of its firepower on the territory’s north, where Hamas remain relatively entrenched despite multiple military assaults.

Tanks have advanced into neighbourhoods to the east of Gaza City, so-called “evacuation orders” have forced thousands from makeshift shelters and airstrikes have killed dozens.

When the dust and smoke cleared at the al-Baqa cafe, scenes of carnage were revealed.

“Shrapnel flew everywhere, and the place filled with smoke and the smell of cordite. I couldn’t see anything. I ran toward the cafe and found it destroyed. I went inside and saw bodies lying on the ground. All the cafe workers were killed.”

Other witnesses described seeing a dead child, an elderly man with both legs severed and many others with serious injuries.

All said they had been surprised by the extent of the damage, which wrecked the entire cafe, warping concrete columns and scattering debris. A deck of cards and a giant stuffed toy animal could be seen amid the wreckage.

Even hours later, the air “smelled of blood”, one witness said.

Many expressed surprise that the cafe could be targeted at all. A 55-year-old sports teacher who lives nearby described the cafe as the “nicest in Gaza” and a place that “should have been the safest of anywhere” in the Palestinian territory.

An IDF spokesperson said the attack was under review, adding that the Israeli military had “struck several Hamas terrorists in the northern Gaza Strip” and that “prior to the strike, steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians using aerial surveillance”.

In a separate statement on Tuesday, the IDF said Israel’s air force had attacked more than 140 “terror targets” in Gaza over the previous day, including “terrorists, anti-tank missile launch posts, weapons storage facilities and other terrorist infrastructure”.

**************

“We cannot be asking civilians to go into a combat zone so that then they can be killed with the justification that they are in a combat zone.” It defies belief that the Unicef spokesperson, James Elder, should have needed to spell that out this week. And yet each day Palestinians continue to be killed while attempting to collect aid for their families from food hubs in Gaza, forced to make a lethal choice between risking being shot and letting their families slowly starve. More than 500 have died around the centres since the system was introduced – yet, with attention fixed on Israel’s attacks on Iran, there has been little to spare for recent deaths.

The Israeli military has given shifting accounts of events. But soldiers told the newspaper Haaretz that commanders ordered troops to shoot at crowds that posed no threat. The Israeli prime minister and defence minister attacked the allegations as “blood libels”. Médecins Sans Frontières has accurately described the system as “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid”. Meanwhile, Israel has closed crossings into the north.

Overall, Gaza’s health ministry says that 56,331 people have died in Israeli attacks since war began. Researchers who assess war casualties suggested this week that, far from being exaggerated, this undercounts the toll. They estimated that violent deaths had reached 75,000 by this January, with another 8,500 excess deaths due to the war. The toll of hunger has yet to be reckoned.

The ceasefire with Iran has prompted talk that Benjamin Netanyahu may be contemplating an early election, hoping to ride to victory on the glory. That would be tough without the release of hostages and at least the impression of an end to the war in Gaza. Yet it remains unclear whether there is actual movement towards a deal with Hamas. Donald Trump’s hazy vision of a grand deal for the Middle East is built upon a fantasy of Arab state acquiescence without any concrete offer for Palestinians.

Without a proper agreement, the threat of strikes resuming would loom large, there would be no promise that proper aid would follow, and recovery would be impossible. The far-right coalition partners upon whom Mr Netanyahu depends want the “day after” to bring not a resurgence of life but the disappearance of Palestinians from Gaza – and beyond. The surging violence and mass displacements in the occupied West Bank, which have seen 943 Palestinians killed by settlers or security forces since 7 October 2023, have been described as “Gazafication”. Meanwhile, Israel entrenches its control politically.

As Israel’s allies stand by – or, like Mr Trump, spur on horrors such as the food scheme – the necessary destination of a two-state solution is becoming a mirage. Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, has suggested openly that the US no longer sees an independent Palestinian state as a goal. European nations, including the UK, which had edged towards recognising one, have backed off since Israel attacked Iran.

A review by the diplomatic service of the EU – Israel’s biggest trading partner – found that the country was probably breaching human rights duties under their trade deal, yet the bloc has not acted accordingly. The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, rightly urged the EU to suspend the accord. While the arms and trade still flow, Israel’s allies are complicit in the destruction of lives in Gaza.

Identifying the powerful Zionist-capitalist influences within imperialism and intertwined with it, is crucial.

By no means does that say imperialism is "run by the Jews", tipping into actual anti-semitism (as inevitably arising mass hostility can do without a better theoretical understanding) but nor does it play to idiot moralising of the single-issue "anti-racist" "left" which falls over itself to deny any influences at all for fear of such labelling, a self-lacerating PC righteousness that allowed the Zionist lobby to calculatedly and completely torpedo the popular left upsurge underneath the reluctant "left" Labourite Jeremy Corbyn for example.

But neither is it the case that Zionism remains solely a "tool of imperialism" as "lefts" like the WPB's George Galloway assert.

Huge pressure and influence is exerted by lobby groups like the rich and powerful AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) which has been able to demolish the careers of numerous US politicians who speak out for the Palestinian cause in even the most tremulous way, pouring in campaign resources and advertising in their constituencies as well as by 1001 informal networks.

But the deeper purpose of imperialism's creation of "Israel" was to use it for control of the Arab world and the Empire has does have its own interests which the EPSR has long speculated could cause a clash with Tel Aviv as the Empire balances all factors, in contrast to a single-minded Zionist agenda.

From which emerges another aspect of the US bombing raid: it looks as if it were aimed not to back up the Zionist war at all but rein it in.

Washington has a growing problem with the whole slew of stooge Arab thug-monarchist regimes from the insanely wealthy Gulf oil states and Saudi Arabia to the 110 million teeming masses of gigantic if nearly bankrupt Egypt, the centre of the revolutionary Arab Spring in 2011 which shook the imperialist world to its core in the wake of the global credit collapse, and which remains a pressure cooker of potential revolt despite (and because of) its repression by the vicious President Sisi torture regime, set in place by a 2013 violent counter-coup killing hundreds and hundreds.

US efforts to keep all these elements on side with deals and the treacherous Abraham Accord treaties to tie them in with Jerusalem have been shaken to pieces like uranium centrifuges hit by B2s (allegedly).

Vile and degenerate as these regimes are, their degenerate mafia-monarchist wealth completely contemptuous of the mass populations, and secretly wishing the Palestinian and wider Arab revolt would disappear, they cannot afford to ignore the 300+ million strong “Arab Street” which has reached white heat in sympathy and solidarity with their slaughtered Palestinian brothers, and anti-imperialist sentiment.

So the showpiece attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was effectively a quid pro quo, a gesture - or a Trumpite "deal" – to placate the Zionists’ alleged fears of a bomb attack from Iran while at the same time, winding down the demented warmongering in all directions by these out-of-control Bible-myth-spouting fanatical settlers.

That is why Trump is simultaneously leaning on Tel Aviv to agree a ceasefire in Gaza too.

And such US concerns are deepened by the genuine world rebellion which continues to ferment even more, whatever the continuing ruling class efforts to muddy the waters with its endless colour revolutions, false flag operations and exaggerated “popular movements” stirred among mainly petty bourgeois elements and naïve ambitious students and backed up by fake-“left” ultra-left posturing (the toppling of the Sheik Hasina government in Bangladesh (see EPSR No1654 08-03-25) eg, violent counter-revolutionary “democracy” movements in Hong Kong and spread to Myanmar, the same in Georgia, Slovakia and currently Serbia, and many more).

The "lefts" are missing the point in a big way too when they continue their "condemn terror" cravenness, failing to see the turmoil in Africa for example as an expression of imperialist breakdown.

The groups in question may not be an answer either but they are picking up popular support: and it is imperialism (French, US, Russian mercenaries) that has been trying to stop them – and losing (which rather undermines the "all run by the CIA" glibness):

The Jama’at Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin, or JNIM, an Islamist extremist group which now controls a swath of the Sahel, which stretches across Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and marks the borderlands between the Sahara and less arid zones.

The series of bombings, hijackings, attacks on military bases and raids into major towns in Mali and Burkina Faso carried out by JNIM in recent weeks have gone largely unnoticed in a world preoccupied by conflicts elsewhere, but marks one of the most significant military efforts by any Islamic militant organisation anywhere in the world since the Taliban stormed back to power in Afghanistan in 2021.[...]

Across the Sahel, grinding poverty, instability, sectarian and longstanding violence have long combined to offer opportunities to insurgents, separatists and extremists. These factors have lately been exacerbated by politics. A series of coups have brought military regimes to power in key states worst hit by Islamic extremism, leading to the expulsion of one of the biggest deployments of UN peacekeepers, French elite units and more than 1,000 US troops equipped with dozens of surveillance drones from the region.

Earlier this month, the Russian mercenaries who had been brought in by Mali’s military rulers to help their forces fight JNIM abandoned a brutal campaign in which they had suffered heavy casualties – and been implicated in the massacre of thousands of civilians.

Ulf Laessing, who runs the Sahel programme of Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation from the Malian capital, Bamako, described the JNIM as a “ghost enemy” that appears out of nowhere in force.

“By the time the government forces react, they can’t reach the real bad guys so take revenge on civilians and that is a major driver of recruitment,” he said.

Such atrocities are repeated by militaries across the region and have fuelled support for the JNIM, particularly in communities systematically targeted as supposed “supporters of terrorism”. A UN survey in 2017 underlined the link between radicalisation and abuses by authorities in sub-Saharan Africa.

Though security has deteriorated across the Sahel, aid programmes have been cut back or ended. President Trump’s recent decision to slash foreign assistance has curtailed more. Western diplomats and NGOs have also withdrawn, or been expelled, along with soldiers.

JNIM and other militants have exploited the vacuum that has opened up, offering protection and some basic services as well as coercing communities into accepting their authority and strict Islamically inspired rules. Expansion also means resources. Control of roads means traffic can be taxed, for example.

“JNIM are becoming a force that is well beyond just military … Villagers see no other option. JNIM run courts, schools, informal goldmines. They are very pragmatic, and not corrupt,” said Laessing.

This broad social approach was pioneered by al-Qaida, to which JNIM may owe a tenuous loyalty, after Ayman al-Zawahiri took over as leader after the death in 2011 of its founder, Osama bin Laden. It has had mixed success but has been effective in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, especially the Sahel.

Aneliese Bernard, a Washington-based expert and former US official in the region, said local actors were key to the JNIM expansion into littoral states.

“It’s a hybrid of spillover and homegrown … JNIM’s strategic approach is to do prospecting. They pay marginalised youth, often from Fulani communities or teenage girls, to provide intelligence on local security forces and communities which might be open to approach but the homegrown jihadist cells now linked to JNIM probably would have emerged on their own,” Bernard said.

The group may have other ambitions, too. A leader and spokesperson recently boasted that the group had launched a “second phase” of its war against local states and would be hunting its enemies “in the big cities … in your last refuges”.

One possibility, analysts said, is that JNIM is preparing a radical shift, inspired by the success of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which seized power in Syria after Ahmed al-Sharaa, its leader, moderated his organisation’s ideology and focused on governance rather than holy war.

Such a victory may be distant, but there is no doubting who has the momentum in the Sahel.

Links to the HTS are dubious if true but the overall thrust of this piece is of anti-imperialist turmoil, supported by the local populations and in opposition to the more "official" anti-Western military coups of the past two years, which have pushed out the Western forces because they have "not been doing enough" to control the upheavals.

To disentangle the deliberate confusion a detailed historical class-balance analysis (ie Leninism) is ever more vital.

That will mean sorting out what the working class has achieved before, and most of all the history of the Soviet Union, its giant successes and eventual “failure” (actually failure of revisionism not the workers state itself).

With it must go the exposure of every kind of fake-“leftist” masquerade, be it from revisionist brainrot, Trot petty bourgeois anti-communism or deliberate imperialist subversion, all of which cravenly lines up behind imperialism’s “condemnation of terror”, pleading for “stability” (of existing capitalism!!!!) and failing to recognise the revolutionary content of the great ferment in the world.

Meanwhile that turmoil is steadily finding its way towards greater philosophical coherence and nowhere more obviously so than in the Palestinian struggle where the fighting spirit of this most persecuted people has still not been defeated after 20 months of the most public and visible fascist atrocities by the Zionist landgrabbing colonisation, on a scale that parallels the 1940s Nazi holocaust.

Whatever the religious notions of the Hamas leadership (and others fighting alongside it, some secular) the capacity to take on the imperialist backed Zionism has reached astounding levels of logistical organisation, coordinated fighting ability and readiness to sacrifice that indicate a movement which has already climbed far beyond the primitive efforts of the first Intifada and the suicide sacrifices of the Second.

Backward or reactionary ideologies may well be present in the absence of any clear Marxist revolutionary leadership or understanding but to denounce these movements, as the fake-"left" does, is to side with the imperialism which has been trying to suppress them.

And it is to miss the huge pressures of the crisis which is generating all the turmoil.

That is certainly unnerving more and more sectors of the ruling class, where the "liberal" and "left" reformist wing is desperate to find some way to ameliorate the growing contradictions:

The world is facing a looming crisis of inequality that could see the first trillionaires emerge while nearly half of humanity still languishes in poverty, a group of 40 former presidents and prime ministers warns.

In a letter seen by the Guardian, the group – which includes the ex-British prime minister Gordon Brown – issues a joint appeal to current world leaders for a “new economic coalition of the willing” to address the escalating threats of inequality, poverty and environmental breakdown.

The former leaders also condemn “narrow unilateralism” and the “outdated” 1944 economic model while urging comprehensive debt relief, international tax cooperation, and reform of institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.

The letter was organised by Club de Madrid, the world’s biggest forum of democratic former heads of state and government, with support from Oxfam and the People’s Medicines Alliance.

Its signatories include Brown; Helen Clark of New Zealand; Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain; Carlos Alvarado Quesada of Costa Rica; Aminata Touré of Senegal; Sanna Marin of Finland; and Nobel peace prize winners José Ramos-Horta, the current president of Timor-Leste, and Óscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica.

Their rare intervention comes in a moment of profound global uncertainty with democracies backsliding, the rules-based order in retreat and violence on the rise. Policy analyst Fiona Hill has argued that a third world war is in effect already under way.

Donald Trump has continued to challenge the post-war consensus, withdrawn the US from the Paris climate accord and, with help from the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, shuttered the development agency USAID. Musk is poised to become the world’s first trillionaire by 2027, according to one report.

“Volatility orders our world today,” the letter states. “Inequality spirals across nations. Trillionaires could emerge this decade, while near half of humanity lives in poverty. 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest to pay sovereign debt than on education or health.

“Climate breakdown outpaces green transitions. Across too many places, children are being buried under states’ belligerence as any sense of a rules-based order is violently displaced by a power-based one. The multilateralism to solve global problems that grew out of two World Wars is in disarray. Global problems that need global solutions and cannot be solved by nation states on their own remain unaddressed.”

The world is falling short in multilateral cooperation and the financing of global development aid, the former leaders warn, leading to more poverty, ill health, illiteracy and environmental problems.

In what some observers may interpret as a swipe at Trump, who has attacked organisations such as Nato, the United Nations and World Health Organization, the letter states: “Alone, any one country – and its people – is left vulnerable when another chooses narrow unilateralism above all else. We need international cooperation, revamped for our era.”

Despite the grim assessment, the former leaders express optimism that “a powerful shift is possible” and advocate for “a new economic coalition of the willing of countries to cooperate – to combat extreme inequality, end poverty and meet human rights. One that is founded upon values of solidarity and sovereignty.”

They assert: “Trillions of dollars exist for financing development – but too much public money is captured by private power.” Condemning the “hemorrhaging cuts by rich nations”, they argue for a restoration of development aid and global minimum taxes on the profits of multinationals.

The group of 40 former presidents and prime ministers identify the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development in Seville, Spain, G20 in South Africa and Cop30 in Brazil as major opportunities to advance their agenda.

Fat chance of course. The imperialists' answer to this crisis is warmongering, even if it means bankrupting themselves, as the European NATO pledges to spend 5% of their GDPs on arms will obviously do, making their domestic circumstances even more desperate than the chaos engulfing the British Labour Party, terrified of the mass revolt its vicious cuts are stirring and split wide open.

And the "sovereignty" the arms money supposedly defends is a giant joke say even the generals:

This week, Sir Keir Starmer announced that the UK would buy 12 American F-35A fighter jets capable of carrying US nuclear bombs and dropping them as part of any Nato nuclear campaign. To hear Sir Keir tell it, this is a huge change. So it might come as something of a surprise to learn that Germany and Italy have been doing exactly this job for decades, with the same weapons.

Since the 1960s, the US has wanted to ensure that European hands are dipped in the blood of any decision to use nuclear weapons defending Europe. They did not want to be accused of laying waste to our continent alone. At the same time, the US has never been of a mind to hand out nuclear weapons left, right and centre for Europeans to use as they please.

The solution has been a “dual key”. An American general has overall command of Nato forces, US generals in Omaha decide what nuclear weapons should be used on which targets, and if it came to it in all-out war, America would authorise and then order the use of these weapons, but European allies would also consent. Then American and European pilots would fly their doomsday missions.

It’s not often noted in the UK, but the Royal Navy’s Trident system is also part of this plan. We think of Trident as a UK national deterrent but going back to the original purchase of the predecessor Polaris system, the first call on UK Trident is for the Nato war plan. US StratCom generals come and inspect UK Trident submarines regularly, to make sure they are up to snuff. Only if the UK was left alone in national extremis, would Trident become a UK-only weapon.

So, what should we make of this week’s announcement? Italy and Germany already carry American B61 nuclear bombs on ageing Tornado aircraft, and Germany has already agreed to buy F-35A jets to replace them as nuclear bombers. The US itself has a variety of aircraft capable of carrying the B61, and about 150 bombs are stored, under strict US control, in Europe at bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.

From a Nato perspective then, it’s not immediately obvious what the RAF adds. The job, as gruesome and unimaginable as it is, is already well covered by other Nato members.

Perhaps, as the PM seemed to imply, buying these jets and acting as a delivery service for Armageddon increases the UK’s own nuclear arsenal and options? Well, not really. These B61 bombs are very firmly under US control and would only ever be used as and when the US wanted. The UK will have no substantive say in this plan. Only our consent to the execution of a US plan is required.

If money were no object, we could view the £2bn price tag for doing this as a Thank You to Uncle Sam. The UK is, in effect, picking up part of the cost of a mission that would otherwise fall to the US. In a world that wants to please President Trump, it’s easy to see how it plays well to buy aircraft primarily built in Texas.

But money is an object, and UK defence is currently threadbare in many areas. There are many more pressing ways we could better use that money to defend the UK.

Or maybe "we" could simply end this hair-raising Armageddon system altogether to establish sane and rational communism.

Build Leninist revolutionary understanding.

Alan Scott

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