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No 1641 14th April 2024

Western backing for Gaza butchery continues despite horrified liberal opinion – Jewish and non-Jewish – out of fear and desperation as imperialism’s Catastrophic breakdown deepens. Kill-them-all smiting is the only answer barbaric Zionism has to the impossible problem of taking someone else’s land, but only deepens Palestinian resistance and spreads it ever further afield inflaming the whole Middle East and the “Global South”. So called “terrorism” can never stop for as long as this arrogant landtheft tyranny continues imposing its artificial “state”. US now torn in two, wanting to smash down growing world hostility inflamed by 20 years of (failed) warmongering - and failing in Ukraine too – but terrified of turning “terrorist” revolt into ever more capable anti-imperialism against the whole rotten and collapsing system and its US empire heart. Hypocrisy about the lying fraud of “democracy”, “freedom” and “international law” adds to its problems. Leninism ever more vital

The fake-“left”, has been shamefully demonstrating yet again its opportunist evasion of revolutionary politics by its hopeless “ceasefire” pacifism on Zionist/imperialism’s disgusting blitz-and-starvation world-terrorising Gaza holocaust; by its “condemnations” of the recent terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall; for continuing Ukraine war confusion (both for and against Bonapartist Putin); and in “gangster” sneers at Haïti’s armed uprising (see p8).

The world needs more than ever to understand the all these as facets of capitalism’s overarching crisis Catastrophe and its intractable contradictions

And it needs to understand them in a framework of international class war to bring to an end this nightmare system of ever more insane inequality, as its billionaire “owners” drag humanity towards an armageddon of endless warmongering horror, human fascist depravity and planet threatening eco-disaster.

War after war has already been imposed by dominant power Washington from the blitzing of Serbia in 1999 and the long (but failed) invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, to the devastation imposed on Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and the Yemen, and now in Eastern Europe through the Nato-controlled nazi stoogery in Kiev.

All are part of the warm up for the war destruction that imperialism needs to escape its Catastrophic “overproduction” crisis (see Marx quotes economics box) and which not going to end until the world is reduced to rubble or capitalism itself is overturned by mass revolutionary class war.

There is no other way of stopping this plunge into the World War Three “crisis solution” by the American monopoly capitalist domination and its filthy fascist collaborators from Westminster and Brussels, to the nazis in Kiev and the demented genocidal Jewish “Israel” occupation planted in Palestine 75 years ago to suppress the Middle Eastern peoples in this crucially valuable region, and now threatening to explode the whole of it through its terrified war frenzy.

Only a Marxist revolutionary perspective can even start to make sense of all these appalling developments and their interconnections, in all their staggering and continuously unfolding complexity and thereby make clear the only, revolutionary, path out for humanity.

But far from a renewal of Leninist scientific understanding developed by a purpose built party of leadership to fight for the vital dictatorship of the proletariat, the fake-“left” continues to prop up the brainwashed and brain-dead revisionist delusions of democratic paths, “peaceful roads” (!!!!), “multipolarity”, international “law” and “freedom”, even as the Zionist-imperialist onslaughts and appalling crimes against humanity – backed to the hilt by Washington – make a mockery of it all, or rather expose what a mockery the entire thing has always been.

From the contemptuous treatment of the “United Nations” and its anyway-toothless international “warcrime justice”, the sabotage of its humanitarian-aid palliative organisations (like UNRWA), the trampling over “Geneva conventions” to now the bloody disregard for even the 19th century (!!) Vienna Convention on the “inviolability” of embassies (the “sacrosanct” principle just bombed out of existence by these demented fascists’ F-35s along with the physical reality of Iran’s Damascus diplomatic building in Syria), the whole fabric of post-war “democracy” and reformism, is being torn up.

The imperialist system has hit the buffers, spiralling into the greatest economic disaster of all time and is now lashing out in all directions most notably at present in the deliberately provoked war with Russia (lyingly presented as “caused by Moscow”) and preparing far more, particularly against China.

But the non-stop atrocities by the frenzied Zionists, poleaxed by the astonishingly heroic and self-sacrificing rebellion of the dispossessed and concentration camp-imprisoned Gazan Palestinians (and many in the West Bank), are at the forefront of world attention.

They have their own particular character driven by the specific fanaticism of the colonialist settlers (both current and over the last century) whose Greater Israel takeover programme was in train even before the horrors of the 1930-40s German imperialist Holocaust victimisation of poor Jews, Roma, communists, disabled and homosexuals which they use as “justification” for their own barbaric actions.

And the logic of their colonialist landtheft of someone else’s country has always meant no other outcome was ever on the cards eventually than permanent suppression or elimination of that people, just as the Native Americans were wiped out or Australia’s aborigines and many others – no other outcome that is except that those oppressed peoples’ would wage determined struggle to eliminate this artificially imposed racist-apartheid “state” entity to win back their own land and create a single Palestine again, under their own sovereignty.

(That is a struggle which is nothing to do with “eliminating Jews” as the Zionists’ “anti-semitism” propaganda shield monstrously, lyingly and hysterically asserts. A single Palestinian Palestine could (and should) accommodate as many Jews as requested to live there (and were acceptable) providing that the land, farms, property, and housing were returned to those they were taken from, all of them, as far as possible.

The others, mostly recently or relatively recently arrived could return to the countries they came from, (particularly America)).

But the Zionist-imperialist plan, whatever flannel was ventured about two-states etc, (and swallowed by idiot revisionist “left” politics) has always been to drive more and more of the Arab people out, poisoning their wells, destroying or hemming in the olive groves, and increasingly murderously rampaging through any remaining undestroyed villages and towns, burning cars and houses, and carrying out outright murders and beatings as they steal ever more of the land for the “illegal” hilltop settlements, the latest manifestations of a programme of steady expulsion and terror takeovers, blitzing suppression and massacres underway for decades, long before the October 7th resistance outbreak from Gaza.

The Zionist agenda is also inseparable from imperialism’s general programme of warmongering.

Western political support and massive arming, financing and direct military aid of the monstrous Zionist occupation’s blitzing, knowingly encourages its inhuman barbarity, despite tepid, very belated and ineffectual crocodile-tear “concern” about civilian casualties, because it too wants to see the total wiping out of the rising challenge to imperialism’s authority and dominance by the Third World’s masses, among which the particularly oppressed Palestinian nation is at the forefront.

For just this reason imperialism gave the go-ahead to the mystical Zionist agenda in the first place, initially through the British Balfour Declaration and then in the newly established US-dominated United Nations partition plan of 1947 and the decree in 1948 “granting” the Jewish occupation a “share” of Palestine (shamefully recognised and deludedly agreed to by revisionist Stalin’s Soviet Union leadership - as the museum-Stalinist CPGB-ML’s bravado on Palestine carefully hides away).

It was immediately expanded to a lion’s share by massacre-terror and 18 months of Zionist warmongering, destroying villages and thousands of lives to drive out 750,000 local Arabs from their own lands in the great ethnic-cleansing Nakba.

Having this cuckoo “state” sitting in the Arab nest has suited imperialism ever since, to smite and suppress every tiny stirring of local resistance or anti-imperialist sentiment whenever it has proved impossible to simply bribe and subvert the regional national bourgeoisies and backward feudal/tribal regimes into craven collusion with the West (as most of them have been for the whole post-war period, and still are, even now sitting on their hands at best as the very public butchery continues, from reactionary monarchical Jordan and the Gulf States to the viciously repressive “President” General Abdel Sisi coup regime in giant Egypt – many so sickeningly in the West’s pockets they secretly even hope the Zionists will wipe out the rebellious Hamas and other similar militant influences, muslim or secular).

Every illegal and brutal move by the Zionist occupation has not just been tolerated by the “democratic” US but supported and financed, in war after war, terror imposition, blitzing, killing, hounding, arbitrary imprisonment (including of young teenagers), non-stop torture, and a blind eye turned to the vicious settler land and property stealing programme all across the notionally “Palestinian” territory of the West Bank, relentlessly pursued despite supposed “international community” disapproval and endless ineffectual motions, declarations and resolutions passed at the useless imperialist-stooging United Nations.

And it is that injustice which has inevitably created the steadily growing armed struggle response to Zionism’s brutal violence using whatever means the benighted and oppressed have been able to find, fighting from Jordan and Lebanon and then by staggeringly determined self-sacrificing suicide attacks in the first intifadas, and now the guerrilla war and terror outburst of October on the military bases and (armed) kibbutzes nearby.

Accelerating and hugely intensifying the long-term ethnic cleansing/genocide programme, to “deal with” this most astonishing and organised uprising yet of the persecuted Palestinian people (the inhabitants of the region for nearly 2000 years) suits imperialism’s crisis interests in general as its Catastrophic breakdown deepens and worldwide anti-imperialist hostility with it.

The only restraint from Washington and the “international community” (ie the small group of imperialist powers mainly in Europe, and Japan and hangers on) over 75 years of endless repression, has been on how much difficulty the specific Zionist fanatical agenda might cause the US Empire’s broader strategic interests, especially where the growing anti-imperialist sentiment it generates starts to spread far and wide, undermining the Middle East compromisers especially.

And the latest onslaught comes at huge cost in exposing the lies, hypocrisy and fraud of the imperialist “democracy-and-freedom world order” (still being used to “justify” the fascist Ukraine warmongering, anti-China demonising, the strangling blockade of the Cuban workers state, ditto against North Korea, the armed “pro-democracy” attacks in Myanmar, against Venezuela and Nicaragua, plus all the other CIA etc imperialist subversion and sabotage, or outright blitzing, of any hint of anti-imperialism anywhere).

The excuse that the Hamas attack was an “intolerable” terrorist outrage carried some weight with petty bourgeois sentiment and reactionary eye-for-an-eye notions initially particularly when luridly magnified with much Goebbels lie propaganda and fabrication about its extent and “bestiality” (much of mayhem, which was the result of the Zionists own counter-attacks as in the burned-out cars at the music festival especially) and presented entirely context free, as if just a sudden unexpected attack on “peace-loving” Israelis.

But that has quickly been overtaken by the scale and savagery of the demented collective punishment butchery appalling worldwide public opinion.

As the EPSR has long been able to warn, because of its Marxist understanding, Washington can eventually see its interests diverge (No1190 24-06-03):

Not all of Zionist aggression’s wag-the-dog warmongering (to please the USA’s master-race-plans to kick arse worldwide as a cover and diversion from insoluble economic crisis), is necessarily going to please Washington all of the time.

It is not completely impossible (although still a long shot) that American blitzkrieg repression might just have to exert some of its authority on Zionist colonial-military wildcatting itself in order to preserve its credibility in the world’s eyes, and possibly to see through any particular aspect of strategy or tactics that the US warmongers decide, in their confusion, is “vital” for imperialism’s chaotic “plans”.

Credibility is draining fast, especially in the “global south” but also within the imperialist powers’ own class-struggles, not least because the Zionist frenzy has been driven to ever greater extremes of warcrime savagery and collective punishment by the resistance of the Hamas led uprising, still undefeated despite now six months of utter barbarity against it and much more the civilian population.

The stirrings at the sheer depravity and horror of the onslaught grow deeper by the day and are causing Washington growing problems regionally and domestically, reported at least by the Middle East press:

Since Israel’s war on Gaza began, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in neighbouring Jordan, particularly outside the Israeli embassy in the capital, Amman.

Photos of popular anger coupled with literal flames in the streets have carried the message of a population enraged by what is happening to their close neighbours.

While the number of protesters has ebbed and flowed throughout the war, the recent Israeli military campaign on al-Shifa Hospital and the pending invasion of Rafah has brought many Jordanians back to the streets en masse.

Protesters’ demands may vary, though one Jordanian researcher monitoring the protests told Al Jazeera that there are some primary asks, including suspending normalisation with Israel, reconsidering ties with the United States, and cancelling other energy, gas, or trade deals with Israel. The researcher did not want to be identified out of fear of repercussions from the state.

Jordan and Israel normalised relations by signing the Wadi Araba Treaty in 1994. Meanwhile, the US and Jordan have an agreement that sees the Hashemite Kingdom net $1.45bn a year in economic and military aid until the 2029 fiscal year.

Jordanian security forces have responded to the protests with force at times and have arrested protest leaders from across society, including politicians, journalists and union figures, drawing criticism from human rights groups.

Authorities have tried to blame disquiet as the work of shadowy “infiltrators” or “ghosts”. But the protests have resonated with wide sections of society, including both native Jordanians and those with Palestinian origins.

“The protests are ongoing because what’s going on in Gaza is very much a Jordanian affair,” said Imad Harb, director of research at the Arab Center Washington DC. “We’re talking about a country with at least two million Palestinians who live and have citizenship in Jordan but they still have ties to the old country and still care a lot about the old country.”

“Protests are not commonplace, not allowed and not easy to organise,” the unnamed researcher said. “But because the issue is Palestine, people will go in big numbers.”

Less well reported but even more significant are potential upheavals in Egypt (see past EPSRs) with a population of over 110 million still seething after the 2013 mass street-massacre coup-suppression of the newly installed Arab Spring “democracy” (half-celebrated by Stalinist idiocy – also unexplained to this day); in thug-monarchical Saudi Arabia, and the equally thuggish UAE, as well as the increasing mass support for the continuing pro-Palestinian activities of the Houthi “rebels” in Yemen against Zionist, US and British Red Sea shipping, and for the Hezbollah forces in Lebanon.

Combined with the shocked reaction of public opinion in even the heartlands of the West to the Gaza genocide, steadily deepening as the full, barely believable extent of the horrifying bombing and famine butchery, and its deliberate civilian killing, continues, these factors are now beginning to shake the so-far all-out Western bourgeois support for the Zionists.

Even such opportunist “left” fakery as the Democrat representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is getting edgy at the damage being done to the “democracy” fraud inside the US (though still supporting warmonger “Joe” Biden!!):

As we speak, in this moment, 1.1 million innocents in Gaza are at famine’s door. A famine that is being intentionally precipitated through the blocking of food and global humanitarian assistance by leaders in the Israeli government.

This is a mass starvation of people, engineered and orchestrated following the killing of another 30,000, 70% of whom were women and children.

There is hardly a single hospital left. And this was all accomplished with US resources and weapons. If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes. It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away. It looks like good and decent people who do nothing. Or too little. Too late.

It is against United States law to provide weapons to forces who block United States humanitarian assistance. And that is exactly what is happening right now. So much so that the president himself stated, during the State of the Union, that the United States must and will be building its own port to let aid through. It will be too late.

The time is now to force compliance with US law and the standards of humanity. And fulfill our obligations to the American people to suspend the transfer of US weapons to the Israeli government in order to stop and prevent further atrocity.

Honoring our alliances does not mean facilitating mass killing. We cannot hide from our responsibility any longer. Blocking assistance from one’s closest allies to starve a million people is not unintentional.

We have a responsibility to prove the value of global democracy, enshrined in the upholding of civil society, rule of law, and commitment to human and civil rights.

This is not just about Israel or Gaza. This is about us. The world will never be the same. And we will never be the same.

Since the Zionists said just two days after the Hamas breakout from Gaza that they were going to cut off food, water and electricity to Gaza – in itself already a “crime against humanity” barely commented on by the sanctimonious West busy throwing daily unsubstantiated “warcrime” accusations at Russia, China, Myanmar etc, – her cynically timed remarks are just a little bit late.

But she is right on one question – nothing will be the same as the world’s hatred for imperialism is magnified one hundredfold, and on a trajectory eventually to conscious revolutionary Marxist struggle, however convoluted and mistake-filled that might be on the way (and which would be much shorter if the world re-established the revisionist-abandoned fight for Leninist understanding as soon as possible).

The Hamas rebellion, itself still hampered by its religious ideology in many ways, nevertheless makes the point through its astonishing level of organisation, combat skill, readiness to sacrifice and determination, that the Palestinian struggle has advanced far beyond the early “intifadas”.

Downtrodden humanity is learning to fight and that will spread, including into the heartlands of imperialism.

Even the German “social-democrats” who have presided over a viciously censorious atmosphere in the country with McCarthyite sackings, cultural cancellations and anyone speaking out for the Palestinians deemed virtually criminal and “anti-semitic”, are now hesitating as the bourgeois press is reporting:

There has been no stronger defender than Olaf Scholz’s German government of Israel’s contention that the assault on the Palestinians was a necessary evil. But as evidence grew that the Israeli military was less than discriminating in the killing of thousands of civilians, and with a manufactured famine looming and Israel threatening an attack on Rafah, Chancellor Scholz went to Jerusalem last month to ask Benjamin Netanyahu whether the pursuit of Hamas could “justify such terribly high costs”. The Israeli prime minister surprised no one by saying that it could.

What Scholz will do in response, if anything, remains to be seen. But the Germans, like the Americans and the British, have been forced by mounting evidence of the horror being perpetrated on ordinary Palestinians in Gaza, where women and children account for a majority of the 33,000 dead, to at least consider that there might be more to this war than Israel’s claim that it wants only to break Hamas. In Britain, a letter signed by more than 600 prominent lawyers, including former supreme court justices, warning that the UK government is breaching international law by continuing to arm Israel, has added to the pressure on politicians to confront this reality.

The Israeli military’s killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers has provided the latest jolt to those who complacently repeat the Israeli mantra that its military is doing all it can to protect innocent lives. Six of the dead were citizens of countries that have given some of the strongest support for Israel’s assault – so the western world had something to say about their killings.

The British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has told the Israeli leader that too many aid workers and Palestinians have died and “the situation is increasingly intolerable”. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, warned Netanyahu that he was putting solidarity with Israel “to a really hard test”. And in the US, Joe Biden said that the WCK deaths were not a “stand-alone incident”, and that Israel was killing too many aid workers.

The other 200 or more humanitarian workers killed in the war have drawn less attention because they are mostly Palestinians. As objectionable as this is, the attack on the WCK convoy has thrown a global spotlight on two Israeli policies that will be increasing difficult for western governments to downplay now they are the focus of public attention: the Israeli military’s low bar for killing civilians, and its engineering of a food crisis that is creating starvation.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the WCK vehicles had been targeted because of a suspicion there was an armed Hamas member travelling with the convoy. There wasn’t. But even had there been, it is revealing that the rules of engagement deemed the mere presence of a member of Hamas as sufficient for a military drone operator to wipe out people who the army knew were not combatants.

It’s safe to say that large numbers of Palestinians, including thousands of children, have been killed and wounded under the same loose rules of engagement. Shortly before the attack on the WCF convoy, Haaretz reported that Israel had created “kill zones” in Gaza where “anyone who crosses into them is shot”, whether a combatant or not. Just on Wednesday, the Guardian reported that the Israel Defense Forces set allowances for the number of civilians who could be killed when striking a particular target. In the early weeks of the war, this included the killing of “15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants” who had been identified with the help of artificial intelligence.

Undiscriminating warfare has, in turn, contributed to looming mass starvation brought on by Israel’s tight restrictions on food deliveries to northern Gaza, including its refusal to let aid lorries through crossings just a few miles from the areas of greatest need.

International aid agencies say hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are facing famine in the coming weeks, and that half of the entire population of Gaza will be starving by the end of July if the present food crisis continues.

Israel’s restrictions forced WCK to deliver food by sea and then undertake the dangerous journey of moving it across the Gaza Strip. José Andrés, the group’s founder, said that necessity put its workers lives at risk. “The team would not have made the journey if there were enough food, travelling by truck across land, to feed the people of Gaza,” he wrote in the New York Times. “The Israeli government needs to open more land routes for food and medicine today … You cannot win this war by starving an entire population.”

Israel’s defence ministry denies any such intent, and claims it is permitting twice as much food into Gaza by lorry as was delivered before the war. It blames aid organisations in general, and the United Nations in particular, for failing to distribute the supplies.

At one point, the ministry posted a picture of what it said were dozens of lorries just inside Gaza, waiting to make deliveries. But what food there is there is far from where it needs to be, and some aid agencies say the Israeli military’s open-fire policies make it too dangerous to drive north. In addition, Israel has barred the organisation best able to distribute food – the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) – from doing so as part of a political campaign to get rid of the agency.

All this could be resolved by simply opening the northern crossing points. Instead, famine looms ever closer after charities providing hundreds of thousands of meals a day suspended operations because of concerns about their workers’ safety after the Israeli killing of the WCK staff.

In these circumstances, it is difficult not to conclude that Netanyahu is using food as a weapon to do what bombs and bullets have so far failed to, and drive out the remaining Palestinians in northern Gaza – or worse.

He won’t lose much sleep over German criticism. But Israeli politicians who are more sensitised to the consequences of alienating their country’s allies are worried. Images of Palestinians dying of starvation en masse would strip away what cover foreign politicians have to support Israel by claiming that civilian deaths have been an unfortunate but unintended consequence of war.

In Britain, the US and Europe, political leaders have already been forced by public revulsion at the scale of killing to start conditioning their support for Israel with tempered criticisms, and issuing calls for a ceasefire.

The “liberal” Guardian, which like all bourgeois press has spent 6 months backing the “war” on Hamas and defending the Western declared “right of Israel to defend itself” – as if an outright colonialist oppression were the “victim” and those fighting to get out from under its 75 years of occupation tyranny were the “aggressors” – still cannot bring itself to say, with its “or worse” phrasing, that the Zionist intent is quite deliberately to kill the Palestinians with starvation.

And the small hint of there being “more to this war” is equally obscure instead of spelling out that the whole deliberate ethnic cleansing in Gaza was being planned well before October, as the fanatical settler wing has been pushing, waiting only on some incident to precipitate things (and possibly even letting it happen, with the chest-beating “intelligence failure” admissions a cover for quite cynical ignoring of all the warning signs as various reports indicated, (including even in the Daily Mail – hardly a “left conspiracy” supporting paper) – months back):

Israel’s military and intelligence officials were given a highly detailed warning that Hamas was actively training to take over kibbutzim on the Gaza border and overrun military posts with the aim of inflicting substantial fatalities, according to reports in the Israeli media.

The claim made by Israel’s Channel 12 on Monday evening was based on leaked emails from the Israeli military’s 8200 cyber-intelligence unit discussing the warnings.

Those emails revealed that a senior officer who reviewed the intelligence considered the danger of a massive surprise attack by Hamas across the Gaza border to be “an imaginary scenario”.

The hugely embarrassing leak describes in shocking detail what would turn out to be key elements of Hamas’s planning for its massacre of 1,200 Israelis on 7 October, including that Israel spotters were aware of senior Hamas officials present as observers during training preparations.

According to the leaked emails, Hamas went as far as giving the mocked-up kibbutz used in training a name and even practised raising a flag over its synagogue.

Plans were also intercepted that discussed overrunning a border military base and killing all of its occupants.

While much of the focus of recent scrutiny for the intelligence failure before the 7 October attack has looked at what information was available to senior political and military figures, including Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the new leaks and briefings suggest serious failings within the Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence reporting and distribution system as well.

The source of the warning is a highly respected career military intelligence NCO identified in Israeli media reports as V who warned her chain of command during the summer that Hamas was planning a large-scale incursion.

Further emails leaked to Channel 12 suggest the initial warning was corroborated a few days later with evidence that other Hamas units were involved in similar training aimed at apparently different targets.

Some officials appear to have been impressed by the intelligence but a senior intelligence officer who reviewed the material in July was more sceptical and suggested it was necessary to distinguish between what Hamas was doing for “show” and what was “realistically” the purpose of the training.

In another subsequent email, a colleague of the soldier who gave the initial warning said they emphatically disagreed with this assessment, while V herself suggested they were seeing a concrete “operational plan without a timetable for implementation” and that Hamas was planning for a “big event”.

Other very senior officers, including the head of the 8200 unit, have suggested in briefings to Israeli journalists that they were not shown V’s warning, despite the email chain discussing it.

One report suggested that when the head of the IDF’s military intelligence directorate, Maj Gen Aharon Haliva, visited V’s unit, the warning was not passed on to him, and Haliva left with an assessment suggesting that “[the Hamas leader] Yahya Sinwar has no intention of causing the situation to deteriorate [and that] Hamas has instructed its operatives on the ground to show restraint”.

Israeli media have carried their own versions.

Haaretz described the same training exercise on the mocked-up border kibbutz with reference to the 8200 unit email chain, which it said concluded with a Hamas message from those involved in the exercise saying: “We have completed the murder of all of those on the kibbutz.”

Haaretz described V’s warning six months before 7 October that Hamas had completed training exercises simulating a raid on kibbutzim and IDF outposts on the Israeli side of the border.

“V concluded that Hamas had completed its preparations, because senior Hamas commanders had turned out to view the exercises – something that was also reported by IDF spotters based on the border. Just like the spotters, her warnings were brushed off dismissively,” it said.

“While they were distributed to senior officers, to her own unit and to field intelligence, a senior intelligence officer wrote to her in response, praising her work but adding: ‘It sounds imaginary to me,’ almost exactly echoing the language of the leaked 8200 emails.”

According to this telling of events, V’s direct commander backed up her assessment, insisting it was a real exercise and not a display. The warnings were reiterated by the soldiers involved a few weeks before 7 October.

The Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported that on 6 October, hours before Hamas launched its assault, the IDF’s most senior officers were alerted to “weak signs” that something was happening on the Gaza border and that Hamas was preparing for an offensive.

And the fascist deliberateness of the killings is coming more into view:

Children account for more than one in three of the more than 32,000 people killed in Israel’s months-long assault on Gaza, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Tens of thousands more young people have suffered severe injuries, including amputations.

Nine doctors gave the Guardian accounts of working in Gaza hospitals this year, all but one of them foreign volunteers. Their common assessment was that most of the dead and wounded children they treated were hit by shrapnel or burned during Israel’s extensive bombardment of residential neighbourhoods, in some cases wiping out entire families. Others were killed or injured by collapsing buildings with still more missing under the rubble.

But doctors also reported treating a steady stream of children, elderly people and others who were clearly not combatants with single bullet wounds to the head or chest.

Some of the physicians said that the types and locations of the wounds, and accounts of Palestinians who brought children to the hospital, led them to believe the victims were directly targeted by Israeli troops.

Other doctors said they did not know the circumstances of the shootings but that they were deeply troubled by the number of children who were severely wounded or killed by single gunshots, sometimes by high-calibre bullets causing extensive damage to young bodies.

In mid-February, a group of UN experts accused the Israeli military of targeting Palestinian civilians who are evidently not combatants, including children, as they sought shelter.

“We are shocked by reports of the deliberate targeting and extrajudicial killing of Palestinian women and children in places where they sought refuge, or while fleeing. Some of them were reportedly holding white pieces of cloth when they were killed by the Israeli army or affiliated forces,” the group said.[]

Eyewitness accounts and video recordings appear to back up claims that Israeli soldiers have fired on civilians, including children, outside of combat with Hamas or other armed groups. In some cases, witnesses describe coming under fire while waving white flags. Haaretz reported on Saturday that Israel routinely fires on civilians in areas its military has declared a “combat zone”.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) deploy snipers – or sharpshooters, as the military calls them – during combat operations, often as part of elite units. They are trained to “target and eliminate particularly difficult terrorist threats”, according to the military’s own definition.

Israeli and foreign human rights groups have documented a long history of snipers firing on unarmed Palestinians, including children, in Gaza and the West Bank.

Palestinians in Gaza also report a terrifying new development in the latest Gaza war – armed drones able to hover over streets and pick off individuals. Called quadcopters, some of these drones are used as remote-control snipers that Palestinians say have been used to shoot civilians.[]

“The IDF only targets terrorists and military targets. In stark contrast to Hamas’s deliberate attacks on Israeli civilians, including men, women and children, the IDF follows international law and takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm,” it (IDF) said.

Doctors say otherwise.

Dr Vanita Gupta, an intensive care doctor at a New York City hospital, volunteered at Gaza’s European hospital in January. One morning, three badly wounded children arrived in quick succession. Their families told Gupta that the children had been together in the street when they came under fire and that there had been no other shooting in the area. She said no wounded adults were brought in to the hospital at the same time and from the same place.

“One child, I could see there was a shot to the head. They were doing CPR on this five- or six-year-old girl who obviously died,” said Gupta.

“There was another little girl about the same age. I saw a bullet entry wound on her head. Her father was there, crying and asking me, ‘Can you save her? She’s my only child.’”

“The neurosurgeon looked and said, ‘There’s no hope.’ You could see the bullet had gone through the head. I don’t know how old he was, but young,” she said.

Family members told Gupta that the Israeli army had withdrawn from the area about four kilometres from the hospital.

“They said people started returning to their homes because the army was gone. But the snipers stayed on. The families said they opened fire at the children,” she said.

Doctors who worked at the Nasser hospital in southern Gaza said what appeared to be targeted Israeli fire killed more than two dozen people, including children, as they entered or left the hospital in the first weeks of this year.

Among the casualties was 14-year-old Ruwa Qdeih. Doctors say she was shot dead outside the hospital in Khan Younis as she went to collect water. They said there was no fighting in the area at the time and that she was killed by a single shot and then men who went to recover her body were also shot at.

In Gaza City, three-year-old Emad Abu al-Qura was shot outside his home as he went to buy fruit with his cousin, Hadeel, a 20-year-old medical student, who was also killed. The family said they were targeted by an Israeli sniper.

A video of the pair lying together in the street shows Emad still alive after he is first hit and trying to lift his head. More shots hit the ground close by including one that strikes a plank next to Emad. The boy’s mother said he was then hit again and this time killed.

Hadeel’s father, Haroon, saw the shooting.

“The targeting of civilians is very clear. It is a deliberate direct targeting aimed at killing civilians without reason, without there being any events, without there being any resistance. They deliberately killed Hadeel and Emad,” he told Al Jazeera.

In December, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said that 13-year-old Amir Odeh was killed by an Israeli drone at its headquarters in the Al-Amal hospital in Khan Younis. The family told Euro-Med Monitor he was shot through a window as he played with his cousins on the eighth floor of building where they had sought shelter from the fighting. The killing was especially notable because the single shot to the chest came from a type of drone not seen in combat in Gaza before – a quadcopter, fitted with a gun, camera and speaker. Unlike some other drones, quadcopters are able to hover over their targets.

Dr Thaer Ahmad, a Chicago doctor who volunteered in Nasser hospital’s emergency room, said quadcopters sometimes appeared in swarms, giving orders to Palestinians to clear an area.

“We heard an incredible amount of stories from people recovering from injuries from these quadcopters firing bullets from the sky,” he said.

Ahmad said that on one occasion a drone shot one of the hospital’s doctors in the head, although he survived.

Dr Ahmed Moghrabi described on Instagram “hundreds” of quadcopters descending on the Nasser hospital in the third week of February and ordering people to evacuate the compound before killing a number of them. On another occasion, he filmed quadcopters giving instructions to Palestinians to leave the area.

Although the Israeli military has previously deployed quadcopters for intelligence gathering, this appears to be the first time that versions of the drone able to fire guns have been used against the Palestinians.

Prof Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon and who was recently elected rector of the University of Glasgow, told Mondoweiss, a leftwing Israel-Palestine news site, that working at the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City “we were getting a lot of people shot by these quadcopters, these drones that have sniper guns attached to them”.

Abu-Sittah, who has operated on Palestinians wounded by Israeli sharpshooters during visits to Gaza in earlier years, described the quadcopters as firing “single high-velocity” shots.

“We have received over 20 chest and neck gunshot wounds fired from Israeli Quadcopter drones [] a low flying sniper drone,” he wrote on X.

Quadcopter killings documented by Euro-Med Monitor include two children shot dead on 21 January when drones opened fire at al-Aqsa University near Khan Younis, where thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering. The following month, a drone shot dead Elyas Abu Jama, a 17-year-old whose family said had mental and physical disabilities, outside his tent in a Rafah displaced persons camp. Euro-Med Monitor said that on the same day, a quadcopter killed 16-year-old Mahmoud al-Assar and his 21-year-old sister, Asmaa.

[One] doctor said he treated five children he believes were shot by snipers []placing of the bullets suggested they were not hit randomly but targeted.

“They were mostly shot in the thorax, the chest area, some in the abdomen. There was one boy shot in the face. As a result he had a shattered jaw. There were two children who had been shot in the chest, young, under the age of 10, who did not survive. Two others, one shot in the abdomen, did survive. They were still recovering in the hospital when I left,” he said.

[]Doctors said that apparent sniper shots also account for numerous amputations and long-term disabilities, made all the worse in children because a bullet often causes more damage to small bodies.

An Israeli group, Breaking the Silence, collected testimonies from IDF soldiers in earlier conflicts who said they shot Palestinian civilians merely because they were where they were not supposed to be even though it was evident they were not combatants.

IDF snipers boasted about shooting unarmed Palestinian protesters, including young people, in the knees during nearly two years of demonstrations at the Gaza border fence from the spring of 2018.

One former Israeli army sniper, who did not want to be named, told the Guardian that the IDF’s open-fire regulations were so broad that a soldier has extensive leeway to shoot at anyone once an area is declared a combat zone.

“The problem is the regulations that enable soldiers who just want to shoot Palestinians. In my experience, most soldiers who pull a trigger only want to kill those who should be killed but there are those who regard all the Arabs as the enemy and find any reason to shoot or no reason at all,” he said, adding that a system of impunity protects such soldiers.

“Even if they are outside the regulations, the system will protect them. The army will cover up. The other soldiers in the unit will not object or they will celebrate another dead Arab.”

Just as ludicrous are the Zionist propaganda lies about its destruction of Gaza’s biggest hospital:

Israeli forces have withdrawn from al-Shifa hospital in Gaza after a two-week raid that left most of the major medical complex in ruins, amid claims from Hamas that the Israel Defense Forces killed 400 people in the compound.

According to the IDF, the facility – Gaza City’s main hospital before the war – was used to harbour Hamas fighters. The army described the operation as one of the most successful of the nearly six-month conflict and cited the killing of 200 militants including senior operatives. The claim they were all militants could not be confirmed.

However, the UN health agency said several hospital patients had died and dozens were put at risk during the raid. Palestinians who fled the facility described days of heavy fighting, mass arrests and forced marches past dead people, while the Hamas-run health ministry described the scale of the destruction inside the complex as “very large”.

Footage showed widespread devastation, with the facility’s main buildings reduced to burned-out husks.

“Dozens of bodies, some of them decomposed, have been recovered from in and around the Al-Shifa medical complex,” the health ministry said, adding the hospital was now “completely out of service”.

Most of Gaza’s hospitals are no longer functioning, the UN has said.

According to a statement by the World Health Organization director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, published on X late on Sunday, at least 21 individuals died during the military operation with more than 100 patients still remaining in the compound, at least 28 in critical condition.

“Among the patients are four children, lacking necessary means of care – no diapers, urine bags, water to clean wounds,” Ghebreyesus wrote. “Many have infected wounds and are dehydrated. Since yesterday only one bottle of water remains for every 15 people.”

Raed al-Nims, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, the Palestinian branch of the humanitarian organisation the International Red Cross and Red Crescent, told Al Jazeera: “The situation is dire. The medical staff, some of them were killed, others tortured, others detained, and above all, they have been besieged for two weeks without any medical supplies or even food or water.”

Nims added: “According to eyewitness accounts and official reports, many of the civilians were executed. They were killed by the Israeli occupation forces, including medical staff, doctors and nurses; they were purposefully executed by the Israeli soldiers.”

The Gaza media office, run by Hamas, said Israeli forces had killed 400 Palestinians around the hospital in Gaza City, including a doctor and her son, also a doctor, and put the medical facility out of use, Reuters reported.

“The occupation destroyed and burned all buildings inside al-Shifa medical complex. They bulldozed the courtyards, burying dozens of bodies of martyrs in the rubble, turning the place into a mass graveyard,” Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Gaza media office, was quoted as saying by Reuters. “This is a crime against humanity.”

These claims are yet to be independently verified.

In a statement, the IDF said its forces had “conducted precise operational activity” at al-Shifa hospital, apprehended about 500 people and “eliminated hundreds of terrorists”.

The IDF said the operation was based on “precise intelligence” and said its forces “found large quantities of weapons, intelligence documents throughout the hospital, encountered terrorists in close-quarters battles and engaged in combat while avoiding harm to the medical staff and patients”.

Rear Adm Daniel Hagari, the top Israeli military spokesperson, said Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad group had established their main northern headquarters inside the hospital, according to the Associated Press.

Hagari blamed the Palestinian militants for the destruction at the facility, saying fighters had barricaded themselves inside the facility. Hagari denied that any civilians had been harmed by Israeli forces, and said the army had evacuated more than 200 of the estimated 300 to 350 patients and delivered food, water and medical supplies to the rest.

Hamas denies using the facility for military ends and accuses Israel of war crimes.

For the moment the “warnings”, being reported in the bourgeois press, by the US Biden administration to Benjamin Netanyahu against “inadequate protection for civilians” in the next planned attack on Rafah – are mostly the sickest of cosmetic gestures while massive arms deliveries continue to pour in:

The US authorized the transfer of thousands of bombs to Israel on the same day Israeli airstrikes killed seven aid workers working for the World Central Kitchen (WCK) in Gaza, the Washington Post reported, citing multiple officials.

The state department approved the transfer of more than 1,000 MK82 500lb bombs, more than 1,000 small-diameter bombs, and fuses for MK80 bombs to Israel, it said. The transfer authorization was also reported by CNN.

According to the Post, a state department confirmed the approval and said it occurred sometime “prior” to when the Israeli aircraft struck the aid convoy. A day after the attack, Joe Biden released a statement that he was “outraged and heartbroken” by the deaths of the aid workers, which included a US-Canada dual citizen.

Last week, the US reportedly authorized the transfer of similar weaponry worth billions of dollars to Israel, including more than 1,800 MK-84 2,000lb bombs and 500 MK-82 500lb bombs.

Washington gives $3.8bn in annual military assistance to Israel, its longtime ally. The latest transfers came from authorizations granted by Congress several years before the Israel-Gaza war began in October, but the US government has the authority to suspend an arms package any time before delivery.

But rising disgust across the world has nevertheless pushed Washington to start leaning more heavily on the Zionists who have (marginally) delayed their next planned phase of their onslaught on the Rafah town area at the southern end of the Gaza strip which a majority of the surviving population has been forced into, cynically declared a “safe zone” for what that is worth for the tens of thousands struggling to survive the winter conditions in thin tents or even just scraps of fabric and plastic and bombed even there.

As repeatedly warned any military attack would have horrific consequences among a debilitated and weakened crowded population.

And some token gestures have been made by a disgruntled Zionism towards opening up entry points into Gaza for some aid trucks though how many are actually getting through a deliberately obstructive Zionist blockade is still not clear – and an increasing number of deaths from outright deliberately imposed famine is already being reported. Even getting food through now will not fully save the population which is so close to starvation death that it needs simultaneous medical help in re-starting to eat – a process which can kill if not controlled carefully for the weakened.

The Washington pressure is not due to any kind of humanitarian concern but because of the great crisis of imperialism is shaking the ruling class to the core, as it faces dismal failures everywhere in its efforts to keep the world in line and disciplined for the relentless exploitation of the rest of the planet that its system lives by.

The warmongering so far has seen defeat, collapse and failure in withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq and potentially a disastrous setback for the Nato war set going by provoking Russia into a preemptive strike against a military buildup two years ago by the nazi-dominated Ukrainian nationalists in Kiev, threatening to hugely escalate the war they had been waging for eight years already against the country’s Russian speaking population (after they were installed in power by the CIA-MI6 organised colour “revolution” built up over years of prior subversion and culminating in the violent Maidan coup in 2014).

And as the EPSR has long explained, the breakdown of its system is accompanied by more and more antagonisms and recriminations, inside the ruling class, and with its stooges.

And those splits are also tearing up the Zionists themselves both inside “Israel” where huge demonstrations are now reflecting discontent and dismay with the extreme rightwing Netanyahu and the even more ultra-right settler lobby (as they were doing over the last two years before the Gaza breakout) and externally throughout the Jewish freemasonry diaspora, as an increasing number of public and entertainment figures have made clear:

Miriam Margolyes has called on Jews around the world to “shout, beg, scream for a ceasefire” in Gaza, saying she was “so ashamed of Israel” for defending its actions in the region.

In a video released via the Jewish Council of Australia, Margolyes, 82, said:

“To me, it seems as if Hitler has won. He’s changed us Jews from being compassionate and caring and do unto others as you would have them do unto you into this vicious, genocidal nationalist nation, pursuing and killing women and children.”

Margolyes – whose film credits include the Harry Potter series and Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence – condemned the actions of Hamas and allies on 7 October, when they took some 250 civilians and soldiers hostage and killed around 1,139 people in terrorist attacks in southern Israel.

Israel retaliated by invading Gaza. The six-month conflict has so far seen more than 33,000 people in Gaza die, according to Gaza Health Ministry figures, and 1.7 million people displaced according to UNRWA. Aid agency UNRWA USA says the region now faces a “man-made famine”.

Margolyes said what was currently occurring in Gaza was “shocking, embarrassing and wicked and I cannot understand why all Jewish people, particularly members of synagogues, do not want immediately to stop what is going on.”

Jews, said Margolyes, should “shout, beg, scream for a ceasefire” in order to do the “right thing”, which she feels “is a ceasefire to stop the killing, certainly to beg and insist on the release of hostages”.

Margolyes did not address comments made by director Jonathan Glazer at the Oscars a month ago, when he said, “We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people” in Gaza and Israel.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) condemned his remarks and hundreds of Jewish Hollywood figures signed an open letter accusing Glazer of “drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination”.

But many others have come to his defence, and last week more than 150 Jewish Hollywood professionals expressed support for Glazer. Signatories including Joaquin Phoenix, Joel Coen, Todd Haynes, Mike Leigh and Nicole Holofcener wrote that they were “alarmed to see some of our colleagues in the industry mischaracterize and denounce his remarks”.

“Their attacks on Glazer are a dangerous distraction from Israel’s escalating military campaign which has already killed over 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza and brought hundreds of thousands to the brink of starvation,” the letter reads. “We grieve for all those who have been killed in Palestine and Israel over too many decades, including the 1,200 Israelis killed in the October 7th Hamas attacks and the 253 hostages taken.”

Two weeks earlier, Angels in America and The Fabelmans writer Tony Kushner also backed Glazer, saying Israel’s policy in Gaza “looks a lot like ethnic cleansing”.

What none of this “liberal” Jewish angst does is take up is the fundamental question at the bottom of the whole horrifying and very public genocide – the notion of the existence of “Israel” itself, which will always stimulate resistance (unless the rebelling people are completely wiped out) as the EPSR has said before eg No1212 09-12-03):

The question never gets debated in the media because the whole of the Western world knows that there is not a single shred of historical justification for the armed establishment of “Israel” in the Palestinian Arabs’ very midst, either then or now.

To any materialist rational-thinking historical judgement, the whole notion of planting a Western armed colony in 1948 right in the heart of the Arab Middle East is simply an utterly insane idea which will become one thing only in due course, — a festering sore of unendable warmongering conflict in the region.

And so it is now proving, exactly as the EPSR has always explained was bound to happen.

[...]Thanks to the naïve philosophical-imbecility of Stalinist Revisionism, [...] the Soviet Union lulled the world into accepting that the now US-led “new world order” (of the same old Western imperialist military domination of the planet, disgraced even more by WWII than it had been by WWI), would henceforth become “safely coexistible-with”.

The limitless warmongering insanity now escalating its grip over the planet, — of which the armed genocidal colonisation of the Palestinian homeland by Western-imperialist Jewish interests is not just a symbolic and typical instance but also now plays a key role, is the outcome of that temporary infantile regression in the steady evolution of world materialist philosophy.

It is precisely in the absurdly deluded shallowness of the stock western view of the post-1945 “new world order” that the Jewish religious-freemasonry interests hope to get away with muddying the clear picture today (of relentless Zionist-fascist aggression to genocidally wipe out the Palestinian homeland) — by labelling its depiction as “anti-semitism”.

If the postwar settlement by the “victorious allies” is now an accepted part of history which can no longer be challenged, — the Marshall Plan to “generously aid European reconstruction”; the establishment of “international law” by the UN; the Western pretence of “peaceful and democratic settlements universally”; etc, etc; — then a classic example of all these supposed benefits for mankind in operation, namely the “generous founding of a homeland for the Jews in the Holy Land to be called ‘Israel’” is to be treated as similarly unassailable History now.

And every devious approach to this subject now tries to pull this same unstated stunt:— “Criticise any act you wish of the Israeli Government, just don’t challenge the right of Israel to exist”.

And every single slander of “anti-semitism” now works itself up into a lather via unstated reference to this assumedly “untouchable” question of “Why should Israel exist at all?”.

Every argument which strays in that direction immediately gets the “anti-semitism” boot right in the face, just as all Palestinian and Arab resistance since 1948 to that armed colonisation of the Palestinian homeland has been getting a boot in the face (and much worse besides).

And these days the argument is not just philosophically suppressed but by state censorship and law (proving only that imperialist ideology is losing the argument and no longer able to hold public opinion).

So while the dismay of the “liberal” Jewish wing is a significant symptom of Zionist-imperialist setback – in fact a defeat inasmuch as the Palestinian uprising is still there and still fighting, despite the staggering “asymmetry” of the “war” (as the Western media misleadingly call it, implying there to be some kind of balance between them and the oppressing forces, one of the most heavily armed and technologically well-equipped in the world) – it still does not challenge the root causes.

Just the opposite; nearly all critics in the Western Jewish freemasonry nevertheless identify with “Israel” and support its existence, (at least 90% as numerous surveys show) and are therefore de facto Zionists, and while they do so remain on the side of Western oppression.

Even more was this shown inside Israel itself where the political opposition of “liberal” Israelis, demonstrating against the extremist settler wing for the last two years, immediately fell into line by joining the “war cabinet” for the blitzing of Gaza.

Only those very small numbers of Jews in modern times who stand for the ending of, and dismantling of the whole “Israel” structure, are not essentially Zionist.

Meanwhile the general rising opposition and mass demonstrations against the Gaza butchery continue, the last in London again bringing 200,000 onto the streets.

These numbers were seen despite the best efforts of Zionist censorship and Western bourgeois news control (through the intelligence agencies, informal establishment pressure, the D-notice system etc) to keep the conflict out of the mainstream media headlines, and play down the full extent of the Zionist atrocities – all failing due to their sheer extent and the modern news “leakage” through the Internet etc. from journalists who continue the brave and determined reports, despite continuing deliberate targeting by the Zionist military killing around 100 so far (yet another contemptuous trampling on the “free speech” and “democracy” pretences hiding bourgeois dictatorship).

Small wonder the Zionists have now passed a new censorship law:

CNN: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to shut down news network Al Jazeera following the passage Monday of a sweeping law allowing the government to ban foreign networks perceived as posing a threat to national security.

Netanyahu said he intended “to act immediately in accordance with the new law” to stop the Qatari-based news outlet’s activity in the country, according to a post on social media platform X following the passage of the law.

Al Jazeera Media Network, which has produced dogged, on the ground reporting of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, slammed the decision in a statement, vowing it would not stop the network from continuing its “bold and professional coverage.”

The new law gives the prime minister and communications minister authority to order the temporary closure of foreign networks operating in Israel – powers that rights groups say could have far-reaching implications on international media coverage of the war in Gaza.

Its approval by Parliament Monday comes months into Israel’s war against Hamas and as Netanyahu faces mounting public pressure – and large public protests – over his handling of operations in Gaza.

Netanyahu’s government has also long complained about Al Jazeera’s operations, alleging anti-Israeli bias.

In his statement on X Monday, the prime minister accused the network of being a trumpet for Hamas and accused it of “actively participating in the October 7 massacre and inciting against IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) soldiers.”

Al Jazeera, which is funded in part by the Qatari government, said these were “slanderous accusations” that “jeopardize” not only the reputation of Al Jazeera but also the safety and rights of its employees worldwide.

But this is no different in fact to the rest of imperialism which has been imposing more and more draconian censorship as its crisis deepens, notably on Russia’s RT network, blocked since the beginning for the Ukraine war, along with the informal self-censorship of the craven bourgeois media.

Meanwhile the fake-“left” all shades fails to draw out the full significance of the conflict and its connections with the rest of imperialist crisis warmongering, most obviously in Ukraine and with the crisis collapse driving it and with the need for rebuilding the deepest Marxist Leninist understanding and perspectives.

Demands for a “ceasefire” might reflect much spontaneous appalled public opinion confronted with the horrors they do see reported but do not take things very far forwards in building any kind of understanding about either the specific conflict in Gaza, in the Middle East or of the overall collapse into imperialist world war everywhere.

To the contrary; they are nothing more than hopeless pacifism that leaves all kinds of questions unanswered – not least where any ceasefire would leave the Palestinian masses, immediately and in the future – obviously no further forwards in getting out from the long oppression and humiliation which has driven their justified struggle in the first place, and in fact much worse off.

Like the suddenly revived notions of a “two-state solution” it is completely unworkable, suggesting the Palestinians should accept a permanent agreement to surrender virtually all of their land – the 80% occupied “legally” and illegally by the Zionists – and by now with the relentless settler programme far more – and an existence of endless second class status, forever under the jackboot of military-Zionist control.

“Stop fighting and we will let you live on a few tiny scraps of rocky and near water free land as permanent second class slaves” is the essence of the deal, as one recent Israeli Zionist offered.

As the settler reaction has more overtly declared than ever before, there is no intention of agreeing any such thing, fanatically determined as it is to takeover everything.

If a ceasefire came with even 10% of the significant concessions needed by the Zionist-imperialist domination to give the Palestinians even a facsimile of “independence” on even a ridiculously tiny concession of a “state” (on fragments of their own land) that would essentially be a defeat for them.

The desperate crisis for all imperialism essentially makes even such a “ceasefire” compromise intolerable to the Zionists as declared because it would leave the resistance intact – and their desperate fear is correct that it will only regroup and deepen even further in understanding, linked more and more with the whole region and with the whole Global South now hugely inflamed by the hatred and anger these blitzings, and hate-assassinations have caused.

The much vaunted strategy of “eliminating Hamas” is completely unrealisable as every rational commentary has stated (where such analysis is able to get out from the blanket smothering of all reason by the ludicrous “anti-semitism” McCarthyism poured out by the ruling circles in imperialism) because it penetrates completely the entire millions strong persecuted people.

Hamas has won massive and growing support because it has led a disciplined armed struggle with more coherence, heroism and organisation than any before.

It is a product of the whole century of oppression of Palestine and their never ending determination to fight back and could only be “eradicated” (as the fascist minded “vermin” thinking language of Zionist domination puts it) by destroying the whole population of Palestine (which the Zionists are now making clear is their intent).

But as the struggle now becomes even wider, merging necessarily with the struggle against world imperialist domination not just in the Arab world, or the more general Middle East but across the planet, its limited religious perspective and puritanism will become less adequate for the giant tasks ahead.

If Hamas militancy and other religious ideology now falters it will be supplanted by a deeper understanding - for which there have already been signs in the secular armed resistance groups which have arisen on the West Bank, and will keep arising however much they are butchered by the Zionists.

At some point despite its militancy and astonishingly brave sacrifice, discipline and determination Hamas will prove inadequate for the task to come, the great revolutionary struggle to overthrow the whole of imperialism.

That is what is posed by this unprecedented Holocaust being visited on Gaza which is now completely intertwined with the imperialist war agenda to escape its intractable and unsolvable crisis.

A “kill them all” policy is the Zionist-imperialist’s only answer, still in train despite the placatory cosmetic “rein it in” comments from Washington to the Zionists to quell the growing disquiet.

For all the placatory flanneling around by Washington about “looking out for the civilian victims” the clear agenda from Washington is to support these monsters all the way.

Biden’s new declaration of total support for Zionism should its warmongering blitz-provocation of Iran’s Syrian embassy lead to any kind of response from Tehran makes this clear.

The bombing of Iran’s embassy is a flagrant breach of all protocols and tantamount to a direct hit on Iran itself, which by any measure constitutes an act of war – which is imperialism’s only strategy for escaping its Catastrophic breakdown.

In other words a fearful world bourgeois has no other answer but universal warmongering making clear the need for a much deeper worldwide revolutionary response.

But the “left” across the board comes nowhere near saying any such things it despite declarations of support for the Hamas fight from many and formalistic statements of its “right” to struggle for national-liberation.

Reliance on the International Court of Justice and the post-war UN etc, by revisionists like the South African Communist Party, or the once-revolutionary Nicaraguan nationalists under Daniel Ortega, to declare “genocide” might be useful propaganda.

But without explaining the fraud of the whole UN racket as the same time it serves to tie the world’s masses back to the great hoodwinking pretence of Western “freedom” and the “rule of law”, - in other words to capitalism, whose breakdown is the cause of all this barbarism.

What the world requires is to rebuild Leninism and the fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat, contradictorily the only real democracy there can be, achieved by revolutionary war against this utterly vile system.

Don Hoskins

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Discussion: Fake-”left” continues to shame itself condemning growing world “terrorist” or “gangland” turmoil like Moscow or Haïti, instead of explaining why it continues to grow, what it represents and what can be done about it – namely developing the Marxist scientific understanding for better revolutionary leadership of spontaneous eruptions of mass hatred and revolt. “Ukraine did it really” theories are an evasive copout.

Fake-“left” blindness to the paralysing intractability of the imperialist Catastrophe continues to miss the symptoms of revolutionary development rising across the world.

The recent bloody Islamist attack on Moscow’s Crocus Concert hall, claimed by the ISIS terrorist group to have been carried out by an Asian offshoot, the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), (despite initial accusations of Ukrainian war connections) and the alleged “gang” violence in Haïti for example both express an underlying hostility to imperialism’s gross exploitation and brutal domination which is finding similar expression all across the world, not the least obviously in the Gaza strip and its barbarically suppressed guerrilla war, and throughout Africa.

And while none are necessarily on a straight (or even a snaking dialectical) path towards the necessary communist future for mankind – and certainly not by the kind of “proper” heroic people’s army approach that makes for nice gazing-into-the-far-distance posters for Islington study walls – they are extremely significant phenomena in a collapsing imperialist world order that is hitting the rocks of the greatest crisis breakdown in all history.

Setbacks for imperialist world tyranny are the critical aspect in all these upheavals however crude, partial or anarchic they might be, with sometimes backward ideas in their heads, and with the tragic consequences for those unjustly caught in the mælstrom (as much a random risk for revolutionaries as anyone else).

Out of defeats for the ruling class, its splits and recriminations as “things go wrong” emerges the possibility for the fight for revolutionary consciousness to begin taking hold, as it must.

But that will not come from any of the fake-“lefts” in various flavours denouncing the terrorists as reactionaries, either deliberately “created” by imperialism, or used and manipulated by them and therefore “serving imperialist purposes”.

It is one-sided petty bourgeois complacency, defeatism and cowardice to write them off as either just “criminality”, or worse still as another form of reaction as the fake-“left” is doing under various pretexts – just as it has joined in the Western “condemnations of terrorism” since 2001’s New York and Pentagon attacks particularly.

Currently the attack on the Crocus Concert Hall in Moscow (tragically killing dozens) is the most complex to grasp, because of complications from the imperialist war with Russia and initial suspicions/accusations by Moscow that it was somehow set up by the Ukrainian nationalist and swastika-toting nazis in Kiev and their Nato backers.

They are capable of any atrocity as shown for example by the early on Odessa trade union building arson killings, deliberately trapping dozens in the fire just after the violent, CIA-engineered, Maidan “colour revolution” coup in 2014 and then eight years of bombarding and killing multiple hundreds of civilians in Ukraine’s eastern Russian speaking provinces, (where the population resisted Ukrainian reactionary nationalist suppression), finally provoking Russia’s “invasion” two years ago by escalating their own Nato-trained troop buildup, forcing Moscow’s hand to protect the Donbass.

But irrespective of any alleged Ukraine war skulduggery and even allegations that it was a completely false operation – accusations of which have been rowed back on by the Vladimir Putin bonapartist leadership since March 22 – the fact remains that it was carried out by a real wing of the ISIS group (which then posted videos).

Even if manipulated, the key element to explain here is why such an ever rising tide of unstoppable Third World hatred for imperialist exploitation and military domination, (including from Russia) exists at all with desperate struggles now spread far and wide across the world and nearly all being fought against by Western forces or stooges.

But the “lefts” variously find ways to condemn the perpetrators as “reactionaries”, not the system which is responsible for producing them, describing the gruesome north Moscow incident as “murderous savagery” etc, with same tone of appalled shock, horror and even in some cases vengeful wishes for terrible retribution (Weekly Worker), –

personally I would like to see them rot to oblivion over a long period in a Siberian penal colony [as] execution would be a mercy

says an unchallenged letter from a WW “democracy” regular, – that dominates media-stampeded petty bourgeois public opinion in the West.

(And unfortunately, so too do the remaining revisionist workers state leaderships, in Beijing, Havana, Pyongyang etc, keeping silent or even participating over years in “anti-terrorism” measures, along with various bourgeoisies, to “maintain stability” (as if there could ever be any stability in the greatest overproduction slump in all history (see economics box , the Communist Manifesto and virtually every other word of Marxist-Leninism)), or actually, as if there ever had been any “stability”, since even the long post-WW2 US-dominated dollar “boomtime” was nothing but colonialist wars and coups for everyone outside the “metropolitan” (i.e. imperialist) countries – and repeated slump crises within.

As one expression of their moralising disapproval some of the pro-Moscow “left” groups have “offered their condolences” to Russia (more genuinely perhaps than similar statements from the Western embassies and diplomats, which are nothing but gross dissembling hypocrisy, particularly in the middle of the non-stop butchery by the Nato-Kiev Nazis, and the blitzings of Gaza, Yemen and Syria).

By all means let there be as much sympathy as possible for the tragic innocent victims and families unjustly and randomly caught in gruesome slaughter.

But such tut-tutting, alongside the Easter pacifist moralising of archbishops and popes, will not only do nothing to stop the growing hatred and desperation of the Third World’s relentlessly driven and tyrannised masses as “austerity” conditions worsen into unsurvivability (as the rising imperialist debt burden is bringing) – and as they are steadily deepening also in even the richest of countries for the proletarian sections – but plays into the hands of the ruling class and its demonising “justifications” for its non-stop war drive to escape its Catastrophic crisis and its “war on terror” crackdowns.

Far from stopping such eruptions their bloody suppression can only make them more likely, as everyone with any rationality at all was warning from the outset of Washington’s demented blitzing and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of 9/11 and has proved the case, with huge recruitment into the “jihadist” movements subsequently, and further transformation into the mass street movements of the 2011 Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, brutally put down with the General Sisi coup and its Cairo slaughter of many hundreds but festering ever since, contained only by the most savage torture and death-sentence arbitrary dictatorship “justice”.

Short-sighted sanctimony and bolstering of imperialism’s lying propaganda about mysterious and inexplicably emerging “evil” forces and “those who would attack ‘our way of life’” – as if that “way of life” were not based on utter tyranny and the most ruthless extraction of value from the labour of billions throughout the planet, along with the wasteful and devastating plunder of their natural resources, ignorantly and callously disregarding the often irreversible and widespread damage done to the environment – is a capitulation by the “lefts” to imperialist stampeded public opinion and appalled petty bourgeois fearfulness of the coming chaos and societal collapse as the world hits the complete paralysis of monopoly capitalism’s slump crisis.

The rise of “terrorism” is one facet of that breakdown, not its cause but a growing class war response. As the EPSR has put it before-

this “terrorism” is nothing but the world socialist revolution in its early, clumsy, own-goal-scoring, teething stages, — expressing, via inevitable, initial, spontaneous, anarcho-individualism, the serious class-war HATRED around the Third 3rd World without which there would never be world socialist revolution. (No1208)

That does not mean adopting or advocating its methods which are not those thought very useful at this stage by Marxist understanding (which puts at the forefront the fight for scientific revolutionary understanding and its development as leadership for a mass class war movement).

But neither does it mean denouncing the struggles that other anti-imperialism is forced into, or thinks to be a way to fight, and least of all declaring them “unacceptable” or “giving imperialism an opportunity for crackdown” as the “lefts” have finked on anarchists like the Black Bloc in various anti-capitalist upheavals for example and as they decried the wave of terrorism and jihadism ever since 9/11 (EPSR No1248 14-09-04).

Over Moscow, most of the “lefts” have been direct in their “condemnation” as they have been for the last 20+ years since the 2001 New York attack and many since, like the London 7/7, the Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo events in Paris and Spain in 2004, cravenly declaring the arbitrary and unjust “selection” of innocent victims to be “the wrong way to fight” or even “impermissible” (neither of which was ever part of Marxist-Leninist understanding as the EPSR spelled out after the WTO/Pentagon plane-hijack suicide crashes – see eg No1106).

Particularly crudely stated among them are the semi-Trot anti-theorists of the SWP who simply declare the jihadists to be “vicious sectarians”, going on virtually to criticise Western imperialism for not making enough of the incident, declaring the ruling class to be “hypocritical” because it has not responded with the usual full range of sanctimonious humbug and pseudo-solidarity displayed in memorial ceremonies and petty bourgeois marches and demonstrations by the “great and good” after other incidents like the Bataclan in Paris.

So eaten up is the West with its hatred for Russia they say, that its bourgeoisies have instead remained relatively muted.

Possibly so, but what is being suggested here – that such previous anti-islamic herding of public sentiment and concomitant “war on terror” rampaging abroad and repression at home is a good thing?

And why has imperialism mobilised public opinion against the ISIS anyway?

The SWP says that:

Isis is itself a legacy of the infernal cycle of imperialist interventions...

The US and British-led destruction of Iraq and their support for groups sowing sectarian divisions, laid the foundations for Isis and others. Those groups helped fill the political void that imperialism created.

But if the West was supporting such groups, why would it bomb and blitz them as it has been doing for years in Syria and Iraq? And why would it be fighting jihadist groups in the Sahel countries like the Niger and Mali, firstly by French troops, now expelled, and currently by the US Africom (though its Niger base is also under pressure from the recent coup leaders and potentially to be replaced by Russian Wagner mercenary forces). And why would it have worked alongside Russia, Iraq and Iran to do so in Syria and Iraq, with the US even entering at least an informal coalition, as the former UN weapons inspector and now well known pro-Russian pundit Scott Ritter has pointed out recently?

If “legacy” is meant in the most general way, as being a result of imperialist oppression, does that not equally apply to the working class?? As Marx said it is the capitalist system which creates its own gravediggers.

Perhaps hostility to imperialism having grown

out of imperialist attempts to dominate Muslim populations in Asia, the Middle East and Africa

they “filled the political void” with hostility for imperialism in fact, and hatred for Putin’s Moscow too:

Those groups helped fill the political void that imperialism created. And Russia’s history of assaults against Muslims will likely have contributed to the attack.

Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute, told the Al Jazeera news network that Isis-K uses examples of Russian oppression of Muslims in its communications.

“The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan” and “Russian actions in Chechnya” mean that “Russian foreign policy has been one big red flag,” he said.

The Russian state has committed atrocities in Chechnya—a primarily Muslim area currently under Russian rule.

In the 1990s, it led bloody colonial wars against Chechnya after the republic declared independence. To enable this slaughter, the state has long used Islamophobia to dehumanise the Chechen people, proclaiming them “the enemy within”..

It also led a second bloody war after Putin’s ascendancy, settled only by bribing a brutal pro-Moscow wing of the Chechens under the near warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, still in power.

And what political “void” anyway? Imperialism does not create political voids, it fills everything with its own bourgeois ideology pumping out anti-communism from morning to night, and from birth to death, all capitulated to by such petty bourgeois shallowness as Trotskyism.

The real “political void” is that left in the international class struggle by Revisionism, a deficit begun in the 1920s by Stalin’s steady philosophical retreat from Lenin’s Marxist Bolshevism.

Despite the brilliant and determined struggle to build the Soviet Union’s workers state, – which he led with such success that it could not only out manoeuvre and then fight off the great German Nazi anti-Soviet onslaught of WW2, built up by all imperialism in the 1930s (which encouraged Hitlerism), but completely destroyed it, going on to inspire the huge wave of anti-imperialist and communist struggles post-WW2, – Moscow sank deeper and deeper into permanent peaceful coexistence delusions after WW2, following Stalin’s lead as spelt out in his 1952 Economic Problems book.

Even as the Soviet state made further stunning advances in many fields (culture, social conditions, industry, military and science, including putting the first man into space), bureaucratic complacency and revisionist confusion continued, until under Mikhail Gorbachev it spiralled into the idiotic liquidation of the workers state in favour of deluded and complacent fantasies about the “free market” (see EPSR Books Vol 13 Gorbachevism and Vol 20 Unanswered Polemics against Stalinist revisionism).

Endless prior decades of poisonous Trotskyist hostility from the likes of the SWP, and permanent “peaceful coexistence” brainrot, facilitated this abandoning of the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1991, leaving the “void” it now whinges on about without a word of remorse or explanation, after backing nonstop such counter-revolutionary stunts as the bogus “trade union” Solidarnosc in Poland, which helped “overthrow” the Soviet Union (in fact idiotically self-liquidating).

And what is left? Some 35 years of total reaction in Warsaw (and most of east Europe) including the latest government under Donald Tusk now taking the lead in whipping up further war fever in Europe with hysterical and panicked nonsense about the “Russian threat”, alongside assorted UK generals, French presidents, Tory ministers like Grant Shapps and even the Swedish Defence minister recently, all demanding Nato arms build-ups and stampeding public opinion behind the absurd (but still dangerous) notion of a “pre-war” situation now prevailing in Europe, with one ex-MI6 spy spook chief even floating the idea of “re-introducing conscription” to keep imperialism’s warmongering on the boil. Good luck with that.

It is not the Russian bogeyman which is the “war threat” of course, but imperialism itself, (albeit that includes Russia) which needs and is constantly creating war, exactly as it has deliberately set it going in Europe, in Ukraine, to escape Catastrophe (and for the US to knock down all economic rivalry, especially German industry, as its NordStream sabotage demonstrated).

But those few “left” groups who correctly stood against the Nato warmongering and its proxy stooges in Ukraine (Stalinists like the Lalkar/Proletarian CPGB-ML, the NCP, one or two small Trotskyist groups and George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain) cause just as much confusion for workers.

They instantly followed Vladimir Putin’s dishonest bonapartist excuse-making to declare this tragedy to be “obviously a set-up job by Ukrainian intelligence” and, going further, “almost certainly guided by the US and UK”.

Now, as mentioned, it is not impossible that the hard pressed Kievite Nazis, currently losing the conflict with Russia all along the line and possibly teetering on the edge of complete military implosion, might have had some hand in this – with or without the Nato military and Western intelligence agencies pulling their strings (in fact Nato might have actually have been against such an operation on grounds of preventing too much of a spilling over of the war from Ukraine itself, as they have plotted from the start).

But given that an enormous jihadist wave has swept across the world for two decades, it makes much more sense to treat it at face value, as already discussed.

Insisting that the attack “has to be” the West, has far more to do with justifying a retreat from holding to a revolutionary position by these “pro-Russian” groups and a wish to stay with the mainstream public opinion, than any coherent exposure of Western skulduggery.

It has the convenient effect of allowing them to condemn the terrorist “outrage” and the “terrorists” but more obliquely: instead of denouncing the jihadists for the attacks, they can safely blame imperialist reaction and its Nazi-proxies in Kiev as being “responsible”.

In just this way they blamed imperialism after the World Trade Centre and Pentagon hijack-plane attacks by adopting the barmy conspiracy theories, circulated ever since (possibly even by the CIA itself), which declare 9/11 to have been “all organised by the CIA”.

These pro-Russian groups are sufficiently aware to have avoided the craven capitulations of opportunist TUC/Labourism and the majority “left” to the NATO warmongering stampeded in 2022 (on a par in treachery to that of the Second International in 1914, abandoning all the principles of the 1912 Basle Declaration against imperialist war, to vote for their own bourgeoisies’ chauvinist war aims with only a few from Lenin’s Bolsheviks and small Serbian and Hungarian groups standing against them).

Undoubtedly these few groups, are also aware enough of growing worldwide anti-imperialist sentiment taking various muslim and non-muslim forms, not to want to be seen condemning these latest attackers per se, knowing that many of the oppressed in the exploited world have little else to fight with except terrorism.

To condemn all such guerrilla war upheaval, however crude it might be, would expose their opportunism as the EPSR said of them two decades ago in the aftermath of the planes flown into the World Trade Centre:

These conspiracy fantasies are just a sly way for petty bourgeois Revisionist mentalities (which like posturing very ‘left’) to conform with the rest of middle-class public opinion in ‘condemning’ Sept 11 but while giving the appearance of not doing so, – or not doing so quite in the same way because what is being condemned is not a DIY anarcho-terrorist spontaneous revolt (which some fake-‘lefts’ might find it embarrassing to condemn, being aware (usually because of the EPSR) of at least some of the rudimentary ABCs of Marxism-Leninism on such subjects) but yet another dastardly CIA plot. (EPSR No1123 12-02-02).

They will also realise that the rising rebellion in the Middle East against the Zionist-imperialist landtheft occupation and suppression of the entire region with its non-stop blitzing raids, bombings, missilings and now the deliberate all-out genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza, throws an even starker light on “condemnations” particularly as the Hamas leadership of the Palestinian resistance is declared a “terrorist” organisation by Zionism’s main backers, the US and Britain.

Pulling together flimsy points of mechanical logic and supposition, and scraping together fragments of circumstantial evidence, such as the “use of the left hand” to make the Islamic oath in the pre-incident video by the alleged ISIS perpetrators (declared to be definitive proof of a “false flag” operation), or the “very telling speed with which the West instantly denied any responsibility” does not make the case at all.

Just the opposite. It is more likely that a much more fundamental class reality was being expressed, (or rather sensed) by Western imperialism, of hostility to the raw anti-imperialist content in the crude terrorist outburst.

It can be speculated that basic capitalist class position against this potentially revolutionary outburst is shared with Russia’s oligarch serving regime by at least some sections of the Western bourgeoisie causing it to hold back, and temporarily at least overriding the inter-imperialist antagonism of the Ukraine war being waged.

Putinism has a long history of apeing the West’s “war on terror” in Georgia, Chechnya, and especially in Syria (working with the US to some extent in shared airspace collaboration etc) as well most recently in backing up the Kazakhstan oligarch government against the oil strike and street uprising there prior to Ukraine.

Western declarations of non-involvement are just as likely to reflect general class interest as confirm a supposed Western hand in the Crocus Hall event.

If there is anything in such a speculation, it would not be picked up by these revisionist orientated groups because of their outright support for Russia in the war, itself built on a hopeless misanalysis (sophistry) of the nature of Putin’s Russia.

Aware of the imperialist drive to dominate the world, intensified by the growing crisis, they at least understand that the need is to stand against the US empire and Nato warmongering.

But how could that be possible they posit, if Russia is also an imperialist power (as it clearly has become following the capitalist restoration that was let in by the late 1980s Gorbachevite liquidation of the Soviet workers state (the final, counter-revolutionary, transformation of decades of bureaucratic revisionist complacency/retreat stretching all the way back to early retreats from Leninism in the 1920s))?

Surely the Leninist principles advanced during the 1914-18 war, of a plague on both their houses, with the working class on both sides calling for defeat for its own ruling class, and turning the guns on its own ruling class to transform the situation into revolutionary civil war – would have to apply??

And just such a line has been invoked by the more “sophisticated” “left” capitulators like the Weekly Worker CPGB frauds, but only to completely distort its meaning, declaring that since this is an inter-imperialist war they can ignore it because the “main enemy is at home”.

Lenin is used as a sly evasion, to essentially wash their hands of the war, pretending this means “concentrating on domestic struggle”.

Lenin’s meaning is utterly different. It says conscious workers should pay full attention to the international struggle, but far from supporting “their nation” should call for defeat of their own ruling class – in this case meaning defeat for NATO and its Kiev stoogery.

The pro-Russian CPGB-ML and their anti-NATO allies clearly are groping towards a defeat for Nato position, but are completely stuck by the reality that restored Russia is an imperialist power and Putin’s bonapartist regime services the interests of its billionaire oligarch exploiters.

So they simply deny the imperialist nature of Putin’s Great Russian nationalism and pretend it is some kind of “non-imperialist” capitalism, making it allowable to offer support to what is declared to be “anti-imperialist bourgeois nationalism”.

Some elaborate mind-bending has been required to establish this notion based on a completely non-dialectical reading of Lenin’s vital analysis in Imperialism- the highest stage of capitalism , using the characteristics he adduced as the defining elements of newly emerged monopoly-capitalism, (imperialism as Marxism defines it), which became the overridingly dominant form of capitalism after approximately 1900, as if they were a checklist of necessary conditions to be an imperialist.

This nonsensical mechanical application of a living dialectical analysis of constantly developing, fluidly bounded reality, is founded in wishful thinking and denial, ignoring the ruthless capitalist nature of the oligarchs and their exploitation of both the Russian working class and the multiple nations that make up the Russian federation, as well as externally (including Chechnya as the SWP manages to say).

The oligarchs are not like other billionaires it is ludicrously maintained because they don’t invest as such, (export capital) but just indulge in ultra-luxury purchases like super-yachts and football clubs. Not so, as the latest bourgeois press reports indicate:

The UK government faces an “extraordinary” $1bn damages claim, a court has been told, in a lawsuit brought by a mining company that has been bankrolled by Russian banks targeted by sanctions.

ENRC, the UK-based arm of a global mining conglomerate belonging to oligarchs, is seeking compensation for losses it claims it suffered as a result of a decade-long Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigation that was dropped last year, according to court documents.

A judge ruled in December that the fraud and corruption investigation was launched as a result of “the SFO’s wrongdoing” and that this resulted in unnecessary costs for the mining company.

The SFO is seeking permission to appeal against that judgment. In a filing to the high court on Monday, the anti-corruption agency said “it appears ENRC will contend that losses” were in the region of $1bn, an amount the agency describes as “extraordinary”.

[...]ENRC’s latest accounts, filed last September, name the state-owned Russian banks Sberbank and VTB as “major lenders” to ENRC’s Luxembourg-based parent company.

Both banks are controlled by Vladimir Putin’s regime. They were placed under UK and other sanctions after his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Founded by three oligarchs from the former Soviet Union known as “the Trio”, ENRC floated in London in 2007 and was worth £20bn at its peak, gaining a place on the FTSE-100 list of the UK’s most valuable companies.

After the SFO launched its criminal investigation, the Trio bought back the ENRC shares they had sold on the London Stock Exchange, taking the company private. They shifted the corporate headquarters to Luxembourg, folding ENRC into their new Eurasian Resources Group.

And the activities of Russian mercenary enterprise Wagner across Africa, with complex commercial tie-ups tell a similar story.

Even were Putin’s Russia to be comparable to a bourgeois nationalist regime there still would be nothing Leninist in supporting it as such, just as there was nothing Leninist in supporting the thuggish Saddam Hussein, or the dire revisionist nationalist Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia as the EPSR has repeatedly explained.

Let attacks on them fall flat on their face, but solely defeat for imperialism was the crucial call to make while not giving any credence at all to such untrustworthy and opportunist elements.

They needed toppling by revolution just as all capitalism does, but with the caveat that making that call during an imperialist onslaught would have been pointlessly damaging.

Putinism and the oligarch class – bourgeois monopolists, – equally need to be overturned but not by Western imperialism.

For the Ukraine war the EPSR has fought to understand that a similar understanding can apply to Russia despite its restorationist imperialist nature because the century of ever more intensified concentration of imperialist monopoly industry and finance has led to such a vast imbalance in sides that the defeat-for-all principle can be tempered (to some extent).

All such principles are relative and need to be assessed keeping in mind the need to defeat and end the rotten-ripe imperialist system as the overriding priority.

And as the EPSR has maintained since February 2022, defeat for the croaking little green fascist toad Zelensky’s stoogery and the NATO-imperialism pulling his strings is the call to make now.

Russia is a wannabee third tier imperialist at best, completely on a different scale to Western imperialism albeit big enough and advanced enough to be a virtually indigestible mouthful for US imperialism to take on (which has had huge problems even with somewhere as small as Iraq and even dirt-poor Afghanistan).

There is now one overwhelming imperialist power and influence on the planet (though wracked with crisis weaknesses) and that is the US empire and the stoogery that goes along with it, notably Britain and the other “Anglo-Saxons” like Canada etc.

Defeat for that influence, the main enemy for the world’s proletarian masses is the overriding consideration but with an even stronger caveat about no credence at all for Putin’s backwardness, and least of all his ridiculous and reactionary Great Russian chauvinism (which even some of the Trots are able to point out actually undermines the coherence of Moscow and its multiple nations).

The further complicating legacy of 70 years of astounding Soviet development certainly lingers on as a significant class influence (and not just as sentimental nostalgia).

Putin’s bonapartist balancing act is forced to take account of it, (which is why he reined back the oligarchs in the first place and why Western counter-revolutionary stunts like the Aleksei Navalny “opposition” go nowhere, being largely for the consumption of Western public opinion to keep playing on the delusions about “democracy” and “freedom”, which petty bourgeois fears of “totalitarianism” (meaning the dictatorship of the proletariat i.e. communism) keep afloat even as the ghastly genocide in Gaza shoots the whole racket full of hypocritical holes.

But equating such historic proletarian influence, and the expression it finds in significant votes for the revisionist communist party, with a return to Sovietism, is hopeless wishful thinking expressing only the continuing confusion and numbing opportunism of Stalinist revisionism effectively treating capitalist Russia as if it were an extension of the Soviet Union.

Worse still it fosters the same chauvinism as that underlying Putin’s worst reactionary Great Russian nonsense, even declaring that the critical questions in the world are those of fighting for “sovereignty” without a word breathed about communism (and quoting Stalin as the authority for it).

Putin’s contempt for Leninism and the Bolshevik revolution is largely centred in this chauvinism and particularly hostile to Lenin’s deep understanding of the rights of nations to self-determination, which he blames for “causing all the trouble” with Chechnya first and now Ukraine.

And that has to be the background in examining the terrorist outburst in the Crocus Hall and whether or not it was ”genuine”. There is certainly a deep resentment both within and around Russia, by “lesser” nationalities at significant racist and chauvinist currents as some of the bourgeois press reports made clear (perhaps spun for their own propaganda purposes, but nevertheless hardly fabrications):

In the aftermath of Russia’s deadliest terrorist attack in over two decades, limited details have emerged regarding the background of the alleged shooters.

Russian authorities have continued to try to tie others to the attack, which killed 139 people, with FSB head Alexander Bortnikov on Tuesday saying he believed Ukraine, the US and Britain were involved.

All four men are Tajik citizens, apparently radicalised and recruited by Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP).

The men were reportedly living in and around Moscow, part of the roughly 1.5 million Tajik migrants who left the poverty and unemployment of their home towns and villages in search of a better future in Russia.

Muhammadsobir Fayzov, 19-year-old stylist at the small barber shop was brought into a courtroom on a gurney, with a catheter attached and one eye injured or missing. He appeared to fade in an out of consciousness.

The eldest defendant is Dalerdzhon Mirzoyev, 32, who may have been living in Russia illegally. He was shown sitting in a glass cage in the courtroom with a black eye and bruised face.

Another alleged shooter, Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda, 30, was apparently unemployed. Registered as a resident in Russia, he could not remember in what city, according to Russian news reports. When he appeared in court, his head was awkwardly bandaged after Russian officers reportedly sawed off one of his ears.

Shamsidin Fariduni, 25, appeared to have had the most stable life of the four suspects. He was registered in Krasnogorsk, the Moscow suburb where the killings took place, and worked in a flooring factory.

Gruesome videos and photographs circulating of their interrogations suggest that the men were tortured. Human rights experts have warned that any of their future statements or confessions could be notoriously untrustworthy.

It is yet unclear when and how exactly the men might have become radicalised and joined ISKP. The radical group, which was founded in 2015 by disaffected members of the Pakistani Taliban, has a long history of recruiting nationals from central Asia, including Tajikistan.

In Russia, the men would have faced the same challenging life as hundreds of thousands of central Asian migrants before them. Lured by salaries several times higher than at home and visa-free entrance, migrants from Tajikistan often live in cramped apartments and dorms, frequently sharing a grim room on the outskirts of Moscow with up to two dozen other workers.

Loathed by many in Russia – anti-migrant attitudes and racist sentiments have long been entrenched in society – migrants also face frequent police searches and arrests.

In one of such raids in January, footage showed police in Moscow forcing a group of Tajik workers to walk while squatting in a stressful position, an incident that caused anger in the Tajik community and led to protests from Tajik officials.

A potent mix of xenophobia, poverty, and discrimination faced by Tajik men in Russia could have served as a fertile ground for recruitment by ISKP.

But their alleged radicalisation could have also happened back home in Tajikistan.

Although its nearly 10 million people are overwhelmingly Muslim, tensions connected to Islam are common in the impoverished central Asian nation.

Islamists were a key opponent during a 1992-97 civil war in which the government killed as many as 150,000 people and devastated the economy. When the war ended, the Tajik president, Emomali Rahmon, took steps to sharply curtail religious freedoms. These included bans on men wearing beards and the closure of hundreds of mosques. In 2017 alone, the beards of approximately 13,000 men were forcibly shaven, some of whom were later detained.

Observers have warned that some of these measures have had a counterproductive effect, with authorities radicalising far more of its citizens than it is reining in.

At least 1,000 Tajiks have become foreign fighters for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. In 2015, a senior Tajik police commander defected to IS, reappearing in a video dressed in black, brandishing a sniper rifle and vowing to bring jihad to Russia and the US.

In Moscow, early signs point to the fact that the Kremlin is unlikely to divert significant resourcing into tackling Islamic extremists, instead laying the groundwork for blaming Ukraine for the attack.

On Monday evening, Putin admitted the terrorist attack was conducted by radical Islamists but reasserted his earlier claims that Ukraine was probably somehow involved in the attack.

Nikolai Patrushev, the powerful secretary of Russia’s security council and a close ally of Putin, on Tuesday went a step further, saying that Ukraine was “of course” behind Friday’s attack on a Moscow concert hall. His words were echoed by the Bortnikov, who said, without evidence, that he “believes” the US, Britain and Ukraine were behind the attack.

“Putin wants to focus on Ukraine, rather than Islamic terrorism,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert in Russian security services. “Possibly precisely because there are no easy answers to tackling central Asian extremism.”

Instead, in the days since the mass killing at the Crocus City concert hall near Moscow, innocent Tajik migrants across Russia have been subjected to threats, verbal abuse and discrimination.

Russia is capitalist, and with significant imperialist aspects. World warmongering is caused by capitalist crisis and cannot be stopped except by the revolutionary struggle to establish workers states.

Islamic terrorism is not the answer to that but denouncing it and playing up to Putin’s excuses and vicious cover-ups is even less so and shamefully.

If such spontaneous revolt is inadequate then Marxist need to put forwards far better revolutionary understanding and fight for the leadership of the masses was Lenin’s reply.

The same applies to the armed uprising in Haïti which has toppled the imperialist interest serving stooge president Ariel Henry, after weeks of rebellion forced his resignation.

The Western media continues to paint this obviously class based civil war as just criminal “gang warfare” in order to justify yet further Western intervention and suppression.

As usual that is dressed up as “restoring democracy” as the laughable phrases from the stooge UN put it, to which the only response can be “you are taking the piss surely?, after a century of brutal and vicious dictatorships propped up by America on top of many direct interventions by American imperialism.

Not least is the cynicism of the UN when its own “peacekeeping” intervention contributed further to popular hatred for the West as the bourgeois press admits:

the...2004-2017 mission... was tarnished by appalling sexual misconduct allegations and the fact that sewage from a UN camp was implicated in a cholera outbreak that killed nearly 10,000 people.

that same mission being anyway a response to the fascist turmoil used to topple reformist “left” president Jean-Baptiste Aristide, “escorted” out by US marines in what was effectively a US backed coup (under cover of “suppressing gangs” - EPSR No1255 02-11-04).

It was not just an “outbreak” of cholera but its introduction into a country free of it before.

That on top of an exceptionally long and brutal history as even the bourgeois press has to admit as this 2023 “analysis” says:

The country has been in a state of electoral and constitutional turmoil since the assassination of the president, Jovenel Moïse, in 2021 at the hands of Colombian mercenaries with unknown paymasters, but the immediate crisis can be traced back further.

Haiti has not held functional elections since 2019 – and the country has been in a fragile state since the 2010 earthquake that killed up to 300,000 people. But Moïse’s death in July 2021 – and a new earthquake the following month – sent the situation spiralling out of control.

Moïse was replaced by an acting president, Ariel Henry, who is unelected and widely viewed as illegitimate. In September, the G9 gang coalition blockaded the main port and fuel terminal after Henry caused fuel prices to double when he announced a cut to fuel subsidies – a development that brought the crisis to new heights. Haiti is now experiencing its worst-ever famine, with 4.7 million people facing acute hunger.

At the same time it is impossible to understand the current situation without acknowledging the dark history of international interventions, including US occupation from 1915-1934, that have blighted Haiti. “Those interventions have shaped Haiti,” Smith said. “There’s a chain-link connection.”

Long before the litany of recent disasters, he said, “the Duvalier dictatorship [the rule of father and son François, or “Papa Doc”, and Jean-Claude, or “Baby Doc”, Duvalier from 1957-1986] destroyed the hopes of a functioning state that serves the nation..”

There is an even deeper history. For generations after independence in 1804, Haiti was saddled with the impact of “reparations” to France – the country that enslaved its people – in some years spending 40% of government revenue on its resulting debts. That burden severely hampered economic growth and the development of robust public services.

In the absence of a functioning state, gangs have filled the void. Port-au-Prince is the centre of a horrific turf war in which there have been prolific kidnappings, many civilian deaths, and gang-rape of elderly people and children, a UN report says.

Gangs have a longstanding role in political life, and have operated in tandem with political actors since the 1950s to intimidate rivals and deliver votes. There are suggestions of oligarchic figures with ties to the drugs trade pulling the strings – but “many of them are not affiliated to anybody”, Smith said.

But this last impressionistic comment is the slimiest of calumnies deliberately conflating a much more complex situation where at least some of the multiple gangs – some who are anarchically criminal – declare a different purpose of standing against the kidnappings, rapes and murder.

Particularly emerging is the G9 coalition led by former policemen Jimmy Chérizier.

Formed in the poorest of Port-au-Pince slum areas it has a potentially revolutionary character, originating in local area councils trying to protect themselves from the anarchic chaos, and at least declares itself to be fighting for the poorest in the population and aiming for revolution against imperialism.

Chérizier may or may not be a demagogue with his declared admiration for Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Thomas Sankaro and Malcolm X, as quoted, –

Over the past five years the Haitian outlaw – who has emerged as the main spokesman for the gang uprising [which] he calls his noble – if bloody – crusade to defend his country’s famished urban poor.

“I’m not a thief. I’m not involved in kidnapping. I’m not a rapist. I’m just carrying out a social fight,” Chérizier told the Associated Press last year while sat outside a bullet-pocked house.

– calling his favela army

“a sociopolitical structure and force that is fighting on behalf of the vulnerable”

– but if that is all he is, then the language he uses still reflects a need to ride what clearly is a revolutionary sentiment fermenting underneath.

And non-stop Western media attempts to rubbish his background with a string of usual unproven and thin “accused of” allegations and guilt by innuendo only suggest the opposite.

And the entire “left” joins in, sneering at the gangs as “being a problem” (for whom exactly???) with once again the implication that there is a “stability” to return to instead of their “reign of terror” etc, the sympathies of all these fearful petty bourgeois immediately lying with the middle class districts in Port-au-Prince and terrified of the actual breakdown of society underway.

Most disgustingly the Weekly Worker CPGB puts forwards a true enough critique about the other fake-“left”s (the few commenting at all) merely offering Trot idealist platitudes such as instructing “the working class to take up a programme of permanent revolution in alliance with class brothers and sisters in the imperialist centres” (just like that presumably!!), but then declaring the problem to be drug running (of which all the “gangs” are guilty it is alleged).

This vile slander sounds little different to CIA propaganda and is compounded by a long rigmarole about the answer being to legalise drugs (bending some Karl Marx strategy on how to fight the British during the the Opium War to lyingly suggest he was in favour of smoking the pipe!!!).

What none of the “lefts” draw attention to is the imperialists’ utter paralysis and fearfulness, unable to control Haïti at all, with all the major players like the US or Canada “declining” to send any forces, as the “anarchy” has erupted, for fear of inflaming the ferment as past interventions have done.

Even Kenya, bizarrely and desperately recruited to send a 1000 strong police “peacekeeping” force keeps hesitating, keen to earn some dollars and kudos but challenged domestically, ostensibly on legal infringement-of-the-constitution grounds but in reality because of revolutionary ferment inside Kenya against a government which is just as undemocratic as anything in Haïti.

And English speaking corruption inside French and creole Haïti seems a recipe for disaster as bourgeois comments suggest:

watchdog groups expressed alarm about the human rights track record of police in Kenya and warned that the force may export its abuse.

Kenyan police have been long accused of killings and torture, including gunning down civilians during the COVID-19 curfew. One local group said officers fatally shot more than 30 people during protests in July, all of them in Kenya’s poorest neighbourhoods.

What a sick mess! Build Leninism. Tony Lee

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