Recent issue
No 1352 26th June 2009
Fake-“left” falls for yet another Western “democracy” subversion stunt in Iran, failing once again to warn the working class of imperialism’s endless intriguing and hostility against Third World anti-imperialism and, more importantly, its driving need to get into war at any cost. The mullahs are no solution to capitalist crisis either but at the moment are the victims of imperialist aggression, the next “rogue state” target for the desperate drive to war which is imperialism’s only “solution” to its overwhelming economic and political crisis collapse, just as Slump depression turned to World War twice already in the last hundred years. Let the working class note carefully the opportunism and failure of these pseudo-revolutionaries and build the vital Leninist party crucial for leadership to end capitalism for good
The Western intelligence stunt of a supposed “peoples’ revolt” in Iran looks as if it is falling flat on its face as it runs into a firm, if sharp enough, anti-imperialist response from the Ayatollahocracy which controls the country – though not before it has dragged much of the fake-”left” along in its wake, cheering on the petty bourgeois frenzy of the Tehran gilded youth.
As they so clearly demonstrated across the board after 9/11 in 2001 and onwards, when the chips are down the fake-”lefts” (Trotskyists and revisionists all) will always show their true colours, lining up with the most reactionary elements like George W Bush’s neo-cons and Blairism, or in this case Brown, Obama, and reactionary presidential US candidate John McCain (not to mention ultra-right Zionist leader Benjamin Netanyahu who has also voiced support for Mousavi’s street demonstrations), to “support freedom and democracy” and join imperialism’s specious crusades against “terrorism” and “rogue states”, all preparing the world for war.
The chorus of their self-satisfied and smug “condemnation” of the entire Third World and its rising struggles against profit domination continues to be deafening.
It is doubly craven now in aiding the imperialist war plans to escape from its dire economic and growing political crisis, which have long had Iran at the top of its list of demonised states being lined up as the next scapegoats for the Iraq and Afghanistan blitzkrieg treatment, warming the world up for the massive inter-imperialist conflicts to come.
The ruling class is desperately aware that catastrophic failure of capitalism, held off for a short while by mountains of new paper dollars, will implode again before long and with multiplied effect from the insane “quantitative easing” which has started up all the old profiteering and bonus grabbing again, escalating even further the cutthroat trade war over collapsing industries already underway which can only end in shooting war between the great monopoly blocs as history showed in 1914 and 1939.
The clamour set up over an outrageously bogus claim of “rigging” in the Iran election, is simply part of the long running plans to set Iran up, which under Bush involved constant talk of invasion and regime change, for which Zionism has carried out actual warplane exercise bombing runs and which are only on the back burner temporarily under Obama because US needs a breathing space after rolling defeats in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
For the ruling class, fresh from its complete cynical exposures of parliamentary corruption to declare a high-moral interest in Middle Eastern “democracy” while continuing to cosy up to barbarically backward Saudi Arabia, the vicious Zionist apartheid contempt for UN resolutions in its genocidal oppression of Palestine, and the gangster-run torturing dictatorship in Egypt (which Obama completely left unmentioned when speaking in Cairo on his recent Middle Eastern tour), is staggering and the more so given that only a week previously the West had been gleefully reporting “success” in the Lebanese elections, so stitched up by heavy handed outside interference that the bourgeois press reports simply referred to the “US and Saudi backed” Christians versus the alleged “Syrian backed” Hizbollah:
Isolated voting booths, indelible ink and a voter education campaign launched by the interior ministry made the elections a significant improvement on 2005, with turnout averaging more than 50%.
The vote pitted a moderate Sunni-led government, supported by the west, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, against an opposition led by Hezbollah, the Middle East’s most powerful militant group, which fought Israel in the devastating 2006 war and is financed by Iran’s Shia government.
Presidential elections will take place in Iran on Friday and fears about growing Iranian influence were evident in some Lebanese voters. “My main concern is for the army to be the only ones to carry arms,” said Georges Abdo, a Christian hairdresser who voted for the current ruling coalition. Such fears were dismissed by voters supporting the Hezbollah-led coalition. “We don’t listen to everything Hezbollah says,” said Harout Vartanian, a 30-year-old Armenian kung-fu champion who said he was voting with the opposition in order to secure his community’s representation in cabinet.
There were widespread reports of vote-buying before the poll, with some Lebanese expatriates being offered free air tickets home. Though voting passed off largely without incident, tensions in the capital and the battleground Christian towns remained high, with the army imposing a midnight curfew on the capital.
“Democracy is a blessing we must preserve, a blessing that distinguishes Lebanon in the Middle East,” said President Michel Suleiman after voting in his home town of Amchit, north of Beirut. He urged Lebanese to vote “calmly and with joy”.
So “freedom” for the West means the “freedom” to fund and swamp the vote in a small country with the billions available from (non-elected) Saudi princes and the US itself, the only reality there has even been for “democracy” as was well understood by the Bolsheviks more than a century ago.
That does not stop the “fake “lefts” going along with the entire charade.
From long before 9/11, fake-“left” shallow impressionism and relentless petty bourgeois class orientation means they have fallen for every “populist” racket in the book, stampeded by the CIA, MI6 and the capitalist press lie machine working overtime.
It might have been thought they could work it out by now, after a stream of “colour” coordinated “revolutions” have come and gone in eastern Europe, all stirring as much monstrous petit bourgeois nazi-flavoured nastiness as possible and, where successful, rapidly degenerating into the foulest of Western stoogery and reaction.
Across the entire spectrum of East European anti-communist “popular revolts” for “democracy” in the 1980s, starting with the theatrics of the Vatican and US billion dollar-funded Solidarnosc pseudo-”trade union” movement in Poland, to the slickly organised “designer” colour-coordinated “Rose” revolutions in Georgia, “Orange” petty bourgeois “pro-Europe” (ie pro-capitalist) revolt in Ukraine, and the failed “saffron”-feudal oppressive monk demonstrations in Burma, these movements have all turned into outright stooges for the West, opening the doors for wholesale privatisation and carpet-bagging financial plundering, stepped-up worker exploitation (with long established social provision and conditions decimated), backward racist and reactionary social policy, celebration of the Nazi-collaborations of the Second World War (official in most of East Europe from Latvia to Poland), and collaboration with US (and Zionist) military and intelligence activities.
Most have ended up stooging their participation in the West’s escalating crisis warmongering by sending troops to the torture and civilian-blitzing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, setting up anti-Russian missile bases etc and carrying out Western (and Zionist) coordinated military exercises and training with a provocative aggressive agenda, as in Georgia for example.
Many of the regimes established by these bogus “popular democratic” street revolts, have also been revealed as willing collaborators in the secret network of torture and prison camps which, it has slowly leaked out, the CIA runs across the planet for its hidden nighttime prisoner “renditions” (another word for “disappearings” notorious from Latin America) to brutal interrogation and torture.
They were the counter-revolution par excellence in other words.
They are all part of the anti-communist subversion and endless dirty war manipulation of capitalism to push back and suppress any socialist progress made by the working class against imperialism or even, in the last revisionist confused decades, the broader and simpler anti-imperialist movements of the Third World which have gathered momentum as the relentless oppression and exploitation of imperialism has become ever more intolerable to a developing mass population of the world.
Most of the well-honed subversion techniques, practiced later on regimes like Mugabe’s ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, on Burma or Tibet, on Chávez’s populist leftism in Venezuela (during the coup of 2002 e.g), or constantly against the indigenous people’s leftism of Bolivia’s Evo Morales, are all glaringly obvious in Iran. Set up a torrent of Western “free market” pro-democracy propaganda as an election falls due, with a completely specious “expectation” created of a victory for some middle-class based movement and innuendo of possible “vote rigging” to come, and then drench the airwaves in indignation and feigned “outrage” when, unsurprisingly, the result does not happen.
It follows a pattern exactly as against Zimbabwe, as a few tiny admissions in the bourgeois press made clear, buried away in side interviews on the BBC’s Newsnight programme (days into the hysterical campaign) or at the end of pages of otherwise relentless demonisation in the newspapers.
Two tiny last paragraphs at the end of screeds of floridly emotive and inflammatory stuff about “they came to demand justice” and the repetition of outrageous claims about a “victory for Mousavi” appeared in the Guardian for example, after days of frenzy, even then only as a small side article repeating completely spurious voting estimates by the “opposition” knowingly recorded as highly suspect but set out in authoritative looking tables anyway. Then, buried at the bottom, the key admission:
Nate Silver, a respected US political analyst, concluded: “The statistical evidence is intriguing but, ultimately, inconclusive.” [referring to the specious statistics of a middle-class Mousevi victory].
Two US think tank analysts said today that the official results were consistent with an independent telephone poll they conducted three weeks before the vote, which showed Ahmadinejad leading by a two to one margin.
Ken Ballen, the president of Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, which studies attitudes toward extremism, and Patrick Doherty, of the New America Foundation, wrote in today’s Washington Post: “While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad’s principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran’s provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead”.
But contrary to all journalistic basic training, which teaches never to repeat what “a man told me in the pub” without extensive checking and verification (or the modern equivalent, of what is on assorted web sites), the first part of the story is a stream of supposition, which drowns out the authoritative academics before their views are reached:
Amid a swirl of rumour, two alternative sets of statistics purporting to represent the reformist presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi as the “true” winner of Iran’s disputed presidential election have been circulating in Tehran.
Their authenticity is impossible to gauge. One set, attributed to an “informed source” in the interior ministry and appearing on Iranian opposition websites, shows Mousavi winning 21.3m votes, or 57.2% of the total – enough to give him outright victory without a second-round run-off.
According to these figures, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won 10.5m votes (28%). The two other candidates, Mohsen Rezai and Mehdi Karroubi, are reported as gaining 2.7m (7.2%) and 2.2m (6%) respectively.
In contrast to the official result, the figures also report 600,000 spoilt ballots. Unusually, the interior ministry’s official announcement made no mention of invalid votes.
The unofficial figures also record a different turnout statistic – 81% (37.4m) in contrast to the 85% given by the government.
The figures have been accompanied by claims from unnamed interior ministry sources that fake statistics were fed into a software program and then distributed to vote counts among polling stations to produce a plausible outcome. The same sources have also claimed that the interior ministry’s statements announcing the results were prepared before Friday night’s count.
Another – and arguably less plausible – set of statistics has been announced by a reformist former MP, Ebrahim Amini, now an adviser to Karroubi.
Putting the total number of participants at just over 42m, the figures show Ahmadinejad in third place, with the breakdown is as follows:
Mousavi: 19,075,623
Karroubi: 13,387,104
Ahmadinejad: 5,698,417
Rezai: 3,754,218
The competing statistics illustrate how difficult it could be to get a final result that will be accepted as authoritative. But suspicions of how the official outcome was arrived at may endure.
The Iranian website Balatarin posted an email said to be from an internet inspector in charge of six polling stations. It alleged that software had been rigged to register ineligible votes, including ones cast by children, dead people or by the same individual several times.
Last week, a group of interior ministry employees wrote to senior officials, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, claiming that the statistics for eligible electors had been deliberately understated at 46.3m rather than 51.2m. The ministry then printed 58m ballot papers, the letter alleged, paving the way for possible fraud.
Voting analysts have been pointing to surprising elements of the official results when broken down region by region. In the western province of Lorestan for example, conservative candidates in the 2005 election won only 20%, yet Ahmadinejad supposedly won 71% on Friday.
“Suspicions may endure” is precisely the intention of reporting these “facts” in this sophisticated and knowing way, so that when things die down and the actual figures are released, the impression is already stuck in the public mind of something else.
It is no small side matter when the entire revolt is built around the premise that “we wuzz robbed” with all the turmoil following as a consequence.
To say that such statistics circulate might at a pinch be declared “valid reporting” but even then only when underlining, as one Iranian student interviewed this week on BBC’s Today programme naïvely declared, that the main source of information is “the BBC and the Voice of America because you can trust them and they believe in people”.(!!)
“Coincidentally” it happens that the BBC Persian language service was only set up six months ago, funded with £15M of BBC licence (ie working class public tax) money.
Such a tide of rumour mongering, reports from “diplomatic sources” (code for Western intelligence) and “unconfirmed witness accounts” that “cannot be substantiated at this stage” has long been a key weapon of Western propaganda followed with ever more lurid exaggerations, aiming if possible to provoke violence and inflame hothead elements in the confusion and uncertainty, so that eventually there can be some real “incidents” to build on.
All is larded with “authoritative” analysis declaring that the opposition is “ready to go out on the streets today” and will be “in the hundreds of thousands” – reported in advance of the actual events entirely without substance except for the “authority” of the BBC.
All government and official statements meanwhile are sneered at and disparaged, often with the supposedly “killer” phrase that the comments come from “state run” TV or “conservative” newspapers, a staggering hypocrisy from the “state run” BBC or the billionaire controlled national newspaper press in Britain and the US.
It is not analysis but incitement.
It is a monstrous knowing Goebbels lie for Labour Foreign Secretary Miliband to deny British and US interference and involvement.
Imperialism is up to its elbows, the means by which it has controlled and exploited the world for centuries.
In the most extreme cases, as was reported for the Caracas middle-class counter-revolutionary putsch attempt against Hugo Chávez, things might even be “helped along” with some judicious placed snipers and provoked violence - and Tehran has alleged exactly that.
It is not ruled out especially as the US has long been funding numerous anti-regime covert organisations and external sabotage, most all from the huge occupation force across the border in Iraq.
One of the most notorious of past set-ups is the entire Western coordinated fabrication of a “massacre” in Tian An Men, in Beijing in 1989 with supposedly as many as ten thousand “innocent demonstrators” gunned down and mangled by tanks in the great central city square - all repeated again by innuendo in the “20th anniversary remembrances” which have been dutifully rolled out this month to reinforce the anti-communist impressions left by the outright lies of the time (with a few carefully hedged, low-key, buried away admissions in the background that “actually only a few hundred” deaths happened and that those were in demonstrator-provoked skirmishes around, and not in the square at all.)
The lies were palpable and exposable as the EPSR analysed in detail over the six weeks of the West’s destabilisation campaign in 1989, demonstrating that the crudities of the Nazi Goebbels Big Lie technique have got nothing on the sixty years of propaganda refinement, sophisticated spin trickery and truth-bending perfected by dominant US and sidekick British imperialism in particular, though used by the entire Western imperialist order in general (see extended quote in archive box page 5 onwards, and full account in EPSR [ILWP] Book 16).
The “crack-down”, if the state forces are firm minded enough and eventually take action to prevent matters going out of control, can then be painted in lurid colours implying some grotesque cold-blooded barbarity and a general sense of inhuman bloodlust and “tyranny”, the same deranged perspective which Western anti-communism has pumped out on every cultural channel for the last 60 years, of an apparently monstrous and inhumane “totalitarianism” which is more or less arbitrarily brutal, violent and above all completely uninterested in the fate or lives of its masses.
It is utter deranged, brainwashing nonsense.
So why would anyone have gone to all that trouble, sacrifice and pain, decades of isolation and exile and despair, to make and lead revolutions and build a new society altogether if what they really wanted was to behave just like imperialism routinely does in its exploitation and warmongering (intrinsic to the production for profit system)?
There are plenty of far quicker “routes to the top” for the truly ruthless in capitalism (mafia criminality, cynical bourgeois politics, cut-throat business wheeler-dealing, etc etc) without the enormous complications of devising and sustaining a deeply-studied, constantly evolving and working class sympathetic philosophy which is coherent, objectively accurate and above all revolutionary, and which rings so true (because it is) to the ordinary exploited proletariat and workers that it can mobilise and motivate giant spontaneous mass movements of struggle and bitter sacrifice on a world shattering scale, from the initial heroically triumphant Soviet Revolution to the titanic Second World war fights which defended it and eventually pushed imperialism’s most barbaric Nazi aspect back into the mud, at a cost of something like 25 million - 25 million Soviet civilian and militarily sacrificed - lives.
A worldwide wave of anti-colonialism, communist rebellions, national liberation has followed since.
A philosophy that is soundly class based and real is no easy matter to invent for shallow, cynical, self-seeking manipulation as insanely suggested by imperialism – just ask the endless varieties of fake-“left” Trotskyists, labourite reformists and assorted shades of revisionism whose academic and windbagging “theories” about “perfect revolutions” and “working class democracy” and elaborate party programmes and constitutions, have gone absolutely nowhere for 100 years, least of all mobilising and stimulating any revolution anywhere, the only answer to the constant return of slump disaster and war destruction inherent in capitalism.
As always the bourgeoisie throws out as an accusation against others, just what it is doing itself – the great fraud of bourgeois parliamentary democracy being perhaps the greatest cynical power-control confidence trick in history, covering over the dictatorship and manipulation of the ruling class which calls all the shots in reality to sustain its endless greed and exploitation.
Despite bureaucratic revisionist complacency, the opportunist carpet-baggers and corrupt degeneracy in the Soviet Union (money grabbing gangster oligarchs etc) only really emerged when capitalism finally got the chance push back the dictatorship of the proletariat and in 1989/90, re-establish private ownership of the factories and farms, banks and mines, replacing the powerfully defended workers state, let go by the fatuous shallowness of the Gorbachevite retreat from Marxism, itself the end point of a decades long retreat from fighting for the difficult and complex revolutionary understanding in the teeth of the constant counter-revolutionary subversion by the West.
China fortunately retained enough of the revolutionary momentum from its own gigantic struggle of the 1930-40s against rotten and foul inhumane imperialist oppression and “coolie” exploitation, and the final victory of Mao-led communist forces in 1949, to hold firm despite the illusions of revisionism in “peaceful roads” and the “containment of imperialism” being just as rife in Beijing as they were in Moscow, then and now.
Almost despite itself, after weeks of prevarication, (not as the tailending revisionist and unscientific opportunist sycophancy of the CPGB-ML puts it, with “firm resolve”) it finally moved to shut down the obvious counter-revolutionary challenge to its authority symbolised by the in-your-face pro-US imperialism display of the Statue of Liberty graven image mock-up.
As the EPSR said at the time (ILWP [now EPSR] Bulletin 499) :
...the imperialist intelligence agencies have done their homework well, and know what a great stampeding effect can be had on shallow Philistine opinion by the hysteria surrounding an alleged ‘massacre’.
This combination of rumour-mongering deception, of emotional subjectivism, and of played-upon philosophical individualism has proved to be a viciously destabilising cocktail on softheaded spontaneous Western ‘public opinion’ ever since the earliest Western propaganda about Bolshevik ‘atrocities’ and particularly from the notorious Kronstadt ‘massacre’ incident onwards. The anti-Leninist Philistinism of the ‘left’ swamp’s hostility to theory has never looked back, - reinforced in the late 1920s and 1930s by Trotsky’s re-cast ‘Marxist’ denunciation of the proletarian dictatorship strength of the worlds first workers state.
Every anti-Leninist ignoramus on the ‘left’ in the West hates every mention of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and spends the whole time going round in circles trying to deny the very existence of this core of Marxism-Leninism, and its touchstone role for anyone claiming to be ‘Marxist’.
It is this hatred of the dictatorship of the proletariat which every ‘left’ in Britain and the West automatically has in common instantly with every anti-communist dissident in the workers states without even thinking whether they are reactionary dissidents or allegedly ‘progressive’,- as the RCP openly admitted (see last weeks Bulletin),- and even with every subversive disruption by Western imperialist intelligence no matter how reactionary and grotesque.
The CIA’s vicious longterm and short-term anti-Soviet strategies absolutely count on the ‘left’ spontaneous petty-bourgeois ‘revolutionaries’ in the West always automatically lining up first behind any and every anti-communist stunt or major provocation that has ever been unleashed, - such is the hatred of the dictatorship of the proletariat among the un-Leninist ignorant middle class.
Tehran is not China, which for all its (severe) revisionist flaws remains a workers state, and the sometime medieval religious ideology of the Ayatollahocracy is not only not scientific Marxism but hostile to communism (or even the revisionist retrenchment of Beijing), as well as deeply confused about using and trusting the “democratic” mechanisms, which allows much of the subversion and provocation to develop in the first place.
It does not have a class based understanding of the forward progress of humanity and therefore of the real interests at work – precisely now exposed in the split between the poorer masses and the wealthy north Tehran middle class.
But as far as Marxism is concerned the overwhelming aspect of the Iranian stunt remains the arrogance and viciousness of imperialism towards any resistance to its world domination, and the more so as the capitalist ruling order feels increasingly threatened by its own slump catastrophe and the loss of confidence and will that is causing.
There is no question of supporting religious Islam but every reason to wish for and urge the defeat of imperialism and its skulduggery, including, if that is how events are unfolding, by the Mullahs.
This is exactly the philosophy of the Bolsheviks in August 1917 when confronted with the reactionary coup attempt by General Kornilov, standing to fight it alongside the petty bourgeois opportunists of Kerensky etc but without giving them any credence, and ready to deal with their reformist treachery as soon as the immediate dangers was over (as they proved weeks later by taking power and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat).
Skulduggery there certainly is in Iran: every sly trick and hyped up stunt possible has been pulled in Tehran on just the pattern shown in Tian an Men, with a few extras for good measure.
No obsessive nerdy conspiracy theorising is needed to spot the significance of the BBC World Service Iran start-up or to be suspicious when such “human rights” organisations like the “Reporters Without Frontiers” are quoted heavily, alleging “more deaths” etc – this being the same “Reporteurs sans Frontieres” which the Cuban Granma newspaper has relentlessly exposed over the last years as a deliberate anti-communist front receiving money from the US intelligence services and awards and finance from ultra-reactionary regimes like the Taiwanese remnant of China’s bourgeois anti-communist Kuonmintang, and which “coincidentally” was at the heart of “spontaneous” anti-Chinese Tibet provocations around the Olympic torch parade demonstrations last year prior to the Tibet stunt itself (which equally tried to provoke violence, instigated entirely by the “demonstrators”).
(It is telling that reactionary Zionist-sympathising former “left” journalist David Aaronovich has just put out a book, correctly enough perhaps, rubbishing the more looney of conspiracy theories like the “CIA did the 9/11 attack” etc but thereby trying to paint all conspiracy notions as nonsensical, in the classic supposed middle-class put down of “that’s just a conspiracy theory mate”. So the ruling class is not constantly aware of its own interests and countering opposition by the most devious of means? So the enormous funding of the CIA and MI6 is completely wasted money? So streams of books like former CIA man Philip Agee’s detailed revelations of constant worldwide subversion [Inside the Company] are all wrong??)
Nor is it stretching credibility to point to the White House intervention to instruct the “Twitter” texting Internet service to stay on air, because it was due to be taken off service for maintenance during the height of the stunted-up demonstrations, thereby losing the West one of the key rumour-mongering instruments, an ideal tool for instantly spreading hearsay and allegations with no necessity of proof or authorship, stirring up as much of a frenzy as possible in the hot-headed middle-class youth to try and induce violence, exactly as was successfully achieved in China for a moment or two.
And the impressionistic fake-“left” swallow all this wholesale!!!! – aided by their “political correctness” black-nationalist and feminist single-issue reformist non-revolutionary gullibility in secretly thinking that Barack Obama constitutes a “step forwards” from “nasty” George Bush and that somehow America has changed its spots – just as they secretly or overtly thought Blair meant an improvement and as some of the more overtly opportunist, like the Weekly Worker CPGB, are even now calling on the working class, once again, to “vote Labour”, at the point where parliamentary “democracy” has never been more discredited and exposed, on the grounds that it will “keep out the BNP”.
As if the warmongering, lying, twisting, blitzkrieging, torturing opportunism of the New Labour regime – the face of capitalism in other words – had not already done, and is continuing to prepare, far more domestic repression and international bombing and killing than any BNP-er – however backward and dangerous – has ever had the chance to do.
Some elements around the EPSR have succumbed to this shallowness too, unfortunately, with the nonsensical idea that Obama is “different”.
Even the posturing “hard men” museum-Stalinists of Lalkar/Proletarian fell for that one too, declaring in their latest issue:
“Although we never considered President Obama to be anything other than a representative of US imperialism, we had thought that at least he might bring some thought to, and deploy some intelligence and creativity in, carrying out his functions.”
So history is guided by personality and human ideas it seems, the exact opposite of the fundamental core of Marxist-Leninist philosophy which declares that it is material reality and its developing contradictions, relentlessly ripening into revolutionary change, which shapes the consciousness of men.
Obama is the leading representative icon of the most powerful bourgeoisie on the planet and a very slick sophisticated cynical expression of it at that – what is any supposed revolutionary doing spreading illusions that this might mean a “more intelligent” imperialism?
It beggars belief.
Without a class-based objective analysis, only impressionism, subjectivism and muddle-headed confusion and wishful-thinking can prevail at best, unable to counter effectively the weight and pressure of imperialist ideology at best and more likely to be completely swamped by it, turning totally against working class interests at critical moments, which the class interests of the fake- “left” pushes them towards anyway.
As with Iran.
Events can only be assessed and understood with the broadest and long-term historical and world class-struggle perspective – setting the entire context, exactly what the Trotskyites and revisionists do not have, seeing the world always in disconnected and episodic happenings and events and broad ineffectual “stop-the-war” moralising.
Both specific and general revolutionary perspective is central to Iranian development.
First of all the country has long been a target of focused imperialist domination and subversion, for its huge mineral resources and strategic importance in the Middle East, adjacent to Soviet territory and Black Sea.
In 1953 both British and American intelligence carried out one of the most disgusting and brutal coup plots and overthrows in the early post-war years against the popular and elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, who sought to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
The dirty hand of “democratic” western subversion then and since is well testified, as was openly admitted by Barack Obama in Egypt just prior to the Iranian events (more coincidence???), installing the vicious Peacock Throne Shah dictatorship maintained by the notoriously brutal torture regime of the Savak secret police (with constant Western advice).
Western interference stepped in when this was explosively overthrown in 1978-79 in genuine spontaneous revolt, heading off a full communist takeover by helping parachute in the Ayatollah Khomeini from Paris, using the mullahs and religious backwardness to fill the vacuum (as it used militant Islam to fight Kabul’s socialist revolution and its Soviet support).
That was possible largely because the dire retreat from revolutionary perspectives by Moscow revisionism had already created mass disillusion in the working and proletarian masses at supposed “communism”. It helped lead to disastrous failings in understanding and leadership in the Tudeh party, a soft-headed rot that has gone so deep that the Tudeh is actually supporting the latest demonstrations.
But there is not a sign they are anything but petty bourgeois pro-Western reaction.
Communism failed to seize the leadership of the millions demanding an end for the Shah and Western interference, a role filled by the Ayatollahs based around the petty bourgeoisie of the souk traders and less developed rural area poor, and tolerated by the West because it at least headed off socialism and alliances with the nearby Soviet Union.
But it has been an uncomfortable ride.
Despite some brutal suppression of communism, and a continuing tendency to want to compromise with the bourgeois elements in the country (which is why billionaire Rasfanjani – who backs the current upheavals – has been in the thick of the regime for decades for example) the mullahs have had to balance themselves between Western anti-communist compromise and the volcano of poor and proletarian anti-imperialist feeling beneath, constantly banging the anti-Great Satan drum and occasionally seeing the more radical elements prod the imperialist beast (Ahmadinejad among them).
It was enough to make them hated by imperialism which pushed its own monstrous Saddam Hussein Iraq tyrant creation into the near decade-long and truly horrific Iran-Iraq war, for which he understood he had been promised the “reward” of Kuwait, an imperialist betrayal (when he didn’t get it) which cost imperialism a valuable stooge.
Saddam, like other Western instruments, was sufficiently obliged to play to the same rising anti-imperialist pressure beneath (especially over the growing hatred of Zionism) to turn on his master in the First Gulf War, to be festeringly “contained” by brutal sanctions from then on, until new pressures led to the Second Iraq War.
But those new pressures are part of the most crucial broadest perspective of all, imperialism’s onrushing total crisis failure which has been developing increasingly world shattering contradictions for the entire post-war period, with constant seismic shocks to the imperialist trading and world exploitation neo-colonial order, heralding the onset of the greatest disaster ever for eight centuries of capitalist rule, even as its aggressive and tyrannical exploitation and oppression has been extended in depth and extent never before seen in history.
As Karl Marx untangled in his greatest works, the production for profit system is not only monstrously unfair, and oppressive, holding the great mass of the world in thrall of sweatshop, pitmine and plantation slave labour (effectively), but increasingly unstable and unsuited for ever modernising science, technology and organisation of production, becoming a “fetter” holding back the staggering unused potential of uneducated humanity, and becoming ever more wasteful, consumerist pointless and environmentally damaging.
What once drove mankind forwards, however brutally and piratically, is historically bankrupt and capable of driving the world only into ever worsening alienation and tension, culminating in an explosion of international conflict to “sort out” the relentlessly growing international imbalances and unevenness of development, expressed most of all in the unprecedented indolent luxury and power of the world dominant USA versus its ever growing technological and financial bankruptcy.
The war being prepared now will “outdo” the devastation and destruction of the two twentieth century world wars by a magnitude because of the weaponry and technology available, because of the extent of capitalist world penetration and because of the extraordinary stretching of the “boom” by endless new credit mechanisms which have piled contradiction on contradiction (even now again with new profiteering building on last year’s crash bailout while the Slump unrolls!).
As the EPSR alone has constantly warned (against the opposition or incomprehension of the entire fake-“left”), the war buildup by imperialism is part of, and an expression of, this catastrophic crisis failure.
Iran is part of the greatest unravelling of class domination in history, selected as a next victim after the bullying NATO blitzkrieg and permanent suppression since of tiny Serbia, the vicious Iraq dismemberment of an entire ancient culture, and the scorched earth pounding of Afghanistan, now uncontrollably extending into Pakistan.
Imperialism wants, needs and is unstoppably set on a path to war – the “solution” to its problems by destruction of the “surplus” capital which it relentlessly accumulates but which increasingly clogs its financial and trading system.
Mankind wants and needs revolution to end it.
Fake-“left” opportunism’s collusion with imperialist anti-communism only helps prevent it. Leninist clarity and science alone will cut through the confusion. Leninist science and a Leninist Party need to be built. Jim Wright
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How CIA stampeding rumour and subversion
failed to achieve an overthrow in China but
left a poisoned anti-communist BIG LIE legacy
of “massacre in TianAnMen” after 1989
It is the proletarian dictatorship aspects of this which have caused such a hysterical furore in the West.
Their whole agitation against the socialist camp is for the kind of ‘parliamentary democracy’ which will give the bourgeoisie a chance to recapture state power from proletarian rule.
Hitherto, even the feeblest of the revisionist bureaucracies (Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, etc) have avoided being overthrown by the old capitalist-class social and state power (bourgeois dictatorship), despite it being a close-run thing on occasions (Hungary 1956, Poland 1980-81, etc).
But the Cold War crusade from the West has never (and could never) give up hope of overthrowing an established workers state some day (which would be an enormous stimulus to imperialism’s entire counter-revolutionary psychology) through the creation of sufficient revisionist confusion by one means or another.
This whole reactionary manoeuvring of capitalism has been greatly encouraged by the theoretical stupidities of Gorbachevism (who has taken revisionist ignorance of Leninism to startling new depths) and by the similar nationalist-defeatist retreat from world socialist perspectives in China.
The irrational splits between Moscow and Peking, and the subsequent irresponsible posturing on international matters (plus real racist opportunism) in order just to score points off each other, - had the West licking its lips at all the revisionist confusion that was being created everywhere, - perfect for stimulating anti-Leninist mindlessness in all directions and eventually organised counter-revolutionary activities on every front.
Much of this slowly-won and craftily-manipulated subversive influence is now lying in ruins as a result of the upheaval in China.
At a stroke, the Chinese workers state leadership has had to ride roughshod over the millions of cultural threads via which the West was insidiously infiltrating its fraudulent prospectus for ‘parliamentary democracy’ (i.e. capitalist-class rule), trying through every channel to seduce Peoples China away from firm Leninist party leadership (the dictatorship of the proletariat).
Every pained bleat out of the imperialist press gives the game away with its crocodile tears and arrogant hypocrisy about ‘How could China sink back to this barbarism’,etc, as though deadly class conflict was not the norm for every state on earth with the West backing, financing, and organising wholesale daily slaughter on socialist Afghanistan by the mojahedin, on the Salvador revolution by the US stooge regime, on socialist Nicaragua by the vicious Contras, on the Palestinian nation by imperialism’s Zionist thugs, on Ethiopia by the bourgeois tribal secessionists, on the Irish national liberation struggle by the British colonialists in the Occupied Zone, etc.
The ‘free world’ posturers made far less fuss when the Chinese workers state had to put down a counter-revolutionary secessionist movement in Tibet a few months ago with far more bloodshed than was involved in routing the Peking dissident anarchy.
But the Peoples Republic’s assertion of its national territorial integrity is not the issue which Western imperialism with its bloodstained record of colonial tyranny would want to make too much of, even while quietly stirring things in Tibet as subversively as possible.
An open and almost triumphant declaration by Peking, however, of the correctness of rule over all China by proletarian dictatorship is too much for the Western ‘democracy’ fraud to swallow, even while the imperialist powers opportunistically try to limit the damage to interstate relations with China as much as possible, both for self-seeking trade and political influence purposes as well as in order to continue provoking splits between Moscow and Peking by manipulating them differently.
Hence the outraged condemnations of the firm stand taken by the Chinese workers state against subjective anarchism and individualism, followed by attempts to scapegoat just one sector of the authorities (the 27th regiment was singled out) or just one or two leading figures (Li Peng was a favourite hate target) in order to try to then justify maintaining relations with Peking with different state authorities with ‘clean hands’, etc.
The dangerously tricky humbug of such deception on world public opinion in this case was what drove the Western commentators to despair in their unprecedentedly slanderous and dismissive conclusions on the Chinese government’s stand.
Reluctantly, when the West’s hoped-for inter-army conflict inside China (the truly ‘barbarous’ perspective) did not materialise, bourgeois sophistry then had to find ways of accommodating the fact that not only was the Chinese workers state largely united in its firm stand against reactionary ‘liberalism’ and ‘pluralism’; but that it also operated with devastating effectiveness once the decision was taken to crush the counter-revolutionary violence (see last week’s Bulletin).
Worse still, the ‘free world’ press (the monopoly-imperialist lie machine led by the CIA’s domination of the worlds leading news agencies) then had to account for signs that the communist party leadership might just be preparing to make a longterm virtue again of its proletarian-dictatorship rule (as prevailed under Mao); and even more explosively, - that the mass of ordinary Chinese still fully accepted the revolutionary party’s right to rule.
These are issues of pure dynamite for the fraudulent ‘democratic’ myths of Western capitalist society.
It was at this point that the monstrous speculative rumour-mongering passing for ‘news’ in the West, (which was being backed by scandalous imperialist exhortations to the Chinese military to butcher each other (see last week’s Bulletin) and panicky slanders about ‘fascism’, springing from the Western bourgeoisie’s first fearful glimmers that the workers state might prevail),--- momentarily gave way to dumbfounded reconsideration of the entire bewildering upheaval.
One capitalist press comment even admitted doubting that there had ever been a ‘massacre’ at all,— the central fiction of the entire Western propaganda effort:
LATE last night, when another convoy of troops: and tanks rumbled past the office heading east showed unexplained troop movements were continuing, I almost gave up trying to figure out what was going on in Beijing.
There are endless rumours distorted and amplified with each retelling in hectic sessions on the telephone or over dinner at the spookily deserted Western hotel up the road. Few rumours seem based on firsthand information, and my favourite tale held that the troops who had battled their way in on Sunday were doped with amphetamines.’
These and the horror stories about the alleged massacre of students in the square seem part of a misinformation campaign by the students themselves — although there were atrocities enough, or so a contact told me. But that, too, may be just another empty theory.
There are no reliable sources except one’s own eyes. It is too risky telephoning Chinese friends and contacts. There are no newspapers to interpret and the New China News Service has all but given up.
The government spokesman has said in a constantly re-broadcast message that for too long there had been too much talk about brotherly love in China and the country had forgotten about the need for political struggle.
“I don’t deny the value of love, but we must recognise the objective fact that there are bad people in society and we still need political struggle,” he said.
The horrifying implication is that China is heading for a return to Maoist-style class struggle and the methods of the Cultural Revolution.
Virtually no one feels safe enough to drive around the city to obtain first-hand information, even if they could buy any petrol. Yet, based on the slender evidence available, the strangest kind of martial law appears to be in place.
One would expect by now to find troops and tanks stationed or patrolling every intersection, but instead most of the city seems to be left alone. British diplomats who drove out to the university quarter and round the airport came across few soldiers or barricades.
In the south of the city it was much the same story, according to tourists who had come from that direction yesterday. As far as I could tell, the troops controlled a limited area in the centre — the Square, the Forbidden City, the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai, and a few streets around.
The only route out of the city firmly in their hands is the arm, of the Avenue of Eternal Peace (Chang An) heading east, which runs past my balcony.
It wasn’t easy to make much sense of the troop movements visible from the living room. In the morning an armoured convoy roared past leaving the city, four hours later a smaller convoy returned in the other direction.
In between, traffic police roiled up in a mini-bus to clear away the barricades for a convoy of about 60 trucks, which fired wildly into the air as the soldiers went past. The traffic police hadn’t been seen for weeks, so could this mean the government was re-establishing: control? Perhaps.
And the troops? Were they retreating or advancing, attacking or defending? They were clearly very nervous and prepared for battle. With alarming sangfroid, pedestrians picked themselves off the ground when the last truck passed and ran to collect the shells to keep as souvenirs.
Later, platoons of troops moved along the sides of the road, guns at the ready, reconnoitring every corner, until they took up positions as if expecting an attack. They shot up the nearby diplomatic-compounds and later searched apartments facing the road in search of a sniper.
By evening the tanks on the bridge had left, and had also disappeared from Tiananmen Square, but nobody could say were they had gone. Had some greater threat been overcome? Was there some agreement with the 38th. Army believed to be encircling the city?
Other forces, as television pictures showed, had all but left Tiananmen Square, and by evening the tanks which had been standing on the Jianguomenwai flyover since Monday had all but gone. A spooky silence, enveloped the rainy city.
The sick capitalist press technique of rumour-mongering and deliberate half-truths (only barely revealing that isolated sniper fire was the huge new problem confronting the authorities, - hence the alleged ‘shooting up’ of the diplomatic compounds and other buildings),- still persists (by force of habit), plus the hoped-for real massacre between allegedly ‘rival’ army units (no fears then about largescale bloodshed from ‘Chinese killing Chinese’ which had been hypocritically bewailed in earlier coverage).
But there is a sudden remarkable frankness about the vicious behaviour of the so-called ‘student heroes’ who were spreading outrageously provocative lies just like every counter-revolutionary excrescence in history,- as well as butchering and beating up state representatives and even their beloved foreign newspaper friends when things were noticed which the counter-revolutionaries wanted to keep quiet about - (see last week’s Bulletin).
The Western destabilisation technique of rumour-mongering reached a crescendo. (“That’s Channel 4 Rumours - £500,000 please”):
DEEPENING divisions within the Communist Party leadership and the military threatened to plunge China into civil war yesterday as fighting continued in the capital and mass demonstrations convulsed every big city.
Western diplomats said there were unconfirmed reports of skirmishes between troops on the outskirts of Beijing while explosions and heavy gunfire continued to shatter the stillness of its almost deserted streets last night. Armoured convoys were reported to be heading for the capital from Tianjin in the east and from other cities. Western military attaches are convinced that troops opposing the hardline leaders responsible for the Tiananmen Square massacre will attempt a counter-coup.
In the early hours of today clashes shook areas of Peking to the south and west of the city centre leaving military vehicles ablaze, diplomats and residents said. They were not sure whether civilians were attacking troops or whether the army was fighting itself. “We presume it was troops against troops,” a diplomat said.
Yesterday convoys of tanks and armoured personnel carriers took up battle positions along the eastern avenue leading from the square but citizens continued to attack them and plumes of smoke from burnt-out trucks rose over the city.
In one incident, a lone student confronted, and temporarily succeeded in halting, a column of tanks.
Unofficial estimates of the death toll fluctuated wildly, from hundreds up to several thousand.
It is no longer clear who is in command in Beijing or what the troops are trying to do. Diplomatic sources believe the senior leader, Mr Deng Xiaoping, has been in hospital since last week, with either a stroke or cancer of the prostate.
An unsigned announcement from the party’s central committee and the government blamed the “counter-revolutionary turmoil” on two groups of conspirators.
The announcement’s appeal for calm among the populace has been ignored and a general strike appeared to be underway in the capital. Factories and shops were closed, public transport all but ceased running and the telephone system functioned intermittently.
Beijing was a city under siege as the 27th Army, which perpetrated the Tiananmen Square massacre, was encircled by two rival armies believed to have demanded its surrender before dawn today. Cities across China were racked by growing confrontations between troops and civilians.
As skirmishes were reported on the western and eastern flanks of the capital, Western countries including Britain mounted an airlift; to carry their nationals out of the country. The death of the senior Chinese leader Mr Deng Xiaoping, and an assassination attempt against the Prime Minister were rumoured
The 38th Army, the Beijing garrison which refused to attack the student demonstrators, is now considered by the citizenry to be the force which, along with the 28th Army, will drive the 27th from the capital. Last night, US intelligence reports suggested that up to 350,000 troops were ringing the capital.
Other sources said that a further army group, the 64th, was also moving against hardliners occupying central Beijing. The 27th appeared to be taking defensive positions.
State television rejected Taiwanese reports that Mr Deng is dead but only middle-ranking officials appeared and they expressed a grim determination to hold on to the city at all costs.
No attempt was made to analyse why in the only filmed confrontation between tanks and an unarmed civilian, the tanks came off second best after all the talk of their alleged rampages ‘brutally crushing protesters’, etc.
Equally, there was no apology for,— or any attempt to verify,- some of the wilder atrocity stories ‘reported’ by hearsay (see below).
But there was one brief subsequent reference to all these astonishing ‘military civil war’ manoeuvres which in fact never happened at all:
THE idea that the struggle to impose military control on Beijing has set one army against another is not supported by the information filtering out to British military intelligence. On the contrary, the picture being pieced together in London is of an operation that is well co-ordinated at the command level.
More than 1,000 of the estimated dead are believed to have been soldiers, many of them burned to death in their vehicles.
THE massive army convoy came out from Tiananmen Square yesterday morning like a triumphal procession.
First came the tanks. Then two companies of foot soldiers with patrols marching in front and behind, carrying their weapons proudly. And then a stream of troop trucks and armoured personnel carriers, snaking through the remnants of the barricades they smashed down four days ago.
Now, as the parade passed the same spot, many of the same spectators were applauding it. The contrast was as stunning as it was hard to fathom.
Instead of aiming AK-47s at them, some units of soldiers were shouting sympathetic slogans.
“Down with official corruption,” they cried — one of the demands of the democracy movement. “Protect the people of Beijing,” they shouted, as if that was what they had been doing since Saturday.
Some soldiers bent over the side and waved. The crowd at the crossroads swept forward — a reaction which denied all logic.
With historical hindsight the foreign press will be found to have gone over the hill in pursuit of some very wispy stories. The circular process that elevates a rumour into alleged fact extends from Beijing to Hong Kong and back again. For a fortnight, as stories from the Hong Kong newspapers were faxed in through sympathisers at local hotels, and retailed by the masses, they were too often quoted back as from Chinese sources by the networks and the Voice of America.
We shall also have to revise downwards some of the statistics of deaths in the square, though that should not weaken our judgment on the army’s use of killing force. Those hospital counts that are known point to hundreds rather than thousands, although there is uncertainty about the large number of wounded.
The struggle has taken a long step backwards. The government is showing some concern now for public opinion, with long films on television of public confrontations with the army designed to show that everything could be blamed on the “counter-revolutionary hooligans”.
The pattern to all the wilder atrocity stories was the sudden appearance of mysteriously printed accounts such as leaflets and statements, plus a suspiciously large volume of the “one diplomat said” type of disinformation, - the hallmark of the CIA-led activities of the Western intelligence agencies, masquerading as ‘diplomats’, etc:
The crowds last’ night were buzzing with the news that six protesters, according to government television reports, were killed when the Beijing to Shanghai express ploughed into them two nights ago.
I heard a different story from a French consular official who arrived on the scene minutes after the bodies had been removed. Witnesses told him the number of dead was closer to 20, most of them students apparently trying to stop troops being sent to the city.
One particular telltale theme kept recurring in all this rumour-mongering which reeks of a CIA black propaganda stunt,- the insistence that there were mounds of up to 10,000 bodies on Tienanmen Square (after troops evicted the anarchist encampment early on Sunday morning) which allegedly were burned there:
According to one diplomat, units of the 27th Army which blasted their way across the square on Saturday night broke through lines of soldiers attached to other army groups, causing many casualties. Troops under separate orders to evacuate thousands of students safely from the square were also mown down as dawn broke on Sunday. About 1,000 soldiers are said to have been, killed.
“They had orders that nobody be spared, and children and young girls were slaughtered as mercilessly as the many wounded soldiers from other units,” another diplomat said.
While crack paratroopers did succeed in leading several thousand people to safety at the south of the square before the 27th armoured units thundered in from the north, the diplomat quoted witnesses as saying that tanks and armoured troop carriers pulped bodies in the square, and then incinerated them with flame-throwers.
Many bodies were ferried away by helicopter, according to the sources.
Up to 3,000 people were said to have been killed when Chinese soldier and tanks attacked the square, occupied since 15 April by the protesters. No one knows how many have been killed but one Chinese source claimed that a senior officer on the square has said 10,000 bodies had been collected and were being burnt or lifted but by helicopters which flew in and out all day.
In an open letter directed to “compatriots all over the world”, the students said:
“Even those students who withdrew from the square were shot. When the tanks went in, those who were crushed to death became masses of flesh. The survivors were killed by bayonet.
The soldiers piled the corpses up and set fire to them. They did so in order to remove the evidence and witnesses. It is estimated that 2,000 were killed.
“We beg that all Chinese people go on strike, in factories, schools and markets, and fight against the cruel government.
A statement from the Beijing Autonomous Student Federation read: “We have stuck to the principle of non-violence.
Another pamphlet contained a Chinese doctor’s description of events leading to the clearing of Tiananmen Square. He was among the last group to withdraw from the square.
“At 5am, June 4, the students began to withdraw from the square and a part of them didn’t leave in time, because some were weak” or badly injured.
The armoured cars crushed the student bodies and blood and flesh mingled.
“Later they piled the bodies, tents and quilts and other things and set them on fire.
“A student who had just woken up was crushed by the tank.
“We left the square at 7 am and the students had been burnt to ashes,” the doctor wrote.
This sounds more like the evidence of a spin-doctor than a real medic. Human bodies are notoriously difficult things to burn without very special equipment.
To burn one body successfully without trace between 5 and 7 a.m. on an open square without special equipment and without anyone being able to sneak a single picture of it or convincing eye-witness account in the middle of a massive city, which up to that point the Western media was proudly proclaiming to be totally ‘in the hands of the people’, - and partially so still for many days after that, - would be miraculous. To dispose of 10,000 bodies that way puts the parting of the Red Sea and the feeding of the 5,000 with a tin of sardines in the amateur conjuring class.
In other words, the whole ‘massacre’ story is total hokum from start to finish put out by the most destructive imperialist propaganda operation. Despite the presence of the entire-world’s ‘free’ press for weeks before and after the incident and their intimate participation with the counter-revolutionary organisation, plus their all-night activity and film-making on that night with masses of photographs and film footage,- not one single frame or recording exists of this incredible event in the heart of Peking on Tienanmen Square, the centre of the worlds attention, — the destruction by flame-thrower of thousands of dead bodies (an impossibility no matter how long they tried), and/or the removal next day of 10,000 mangled remains (leaving nothing behind) by helicopters “in and out all day”.
And they would needed to have been. With a generous ten bodies per helicopter, and a hard-to-achieve (from a loading and air traffic-control point of view) departure of a filled helicopter every four minutes, it would in fact have taken nearly three whole days (72 hours) to clear the square of the dead. Three thousand would have taken 24 hours to clear, a thousand at least eight hours going flat out from 7 a.m. on Sunday morning with a helicopter soaring up every four minutes.
But not one single photograph exists of helicopters taking off from Tienanmen with bodies on board or anything else on board,- yet the entire world’s ‘free’ press was right there in the heart of Peking all the time, and all the time filming clandestinely there too as we have seen from their stream of pathetically distorted and stunted-up ‘reports’.
Nor one single photograph of the ‘alternative’ method of disposal either,- the burning of bodies with flamethrowers,- or even with a box of matches. Remarkable.
But this vicious Western propaganda hoax was, of course, completely believed in by the so-called ‘anti-imperialist left’ of the British ‘labour movement’ petty-bourgeois swamp. The real onslaught, however, was by the counter-revolutionary provocateurs against the army:
State television showed dramatic and extensive footage yesterday of thousands of civilians attacking and setting fire to a convoy of more than 100 trucks, jeeps, and armoured troop-carriers.
People were been prising open the hatches of a troop-carrier and then setting it on fire.
They were filmed hijacking two other troop-carriers and taking them on a joyride.
There were numerous other military failures. Teargas used against the tens of thousands of people who came out to stop the troops on Saturday had little effect.
The authorities broke their silence last night on the details of Sunday’s brutal attack on the square. Despite Red Cross estimates, they claimed that only 300 people had been killed, most of them soldiers.
This figure, which is absurdly low given the nature of the operation, is bound to inflame public opinion against a government which is already hated by many for its actions in recent weeks.
Yuan Mu, spokesman for the Government’s State Council and a close ally of Premier Li, said only 23 students had died.
He said more than 5,000 soldiers and 2,000 students had been injured during the operation, which ended a peaceful three week sit-in by thousands of students demanding democracy, press freedom and an end to corruption.
The real casualty figures from the weekend assault may never be known. It is widely believed that soldiers have incinerated large numbers of dead bodies to disguise the scale of the deaths.
The assorted Trots, Euros and centrists all fell predictably for the original deception in Peking of the Western-looking anti-communists (symbolised by their statue of liberty and their addiction to the CIA Voice of America broadcasts using the Internationale and pictures of Mao as a cover for their counter-revolutionary hatred of the dictatorship of the proletariat (see last week’s Bulletin) .)
Now the anti-Leninist philistines of Western petty-bourgeois ‘socialism’ have swallowed the CIA’s ‘massacre’ bait whole, - clouding any ability to stop and think that it takes two class forces to make a class struggle, and if the Western imperialist media are breaking every propaganda norm to support one side,- then genuine revolutionaries ought automatically to support the workers state side, - even if all of the evidence of the clear counter-revolutionary character of the student anarchist circles is not immediately to hand. [ILWP Bulletin (now EPSR) No 499 14th June 1989 & Book 16]
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