Back issues

No 1439 23rd January 2014

Western media sink to new depths of demonising propaganda lining up scapegoated states for coups and counter-revolution, like Ukraine and Thailand, or for all-out civil war blitzing like Syria. Lurid “tortured prisoners” or police violence stories cover subversion and violent provocations of middle-class Nazis and stirred up sectarianism that imperialism has long been planning, to evade devastating the Slump catastrophe its system is dragging the world into because of totally unsolvable and ever intensifying contradictions. Crudeness of the Goebbels Big Lies increases in proportion to the desperation of the ruling class whose world “shock and awe” escape plans meet ever greater resistance abroad and war weariness at home. Biggest lie campaign of all is the Davos pretended “economic recovery” an unsustainable fraud, nothing more than sleight of hand from QE money printing. Capitalism is doomed but vicious. But the world needs revolutionary Leninist grasp

The sick NAZI reality of the violence breaking out in the “revolutions” in Ukraine and Thailand, and glaring Goebbels propaganda nonsense being poured out to keep the civil war destruction on the boil in Syria, is becoming too much even for some of the most deluded middle-class “democracy” illusions.

Usually the “liberal” elements, and the fake-“left” who sit among them, tail-end every Western intelligence agency prodded and media inflated “street revolt” from the bogus Solidarnosc “trade union” and the Tian an Men “pro-democracy” counter-revolutions to the civil wars provocations in Libya and Syria, all under the fatuous call for “freedom” and the threadbare illusions of “anti-totalitarianism” which the Western TV, newspapers and politics still pump out.

Such is the philistine retreat by fake-“leftism” from any understanding of the realities of class war and the drive to war being imposed by monopoly capitalism everywhere, to escape its catastrophic economic and political collapse, that the working class has been left open to all these war-stirring propaganda stunts pulled by imperialism against one scapegoated victim after another.

But the crude fascist street violence in Kiev, still being favourably talked up by much of the capitalist media as a “revolution”, is becoming a bit too much to swallow for some petty bourgeois commentators:

The intensity of the violence in Kiev, which began late on Sunday night and culminated on Wednesday morning with three deaths, has taken many people both inside the country and abroad by surprise. While during the two-month course of the protests there were two incidents when riot police attacked protesters brutally, there has not been a large-scale response from the protesters. Suddenly, this week, the police found themselves under a hail of Molotov cocktails, their buses torched and several hundred people unwilling to give their ground and ready to engage them in violent clashes.

After two months of protest with little result, the mood is very different to that back in December. Then, when riot police attempted to remove the barricades surrounding Independence Square in a night-time charge, protesters handed back helmets and shields to officers who got stranded in the crush and sent them on their way. After the surge, groups of officers could stand unmolested at the side of the square. Now, feelings have intensified. When a molotov cocktail lobbed at police lines broke on the torso of an officer and turned him into a human candle, whoops of joy went up from the crowd.

But while some of the violent inclination appears to stem from the frustration of those who saw their peaceful stance ignored, there also appear to be more shadowy forces at work. Pravy Sektor, a murky grouping of nationalist and far-right groups, has said it is co-ordinating the violence, and the coalition represents very different ideals from the initial protest goal of closer links with the European Union.

Andriy Tarasenko, one of Pravy Sektor’s co-ordinators, agreed to meet the Guardian in a cafe in central Kiev. Wearing a rollneck jumper and with a quiet voice, he seemed a far cry from the warriors on the street, but his message was clear.

“For us, Europe is not an issue, in fact joining with Europe would be the death of Ukraine. Europe means the death of the nation state and the death of Christianity. We want a Ukraine for Ukrainians, run by Ukrainians, and not serving the interests of others.”

Tarasenko said the goal of the group was a “national revolution” that would result in a “national democracy” with none of the trappings of the “totalitarian liberalism” that the EU represents for him.

He also has little time for the trio of opposition politicians who have been the de facto protest leaders, including the former heavyweight boxer Vitali Klitschko. “The only negotiations with [President Viktor] Yanukovych should be about how he gives up power. If any of these leaders were capable of seizing power, they would have done it already.”

The number of people taking goggle-eyed selfies in front of the burning barricades and looking on in disbelief suggests that those who feel they are peaceful protesters who have been driven to this by the uncompromising nature of the authorities are still in the majority.

Hardcore Ukrainian nationalism is not even the predominant feature of those involved in active clashes with police. Neither of the two people killed by bullets on Wednesday morning were ethnically Ukrainian. But it is clear that the popularity of Pravy Sektor is growing and that many of those lobbing molotov cocktails and preparing for all-out battle are influenced by their ideas.

Tarasenko said it was hard to say how many active members of Pravy Sektor there were, but noted that its page on the social network Vkontakte had more than 50,000 members. On the barricades, “hundreds are quickly turning into thousands”, he claimed.

As the clashes have continued, the international community has continued to put strong pressure on Yanukovych to avoid violence, but in recent days there has also been an acknowledgement of the darker side of the protest movement. A US state department statement issued on Wednesday blamed Yanukovych for the violence but added: “The aggressive actions of members of extreme-right group Pravy Sektor are not acceptable and are inflaming conditions on the streets and undermining the efforts of peaceful protesters.”

Even amid the violence, there is a certain orderliness and purpose of mind to the protests. While a small number of buildings have suffered from the flames of the burning barricades, there has been no wholesale looting or random violence. Despite the fact that for two months people have been out on Independence Square protesting against Ukraine’s move towards Moscow, a branch of Sberbank – a Russian state-controlled bank – which is adjacent to one of the entrances to the square has remained completely untouched, its glass facade undamaged.

But the number of people wielding baseball bats, planks of wood, golf clubs or even hammers has dramatically increased. There have been other disturbing scenes, such as when protesters captured groups of paid-for government thugs earlier in the week, and forced them to speak Ukrainian or sing the national anthem under duress, making videos of them and issuing threats.

The majority of protesters are horrified at the bloodshed and would be satisfied with some kind of compromise agreement, or at least willing to accept it to rule out the chance of further violence.

But Pravy Sektor says that if Yanukovych does not resign, he should be forced out.

“We would give him and his family 24 hours to leave the country, or there would be a revolutionary tribunal,” said Tarasenko. Asked what he thought the most likely medium-term outcome of the clashes would be, he said: “Prolonged guerrilla warfare.”

The majority of protesting Ukrainians hope for a just, fair and democratic society, even if naively connecting this hope to an idealised “Europe”.

Yet Euromaidan, Ukraine’s pro-EU protest movement, has still not become a point of conflict between the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian society as a whole. According to the polls, support for Euromaidan is heavily concentrated in the western and central regions, while Ukrainians living in the east and the south of the country overwhelmingly disapprove. After mass violent clashes with the police started on Sunday, in which a leading role was played by a far-right network of groups called Right Sector, there is no doubt that people in the eastern and southern regions would condemn the protests even more. This is unfortunate because the agenda of the protest has shifted from a desire to be associated with Europe to the struggle against the police state after parliament ripped up the constitution and rushed through laws restricting, among others, the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of speech.

The Right Sector militants did not appear from nowhere, although many media and liberal protesters preferred to ignore their existence. They were active participants in the protest from the very beginning, interested not so much in European association as the “national revolution”. They efficiently infiltrated the volunteer guards of the tent camps.

On 1 December, they were the main force behind the violent attack near the presidential administration, contrary to the popular version that blamed government provocateurs. When, last Sunday, Vitali Klitschko, the most probable next president of Ukraine according to the polls, tried to stop clashes with police, he was booed. Many protesters, who could not imagine themselves throwing stones and molotovs at the police line before, joined the violence of the extreme right, frustrated at the lack of progress after coming each Sunday to listen to the same talks from opposition leaders.

Yet those who may be thrilled with the illusion of an all-national revolt are forgetting that this is another step in the normalisation of the far right. Right Sector has already efficiently mainstreamed its slogans (“Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!”, “Glory to the nation! Death to enemies!”, “Ukraine above everything!”). We must not forget that these are people with sometimes overtly neo-Nazi ideas who would eagerly pass even more repressive laws, but only against other, ethnically defined enemies.

Several thousand people are participating in the violent clashes but, outside the two central squares and several neighbouring blocks, everyday life in Kiev is going on as usual. This week, though, riot police demonstrated that they can restore control over the streets in a few minutes and that they are ready to open fire against protesters – two have been killed with gunshots, as of midday on Wednesday.

What could be the alternative to this dead-end of senseless rallies without action and no less senseless violence? The negotiations that started between the opposition and some representatives of the government seem to be only an attempt to calm down the protesters.

 

Former heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, now an opposition politician, said Yanukovych had 24 hours in which to call snap elections, and demanded another meeting with the president on Thursday. If this did not happen, he said, the opposition would “go on the attack”. His words drew loud cheers from the crowd on Independence Square, hub of the protests.

“If we have to fight, I will fight together with you. If we have to face bullets, I will face bullets,” Klitschko told the crowd.

Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who represents the party of jailed former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko and attended the meeting with Yanukovych, also had fighting words for the tens of thousands of demonstrators on Independence Square: “Tomorrow we will go forward together. And if it’s a bullet in the forehead, then it’s a bullet in the forehead – but in an honest, fair and brave way.”

The opposition leaders initially condemned attacks by protesters on riot police when they began on Sunday night, saying they were carried out by “provocateurs”. But as the mood has become more radical, they have come under pressure to take a more decisive stance.

Yanukovych issued a statement saying he did not want bloodshed or the use of force, but the government does not appear ready to compromise. Prime minister Mykola Azarov called the protesters “terrorists”. He said those who died were responsible for their fate and insisted the government had no option but to use force.

These mealy-mouthed admissions in the teeth of the obvious Nazi-nationalist traditions of the Ukrainian “revolt” slyly pretend that the bulk of the demonstrators are “genuinely peaceful” and merely “protesting against authoritarianism and corruption” (the usual allegations) but have somehow been “hijacked” by the right-wing.

This is the same old “it-wasn’t-our-fault” story which emerges from the liberals, and the Trotskyists too, whenever their shallow semi-anarchist anti-authority abstract democracy philistinism is shown up for the gullible capitulation to imperialist ideological pressure it really is.

The fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of gangster oligarch capitalism in Moscow most of all proved that their decades of calls for so-called “political” revolution against revisionist USSR leadership, built on the detestation of workers state discipline (the dictatorship of the proletariat) necessary to counter the total class war destructiveness and sabotage of capitalist subversion, were nothing but anti-communist garbage opening the door to counter-revolution and capitalist restoration.

And their “condemnation of terror” and abstract calls for “self-determination” for every little anti-communist “rebellion” like the Kosovo Albanian mafia drug and prostitution runners, have helped feed capitalist warmongering from the NATO blitzkrieg on Serbia to Iran, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, always taken in by the glaring stunts set up by capitalism, or encouraged by its non-stop deluging of propaganda and lies about Western “freedom and democracy”.

Like the post-Soviet capitalist mess, the chaos, warlordism, racism, endless sectarian conflict and destruction left behind in the bombed-out wreckage in Libya and Syria is simply ignored, the “lefts” washing their hands of it and walking away as if their participation in the hate-propaganda and lies against Gaddafi and Assad was nothing to do with it.

It is all lightly brushed under the carpet.

But the fascist realities are getting very smelly now as capitalism pushes deeper in to desperate catastrophic Slump disaster.

The articles above only go so far and are still laden with anti-communist petty bourgeois hostility to the few remaining traces of one-time Soviet workers state authority left in Yanukovitch’s (and Putin’s) dire Bonapartist balancing acts (between restored capitalism and what working class Soviet traditions still linger), blaming the Ukrainian state for the inevitable firm response necessary against the disruption of the well-prepared, and almost certainly externally funded, reactionary violence which has been initiated and caused by the demonstrators’ side from the beginning (just as past events like Tian an Men were deliberately provoked into violence; and as the bogus “Arab Spring” extensions in Libya and Syria were not peaceful protests at all but violent from the beginning.)

The helpless hands-in-the-air “oh-dear it has turned out fascist” tone is so much dissembling; the Nazi background of the movement (stretching all the way back to the German SS-collaborations of the Second World War) has already been well-documented, as has the deliberate alliance between the “moderates” and the outright nationalist Nazis, who have shared platforms from the beginning, along with the group supporting the monstrously corrupt opportunist Yulia Tymoshenko, who was levered into power by the last 2004 coup attempt, only to line her own very deep pockets in true oligarch style.

The hypocrisy of the Western propaganda against the Yanukovitch government, elected in 2010, is breathtaking in its advocacy of bullying demands for resignation suggesting that somehow it should simply take no action against the violence and the coup challenges to the legal government, which are anything but “democratic”, and pouring the blame for violence, one sidedly on the state authority instead of on the heavily armed and provocative demonstrators, who have already nearly killed one policeman doused in flames.

Yanukovitch is clearly no angel either and a million miles from anything to do with communism but not quite compliant enough for Western imperialism’s wish to completely plunder the Ukrainian economy,

How well the rancid Bonapartism in Ukraine and its equally dire Putinist backing holds out against the provocations remains to be seen but for the moment it is imposing another defeat on Western intriguing which will only add to the crisis desperation and confusion of the crisis ridden paralysis.

But things will get worse. All this is part and parcel of the demented stampeding of the world into ever-escalating war turmoil which is capitalism’s only solution to its greatest ever disastrous meltdown collapse in all history.

The remnants of anti-Western imperialism still present in Ukrainian and Russian post-Sovietism (albeit now for the most crass Putinite Russian nationalist ambitions to “stand as an equal player on the world stage” ) are particularly hated by imperialism because of the minor defeats and setbacks they have imposed on capitalism’s war progress in the Middle East, scuppering efforts to destroy the not-quite-compliant Syrian regime and install a more suitable American stooge government – and particularly in showing up its last Goebbels LIE stunt about “poison gas”.

This is all part of the shock-and-awe agenda by Washington to suppress all worldwide revolt and challenges to imperialism, on the rise for decades and massively escalated by the crisis collapse of 2008, still unravelling fast whatever black-is-white propaganda pretences are made of an “upturn” at the out-of-touch Davos billionaires’ shindig.

World war destruction has always been the only path capitalism knows to evade its responsibilities for the utter destructive austerity and bankrupt Slump turmoil the crisis of its grotesque private profit making system repeatedly and inevitably brings, using “shock and awe” intimidation to keep the world pinned down in continuing exploitation despite the system’s its total bankruptcy, and ultimately destroying the “surplus” production clogging its arteries (see Marx eg quotes).

It is the real story of two shattering World Wars which the Michael Gove’s of this world are so desperate to re-write the history of, and cover up with lies about “honour and principle”.

WW1 was nothing but the squabbling of thieves, as Lenin’s Bolsheviks rightly put it, the bitter struggle for colonies and the “right” of the great nation powers to exploit the great toiling masses of the planet, and brought to a head by economic crash and banking disaster from the 1908 world banking failure (rescued by Rockefeller) to the credit meltdown of 1914* which almost destroyed the City of London, then the most powerful banking centre of all world finance.

It was triggered by a relatively minor one-off anarcho-nationalist incident in Sarayevo, which was effectively an irrelevance, simply catalysing a world conflict that had been brewing for over two decades because of the gigantic contradictions within the capitalist system itself.

The Second World War was part two of the same thing, compounded by the great crash of 1929, the Credit Anstalt domino bank failures of the early 1930s and the great Depression following, and riddled with equally fraudulent causes including the infamous Gleiwitz radio station attack pretence by Nazi troops dressed as Poles.

Now comes what even the former governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King declares to be the greatest financial collapse of all time, only suspended temporarily by the insane QE money printing swamping the world in paper (or electronic currency), but ready to burst through again into an even greater collapse than 2008.

The pumping out of so much worthless credit by the USA first of all, the other major imperialist powers, and now also Japan, is designed to “cover” the unrepayable debts of totally bankrupted imperialism, forcing supplier counties (like China above all) to accept the dollar payments while there is still some residual purchasing power in them but knowing full well that the real value of the goods and services supplied to America can never be paid back.

The inflation being pumped into the system by the tens of billions of monthly printing on top of over a TRILLION$, in 2008 to prevent immediate world meltdown and domino toppling of the entire banking system, is incalculable.

The ruling class (and its Labourite tailenders) pretend the crisis is now all in the past, consciously lying about an impossible “upturn” which they know would come to a juddering halt tomorrow morning if the Quantitative Easing tap was turned off and ultimately will implode anyway.

Meanwhile even the fraudulent transience of a “recovery” is passing by the great masses of the population, hammered by wage cuts, inflation, tax rises, unemployment, savage workhouse “discipline” for the out-of-work and homeless, via the most savage class war euphemistically described as “austerity”.

Controlling the inevitable rising revolutionary feeling in even the most “advanced” countries as the crisis bites deeper is the great fear of the ruling class, now turning to all out domestic repression – water cannons requested by the police for example (and sinister populist reactionary Boris Johnson), and court cases making it very clear that police shootings of unarmed “criminals” like Tottenham’s Mark Duggan and, soon enough, political activists and demonstrators (already routinely injured, bullied, inhumanly “kettled” and even killed on marches and demonstrations), will always be given an all clear by the capitalist state machine’s court system.

Total surveillance, embedded police spies in the most innocuous of protest groups, and universal spy cameras are already part of a nightmare world which is the real totalitarianism in the heart of the “Mother of Democracy”.

They know and are preparing for the need to drive the working class down ever further in order to hold their own against the major capitalist rivals like Japan, Germany and the US, not to mention a dozen other rising “stars” all desperately battling with cutthroat desperation for the world’s collapsing markets.

Along with the deliberate debt default mechanism of QE this trade war aspect is growing more intense by the minute – US imperialism has been aggressively cutting the world dollar value in order to cheapen its exports but Europe has equally printed Euros in retaliation and now newly resurgent Japan is in the fray with Abenomics, which is primarily the aggressive lowering of interest rates and printing (or electronic conjuring from thin air) of trillions of Yen, to cheapen the Yen and aggressively push sales of Japanese industrial output (after 20 years of stagnation – itself a major indicator of the capitalist impasse reached, of too much capital and nowhere to invest it at a profit, the underlying cause of crisis and collapse which Marx analysed 150 years ago).

Japan’s recent turn to multi-billion Yen printing simply underscores the aggressive international trade war aspect of the “solution” – and will further compound the accumulating devaluation of the world currencies.

It is impossible to create value out of nothing – only human labour power set in motion creates value - and so the notional “value” of all the world’s credit is rapidly eroding.

Part of the great battle of “monetary discipline” insisted on by every national ruling class is to impose brute force financial pressure to push that inflationary (and unemployment) burden onto someone else, mostly other weaker capitalist rivals like Brazil now suffering massive slowdown, the smaller nearly bankrupted European powers, the Third World and the poorer sections of the working and lower middle class in even the richest countries.

But the tensions are building up as the reality of the crisis bites home again and the great post-World War Two capitalist promise of growth, prosperity and greater fairness and opportunity proves to be a massive lying joke (sold to the working class via the opportunist reformism of Labour in the UK and assorted anti-communist reformism elsewhere – all consciously LYING and hoodwinking the working class with pretences of welfare, health care, full employment and education) while pumping out anti-Soviet lies and demonisation).

It is terrifying the ruling class at its potential for explosive revolt as already erupting in the Third World with the emergence of deeper and more conscious revolutionary organisation and struggle sure to follow on eventually – which is why it clings onto any desperate pretence it can of “solving” the crisis, pretending “capitalism is being reformed and changed and regulated”.

But despite all the bullshit from the Davos meeting, assorted “think tanks” and financial statements, about “happy days are here again” everyone knows that the “recovery” is a giant fraud, (with IMF statements, World Bank statements, and others all hedging their bets with phrases like “not out of the woods yet”, or “the recovery is very fragile” or “patchy” or “too soon to put interest rates back up” or ”Quantitative Easing should continue” – all of which are endless variations on a theme of “we all know this is a complete hoax of a recovery but dare not say so and especially in front of the working class who just might start to cotton on that capitalism is totally bankrupt and has to be ended.”

The major part of capitalist strategy to escape this unstoppable and unsolvable crisis of its system, which is driven by the internal contradictions of production for private profit, is the drive to war, distracting populations with chauvinist racism, scapegoating and blame on others, while intimidating the growing Third World revolt (erupting as “terrorism”, or “fundamentalism” or “insurgency” or anti-Americanism or most of all lately, the full scale street upheavals such as Egypt) with shock and awe.

This slide into all-out World War number three has been underway BY WASHINGTON and its sidekicks like Britain (and episodically the other major capitalist powers) sporadically since the 1990s, initiated by a ruling class already aware of the oncoming disaster, getting things underway with the Balkanisation of Yugoslavia and its culmination in the NATO blitzing of Serbia (itself “justified” by a lying non-existent “massacre” at Recak and the completely invented “Srebrenica genocide” among other things) and then non-stop through Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia etc for over a decade.

The lies have poured out, like the Sudanese “chemical weapons factory” which turned out to be making aspirins (once it had been blown apart by Clinton); non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq alleged to “threaten us all”; the “terrorist threat to ‘our way of life’” supposedly emanating from dirt-poor Afghanistan (as if a country near the bottom of the list of development and poverty could be an existential threat against the richest and overwhelmingly most powerful military on earth, the United States).

In Libya there was not even an actual incident to twist and manipulate, simply the totally specious allegation, drawn from thin air, that Muammar Gaddafi “intended a genocidal attack” on Benghazi “to parallel Srebrenica” (which since it itself is a lying fabrication, demonstrates how the propaganda is built-up layer upon layer of lies, each allegedly “proving” the next).

Hate-stampeding Western war propaganda lies have reached a new level of Goebbels stridency with the latest ludicrous mass-slaughter “revelations” of alleged war-crimes against the Assad government Syria, conveniently publicised the very day before the laughably biased “peace negotiations” are due to open, with their bullying insistence that the participants accept the demands of the opposition as a condition of attendance, a Hitlerite demand already rejected by Iran and which parallels the impossible conditions at Rambouillet used to set up Belgrade for its blitzing.

This stunt is obviously aimed at torpedoing any such settlement.

Everything about the story reeks of the Nazi “big Lie” hate-building methods developed in the 1930s but long taken to far greater levels of sophisticated trickery by the West and its CIA/MI6 and other intelligence agency propaganda machines.

Suspicions begin with the fact the report has been produced and paid for by the state of Qatar, one of the reactionary and backward feudal oil states, backed and assisted by US and British imperialism, It is one of the main fund sources for the arms and other support which has sustained the vicious anti-Assad counter-revolution from the beginning.

The three “independent” plummy-voiced British establishment QC (lawyer) authors, much hyped up by the Western media to add supposed credibility to the report, also take their undoubtedly highly generous “emoluments” from the Qatar government.

He who pays the piper.....

Realising the thinness of their case the BBC, Guardian, Channel Four News and all media points south, made sure they asked precisely none of the “hard-hitting” questions they would worry at terrier-like if they had a Syrian ambassador, a trade union leader, a left politician or other demonised figure in front of them.

Instead they pumped-up the “credibility” of the report by sonorously declaring that the thee lawyers “had experience on war crimes investigations”.

That would be experience in the completely Western stooge arena of the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, a joke set-up for the demonisation and show-trial partisan prosecution of scapegoat after scapegoat from the blitzed and bombed Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia to the Liberian Charles Taylor, all figures of hatred for imperialism???

Far from giving credence to this bunch of pompous lawyers it discredits them completely.

The war crimes racket is one of the most laughable tools yet of imperialist Lie techniques, picking on a variety of mostly colonial targets to “justify” the destruction of country after country (Serbia, Sierra Leone, Sudan) and leaving entirely alone such figures as Tony Blair and George Bush first and foremost, responsible for the aggressive war launched to pulverise Iraq on the fraudulent WMD excuse; the just buried and highly eulogised and lauded fascist Nazi-Zionist Ariel Sharon, directly culpable for the horrific slaughter of several thousand Palestinian women and children in the Shabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982 (and several well documented ethnic cleansing terrorising massacres in Palestine before that); and General Sisi in Egypt whose troops recently shot down at least 1000 and probably many more peaceful democracy protestors from the Moslem Brotherhood in Cairo in total cold blood.

The list could go on. Kissinger’s pulverising carpet bombing of Cambodia, sponsorship of the Pinochet Chile coup and more???? Obama’s drone warfare death squad assassinations????

Secondly the alleged atrocities are laid at the door of the Syrian regime without any evidence.

Nothing is proven at all except that there are some pictures of bodies, and that many of these bodies have been abused, starved, tortured etc.

Declaring as the three “senior QCs” who authored the report do that the bodies have been “forensically examined” still proves nothing.

In fact it is a deliberate obfuscation which as these highly trained lawyers must be well aware, simply filling interview time without answering the real questions.

No proper court would tolerate this diversionariness for a moment.

The question is not “are these bodies” and “have they been tortured” etc.

It is by whom? where, when, and how?

But the only evidence on this is the word of a single man, allegedly the photographer, who brought the pictures out of Syria, claiming they were pictures of Syrian prisoners.

The three QCs say they “talked to the man” for three days and in their opinion, “the evidence would be accepted by a war-crimes tribunal.”

That would be the Hague showtrial tribunal then???

Three days of conversation does not constitute real cross-examination or interrogation.

So on such “opinions” only, based on the evidence of a single man anyway without any corroboration the world media stampedes a lurid campaign of allegations about supposed “atrocities” which set an entire country up for the next massive blitzkrieg “punishment” invasion by Nazi-NATO forces, as on Serbia, Afghanistan and Libya?

Who are the Nazis????

Naturally there was not the slightest attempt to even ask the Syrian government for any comments, let alone the opportunity to defend itself from these wild lurid allegations.

Even if the pictures were genuine, which is not even yet established, there could be all kinds of explanations.

Possibly the Syrian government has been documenting the victims it has found in the areas taken back from the rebels???

The ethnic cleansing, terrorising and brutalising of whole civilian populations in outlying districts of Syrian cities by the “rebels” has been well testified and is of such grotesquely horrifying extent that Western diplomacy in Syria has had to wash its hands of many of the “opposition”, setting up its own quisling stooges in the Syrian National Coalition instead of the originally backed (and equally speciously named “Free Syrian Army”).

(Whether the responsibility lies with the alleged “al-qaeda” forces, which are volatile and potentially hostile to imperialism is another question – but there is no doubting the extent of rebel intimidation of civilians).

Bodies by the tens of thousands have piled up in Syria caused by bitter and brutal conflict unleashed on all sides and doubtless, in the hatred created by civil war, with atrocities on all sides.

Such an explanation is just as possible as the story painted across the world media and steamrollered along by the “three lawyers” and the political establishment.

Did anyone ask the Syrians? Not a hope on the Western news channels.

But it is a basic principle of the “rule of law” the Western imperialist order lyingly and hypocritical pretends to be upholding that the accused be given the chance to defend themselves

But the pretence of “fighting for democracy” etc is a total racket from top to bottom.

It is a giant pretence that the West is in any way interested in “justice” and establishing “freedom”.

The vicious civil war ongoing in Syrian was set in motion by Western subversion and deliberate provocations to create inflammatory incidents (including sniper killings by mysterious figures, filmed by the Syrian government but completely ignored by the West), was escalated hugely by vast quantities of arms and money from the most reactionary feudal states on the planet in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia (and covertly by the Zionists and the their US allies behind them), and brought to red-heat by non-stop flame-fanning “atrocity” allegations and “reports” by the Western media, luridly splashing “unverified” and utterly hearsay stories (which would all be thrown out of a responsible court of law on day one) across the front pages day after day with no confirmation or verification, and talked up with the most colourful language and accusations, false conclusions, and demonisation, relying on the subsequent chaos and war hate deluge to sweep away any queries or questions.

Once the deed is done, like the foul atrocity of Gaddafi’s killing by iron-blade buggery (a monstrous crime celebrated by the Western establishment and laughed at by Hilary Clinton on TV – and certainly not prosecuted by the Hague tribunal), the rest is all “details dear boy” and swept under the carpet by the success of the “victors”.

This is way beyond hypocrisy or a “blind eye” – it is deliberate conscious war propaganda BIG LIES no different to the demonisation and hatred by Joseph Goebbel’s anti-Jew, anti-Gypsy and anti-communist propaganda films (and tellingly the Roma gypsies are once more a target for the vicious scapegoating that marked the NAZI period - led by deliberate propaganda by UKIP, the Tories and - right up the establishment fundament - Labourite like David Blunkett).

Contradictorily the much greater sophistication of 21st century propaganda tools is now turning to ever more grotesque crudity.

It reflects the increasing desperation of capitalism to keep its warmongering going because of the rapidly onrushing crisis and the failure of its warmongering.

A festering mess of corruption and hugely intensified rebelliousness has been left everywhere instead of establishing compliant stooge regimes serving the interests of Washington’s imperialist dominance and ensuring its writ and power continue to hold sway for strategic advantage in the oncoming inter-imperialist conflict, as well as for economic exploitation and resource purposes (the simplistic “war for oil” formula beloved of the fake-“lefts”, missing the point entirely of the real crisis basis of the war blitzing, a point underscored more and more as the world glut in oil – as is every other commodity – is more and more obviously on the cards, nothing escaping the “overproduction” disaster of capitalist Slump).

Iraq is again a hellhole of conflict and turmoil, with 8000 deaths in 2013 and Afghanistan an admitted total failure, where over ten years of war has achieved precisely nothing except death and destruction on all sides, including multiple civilians women and children, and leaving a mess of opium farming, degenerate corruption and backwardness.

Not even the chosen regime has proved useful, to such a level that the US even tried to topple its own stooge Karzai:

The US government tried to oust the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, by manipulating elections in 2009, in what amounted to a “clumsy and failed putsch”, the former defence secretary Robert Gates has been quoted as writing in his memoirs.

Karzai has long claimed that the US tried to manipulate the poll to remove him from office, while Washington insisted it was an impartial supporter of democracy. The revelations in Gates’s account of his years in power, which is published next week and covers the war in Afghanistan, appear to vindicate the Afghan leader’s suspicions.

The top US diplomat Richard Holbrooke supported Karzai’s rivals in the hope of pushing the poll to a second round that the incumbent would lose, Foreign Policy magazine reported.

“It was all ugly: our partner, the president of Afghanistan, was tainted, and our hands were dirty as well,” Gates is quoted writing.

Karzai has cited concerns about foreign interference in a vote to choose his successor later this year as one reason for the delay in signing a long-term security pact with Washington to keep troops in the country after their combat mission ends later this year.

The deal is unlikely to be signed on the timetable the US government would like, the ambassador to Kabul warned in a secret cable leaked to the Washington Post.

US politicians and the military want it sealed early this year to allow for a smooth withdrawal and planning for next year if any troops stay on.

Ties with Kabul have been strained by a string of disagreements over civilian deaths, election planning and other issues, including the release of dozens of men Karzai says are innocent and the US claims are a serious security threat.

Washington insists that if there is no deal, it will resort to its “zero option” and take all troops home , but Karzai has argued that is an empty threat to bolster the US negotiating position.

Holbrooke, who died in December 2010, was the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and played a key role in 2009 efforts to remove Karzai from power. He paid public lip-service to the idea of a level playing field, but was working behind the scenes to ensure the opposite, Gates writes: “Holbrooke was doing his best to bring about the defeat of Karzai… What he really wanted was to have enough credible candidates running to deny Karzai a majority in the election, thus forcing a runoff in which he could be defeated.”

Tactics included advising candidates, attending their rallies and organising high-profile photo opportunities, the memoir claims. Karzai soon noticed the efforts, it adds.

In the end, the election was plagued by serious fraud and worries about violence. The candidate who got through to a second round against the president eventually called off the vote and conceded defeat.

The world revolutionary conclusions needing to be drawn from this stinking mess would come a lot quicker without the complete revolutionary failure of the entire fake- “left” – including the wooden Stalinists ostensibly taking the right side on Syria but as tangled in confusion and opportunism as great as any of the Trots, most notably in recent times astonishingly supporting the reactionary military coup in Egypt, even as it slaughters, locks up and tortures not just the Muslim Brotherhood but all the “secular” protestors too, shuts down the support for the Gaza Palestinians and renews outright collusion with the Zionists and the American imperialists.

The lightyear distance of the fake-“lefts” from any kind of world revolutionary perspective, their opportunism and the craven anti-communism that most of them have slid leaves them utterly incapable of exposing and untangling the lies and confusions of the capitalist warmongering stampeding, and in the case of many of the Trots, going along with the counter-revolutionary movement.

Their capitulation is starkly illustrated by their suckered willingness to swallow the grotesque allegation that the recent political infighting in the revisionist regime in North Korea, had been followed by an execution to parallel the monstrosities of the most depraved of the Roman emperors albeit in some cases with some uncertainty.

It was a complete satirical spoof:

Last week, multiple news sources, including NBC News, Fox News, and, yes, Business Insider, picked up a story in the Singaporean newspaper Strait Times that said North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had his uncle Jang Song-taek executed by feeding him to 120 ravenous dogs.

Very quickly, some people began to realize that there was something a little off about this story. For one thing, the Strait Times sourced their news to a Dec. 12 article in Wen Wei Po, a Hong Kong-based newspaper supportive of the Chinese government. In studies of the different credibility ratings of Hong Kong newspapers, Wen Wei Po consistently ranks near the bottom. No official in Seoul has come out to lend credence to the report, according to The New York Times’ Lede Blog.

Reports of North Korean excesses are always worth being extra-skeptical of — there are few Western reporters in the country and most of the rumors that filter out come through South Korean intelligence sources, who very much have their own axe to grind. This story proves even less trustworthy than most, however.

Trevor Powell, an employee at an investment research firm who grew up in Taiwan, went back to check the Wen Wei Po story, and noticed something unusual. Writing on his blog, Powell describes how he noticed that the dogs detail of the Wen Wei Po story appears to be sourced to a “tweet” on the Tencent Weibo microblogging platform. You can see the original Wen Wei Po story here (the tweet is included as an image) and the original tweet here. It’s translated below with Google:

Tencent Weibo Dog Rumor The Tencent account is held by someone with the user name Pyongyang Choi Seongho, who claims to be an editor at a North Korean newspaper currently studying in Beijing. They have almost 40,000 followers, but are not verified.

There’s something a little strange about the Pyongyang Choi Seongho account, however, and it’s not just the background cartoon of Kim Jong-un flipping the bird. Pyongyang Choi Seongho appears to be run by (or at least inspired by) the same person who runs a similar unverified account on Sina Weibo which is better known (it has over 2 million followers). The Sina Weibo Choi Seongho has been featured a number of times in the Chinese press, but — and here’s the important part — many observers believe it is satirical. The popular expat blog Beijing Cream described Choi Seongho as a “master Internet troll” last year.

Could Western media really have been duped by a satirical tweet? I sent this theory to David Bandurski, a project researcher at Hong Kong University’s China Media Project. While Bandurski stopped short of saying the account was definitely satirical, he didn’t find the account to be believable. “Unless a reliable source at Tencent can confirm their identity,” Bandurski wrote, “this is highly suspect.”

Frustratingly, this still doesn’t mean that we can rule the 120-dogs execution method a complete lie — it’s not completely clear that the Tencent Weibo account was the origin of the rumor, unfortunately. But it does show just how a flimsy Internet rumor about North Korea can end up making headlines around the world with very little evidence.

The crudity of the Western demonisations is such that such parody is little different and with a smattering of anti-communism gets swallowed hook, line and sinker.

But the only response to make to such imperialist “joking” – which will be left lingering in millions of minds as half-digested “fact” is to tell it to get lost. As the EPSR long ago declared (EPSR 839 06-02-96):

But what is crucial to workers philosophically is precisely this complete class identification with what the workers states represent historically, - the world of the proletariat struggling for the right to keep on striving to develop without a bourgeoisie in power, or aid from international capital or commerce, — and striving to overcome their own mistakes in the teeth of relentless and devastating Western imperialist propaganda onslaughts, economic sabotage, political subversion, and military arms-race threats, etc.

Every anti-imperialist struggle to survive, to develop, or to come into being by proletarian-dictatorship forces, or vestiges, gets automatic unconditional support from Leninist science, - whatever the supposed ‘horrors’ or ‘crippling embarrassment’ (such as quelling the petty-bourgeois ‘democracy’ movement of Tienanmen Square, or the unsubtleties of the leadership cult in North Korea). Let bad workers-state practices or understandings be overtaken by better workers-state practices or understandings, not by bourgeois-’democratic’ revivalism. Let proletarian-dictatorship rule plumb the depths of arbitrary vindictiveness or voluntarist folly. To the workers states, comradely criticism to help strengthen their proletarian dictatorships. To the ‘free’ world, get lost with your hypocrisy & lies about ‘Red terror’.

The North Korean regime is attempting to build a workers state and with a dogged hostility to imperialist interference and bullying, including building its own nuclear weapons to deter imperialist aggression, which it has every right to do,

Western sneering criticism and innuendo is simply poison.

It could be wished that Pyongyang’s revisionist limitations could be overcome and brushing over those as the museum-Stalinists do, does not help the world working class.

It would be useful for world revolutionary developments to understand what the political conflict within the North Korean leadership was about, argued out in public as Lenin would have done.

This does not imply the Pyongyang has to be “made answerable” - how it carries out its business is its own affair, not that of hostile imperialism.

But unconditional solidarity does not mean uncritical eulogising – just the opposite it means taking up the flaws and weaknesses of all those standing against imperialism in the world to further clarify the necessary world revolutionary perspectives that alone can end capitalism and its fascist war disintegration.

The crucial issue in the 1980 was to take up the weaknesses and dangers of Gorbachevism, whilst standing 100% on the side of the Soviet Union unconditionally.

The Cuban leadership equally needs to be polemicised with over its flaws and weaknesses, in order to strengthen the heroically dogged workers state.

What is needed is to build the broadest revolutionary perspective, including disentangling the disastrous mistakes of the past, beginning with Stalin’s philosophical retreats from revolutionary understanding.

Museum Stalinism will never do that.

Build Leninism

Don Hoskins

*recently detailed in the book Saving the City: the Great Financial Crash of 1914 for example. [Return to story]

Don Hoskins

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