Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I.Lenin
Economic and Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£12 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications. PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL [Post Office Registered.] Phone 0771 2639934  www.epsr.org.uk 
No 1387  17th May 2011                                                                                                        25p fortnightly

Vigilante US death squad execution of Osama bin Laden and blitzing assassination attempts on Gaddafi underline the stupidity and treachery of the fake- “lefts”. Far from “Stop the War” their degenerate simple-minded confusion and class-based collusion with capitalist Goebbels lies about “dictators” and the “fight for democracy” has played right into hands of the Nazi warmongers. Senior military calls for total NATO destruction of Libya underline the direction that all capitalism is heading because of its unstopping and unstoppable catastrophic bankruptcy and failure, which continues to unravel. Far from “the recovery” the insane printing of money to stop the 2008 “credit crunch” has made matters a thousand times worse as inflation rips and whole countries teeter on the edge of starvation and bankruptcy, like Greece, bailed out and again threatening world destabilising default. War is capitalism’s only way out – defeat for imperialism the only correct Marxist response, on the way to bring it down. Masses need to build Leninism

The blind-eye of the West to the latest Zionist atrocities, doing nothing about the shooting down of yet more hundreds of unarmed protesters, killing over a dozen, and wounding many more on its Lebanese and Syrian borders, will undermine even more the always preposterous claims of imperialism to be for “peace, democracy, and justice”.
Taken with the grotesque death-squad vigilante execution of the unarmed Osama Bin Laden in cold-blood (and before his identity had even been confirmed), in someone else’s country, and the equally illegal and crude blitzing and slaughter of Muammar Gaddafi’s son and grandchildren by NATO forces, all this accelerating incident confirms that the “might is right” exercise of raw intimidation and force is all that counts in the capitalist world.
Might and class domination force is all that has ever counted.
It is all that will ever count until it is ended – by revolution and the establishment of socialism. 
The whole world knows there will be no NATO missions, no sanctions, no cruise missiles or B52, 2000-pound high explosive bombing raids to “degrade” the military infrastructure of Tel Aviv and Jewish occupied Jerusalem, neither in the next weeks nor ever.
And this despite the Zionist tanks ranged against the demonstrators and shooting down unarmed protesters on the Lebanese and Syrian borders in the Nabkha anniversary protests against the theft of their houses, land and country in 1947 (and ever more).
No matter how many more innocent unarmed civilians are barbarously shot down, blitzed, shelled, needle-bombed, burned with illegal war-crime white-phosphorus or simply starved, harassed, besieged and bullied, to add to the long list of slaughter and brutalisation of the Palestinians, genocidally hounded and terrorised for sixty years by this Nazi colonial occupation enclave, there will be no “humanitarian protection” forthcoming from “deeply concerned” Western governments.
No reports and accusations will pour out from their strings of endlessly appearing (and mysteriously sustained and funded) “human rights” NGOs.
There will be no colourful and poisonous diatribes from the bleeding-heart “democrats” and “freedom supporter” correspondents in the capitalist press lie machine.
No interviews with alleged “rape victims” full of pantomime “concern” at every theatrical tearful breakdown. 
There will be no “unconfirmed reports” of torture and “hundreds of bodies” (never filmed or photographed or counted or verified) built on uncontested rumours and the gushingly-reported mouthings-off of dissidents poisoned with decades of hatred and bitter hostility into outright fantasies, fabrications and allegations, (liberally aided and rehearsed by CIA or MI6 or other Western intelligence agency prompts) as there are in Libya or Syria. 
Above all there will be no calls for “regime change” or strident and aggressive demands for “arraignments in the international courts” for “war crimes” based on specious and unproven accusations erected on nothing more than hearsay and allegation but always reported as if proven fact, no pompous and arrogant statements that “the Israeli government must go, and go now” and all the panoply of strutting and sanctimonious hollow and false self-righteousness that is turned on against the demonised enemies of the West. 
No French foreign legion (under cover of the puppet United Nations) will unleash bloody reprisals and vengeance as on the Ivory Coast.
There will, or could be plenty of properly filmed and verified Zionist killing however, just as last week and in the genocidal invasion of Gaza two years ago, the slaughter of Jenin, the mass murder of Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon, and many more incidents in the endless rounds of Nazi brutality, arbitrary shelling, mass imprisonment and torture, daily oppression and land theft imposed by Zionism.
An occasional hint of reality creeps out from a few who cannot stand the inhumanity:
Transgressions by the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories will be disclosed by a group of former soldiers in an internet campaign aimed at raising public awareness of military violations.
Video testimonies by around two dozen ex-soldiers - some of whom are identifying themselves for the first time - will be posted on YouTube. Some of the former soldiers describe the “neighbour procedure”, a term for the use of Palestinian civilians, often children, as human shields to protect soldiers from suspected booby traps or attacks by militants. The procedure was ruled illegal by Israel’s high court in 2005.
Others speak of routine harassment of civilians at checkpoints, arbitrary intimidation and collective punishment.
Idan Barir, who served in the artillery corps, describes in his testimony how an officer forced Palestinian civilians to crawl in a “race” towards a checkpoint near Jenin in the West Bank during the 2000 olive harvest. Only the first three out of “teams” of eight were allowed to pass.
Another, Itamar Schwarz, says Palestinian homes were routinely ransacked in search operations. He describes the day of the World Cup final in 2002, when soldiers confined a Palestinian woman and child in the kitchen of their home for two hours while the unit watched the game in the middle of an operation.
Arnon Degani, who served in the Golani brigade, describes the distress of a young woman who tearfully pleaded to be allowed to pass through a Jenin checkpoint in order to sit an important exam. He gradually came to understand, he says, that the Israeli army’s intention was “to enforce tyranny on people who you know are regular civilians” and to “make it clear who’s in control here”.
The former soldiers were aware of the potential legal and social consequences of going public, Shaul added. “They understand that they risk being prosecuted for what they’re saying. But they’re doing it because it needs to be done.”
Since Breaking the Silence was launched in 2004, it has met with a hostile response from Israel’s political and military establishment, partly targeting the anonymity of some witnesses. There have been attempts to discredit supporters and block funding, and its leaders have been subject to interrogation. Censure increased after it published testimony by soldiers who took part in the war on Gaza in 2008-09.
The events he describes are “things that are really little, but they tell you the big picture of the occupation”.

Even this tame and limited account is persecuted and suppressed. 
It all adds yet more hypocrisy to the disparity between the armed and bloody civilian-blasting NATO intervention in Libya (under the excuse of a long-prepared bogus “rebellion”, taking advantage of genuine upheavals next door) and the tacit, and actual, background armed support for the nazi and feudal backwardness busy shooting down and torturing genuine protesters in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman and Yemen (despite cosmetic murmurings from Washington and London about “democracy”) which has already been a more glaring exposure of the fraud of capitalism’s “parliamentary” racket than ever before.
The nonsensical claims of capitalism to be about “freedom” and “democracy” and against a never-defined and philosophically-meaningless “totalitarianism” have always been a Goebbels-size big lie (bigger and slicker, in fact, than anything the Hitlerite propaganda machine ever managed).
They are a giant confidence trick, misleading and hoodwinking the not-unreasonable wish for fairness and dignity for all, which those in the richer countries have alone had time to think about (while the Third World masses  were worked into the ground), to simply cover up its endless armed interference across the whole planet to put down and suppress any glimmers of resistance to its exploitation.
Almost the whole post-war world has been kept under (or brought back under) US dominated corporate tyranny and wage-slavery by sheer ruthless armed might ultimately, lyingly presented as “freedom” and the “rule of law”.
Anyone who challenges, however confusedly or hesitantly, the grinding degradation, starvation and humiliation of endless poverty-wage factory labour, plantation wage-slavery (if not actual slavery in practice,) and sweat-shop servitude, let alone tries to organise against it, is harried and tortured, sometimes killed and always terrorised.  
Via endless lying propaganda and anti-communist brainwashing, CIA subversion and organised coups, massacres and death squads, the training of vicious, torturing stooge military (in the School of the Americas etc), “diplomatic” bribery and bullying, and where necessary all-out military B52 blitzkrieg on Vietnam, Korea, Iraq etc, this diktat has been imposed throughout the Third World for sixty years by almighty US imperialism, as it was for a centuries before by the direct colonialism of the European “Great Powers”.      
Over 400 such incidents of assassination (Lumumba, Mossadeq), sniper provocation, subversion, massacre (like one million CIA-listed communist victims in Java in 1965), bombing, military overturn, “colour revolution” anti-communist populism (always larded with deliberate violence like Tian an Men in 1989, Ukraine in 2004 and Libya now), twisted “democratic” intervention like France deposing Laurent Gbagbo, civil war provocations, scorched earth mayhem (to stymie mass revolt where outright victory has eluded the West like in Angola in the 1990s, the Congo, or Somalia) have dominated just the decades since the Second World War.
What “democracy”???
It is dictatorship by force, the violent and vicious dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, an essentially fascist system of rule hidden by a pretty façade of pretended “democracy” but entirely dominated by money, bribery, media manipulation, gerrymandering, and stitch-up even in the richest countries in “peaceful times” and always to be thrown aside and discarded for direct rule, martial law and intimidation (justified as “emergency” or “war conditions”), if the working class is ever driven onto a revolutionary path.
And the essential fascist nature of imperialism is a description to which only the deluded and pampered petty bourgeoisie of the rich metropolitan countries ever raises any objection, part of rowing in behind the soft-headed delusions and brainwashing pretences of “the democratic way”, “peaceful roadism” or “the fight for peace” (Stop the War) which the entire fake-“left” (including “hard nut” Stalinist revisionism) has subscribed to one way or the other for decades.
The working class has been led up the garden path by a mass of opportunists, anti-communists and revisionist dunderheads who have failed to warn it of either the reality of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which can only be replaced by a dictatorship of the working class, or of the  inevitable disastrous crash of the capitalist system which has built up for decades and now is heading into open class war repression as the Slump disaster forces the ruling class to impose ever more draconian cutbacks.   
Only the brain-dead, the covert reactionaries (including various former “liberals” and “anti-war” “lefts” now in favour of the Western military in Libya), and Trotskyists poisoned with long years of hostility to workers state discipline, could continue to be fooled.
Only the wilfully anti-communist could fail to see this Nazi rampaging and to declare for the only answer possible – all-out revolutionary turnover of historically worked-out class rule.     
The lies and deceit which cover up the arrogant supremacism of the wealthy and the rich over the 99.99999% of exploited and downtrodden on the planet (including the “better off” layers of workers in the rich countries being rapidly driven down to join Third World levels of exploitation as decades of deluded reformism is stripped away again by Slump disaster) are becoming ever more grotesque and cynical.
But that will further expose the true nature of capitalism and all its charades of “freedom and justice”.
And it will expose the failure and duplicity of the pretend “lefts” who always go along with capitalism at the critical moment or at best, if they do “catch up” with revolutionary sentiment, still fail to make the revolutionary reality of the class struggle the centre of all understanding and repeatedly cover-up their mistakes and failures, thereby compounding and multiplying them over and over.
These disastrous failures of the bankrupt US Empire world domination and its increasingly desperate efforts to keep the world intimidated and in line for paying permanent tribute to sustain the overwhelming luxury and indolent power (of the tiny minority) will grow even deeper.
The reality of world developments is that the imperialist order is facing utter disaster, rotten to the core internally, and facing spiralling credit disintegration and economic implosion, which is eating the heart out of ruling class confidence, and bogged down and facing defeat in its worldwide rampaging.
The shallower part of the American population may leap about in crude, whooping chauvinist satisfaction at a Hollywood-style “taking out” of Bin Laden but it solves none of the disastrous problems facing crisis-racked and bankrupt Washington.
Or the rest of capitalism.
In the broadest picture, the unrolling economic catastrophe that broke open finally in 2008 will simply continue unravelling into the greatest Slump collapse in history, and no amount of “yes we can” “USA-USA” chanting will turn it back.
The desperate efforts of dominant US imperialism to ride it out, by bullying and intimidating the rest of world with ever escalating blitzkrieg and terror into allowing it unlimited credit to feed the insatiable appetites of its all-consuming ruling class, will run into yet more resistance, of which Bin Laden’s sometimes bizarre religious ideology and hostility was an early and shattering signal, however crude and indiscriminate its fightback.
The assassination now, riding roughshod over the pride and nationalism of the region and particularly Pakistan (including over its most reactionary elements) is doubly damaging for imperialism, alienating and humiliating one of its key stooge allies of the Pakistan ruling class, while pouring oil onto a raging fire of hatred, hostility and rebellion which is growing relentlessly among the masses there.
It is part of an upheaval ripening fast worldwide because the historic failure of the production for profit system, which no longer suits the needs of a developed and mature human population and is collapsing under its own contradictions.
And that is a change of epochal significance, far greater than the shallow understanding advanced by the fake-“lefts” of “extra food costs driving the masses onto the streets” or of the crisis “spurring on the demonstrators”; it is an historic metamorphosis taking place which is utterly irreversible and explosively transforming, demanding a revolutionary resolution for the whole of mankind.           
The turmoil and impatience of the ruthlessly exploited billions has been reaching boiling point as they increasingly sense the possibilities of modern science, technology and production to transform the world and their desperate lives into something worthwhile for everyone, but are continually frustrated by the viciousness and tyranny of capitalist sweatshop wage slavery.
And while the nuttier aspects of Al-Qaeda are no solution, its sometimes accurate understanding of Western degeneracy and domineering, combined with the willingness to sacrifice lives to fightback, is a problem for the capitalist system that will not go away, particularly as the Third World resistance turns to the kind of mass movements that have erupted in the Middle East, striding past the limitations of desperate suicide terrorism into a sweeping mass demand for change.
Once these take the next step on from that, looking for the conscious understanding and leadership that can see through the masquerades and hoodwinking pretences of “democracy” still trying yet again to head off their struggles, by smuggling in the same old class domination through the backdoor of pretend reforms and “democratic concessions”, they will really start to move.
And when they reach even further yet, for conscious Leninist revolutionary leadership, as the contradictions of 4000 years of class society (from slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism) collapse even further,  the game will be up for this foul and festering “free enterprise” system.
It is a vast social Titanic which has already hit the iceberg and is sinking fast (notwithstanding the illusions of “growth” and “recovery” produced by printing insane trillions of worthless paper dollars whose injection into the world economy will only make it 1000 times worse than before as rampant inflation rips through everything). 
The great surge, and the Slump collapse of capitalist confidence, is generating a fearful disquiet and doubt eating right into the heart of the metropolitan countries and among many of the more thoughtful middle class.
Over the latest killings it finds one expression in formalistic legal terms by the petty bourgeois intelligentsia:

Your correspondents have rightly been critical of the questionable legality of American action against Bin Laden and Nato attempts to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi (Osama bin Laden and wild-west justice, 3 May). Some 65 years ago US prosecutors and politicians led the way in rejecting the idea of simply identifying and then executing Nazi leaders when they fell into allied hands. Justice Robert Jackson insisted that if the western allies wanted to hold the moral high ground they had to be seen to behave differently from the defeated axis states. The Nuremberg trials gave an opportunity through due legal process for the victor states to demonstrate that the rule of law had to be applied even to the most lawless acts.
How the wheel of history has turned? Instead we have extra-legal murder squads, concentration camps, torture of suspects, wilful disregard for legal sovereignty. No one will shed tears for Bin Laden or for Gaddafi, but if the rule of law was good enough for the Nazi leadership, responsible for the greatest mass murders in history, it must be good enough for our current conflicts. It is time to put an end to the idea that lynch law is a legitimate form of international justice and to try to base Obama’s limp claim that “justice” has been done on a restoration of international behaviour that respects those rules and sets aside the unconvincing assertion that the western killing is the archway to democracy. Robert Jackson would be turning in his grave.
Professor Richard Overy
London

Although the killing of Mr Bin Laden appears to have been received positively in the west (Cheers, tears and beers..., 3 May), I for one struggle to understand on what basis the US can attack and kill a person in another sovereign state.
Bin Laden has not been convicted in any court, other than the court of public opinion. The US is not at war with Pakistan. As far as I am aware a state cannot declare war on an individual. What possible legal basis, other than “might is right”, does the US have to kill this man, without even the cover of acquiescence by that state in such a killing? Can we expect Black Hawks to descend on the home counties in search of Julian Assange, I wonder? The US needs to provide a legal basis for this action or be held to account.
David Enright
Solicitor, St Albans, Hertfordshire

Two things about the connection between waterboarding and the killing of Osama bin Laden (Report, 3 May). First, it is not essential to the case against torture that torture is ineffective; the case against torture is that it is prohibited legally and morally as an abomination, whether it yields useful information or not. Second, even if former vice-president Dick Cheney and Professor John Yoo are right about the effectiveness of waterboarding in this instance, their claim should be understood for what it is: that the unlawful use of torture helped facilitate the unlawful use of death squads. It is no justification for the commission of one crime (torture) that it helps facilitate the commission of another crime (assassination), even when those crimes are committed against people who are themselves dangerous criminals.
Jeremy Waldron
Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, All Souls College, Oxford

So after 10 years US special forces finally killed Osama bin Laden. The evil genius is dead! He was a genius for taking questions to the empire’s military, political and economic heart, but an evil one for the murderous methods he asked them. But as you cheer, please tell us one thing. We are malnourished Indian children, Palestinians corralled in Gaza, Bangladeshis sandwiched between Himalayan floods and inexorably rising sea, HIV-positive Kenyans with no access to retrovirals … we are all those clinging to the underbelly of this wickedly wonderful world system. How do we get answers to the questions of economic, social and environmental justice that Bin Laden so inappropriately asked?
Dr Jeph Mathias
Landour community hospital, India

Now retribution has been exacted and the US has taken its “pound of flesh”, it is time to sit down and talk (Brain food, 3 May). Even the British managed it with the IRA. And if the world has learned one thing over the last 15 years, it is that al-Qaida hardliners are so hacked off they are prepared to strap bombs to themselves and kill anyone.
So why doesn’t the west do something about the legitimate issues that induce Islamic fundamentalism? Like remove western airbases from Saudi Arabia? Like initiate a Middle Eastern peace talk mechanism involving Hamas, without kowtowing to the US Israeli lobby? It would be much cheaper – in both human and financial terms – than continuing to fight a losing global battle. If we engage and negotiate – fairly and unilaterally – there is no “war on terror”.
Nick Hopewell-Smith
Stradbroke, Suffolk

President Obama declaims that “justice has been done” with the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of US special forces in Pakistan. No, not really; vengeance has been meted out rather than justice delivered.
Western democracies have moral legitimacy by adherence to a number of principles, not least the rule of law, due process and respect for the sovereignty of other states. There is little moral distinction to be drawn between the murders inflicted by terrorists in pursuit of their political aims and extraterritorial, extrajudicial killings undertaken by government agencies. Pakistani public sentiment is already seething over the US contemptuously treating it as if it were part of the American wild west. While few here will shed tears for Bin Laden, choppering in an unauthorised posse into Pakistan on a mission to get Bin Laden dead or alive may just tip Pakistan over the edge. If it does, Bin Laden will have the last laugh.
Andy Smith
Kingston upon Thames, Surrey

David Cameron says the killing of Osama bin Laden is a “great success”. I disagree. To execute Osama bin Laden, rather than capture and prosecute him, is surely a war crime and wrong. The same is true in respect of the attempted assassination of Gaddafi, which resulted in the death of his grandchildren and son.
Tom MacKinnon
London

Jackie Ashley (Comment, 2 May) and Benjamin Barber (Comment, 2 May) acknowledge the injustice of targeting Gaddafi and family as violating UN resolution 1973. It is a crime because he is no more in “command and control” than the Queen as colonel in chief. He officially retired in 2007, as Moussa Koussa told us in March. Nato command should be taken to The Hague for war crimes.
Dr James B Thring
Founder, Ministry of Peace and Legal Action Against War

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Bin Laden apparently died from two shots to the head, and rumours are already circulating that whichever bodyguard was in possession of that special pistol on Sunday night carried out this final command. That he was not captured alive, humiliated and executed in the way that Saddam Hussein was will greatly influence the way he is remembered. If Bin Laden becomes an iconic, unifying figurehead, his death may boost rather than diminish the future fortunes of al-Qaida.
Reports that Bin Laden was “buried at sea” are potentially inflammatory, too. There are no circumstances under which this could be “in accordance with Islamic practice” as a US spokesman claimed. Disposing of the body in this way will be seen as questionable by most Muslims (and conspiracy theorists) and as humiliating by the most militant, among whom there will be a desire to avenge Bin Laden’s death.
Al-Qaida’s most active “branches” at present are in Yemen, Somalia and the Maghreb. Just last week, an al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqim) suicide bomber killed 15 in a Marrakesh cafe, and the chaotic situation in Libya also presents opportunities for the group. With its access to the Mediterranean coastline, a vengeful Aqim might be a real threat to mainland Europe.
The structure of al-Qaida has evolved in such a way that Bin Laden’s demise may not greatly affect its future. The pyramid power structure it initially employed (with Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri at the top) has been replaced by a network of enfranchised or otherwise affiliated groups, each with their own “emirs”. Roles and power are widely delegated, so that if one leader is killed or captured it will have a minimum impact on the group’s survival and ability to continue with their agenda undeterred. Paradoxically, the benefits of this structure were suggested to the Afghan-Arab mujahideen by US military advisers during their decade-long fight against the USSR (1979–1989).
Al-Zawahiri – who will now take command of “al-Qaida central – is, if anything, more militant than Bin Laden, and is the suspected mastermind behind 9/11 and the bombings in Madrid and London. Furthermore there is a new generation of potential leaders, some of whom have spent most of their lives as fugitives and jihadists. These include Bin Laden’s son, Saad, and, paradoxically, a growing number of militants from western backgrounds including the high-profile Adam Gadahn, “al-Amriki” (the American) who fronts many al-Qaida videos, and is from Oregon.
There is a danger that post-Bin Laden, al-Qaida may emerge even more radical, and more closely united under the banner of an iconic martyr.

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Consider another fictive scenario. Gangsters are preying on a small mid-western town. The sheriff and his deputies are spineless; law and order have failed. So the hero puts on a mask, acts “extra-legally”, performs the necessary redemptive violence and returns to ordinary life, earning the undying gratitude of the local townsfolk, sheriff included. This is the plot of a thousand movies, comic-book strips, and TV shows: Captain America, The Lone Ranger, and (upgraded to hi-tech) Superman. The masked hero saves the world.
Films and comics with this plot-line have been named as favourites by many presidents, as Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence pointed out in The Myth of the American Superhero and Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil. The main reason President Obama has been cheered to the echo across the US, even by his bitter opponents, is not simply the fully comprehensible sense of closure a decade after the horrible, wicked actions of September 11 2001. Underneath that, he has just enacted one of America’s most powerful myths.
Perhaps the myth was necessary in the days of the wild west, of isolated frontier towns and roaming gangs. But it legitimises a form of vigilantism, of taking the law into one’s own hands, which provides “justice” only of the crudest sort. In the present case, the “hero” fired a lot of stray bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan before he got it right. What’s more, such actions invite retaliation. They only “work” because the hero can shoot better than the villain; but the villain’s friends may decide on vengeance. Proper justice is designed precisely to outflank such escalation.
Of course, proper justice is hard to come by internationally. America regularly casts the UN (and the international criminal court) as the hapless sheriff, and so continues to play the world’s undercover policeman. The UK has gone along for the ride. What will we do when new superpowers arise and try the same trick on us? And what has any of this to do with something most Americans also believe, that the God of ultimate justice and truth was fully and finally revealed in the crucified Jesus of Nazareth, who taught people to love their enemies, and warned that those who take the sword will perish by the sword?

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George W Bush’s remark about wanting Osama bin Laden “dead or alive” reminds us that many people have not moved on from the concepts of “frontier justice”. The events provide an important opportunity for re-examining the role and respect to be accorded to the rule of law and the principles of international justice. If they are to mean anything when applied to other people, everyone needs to know the basis upon which the operation was launched that led to the killing of Bin Laden.
There is a growing and conscientious feeling of “discomfort” that can be allayed only by a thorough and transparent revelation about the objectives and actions taken. Unless this happens quickly, the powerful forces that work in our world, whether nation states or otherwise, will interpret this as a licence to take the law into their own hands, circumvent international norms and convert “might” into right.
President Barack Obama made a measured and carefully drafted announcement . The terms he used are specific. He began his speech with the inevitable reference to 9/11 and stated: “We were … united in our resolve to protect our nation and to bring those who committed this vicious attack to justice”. He then moved on to deal with the development of intelligence, and a lead that arose last August in relation to the location of Bin Laden. “And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action and authorised an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.”
It is noticeable here that there was nothing about an operation in self-defence against a commander in the field during armed conflict; nor any hint of an operation conceived in vengeance and in order to avenge the multitude of deaths in cities around the world. It was an entirely proper and judicious expedition against a man who was undoubtedly responsible for persistent crimes against humanity.
Since Obama spoke these words, however, different interpretations and discrepancies have unfolded. Many of the observations have come from American commentators. For example, Michael Scheuer (CIA) told the BBC World Service: “This operation was not a capture operation, it was meant to kill him.” Daniel J Coleman, who in 1996 was the first FBI agent attached to the CIA’s Bin Laden investigation, told the New York Times that in relation to the attack on the destroyer USS Cole in 2000 “that the deaths of those young men and women were never avenged”.
What therefore needs to be ascertained are the rules of engagement and briefing given to the taskforce, because if its real objective was not to bring Bin Laden to justice but to kill him this begins to have the appearance of an extra-judicial killing or assassination.
The president had little more to say about the operation itself other than: “After a fire-fight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”
For most listeners this gives a clear impression that the Navy Seals were caught up in an exchange of fire with an armed man or men wherein Bin Laden was killed as a matter of necessary self-defence. This description, however, is deficient in two important respects: there was no exchange of fire and Bin Laden was not armed.
How these errors could have arisen is perplexing, because the president, Hilary Clinton and many other officials were, unusually, watching the operation on a live feed through to the situation room in the White House.
While it is entirely understandable that there should be a reluctance to publish any images at the present time, the availability of film and photographic evidence must be preserved for the benefit of an independent judicial examination.
There are other discrepancies concerning the actions of Bin Laden’s wife, which also need to be considered.
Self-defence is a long-standing and well-recognised principle of domestic and international law. While the United Nations has a monopoly on the use of force internationally, Article 51 of the UN charter makes an exception to this in its preservation of the right of self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a member of the UN.
Article 31 (1) c of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague also excludes criminal responsibility for an accused whose actions might otherwise constitute a crime in order to defend himself or another.
Article 2 (2) of the European Convention of Human Rights contains similar provisions, with a proviso that no more force than “is absolutely necessary” is used.
Underpinning this body of law is a consistent prerequisite that the force of the attack or threatened attack to be resisted is imminent. Hence the need for and significance of the “dodgy dossier” and the “45 minute” warning in the case of the Iraq war.
It is far from clear that these preconditions have been satisfied in the Bin Laden case. Normally, one might expect the UN or its security council or its secretary general to have raised these matters, but the euphoric and unquestioning speeches in the council suggest once more that an independent judicial body should be appointed to investigate these issues. Without it, public confidence in the point and utility of international law will be severely undermined.
Some argue that Bin Laden was above and beyond the law and that his case was not susceptible to the complexities and dangers of bringing him to justice in the Hague or even for that matter in the US. It is worth remembering that a case against Bin Laden had begun in the federal district court in Manhattan on 10 June 1998 and has been on-going and substantially amplified since then. According to the New York Times (May 5th), the original indictment was kept secret at first, coming at a time when the CIA was considering a plan to capture Bin Laden and turn him over for trial either in the US or in an Arab country.
In any event, the whole thrust of international treaties and conventions has been towards ensuring “due process” on the basis that no one can be considered to be above the law. Hence there has been a string of international tribunals dealing with equally heinous crimes committed by equally vicious perpetrators, stretching from Nuremburg and Tokyo to Yugoslavia and Cambodia.

All this juridical formalism is a long way from grasping the class reality of the world, and remains fooled by the idea that the Nuremberg trials eg were anything but part of the lies in the first place, no “climb up to a new level of civilisation” but a hollow sham to justify and sanctify the victors of a struggle for plunder and world exploitation profits, whose class domination has just as long a record, – in fact far longer – of genocide, cruelty, invasion and barbarism in the past and since, than anything the “Nazis” ever managed.
If that is challenged just name the Native Americans, the Australian Aborigines, the Maoris, the Zulus, the Incas, the Aztecs, (and other south America natives), indigenous Caribbeans, tens of millions murderously dragged into slavery across the Atlantic from Africa, the Ethiopians and, too, the Libyan and other Arabs, Gattling-gunned Sudanese tribesmen, and millions of deaths imposed on the Indian subcontinent by “enlightened” British Redcoats and ruthless taxation.
Or name the death squad suppressed Latin America ruthlessly pushed down by the Roosevelt  “Big Stick” before WW1 and WW2 and utterly terrorised after it by CIA manipulated coups, tortures and massacres like the horrific General Pinochet Nazism in Chile 1973 and still continuing under the “liberal” Obama in Honduras etc and planned for Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia among others, when forces allow.
Or name the Zionists, in one of the most cruel ironies of history twisted from being the great scapegoated victims into a core of fascist violence and aggression in the heart of the vital Middle East. The petty bourgeois, and the layers of the privileged Western working class it influences, remain fooled too by the demonisation of selected scapegoat countries too, painted in lurid terms by the deluge of Western propaganda as alleged “monstrous dictators” being “selflessly” challenged by lofty and principled Western sacrifice, a heap of such smelly propaganda pig-shyte, that it is difficult to see how anyone has ever been fooled by it.
It could have been seen through a lot longer past if not for the idiocies of Stalinist revisionist “leftism” convincing the great mass of the socialist minded working class that their aims could be achieved by “parliamentary democracy” the “peace struggle” and “containing the warmongering excesses of capitalism” which was supposedly possible post-1945 because of the alleged “hobbling” of capitalism by the ever growing development of the socialist world (which Mao’s revisionism grossly mis-estimated as “a paper tiger”).
This philosophical delusion, which is the real flaw and crime of Stalin’s leadership, became the pursuit of permanent peaceful coexistence alleged to be possible with imperialism, rather than Lenin’s temporary tactical manoeuvres to hold back and split imperialism (as in fact successfully applied even by Stalin in the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact which turned German aggression outwards on its capitalist rivals, buying crucial time to build Soviet industry and the Red Army which did 90% of the fighting to finally destroy Hitler).
But despite the titanic success and massive heroism of the USSR (virtually re-running the 1917 revolution again on a larger scale between 1941-45) its leadership let the post-war CPs degenerate rapidly into the “peaceful road” parliamentary struggle nonsense constantly propping up the treachery and betrayal of reformist Labourism and the official trade union movement.
In the Soviet Union it led to the disastrous capitulation of Gorbachevism to the shallowness of “the wisdom of the market” and the liquidation of the dictatorship of the working class (in the state security, KGB, Red Army etc) which has  seen carpet-bagging plunder of the huge achievement of the Soviet working class and the current oligarchic exploitation and chaos. 
In the West it has almost destroyed serious thought and theoretical understanding, as a correctly mistrustful and sceptical working class has turned away from the dishonest and opportunist cover-ups and posturing of the museum Stalinists (continuing today with a total refusal to debate and honestly assess the mistakes and difficulties of the first huge socialist strides which 70 years of Soviet achievement produced), and the supposed Trotskyist “opposition” which far from critically and scientifically exposing the flaws in revisionist understanding simply wallowed and wallows in out-and-out petty bourgeois biliousness against the workers states, throwing the valuable historical baby of socialist revolutionary state achievements (gigantic and unprecedented as the current celebrations of Yuri Gagarin hint eg) ) out with the bathwater of Stalinist errors and failings. 
This world confusion is one of the major reasons why the capitalists can continue to run rings around the mass movements on the planet with its lies and pretences, even recruiting half the fake-“left” into its Goebbels propaganda against Gaddafi for example, or against Syria, because any class analysis and understanding was long ago abandoned in favour of shallow nonsense about the “fight for democracy” against “big bad dictators”.
What kind of “dictator”, pursuing what ends, and achieving what gains, for which people (which class) is the question that does not even get asked by the simple-minded petty bourgeois Trots like the SWP. 
Is it a communist dictatorship of the working class led by Lenin - or repression of the masses by a murderous thug like Hosni Mubarak, funded and supported by imperialism to the tune of several billion dollars annually and more in armaments and advice?
Is it a bourgeois nationalist revolution which threw out a corrupt monarchy and the remnants of Western colonial domination in the late 60s and has struggled, if erratically and confusedly, to create some kind of egalitarianism and to oppose imperialist interference particularly in Africa (though rejecting Marxist science )?    
The fake-“left” Trots neither say nor even understand the question which is why they fell hook line and sinker for the completely artificial provocations in Libya which pretended to be part of the genuine Egyptian and Tunisian revolts but were clear counter-revolution, fed and whipped on by Western subversion, deliberate violence and a  media campaign of lies exaggerations and half-truths.
And just as the superficial “theory” of the Trots falls constantly for any “rank and file” movement which dresses itself up with a few shallow phrases about “freedom” and the pretence of being a “trade union” or a “fight for freedom”, like the Pilsudski fascist-ideology-saturated Solidarnosc “trade union” in 1981 or the student elitists in Tian an Men in 1989, so it has helped capitalism get the momentum going in the Middle East to muddy the waters of the spontaneous revolt there, and distract attention from the huge upwelling os spontaneous rebellion nearby.     
But the costly and cold-blooded NATO war-game blitzkrieg in Libya allegedly “in humanitarian support” of “ordinary people protesting for freedom” is already escalating into yet another destructive and civilian massacring onslaught, with the chief of the military in the UK General Sir David Richards now demanding even more deadly destruction to “degrade” its infrastructure.
The meaning? To impose the devastation and mayhem which has left Iraq and Afghanistan in ruins, and their populations permanently damaged in bereaved agony and pain amidst environmental and cultural destitution.
The West needs to keep the momentum going because the central purpose of the blitzkrieging ultimately has got little to do with any “rebellion” support nor even very much to do with Libya.
It serves imperialism’s purposes as a side issue to muddy the “Arab Spring” and mix in counter-revolutionary nonsense to confuse everyone locally and worldwide, and to finally make good on subversive and sabotaging preparations long made against the hated, if erratic, anti-imperialism of Mumammar Gaddafi’s 1969 revolution.
But much more is Libya simply a convenient and demonisable victim.
The point is to pump up and sustain the overall war atmosphere in the world, a prelude to the Third World War level conflicts which it knows are coming as a result of its desperate and unsolvable catastrophic financial and historical disintegration in Slump chaos.
Bitter and increasingly brutal trade and international credit and currency war (taking out whole countries at present like Greece and Portugal) is the order of the day, and destined to unfold ever faster, despite the pretence that “international financial order” was restored after the revealing and devastating bank crashes of 2008. 
War between the major powers is the end point as the desperate national ruling classes impose the only “solution” they have ever known to their tangle of “over-production” contradictions called the “free market” - the destruction of allegedly “surplus” capital and “surplus” output (which cannot be sold at a profit rather than being unneeded by desperate billions in poverty).
Just as in 1914-18 and the second phase of twentieth century World War in 1939-1945, war will destroy far more production capacity than simple Slump closures and Depression bankruptcies.
However savagely imposed closures are on weaker capitalist rivals, they cannot be enough with modern super-production technology to solve the problems (as one line of fake-“left” complacency and anti-revolutionism from the Workers Power Trots punts out for example).
Only war can and will result from this crisis of the defunct and bankrupt capitalist system, to create such destruction that there is room again to “rebuild” profitable production, while sorting out at the same time who is to be “top dog” and who is to be forced into the ground.
Chauvinist stirring war serves too as a scapegoating “they’re to blame, those bastards ‘over there’” excuse for the pointless and parasitical ruling class to divert attention from the chaos and mayhem that is entirely the responsibility of its “private enterprise” and “free market” anarchy.
Want and deprivation could be eliminated tomorrow if the fantastic capacities of modern organisation, industry and information technology were used to plan and control production world wide for human need and wants (which does not mean wasteful and pointless consumerism, fatuous fashion and bloated obesity).  But that can only be achieved by forcefully removing the fascist domination of the capitalists and ending the private ownership of factories and farms.
It means even more so keeping suppressed all efforts to restore the old order and minority supremacy. 
It means establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, to change the world and develop it in the interests of the great majority, gradually widening participation in all affairs to do that. 
Revolution is the only means to secure freedom and democracy (which ironically will be ever less required as ever more people become capable and educated).
And with this perspective it was clear from the beginning that all this was being stunted-up behind a completely bogus “democratic” movement anyway, comprising a motley crew of monarchists, pre-liberation colonialist stooges, disaffected petty bourgeois, and out-and-out fascist scum whose death-squad and killer rampages are slowly emerging, even in the heavily biased Western media. 
The energy and momentum has rapidly run out from this obvious counter-revolution (except to the duped and opportunist fake-"left” Labourites, Trots and other pretend “revolutionaries”) because it is an empty fraud, soured with vicious Nazi veangefulness tying its painter to a dying exploitation system.
It has none of the genuinely mass character of the enormous and heroically self-sacrificing anti-imperialist waves of struggle which have been sweeping the Third World and which will increasingly re-emerge over and over.
As even the capitalist press reports occasionally concede (or fail to conceal ) there is instead mass hostility to the West’s fascist intervention, expressed in clearly spontaneous local support for Gaddafi.
The Goebbels pretence is that this is somehow all “manipulated”, the old trick of accusing your enemy of your own crimes to get in first.
But it fails to explain why the stooge gangster dictators or feudalists, brutally and UN-democratically running the West’s interest elsewhere in the Middle East, from Egypt to Oman, have not managed to “organise” any such support (despite attempts).
The desperate fascist character of the “rebels” has been gradually emerging too in reports of the death-squad nighttime rampaging in Benghazi for example, as in an item carefully buried away on the late night Radio 4 news programme last week (and unrepeated), describing how numerous murder victims are turning up in Benghazi, thumbs tied behind their backs and shot through the head.
Taken with the obvious warmongering agenda of the West, cynically ignoring the United Nations legalisms (a charade in the first place), has shown up the fake-“lefts” and pacifists across the board, desperately tying themselves in knots now to try and explain why they are together with overt calls for the Western support and pleading for imperialist bombing raids as these for example:

But the dividing lines over Libya are not exactly what they were with Iraq. Significant voices that opposed the invasion of Iraq are more equivocal about intervention in Libya or even support it.
Professor Juan Cole, one of the most prominent American critics of the Iraq war – and who still calls it illegal – takes an entirely different line on Libya. At the end of March, he wrote on his blog:
“The Libya intervention is legal and was necessary to prevent further massacres and to forestall a threat to democratisation in Tunisia and Egypt, and if it succeeds in getting rid of Qaddafi’s murderous regime and allowing Libyans to have a normal life, it will be worth the sacrifices in life and treasure. If NATO needs me, I’m there.”
In 2002, Hussein Ibish, of the American task force on Palestine, described war in Iraq as unnecessary, dangerous and completely unjustified. Last week, in contrast, he was robustly defending “Obama’s limited engagement in Libya”.
In Britain, another opponent of the Iraq war – Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) – says he is “broadly supportive” of military efforts to protect civilians in Libya, though he is “somewhat concerned” about mission creep and the lack of a clear strategy.
Yvonne Ridley – the British journalist who was kidnapped by the Taliban, later converted to Islam and became a critic of the “war on terror” – now argues that the west must give the Libyan rebels “all the help and support they need to accomplish the removal of Gaddafi”, adding: “The people of Libya would have been brutally crushed without mercy if the west had not responded to their cries for help.”
  
Small wonder the likes of fake-“left” guru fraud Tariq Ali, who pitched in early on with as much anti-Gaddafi biliousness as any of the mainstream bourgeois press (and in the mainstream press at that), helping set up the lying justifications and UN “legality” for the Libyan invasion (which tragically the Chinese revisionists capitulated to), are now desperately wriggling to get off the hook, falling onto a convoluted argument that the West is “pretending” to be in favour of democracy to try and distance themselves from the glaring Nazism.
But the poison and confusion mongering pour out just the same, winding up in this piece, full of foul and gratuitous lying insults against Gaddafi for example and helping set up another victim in Syria.

The patchwork political landscape of the Arab world – the client monarchies, degenerated nationalist dictatorships and the imperial petrol stations known as the Gulf states – was the outcome of an intensive experience of Anglo-French colonialism. This was followed after the second world war by a complex process of imperial transition to the United States. The result was a radical anticolonial Arab nationalism and Zionist expansionism within the wider framework of the cold war.
When the cold war ended Washington took charge of the region, initially through local potentates then through military bases and direct occupation. Democracy never entered the frame, enabling the Israelis to boast that they alone were an oasis of light in the heart of Arab darkness. How has all this been affected by the Arab intifada that began four months ago?
In January, Arab streets resounded to the slogan that united the masses regardless of class or creed: “Al-Sha’b yurid isquat al-nizam!” – “The people want the downfall of the regime!” The images streaming out from Tunis to Cairo, Saana to Bahrain, are of Arab peoples on their feet once again. On 14 January, as chanting crowds converged on the ministry of interior, Tunisia’s President Ben Ali and his family fled to Saudi Arabia. On 11 February the national uprising in Egypt toppled the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak as mass rebellion erupted in Libya and the Yemen.
In occupied Iraq, demonstrators protested against the corruption of the Maliki regime and, more recently, against the presence of US troops and bases. Jordan was shaken by nationwide strikes and tribal rebellion. Protests in Bahrain spiralled into calls for the overthrow of the monarchy, an event that scared the neighbouring Saudi kleptocrats and their western patrons, who can’t conceive of an Arabia without sultans. Even as I write, the corrupt and brutal Ba’athist outfit in Syria, under siege by its own people, is struggling for its life.
The dual determinants of the uprisings were both economic – with mass unemployment, rising prices, scarcity of essential commodities – and political: cronyism, corruption, repression, torture. Egypt and Saudi Arabia were the crucial pillars of US strategy in the region, as confirmed recently by US vice-president Jo Biden, who stated that he was more concerned about Egypt than Libya. 

(no attempt to say why!!! - because Egypt is a genuine revolution and Libya a Western counter-revolutionary stunt?? )

The worry here is Israel; the fear that an out-of-control democratic government might renege on the peace treaty. And Washington has, for the time being, succeeded in rerouting the political process into a carefully orchestrated change, led by Mubarak’s defence minister and chief of staff, the latter being particularly close to the Americans.
Most of the regime is still in place. Its key messages are the need for stability and a return to work, putting a stop to the strike wave. Fevered behind-the scenes negotiations between Washington and the Muslim Brotherhood are continuing. A slightly amended old constitution remains in force and the South American model of huge social movements producing new political organisations that triumph at the polls 
(!!!!)
and institute social reforms is far from being replicated in the Arab world, thus not posing any serious challenge, until now, to the economic status quo.
The mass movement remains alert in both Tunisia and Egypt but is short of political instruments that reflect the general will. The first phase is over. The second, that of rolling back the movements, has begun.
The Nato bombing of Libya was an attempt by the west to regain the “democratic” initiative after its dictators were toppled elsewhere.  

[The essense of the “left” excuse making   - declaring that the West is somehow “doing the right thing because it is forced to”)

It has made the situation worse. The so-called pre-empting of a massacre has led to the killing of hundreds of soldiers, many of whom were fighting under duress,  and permitted the ghastly Muammar Gaddafi to masquerade as an anti-imperialist.
Here one has to say that whatever the final outcome, the Libyan people have lost. The country will either be partitioned into a Gaddafi state and a squalid pro-west protectorate led by selected businessmen, or the west will take out Gaddafi and control the whole of Libya and its huge oil reserves. This display of affection for “democracy” does not extend elsewhere in the region.
In Bahrain, the US green-lighted a Saudi intervention to crush local democrats, enhance religious sectarianism, organise secret trials and sentence protesters to death. Bahrain today is a prison camp, a poisonous mixture of Guantánamo and Saudi Arabia.
In Syria the security apparatus led by the Assad family is killing at will, but without being able to crush the democratic movement. The opposition is not under the control of Islamists: it is a broad coalition that includes every social layer apart from the capitalist class that remains loyal to the regime.
Unlike in other Arab countries, many Syrian intellectuals stayed at home, suffering prison and torture, and secular socialists like Riad Turk and many others are part of the underground leadership in Damascus and Aleppo. Nobody wants western military intervention. They don’t want a repeat of Iraq or Libya. The Israelis and the US would prefer Assad to stay as they once did Mubarak, but the dice are still in the air.
In Yemen, the despot has killed hundreds of citizens but the army has split, and Americans and Saudis are trying desperately to stitch together a new coalition (as in Egypt) – but the mass movement is resisting any deals with the incumbent. 
The US has to contend with an altered political environment in the Arab world. It is too soon to predict the final outcome, except to say it is not over yet.

This posturing alleged erudition, larded with superficially clever phrases to pull the wool of everyone’s eyes, is a disgusting fraud on the working class.
The biggest nonsense in all this is the completely un-Marxist notion that the issue is all about “democracy” in the first place, following completely the lying CIA, MI5 agenda of an alleged “revolt for freedom”, without question.
To evade the obvious subversive nature of the events. Ali deliberately conflates the genuine revolts elsewhere with the counter-revolutionary stunts against Libya and Syria to begin with, all under the heading of an “Arab Spring” (a phrase dreamed up by the capitalist intelligence machine). To bolster this, there is a stream of gratuitous and foul insults against Gaddafi, based on nothing at all but a repetition of the Western demonisation, rumour mongering and lies.
The really sly part is the classical Trotskyist nonsense always used against the workers states, that “secretly” in some unspecified way, they had already transformed back into a capitalist class and therefore were prime targets for revolutionary overthrow, – via the specious nonsense of a “political revolution” which, as all the events of Gorbachevism in 1989, Poland and the rest of East Europe proved, was and could only ever be, counter-revolutionary capitalist restorationism, leading to the rule of the grotesquely rich oligarchs plundering 70 years of socialist achievement, the East European lauding of the Nazi SS, and the misery and deprivation of the post-Soviet working class.   
Right at the beginning in a fraudulently pseudo-knowing “sweep of history” sketched out in glib phrases,Ali smuggles the concept under the wire that Gaddafi’s nationalist revolt had become no different to the stooge gangsterism of Mubarak, or the backwardness of the feudal sheikhdoms with not a jot of justification or evidence, only a Trot defeatist capitulation to the idea that American imperialism was all powerful in quickly subverting the Arab nationalist movement.
When did this happen? Well it didn’t.
Just the opposite - the Libyan efforts towards egalitarianism, and sporadic but continuing anti-imperialism, for all the bizarre and individualistic anti-Marxism of Gaddafi’s “own-brand” Green Book “socialism”, were a permanent irritation to imperialism which repeatedly has tried to bomb, assassinate, economically strangle, and bully it into the ground – the exact opposite to the grovelling diplomatic sycophancy towards the ultra-rich feudalists, and the massive financial support given to Mubarak and his ilk, which did successfully subvert the legacy of Nasserite nationalism in Cairo the wake of Zionist war defeats.
On top of this comes the notion that capitalist warmongering is actually supporting “democracy”. 
As if.
But rather than draw the in-your-face conclusion that Sarkozy, Cameron, the blitzkrieging Nobel "peace" prize holder Obama and the Pentagon behind him, and the rest of imperialism support the rebels because they are reactionaries and Nazis, Ali declares the West is “just doing it because they have been forced into a pretence”.
What a tangled mess of deliberate reactionary confusion!
What “democracy” anyway must again be asked since Marxism is clear there is only the dictatorship of capital – or its replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat, upon which basis the only true democracy there can ever be will be built, just in time for it to become a completely redundant concept anyway, since as soon as the great wide majority is truly in charge (by vigorously suppressing the remnants of the old order and its endless violent attempts to reestablish the rule of the tiny minority), society will have evolved into a maturing socialism on the way to complete communism.
And there, human rational self-discipline at individual and community level will prevail without any need for coercion – by a democratic majority or any other kind.
The biggest fraud however is that the “left” must continue to make “their own struggle” against regimes which in the end are not socialist. 
This a lot easier to argue against the Syrian Ba’athists who have a long record of partial collusion with imperialism, and where there are some greater grievances by the masses.
But there is still a long history of anti-imperialism and anti-Israeli-ism which has been a “thorn in the side” for US imperialism and its Zionist henchmen, whether or not the Assad regime is using it only to head off the pressure from the Arab street. 
To pretend that opposing the Syrian government at this moment is a matter for the "left" independent of the imperialist onslaught is not just naïvety but dissembling treachery. 
Since the days of Kerensky in August 1917 Leninism has been clear on the need to identify the main enemy and even to stand alongside petty bourgeois forces temporarily to fight off and defeat the greater threat.
When the Tsarist general Kornilov marched on Petrograd the Bolsheviks declared that the fight against the reactionary monarchists (fascists) was the critical one, holding fire on the bourgeois Kerensky until that fight was finished, while making clear to the working class that they should have no faith at all in the bourgeois parliament. 
The same applies now. The main enemy is imperialism and the only valid fight is to defeat its accelerating warmongering and counter-revolutionary stunts.
Unlike the uncritical “Victory to the Libyan People (led by Gaddafi)” slogan  which the museum Stalinist Lalkar/Proletarian pump out (swinging to the opposite and equally unscientific end of the spectrum) that implies no support at all for the bourgeois nationalist regime in Tripoli or the even more potentially treacherous Assad.
Neither, however “well-intentioned” they may have been here and there, are the answer for the working class.
But currently they are the target for imperialism which is the source and generator of all the foulness, chaos, turmoil and war in the world and needs to be defeated.
The fake-“lefts” have capitulated completely to imperialist pressure, in the foulest collusion like the Trots or covering up endless years of soft-brained “struggle for peace” retreat from Leninist revolution with a show of pointless and misleading bravado “supporting” the victims.
Leninist understanding is vital built by a Leninist party. It needs to be fought for.
Don Hoskins

E P S R   BOX

Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote is Revolution and a strong workers state, --- as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE explain.

Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.

The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with a vengeance.

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It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And  from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

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"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

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" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

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The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms. (in such a manner) that - to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity - five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution.

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World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
Posada acquitted on all charges

by Jean-Guy Allard
ON April 9, a jury in the nation which has afforded itself the right to draw up a list of countries allegedly sponsoring terrorism, found international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles innocent of 11 charges of perjury, fraud and obstruction. The El Paso court judge announced the decision, which cannot be appealed.
The jury of seven women and five men announced their verdict after just three hours of deliberations, having been instructed by Judge Kathleen Cardone -appointed by George W. Bush - who presided for the second time over a trial at the end of which Posada was free to return to his Miami home.
“Anytime a jury has a case, there’s no telling what they might do. But we respect the jury’s decision,” Timothy Reardon, the assistant US attorney, stated. Reardon, also from the anti-terrorist section of the Justice Department, was incongruously sent by
Washington, while the government refused to acknowledge Posada as a terrorist and try him as such, in line with international agreements signed by the U.S.
Venezuela is still demanding Posada’s extradition on 73 charges of homicide, an application filed in 2005 when the terrorist appeared in Miami.
Upon acquitting him, the jury failed to acknowledge - despite all the evidence presented - Posada’s illegal entry into the United States via the Miami River aboard the shrimp boat “Santrina” preferring to believe his ‘coyote’ story.
Implicitly, nor was Posada’s role in the series of bomb attacks in Havana in 1997, which resulted in the death of Italian tourist Fabio di Celmo acknowledged.
A collaborator with Batista’s police, upon his arrival in the United States Posada was recruited by the cia and admitted into Operation 40, a plan to massacre Cuban revolutionaries as part of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The  cia placed him in repressive agencies in Venezuela, where he led the deadly “cleansing” operations of the disip (former Venezuelan secret police) starting 1967, and as an operative in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
He was detained in Venezuela as the mastermind of the sabotage of the Cubana passenger plane in 1976, killing all 73 persons aboard but, with  cia help, escaped from prison, going on to handle the drugs for weapons operation from the llopango airbase in El Salvador.
In November 2000, Posada was arrested in Panama in relation to a conspiracy to assassinate the Cuban leader Fidel Castro during the Ibero-American Summit, and was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for acts of terrorism. He was released in 2004, pardoned by former president Mireya Moscoso, under pressure from the upper echelons of the Cuban-American terrorist mafia and their protectors in Washington and Miami. •

Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs
ON the afternoon of April 8, 2011, the farce initiated 13 weeks ago in El Paso, Texas, concluded with the exoneration of the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles of all immigration charges filed against him.
For all of those who have followed the sinister career of this terrorist and his connections with successive U.S. administrations, the FBI and cia in the criminal war on Cuba, this is but one more demonstration of the support and protection historically afforded him by U.S. authorities.
Since Posada landed in Florida - arriving from Isla Mujeres in Mexico aboard the Santrina vessel - he has remained, as always, under the tutelage and protection of the United States government, as Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro denounced at that time.
His trial for having lied during immigration procedures, not as a terrorist, is an insult to the people of Cuba and the families who lost loved ones as a result of Posada’s acts.
The shameless proceedings in El Paso are totally contradictory to the anti-terrorist policy which the government of the United States professes to follow and which has even led to military interventions in other countries and cost thousands of lives.
The United States government is well aware of Posada’s participation in the 1976 downing of a Cubana de Aviación airliner, the 1997 bombing campaign against Cuban tourist facilities and his attempt on the life of our Comandante en Jefe, in Panama, in 2000, for which he was convicted in that country.
The administration in Washington has in its hands all the evidence substantiating Posada’s crimes, much of which was presented during the trial in El Paso.
It remains to be seen if it is now capable of bringing new legal charges against Posada Carriles for terrorism or to proceed with his extradition to Venezuela, which was solicited more than five years ago by that country and is legally demanded by international accords to which the U.S. is a party and by United National Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001), which was proposed precisely by the United States.
Most incongruous is the fact that, while Posada Carriles has been exonerated, five Cuban anti-terrorist fighters remain unjustly imprisoned in the U.S. for seeking information about the activities of Cuban-born terrorists who, like Posada Carriles, with impunity, freely walk the streets of Miami.
Cuba reiterates that the government of the United States is fully responsible for this outcome and demands that it assume its obligations in the struggle against terrorism, with no hypocrisy or double standards.
Havana, April 9, 2011 •