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 1420  27th January2013                                                                                                   25p   fortnightly

Goebbels level Western hate campaign against desert “terrorist” upheavals reflects the desperate fears of Western imperialism that revolt against its dominance is spreading uncontrollably. Wild exaggerations about the “threat to our ‘democratic’ way of life” in Cameron’s revived talk of “fifty years” of a “war on terror” are ludicrous in themselves, made to keep public fears at fever pitch and capitalist warmongering on the boil, for the oncoming “answer” to slump and Depression. But while “terror” attacks and desert insurgency is not literally threatening Europe, the growing Third World revolt IS a major phenomenon which reflects the huge contradictions of the capitalist order, incapable of moving forwards and out of time historically. It needs to go by revolutionary overturn 

One of the most degenerate aspects of the West’s desperate colonialist interventions in Mali, now Algeria and potentially most of Africa, is the sheer hate-filled viciousness of its hypocritical and lying demonisation propaganda against the rebels, condemned as less than human or a “new type” of “criminal and psychotic” movement to be stamped out.
And equally sick and detestable is the virtually universal capitulation of the reformist “Labour movement” to this Goebbels tirade, the ranks of  Labourites and “official” TUC, simply going along with its racism and violence, and the blitzkrieg interventions to “exterminate the terrorists”. 
The fake-“left” Trotskyists and revisionists are effectively no better, for all their formal denunciations of imperialist intervention, since they fail utterly to expose this lying and hypocritical “moral” propaganda onslaught and it its Nazi warmongering purpose (and thereby effectively going along with it).
The entire swamp of multiple “lefts” either joins with the hate-campaign, keeps silent, or else invents elaborate “theories” to explain that the rebels are all allegedly “manipulations of Western intelligence” (and therefore it is “OK” to denounce them).
They all bend to the hurricane wind of foul vilification and lies poured on various rebellious movements, either condemning them outright or justifying themselves by implying the Al-qaeda and desert uprisings are “all part of imperialism itself really”.
Such elaborate and convoluted tales reflect the petty bourgeois awe of all these groups at the supposed almost omni-powerful capacities of bourgeois imperialism.
For all their strutting and posing about “revolution” they have no real faith that it can ever be ended, and deep down in their petty bourgeois souls, no real wish for its overthrow and overturn anyway, whatever lip-service phrases they might put into their stories (usually buried deep in a couple of add-on paragraphs at the end – if there at all).
A much simpler story evades them – that world monopoly capitalism is desperately floundering because of its gigantic and catastrophic historic crisis, part of which is the constantly rising Third World rebellion which for all its often weird and backward religiosity, and sometimes crude and counter-productive puritanism and “discipline”, is increasingly undermining the routine oppression and exploitation imposed on the world by imperialism via its numerous and tyrannical brutal dictatorships and stooges.
It is not enough routinely to denounce the bloody intervention by the French army (and the token gestures by British “military aid”) as “imperialist neo-colonialism”.
Or course it is, almost a parody in its obvious crudeness and pursuit of capitalist exploitation interests and the continuation of its “right” to exploit the poorest on the planet and plunder their natural resources too.
But while this may be right, formally speaking, it is only a small part of the story.
The real issue to explain is that these uprisings are part of a worldwide movement of hatred by the masses for long centuries of exploitation.
By going along with, or failing to expose the Western Goebbels campaign and its covering of pretences of “moral righteousness” pumped out by the ruling class propaganda and intelligence machine, the trivial analysis of “imperialist intervention” from the swamp “lefts”  becomes nothing but a dissembling pretence of opposition, carrying no weight or sincerity.
It is no different to the disingenuous “dismay” of the “left opposition” to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, pumped out after all the fake-“lefts” groups had condemned the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York as “unacceptable and criminal atrocity” (or held their tongues when others in the fake-“left” were doing so, as Lalkar did inside the Scargillite SLP) - thereby setting up the entire world public opinion for the blitzings.
Such formally “Marxist” statements are nothing but empty posturing, a shallow cover for essentially going along with the Western stampeding of mass opinion under the seeming logic of “destroying criminals and an unacceptable threat to the peace-loving and democratic Western way of life” etc etc ad hypocritical nauseum).
Once it is accepted that the “rebels” are some kind of monsters, driven by who knows what mystically demonic impulses of “evil” (as described by deliberately fostered anti-scientific obscurantism), who supposedly have lost contact with human decency, and “civilised standards” etc and are nothing more than “inhuman psychopaths bent on destroying our peaceful democratic lives” as the hypocritical imperialist propaganda pretends, then the logic that they should be ruthlessly hunted down and killed is hard to argue with.  
The same mealy-mouthed pretences apply, this time in reverse, over Libya and Syria, where the screaming pitch and non-stop denunciations of “evil dictators” have been poured instead onto the heads of Gaddafi or the Assad Ba’athist regimes because of their anti-imperialist past form and failure to capitulate completely to Western wishes.
Far from exposing for the working class that the deliberate lying hypocrisy and crocodile tears over “the killing of their own people” is nothing but the foulest of lies to keep the world war atmosphere on the boil, which capitalism needs to escape and divert attention from its own intractable catastrophic economic and political implosion, the “lefts” largely go along with the Goebbels deluge.
Some, like most of the Trots, even use the most convoluted philosophical gymnastics to “explain” away the massive Western media support, financing and arming for the pretend “revolutions” set going in Libya and Syria, and the outright NATO Nazi blitzing, by protesting they are “against the NATO invasion of Libya” which supposedly “spoils” the monstrous pretence of “revolution” artificially whipped-up there, which they want to support.
The Trots have turned a blind eye to the obvious petty bourgeois nature of these counter-revolutionary stunts, and swallow all the foulest lies and propaganda deluge with the dissembling pretence that the “more Arab Spring” theatricality organised by capitalism  – and the exact opposite of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions (and aimed at suppressing them) – is “genuine rank and file uprising” even though they showed their reactionary and racist stooge character from day one with immediate widely publicised pleas for Western aid and blitzing intervention, along with declarations of anti-communism, and the waving of monarchist flags, and with the foulest racist and petty fascist viciousness rapidly emerging through the storm of fantastical atrocity allegations against Gaddafi and Assad.
The tepid “Stop the War” declaration of the museum-Stalinist revisionists, which “support” the Assad regime and Gaddafi (and Saddam Hussein) equally confuses and misleads the working class, by telling them that such half-hearted and inadequate bourgeois nationalist leadership, should be “defended” and implying that the at-best limited reforms they make are a sufficient way forwards for the working class “if only they are left alone”.
This not only fails to explain the much greater turmoil on the planet which is all driven by the imperialist crisis – however crude and backward it is in places (such as Mali or the hard-line Sharia areas of Somalia) because it fails to explain the crisis – but gets itself into appalling tangles; one minute the Taliban fundamentalists in Afghanistan are to be supported, the next similarly driven Islamic movements which have been dragged into the fight against Damascus are denounced; one minute the Muslim Palestinian leadership of Hamas is to be supported (after the previous support for the Arafatite Palestinian Authority was dropped without a work of explanation (due to the exposure of its training and finance collaboration with the Zionists and the CIA)); but the next Hamas comes out against Assad, throwing the Lalkar-Proletarian group and other revisionists into more self-contradiction (which they overcome by simply not mentioning these glaring problems – the usual Stalinist cover-up mechanism). 
Where does the Lebanon Hizbollah fit into this? - the cause last week of the internationally criminal war act air-raid by Zionism on Syria, sending in planes to bomb targets of alleged weapon supplies, with scarcely a murmur of the Western diplomatic “outrage” that would have followed if for example Iran had flown planes into occupied Palestine (the pretend state of “Israel”) to bomb the completely illegal and this time, completely real, nuclear “weapons of mass destruction” hold by the manic Zionists against decades of notional (and completely worthless) cosmetic UN and international agreements.
This mess of confusion follows the failure to see imperialism and the imperialist crisis as the sole and crucial driving element of the Depression and War disaster which brings all of this turmoil to the surface and to want to see and understand every blow against imperialism.
The confusion becomes even more dishonest when it is turned against the multiple “terrorist and insurgency” eruptions, with elaborate conspiracy theories.      
Agreed, such movements are vulnerable to manipulation (and because of their own lack of Marxist perspective).
But every time capitalism has managed to use such movements their character is clear, with massive Western media support.
But most of this upheaval is driven against imperialism and even those movements once recruited for anti-communism have turned into the opposite, fighting  US dominated world imperialism.
A big clue is that none of the turmoil of revolt by the Tauregs, or the “Islamists” in Mali, or the Algerian desert, has been calling for Western intervention and help. 
And none of it has been given the gold-plated propaganda treatment about “freedom fighters” and “democratic armies” (the “Free Syrian Army” for example) which always fill the Western media machine when one of its counter-revolutionary stunts is underway, as with Ronald Reagan’s declaration that the Nicaraguan massacring contras were “freedom fighters” to numerous anti-communist stunts in Eastern Europe, starting with Hungary in 1956, the laughable Prague Spring in 1968 and the Solidarnosc pretend trade union counter-revolution in Poland.  
The reality is these are part of an overall world anti-capitalist turmoil whether or not that is what they understand themselves. 
As the EPSR said a decade ago (EPSR 1109 23-10-01): 

Such fake-’left’ condemnation of ‘terrorism’ is on a par with fake-’lefts’ in World War I who could not see the correct Marxist philosophy of the Bolshevik slogan for Russia to be defeated. This would mean approving of the colonial-imperialist military aggression of Kaiser Germany, they claimed.
Lenin dismissed this nonsense in arguments (see quotes below) which apply to today’s fake-’lefts’ who feel obliged to denounce the “terrorist massacre of innocent workers in New York” while pretending to still be for the ‘revolutionary defeat of imperialism’.
In both cases, in the final analysis, it means a retreat from really wanting the defeat of one’s own imperialist ruling class.
If particular disasters likely to befall a hated world-domination imperialist system are to be ‘condemned’ in line with general bourgeois ‘shock horror’ propaganda, then the pretence of nevertheless still being in favour of ‘all-out class war’ is just hypocritical posturing, because of refusing to take advantage of all the difficulties the system is facing in order to overthrow it, - as Lenin explains.
It is precisely because this class-collaborating stance of “all agreed in condemnation of Sept 11 massacre of innocents” has uncovered the philosophical humbug at the heart of fake-’left’ anti-imperialist ‘revolutionism’ that the 57 varieties of Trot and Revisionist petty-bourgeois posturing have so desperately tried to pretend that “imperialism has been strengthened” by the so-called “disastrous terrorist crime”.
The true rottenness of all subjective-idealist philosophy of course oozes out at such a point like foul pus, - prepared to say anything about reality purely in order to “prove” the justice or correctness of a class attitude already instinctively adopted. These middle-class don’t want to be associated with Sept 11 despite wanting to posture as “sincere, all-the-way, anti-imperialist revolutionaries”. So any crap distortion of reality will do to “prove” them right to “condemn terrorism”.
The biggest joke of all, of course, is that the serious scientific Marxist-Leninist disagreement with terrorism as necessarily the best first-choice tactics for fighting imperialism, and its obvious potential disadvantage if trying to build a mass proletarian party of revolutionary political theory as the only possible way to finally defeat imperialism (see EPSR 1106, etc) not only does not imply or require any condemnation of terrorist tactics to substantiate Marxism’s own credibility, but does not lead to any philosophical contradictions if the OBJECTIVE damage to imperialism from other sources or causes (including al-Qaeda terrorism) is acknowledged.

The ruling class fear that rising rebellion is now spreading uncontainably throughout the African continent as well as the Middle East as the crisis failure of world capitalism impacts the already near-the-edge masses everywhere, is driving out the foulest of lying abuse against the hapless desert and other marginalised peoples in this case.
The tide of filth and lies pours out with one purpose, to justify their slaughter and dispersal and to sustain the now non-stop neo-colonialist warmongering of capitalism, which is preparing the world atmosphere for the great destruction to come as the “credit crunch” deepens into total inter-imperialist bitterness and world war. 
It is the end point to which Marxist theory has always pointed and which three giant conflagrations have already demonstrated to be the truth of capitalist crisis, the Franco-Prussian war, the First World War and the Second World War.  
As the latest (and already the deepest and most widespread) crisis spreads its impact from the Middle East, already thrown into chaos and threatening imperialism’s exploitation interests in one of the most strategically important regions, it is driving the Western imperialist ruling class to ever more demented hysteria at a new even higher level than already poured onto Serbia, Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, Yemen, Iraq (where “babies” were allegedly tipped on the floor from incubators etc and mass destruction weapons were “just 45 minutes away”), the Taliban, and the Somalians.
The stream of lies, disinformation, hearsay exaggerations and non-stop wild and unsubstantiated allegations of supposed abuse, “genocide”, massacres and torture already poured out against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and now the Syrian government to stampede Western opinion into accepting yet more blitzkrieg and Western funded sabotage and civil war, is now turned on the Tauregs and central African rebels.
It has become virtually pure distilled hatred with not a shred of humanity within it.
The Nazi hate films in 1930s Germany, which equated the Jews to rats and vermin, painting them as far less than human and ultimately “justifying” their destruction and scapegoated mass slaughter (as an excuse and distraction from capitalism’s own responsibility for the soup-kitchen 1930s Depression) is now echoed in the latest diatribes like this (shortened) foulness run by the “liberal” Guardian declaring the rebels to be beyond the pale criminals and psychotics, essentially describing them as bacteria, and mobilising the stooge United Nations to wipe then out:
..That the UN, in association with African political leaders, recognised the danger posed by fundamentalist aggression to the Sahel and west Africa was not in doubt. The sense of urgency, however, lagged so far behind my own that it was a marvel I did not invade the conference hall with a banner, screaming: TAKE BACK MALI – YESTERDAY!
The security council had already set out a “roadmap” for a west African force of intervention in the Sahel – it required the secretary general to report back on “progress” a few months later. This, it struck me, was an instruction not to the secretary general, but to the fundamentalist invaders to report to the world on the progress they would have made in destroying the ancient libraries of Timbuktu; amputating the arms of a few more Malians; and stoning to death deviationists from their “moral code”.
It was an invitation to Ansar Dine’s allies Boko Haram to nudge a few more terminators into Nigeria; demolish a few more educational, cultural and religious institutions; eliminate what was left of the UN presence after its bomb attack on the UN HQ in Abuja; and continue its project of unleashing death and destruction in southern Nigeria.
...Logically, Mali’s neighbours should have taken the initiative – and within weeks of the expansion of what had been a local, opportunistic insurgency into the global arena. As it was, evidence accumulated that northern Mali had been infiltrated by al-Qaida fighters dislodged from Libya, Somalia and other former sanctuaries, as was acknowledged by the Nigerian government.
Nevertheless, in the end, it took a former colonial power to seize the leadership. Humiliating? Not quite. This invasion was not just a Malian affair, or even an African one: it was a global challenge. It had become clear that a few more weeks of inaction would have empowered Mali’s invaders and, by extension, the murderous campaign of Nigeria’s own Boko Haram.
Unlike most commentators, I confess that I find it impossible to regard these al-Qaida clones as either political or religious movements, even of the extremist kind. That their ability to recruit footsoldiers is a reflection on society’s failures is not in doubt; nonetheless, it is naive to attribute this solely to unemployment, marginalisation and other social inequities. The world is facing viral mutations of the human psyche. Take Joseph Kony, the Christian warrior of Uganda whose idea of “resistance” is child conscription, abduction and rape, spiced with the slicing off of lips, ears and noses of unbelievers. People such as he belong to a special category that is part-criminal, part-psychopathic – hence my warning to that UN meeting:
“Let us recall that it is not anti-Muslims who have lately desecrated and destroyed – and with such fiendish self-righteousness – the tombs of Muslim saints in Timbuktu … The orientation – backed by declarations – of these violators leaves us with a foreboding that the invaluable library treasures of Timbuktu may be next.”
The truth, alas, is that the science fiction archetype of the mad scientist who craves to dominate the world has been replaced by the mad cleric who can only conceive of the world in his own image, proudly flaunting James Bond’s 007 credentials – licensed to kill. The sooner national leaders and genuine religious leaders understand this, and admit that no nation lacks its own dangerous lunatics, be they Ansar Dine of Mali, or Terry Jones of Florida, the earlier they will turn their attention to the issues truly deserving priority.
The treasures of Timbuktu appear to have been saved from total destruction. Mali, finally, is being restored. For Africa’s leadership, however, it is yet another wake-up call – and one that goes beyond a mere call to arms.
This demented tirade rings all the appropriate bells to “prove” that these are illogical inhuman people fully justifying the most blitzkrieging extermination and not just regionally but “threatening the whole world” as the newly revived “war on terror” scaremongering by Cameron and Clinton declares.
One news story simply reported local comments that “they should all be killed”.
The atmosphere of vengefulness and hate deliberately brewed has already produced the most inhuman of consequences, not by the “rebels” but by the victors as the “oh-so-neutral” and “liberal” reporting of Channel Four News describes, after a stream of lurid allegations about amputations etc and the obligatory “gay persecution” and “it’s all racist really” commentaries:
According to Gao residents, the victims of sharia punishments were from Mali’s black African ethnic groups, while the jihadis were mostly lighter-skinned Arabs – both Malian and foreign – and Tuaregs. Touré, of the Songhai tribe, was one of the few black Malians to join MUJAO.
“If you are a Tuareg or Arab, or if you look like them, they don’t threaten you,” said Alzouma, the amputee, who is from the Bella, the group traditionally used as slaves by the Tuareg. “Their people smuggle drugs, cigarettes and everything, but they don’t threaten their own families, just black people – the Songhai, the Bella and the Bambara.”
A year ago Tuaregs rose to demand an independent state in the north. Many Tuareg officers deserted the army to join the rebellion. Some joined forces with jihadis, mostly Algerian or Malian Arabs, who were using the desert for kidnapping and smuggling. During the past nine months, in which they established an Islamist mini-state, jihadis from across the globe arrived in northern Mali.
Ethnic tension has already led to reprisals. Graphic footage shows a mob tearing a jihadi fighter limb from limb. A vigilante group calling itself the Patrollers of Gao is combing the town for members of MUJAO. Last week they seized and beat several men in the marketplace, and one who was hiding in the hospital. Malian soldiers rescued the men, but they too speak with vitriol about those they see as traitors, especially the Tuareg. “We invited them into our homes and ate with them, but they turned their guns on us,” said a senior army officer in Gao. “How can we trust them again?”
In the last few days, the mayor of Gao, who returned from the capital, Bamako, last Sunday, has used local radio to call for tolerance and the rule of law, but neither the police force nor local administration has yet been reinstated.
Lindsey Hilsum is international editor for Channel 4 News

“Limb from limb” is about a horrifying as it is possible to get but is reported virtually as a neutral  afterthought, the vitriol reserved for rebels as always with the “liberal“ Channel Four news, the petty bourgeois anti-communist TV equivalent of the Guardian, always managing to pour more poison out than the mainstream bourgeois outlets. 
Every kind of self-righteous nonsense has been tipped onto the heads of the rebels; they are “racist” it is declared, because they allegedly singled out darker black skinned people for punishment and discipline. But this is because the darker southern Mali population has tended to be the one collaborating with French neo-colonialism, and the accusations – made now they are back in control and pursuing their own racist reprisals – are from carefully selected interviews with those who did well from that and fear the revolutionary demands of the indigenous population. 
It is also the case that white Europeans were “singled out”, again not for “race” reasons but because they were assumed to be Western collaborators – a crude and sweeping identification loaded with potential for injustice and tragic consequences of course but a million miles from the deliberate implication of “reactionary racism” planted by Western propaganda, and swallowed by the petty bourgeois fake- “lefts”. 
Then the rebels are denounced as “callous in their savage discipline” - and draconian they are, with primitive punishment methods that Marxism would not use, to try and counter Western decadence and crime. 
But Hilsum’s report for example cites only about a dozen cases, for which the actual guilt or not is unknown; crude perhaps, but no different to the routine multiple amputations, floggings, and beheadings carried out for decades  as “justice” in the backward feudal Arab states like Saudi Arabia, for which there is barely a word ever mentioned in the bourgeois press (just enough to pretend reporting “balance”) and certainly no calls for “these savage psychotics to be exterminated” etc etc.
When did Hilsum last turn on the “exposés” of women flogged and beaten to an inch of their lives in Riyadh for “failing to wear” the hijab?
Never is the answer, because this all has nothing to do with objective reporting, and everything to do with raising the demonisation atmosphere.
There is more: the rebels are “gangsters and mafia” it is suddenly discovered, with the press mysteriously full of highly detailed and obviously planted intelligence agency stories about “cigarette smuggling”, and “cocaine trails” through Africa, all of interest (so why not reported before?) but all used smear and demonise the rebel groups as “nothing more than criminals”.
There may be elements of all this in the mix under the conditions of turmoil and poverty imposed by capitalism everywhere (though it is the big Western corporations which drive the still $billions strong cigarette trade and deliberate Third World induction of mass nicotine addiction – the real story – and Western mafia racketeering which pushes the world cocaine industry (including big bank “blind eye” money laundering), powered by deliberate Western policy to befuddle its own populations).
But bringing it up is a distraction and diversion in this situation to pull attention away from the essence of the anti-imperialist content of the struggle (as the paramilitary savagery and death squad killings used in the civil war violence and bombing of the FARC communist army in Colombia was presented as an alleged “war on the cocaine trade” by the CIA and Washington). 
The rubbishing goes on; they are also alleged “uncultured barbarians” at the level of a Ghengis Khan (whose abilities are historically misrepresented and demonised anyway); acres of sudden concern for the treasures of the Sankore University and Timbuktu mosques appear, to set the entire Western petty bourgeoisie agonising (this week anyway) over their plentiful dinner party tables about the “destruction of precious manuscripts” etc etc.
As if Western imperialism could care less about what it destroys; its only concern is what fortunes are to be made from plundering and looting such treasures. The US invasion of Iraq (to find nonexistent “chemical weapons”) saw the philistine and ignorant destruction and looting of the riches in the Baghdad museum, dispersing what was not smashed to the four corners of the planet, to be displayed in “private collections” of Texas billionaires as “conversation pieces” in the ranch porticos etc along with ripped-off and ripped-out Egyptian treasures and Mayan statues.
Meanwhile at one of its thoughtlessly (or deliberately?) sited main military bases near Ur in Iraq, the American invasion’s heavy tracked armoured vehicles were daily crushing 6000-year-old archaeological remnants, of inestimable value far beyond the Mali manuscripts.
A well-made point at least managed to find brief mention in the letters pages:
The destruction by Islamist fundamentalists of manuscripts and artefacts in Timbuktu is appalling (Mali rebels burn ancient manuscript collections, 29 January). But before righteousness overwhelms us, we should recall that the stamping-out of culture, art and heritage was carried out on a vastly greater scale by generations of missionaries and other Christian proselytisers from Europe throughout the subjugated lands beyond. We may marvel before Bach and Raphael, Chartres and the mystery plays, but these works were made at the price of torn-down temples, burned images, suppressed musics and unpreserved writings, not to mention genocide, mutilation and torture.
W Stephen Gilbert
Corsham, Wiltshire

Hypocrisy and lies go further:

The director of the Vatican Museums has warned that Italy’s cultural heritage is “vanishing” after prosecutors in Naples said two more people had been arrested on suspicion of taking part in a “premeditated, organised and brutal” sacking of the city’s 16th century Girolamini library.
Antonio Paolucci said he was “saddened but not surprised” by the devastating losses of the historic institution in Naples, where thousands of rare and antique books were last year found to have disappeared. The alleged plundering, which prosecutors have been investigating for the past nine months, was symptomatic of a country whose rich cultural heritage was at risk from various factors including theft and neglect, he said.
“In the Italy of a thousand museums and libraries, our immense national heritage is vanishing … and the cultural fabric of the country is coming apart,” Paolucci, a former culture minister, told the Italian daily La Stampa.
He said a lack of protection for the country’s treasures was having “disastrous effects” and was particularly harmful for small institutions that did not have the same level of security or prestige as, for instance, the Uffizi gallery in Florence. Urging the state to take better care of its heritage, he added: “Every looted painting or plundered library is a wound to civilisation which cannot be healed – a disaster for Italy and humanity as a whole.”
The allegations of theft on a grand scale from the Girolamini library first surfaced last year, when a visiting art historian, Tomaso Montanari, found the institution in disarray, with precious volumes piled up in no particular order alongside fizzy drink cans and other detritus.
Soon after, when prosecutors started looking into reports of missing books, its former director, Massimo Marino de Caro, was arrested, accused of systematically plundering the library for its rare works and selling them on, via contacts, to a network of customers in Italy and abroad. He subsequently admitted to taking books, but said it was in order to pay for the cultural upkeep of the library. He has been working with investigators from his prison cell in Naples.
Estimates of how many books were stolen vary because a large proportion of volumes in the prestigious collection were not catalogued. But investigators have spoken of a total that could exceed 4,000. They include works by Galileo Galilei and, according to the investigators, a 1518 edition of Thomas More’s Utopia.
...Gianni Melillo, deputy prosecutor, said the library – which opened in 1586 – would “no longer exist” as it once 
was. “The damage is irreparable,” he added.

Will Rome now be bombed by NATO?? Naples??
But the greatest hypocrisy of all is the pretence that such uprisings and their attempts to impose a discipline on mass struggle, are irrational and “anti-civilisation”. 
Out of the blue and with no cause? But these are struggles against a Western dominance which always pursued the most relentless oppression, torture, and ruthless suppression to the point of genocide (Natives Americans, Maori, Aborigines, Indians, Sudanese, Zulus) throughout its history, as keeps emerging in “newly revealed papers” etc such as the trials over barbaric “anti-Mau-Mau” practices in post-war Kenya, or in Malaysia, Aden, almost certainly Burma and more, which included British savagery to equal anything the German Nazis ever managed (roasting prisoners alive, castration with wirecutters, and so on.)
All in the past and “let’s move on”????
It is endemic in the latest New Labour “anti-terror” warmongering equalling the barbaric US practices:  
Britain will face fresh charges of breaching international law over the alleged torture and killing of prisoners during the war in Iraq, which began almost exactly 10 years ago. The allegations will be unveiled in the high court, when Britain will stand accused of a “systemic” policy of abuse committed over five years, from 2003 to 2008.
At a hearing scheduled over three days from 29 January, lawyers for 180 Iraqis who claim they are victims of abuse, or that their family members were unlawfully killed, will place a file of statements before two judges presiding over the court in London accusing British soldiers and intelligence officers of unlawful interrogation practices. These include hooding and the use of “stress positions”, sexual abuse, beating and religious abuse of illegally detained prisoners. In some cases, the testimonies allege, the torture led to the death of the prisoner.
The statements were compiled during meetings with victims and relatives, mostly in Lebanon, by human rights lawyer Phil Shiner of the Public Interest Lawyers group, based in Birmingham.
The court will rule on whether the abuses were isolated incidents of which commanders, senior ministry officials and politicians were unaware, as the government insists, or “systemic” and authorised as policy. The MoD contends that any general problems of detention and interrogation were dealt with by an inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa, an innocent hotel worker killed while in British custody in Basra in 2003, and continuing internal investigations by its own Iraq Historic Allegations Team.
But the author of a book on the killing of Baha Mousa, Andrew Williams – a law professor at the University of Warwick – says: “What happened to Baha Mousa, and how the army and the government responded to his death is emblematic of a whole system in operation … a callous culture that … permeated far up the command chain, both military and government”.
Shiner says of his evidence that the Baha Mousa inquiry “may have shone a torch into a dark corner” but what is before the court next week is more like “a stadium in which we will switch on the floodlights.
“We’ve got the training materials”, he says, “we’ve got the policy documents. Violence was endemic to the state practices and part of the state practices”.
His counsel team, led by Michael Fordham QC, will present five so-called “state practices” they claim were “unlawful, right to the top”, including illegal interrogation techniques taught at the army intelligence facility at Chicksands, north of London, unlawful detention and unlawful use of lethal force
Shiner’s files are deeply shocking. Insults to Islam and sexual depravity feature frequently in the statements: a soldier is alleged to have masturbated over a prisoner, another to have committed sodomy with his finger; female interrogators are claimed to have stripped and feigned seduction in exchange for “information”.
Most of the alleged incidents took place while prisoners were in custody, though some occurred during “strike operations” on people’s homes, with suspects and their families allegedly subjected to abuse and crude violence. Prisoners who died in custody were invariably said to have done so due to “natural causes”, despite beatings and kickings.
The hearing comes just weeks away from the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, and will be counted as a measure of how far Britain can reckon with its own legacy in Iraq. South African archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu last year urged in this newspaper that the then prime minister Tony Blair and others should be prosecuted by the international criminal court over the legality and conduct of the invasion.

Torture practices were honed and perfected throughout Britain’s colonialist occupation of “Northern Ireland” itself ripped out of Ireland by the bloodiest “black and tan” violence (with the same First World War brutalised methods which informed German Nazism). But the dribbled out revelations show far more – and let those who decry the use of the term “fascist” for imperialism,  as “just a glib cliché”, explain how else outright death-squad killing should be described?
The family of lawyer Patrick Finucane have correctly said that recent admissions made over his killing – and the pretend “sincere apology” from David Cameron – are a cover up in themselves. But even the halfway whitewashed admissions which have emerged tell a foul story as even some more thoughtful bourgeois press commentary has said:

When is a “conspiracy” only “collusion”? And when is collusion only normal life? Sir Desmond de Silva doesn’t answer these vital questions in his review of the 1989 murder of the human rights lawyer Pat Finucane in Belfast. But he does something rather potent: he publishes hitherto secret material, and in doing so he undermines his own interpretation of the evidence, that there was “no overarching state conspiracy”.
Almost despite himself, his report invites the conclusion that “conspiracy” is a diversion. There needn’t have been a plot: killing nationalists and threatening lawyers was normal in Northern Ireland.
He was asked to review whether the state was involved. The answer is simple: yes, it was. There was overarching state collusion to kill targeted British citizens in Northern Ireland. What else can we make of evidence that the security forces poured “thousands of items of intelligence material”, some of it in “unusual detail”, to the loyalist UDA?
De Silva discloses an alarming statistic: “85 per cent of this [intelligence] was drawn from security force records”. This tells us that the security forces’ intelligence cascaded to the UDA for a targeted programme of assassinations while it was bringing down the 1985 Anglo-Irish peace deal. This was not counter-terrorism, this was a state strategy to sponsor – a word de Silva rejects – auxiliary, unaccountable, sectarian paramilitaries to terrorise nationalists and defeat the peace process.
De Silva confirms that a torrent of intelligence, photographs, maps and profiles were delivered by the army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary direct to the UDA, and that Finucane was one of many lawyers who received the “black spot”, and repeated death threats.
The security services were also arresting lots of loyalists, insists De Silva, as if this were evidence of even-handedness. But these arrests can be interpreted in another way: they were not culling loyalists but controlling them; they were not disabling, they were directing them – by giving something more deadly than guns or bombs: information.
Those running the RUC, the army, the Northern Ireland Office and the Joint Intelligence Committee – later to become a household name during the Iraq war debacle – regarded the loyalists as a vital but disreputable rabble. So the army’s Force Research Unit enlisted an ex-soldier, Brian Nelson, to streamline the UDA’s killing machine. De Silva describes Nelson as “to all intents and purposes a direct state employee” – a remarkable admission. MI5 used him to orchestrate arms shipments from South Africa to distribute among loyalists. The state, it seems, took control of re-tooling the paramilitaries.
All this is known. Indeed, the killers of Pat Finucane are known. Investigative journalists, human rights advocates and loyalists themselves, boasting about their executions, have told us who did it. But what else lies hibernating in the state’s dungeons? De Silva’s insistence that ministers could not have known who was being targeted is bizarre. He appears to take at face value that “no records have been identified” of ministers being briefed about intelligence delivered to loyalists. However, he records a security policy meeting on 26 September 1989 – before Finucane’s murder – attended by the Northern Ireland secretary and the heads of the security forces, which was called precisely to discuss the traffic in information.
De Silva confirms that the heads of the security services, the attorney general, the defence and Northern Ireland secretaries, and No 10, discussed the potential damage to public confidence in “our attachment to the rule of law”. The cabinet secretary and the prime minister were told in 1991 that the potential charges against Nelson were “as serious as they could be”, and that the FRU itself “might have to be disbanded” if the public were told what it was getting up to. The FRU was indeed disbanded – or rather re-incarnated, as the Special Reconnaissance Unit, which was later involved in the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.
The alternative – that ministers preferred the status of simultaneously knowing and not-knowing and thus the option of deniability – is worse: that they didn’t care whether catholics lived or died as long as the Brits were winning the war.
If De Silva’s review fluffs the ‘state involvement’ question by floating the conspiracy kite, he has nevertheless done something useful: he tells us more than we knew before about the sinister synergy between security system and the loyalist gunmen.
There is more to be told. We now need a public inquiry – not to find out who killed Pat Finucane, but to discover who authorised the entire system, to ensure they face justice, and to know that Britain will not collude in such killings again. The FRU and its boss, Gordon Kerr, have never been called to account. And Northern Ireland is the prototype for British counter-insurgency in the so-called war on terror.
The usual pointless liberal ”call for an inquiry” tails this piece with its soft delusion that the very system which carries out – and has always carried out – such outright dictatorship violence through its secret state machinery is somehow going to “ensure” its own establishment is “going to face justice”.
Any justice that comes will involve carefully limited scapegoats thrown to the wolves, and almost certainly those that “honourably” take the rap (if any) will be well looked after and rewarded, as always happens when the capitalist ruling class is forced to give ground. 
The key point to make is “when it is forced to” which means the ducking and weaving it makes to head off revolutionary pressure, the only basis on which any concessions and reforms have ever been made by a ruling class, through fear of where things will go otherwise.
Let there be as many further exposures as possible, and via any mechanisms like inquiries which imperialism uses to concede ground. 
But Leninism has long made the point that it is the defeat of British rule, and the declining power of its Empire, which produces such developments. 
The latest revelations on secret death squad operations – though still highly selective and limited – are further confirmation of the triumphant success of the dogged armed national liberation struggle by Sinn Féin/IRA, the exact opposite to the “sellout” slanders against them made by the fake-“lefts”. 
Far from indicating some kind of climb down in the teeth of a “Washington imposed peace settlement that limits the nationalist aspirations of the struggle” or indicates a “permanent continuing British domination” as various Trotskyist and reformist leaderships have declared – including Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party sneer that he would “never have settled for anything less that full unification” (“like the full victory of the 1984 strike Arthur” it might be asked) the steady trickle of apologies, inquiries,  “drama documentaries” about Bloody Sunday and other atrocities given mainstream TV airtime, is all part of the continuing snail’s pace withdrawal from Ireland by British imperialism.
“Exceptionally and frustratingly slow” might be said, and so it is, all part of the plan by imperialism to cover over the reality of its defeat at the hands of the IRA struggle, and to avoid giving any indication to the world that progress has come by revolutionary means.
Ireland is nevertheless slowly but shortly on the way to its unification and the “dissident republican” hostility and attempts to sabotage to peace agreement are misguided and wrong.
The flurry of sour demonstrations around Christmas by sulkier and poorer elements of the old colonist communities (Loyalist “working class” as they are misleadingly named) against the latest token moves to indicate formally the steady British withdrawal by restricting the use of the old Union Jack symbolism on council offices, is further confirmation – the protests arising because the flag issue indicates the removal of the material privileges (jobs, better wages, housing) previously given only to the colonist side. 
There is another story arising too; the poorer sections are feeling the pinch more because of the capitalist crisis which is biting at least as hard on the remnants of “Northern Ireland” as anywhere, if not harder.
New questions are driven to the surface which Sinn Féin does not effectively answer and which the inevitable nationalist victory and eventually complete unification will not answer either. These are the same questions facing workers everywhere of the now deadly catastrophic meltdown of  imperialism which presents workers in Ireland – republican and the steadily more abandoned-by-Westminster former supremacists – with the same challenges, namely of revolutionary struggle to end capitalism.
Sinn Féin’s heroic record of determined, and most important, victorious national-liberation struggle has not given any signs of bringing this kind of leadership to the working class anywhere in Ireland.
Just the opposite - its petty bourgeois limitations have emerged in previous mistakes which include similar “condemnations“ of 9/11 “terrorism” and the Madrid bombings as were made by other parts of the reformist “left” and its fake-“left”.
Its economic analysis of the importance of breaking down the old cross-border bureaucracies which unity would achieve, also goes only part way – while its campaigning on the major economic questions in both north and south is limited to no more than the same “Stop the Cuts” protest and exposures of corruption as the rest.
But what is needed is Marxist Leninist revolution to overturn capitalism, not opposing Sinn Féin’s achievements but going far beyond them.
Build the fight for Leninist understanding. 
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

Only the criminal, 50-year US imposed siege blockade on Cuba prevents its planned socialist economy making even greater achievements 

Speech by Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cuba, at the United Nations General Assembly, on Item 41: “The necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed on Cuba by the United States of America.” New York, November 13, 2012.

Mr. President;
I would like to reiterate the most heartfelt condolences of the people and government of Cuba to the people of the United States, the city of New York, to populations directly affected and particularly to relatives of the victims, for the loss of human life and the severe material damage caused by Hurricane Sandy.
We likewise express our condolences to the peoples and governments of Bahamas, Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Canada, also affected by the hurricane, as well as to Guatemala and Mexico for the recent earthquake which affected those countries.
Mr. President:
On April 6, 1960, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lester D. Mallory wrote the most concise, accurate and enduring definition of the blockade of Cuba, and I quote: “To cause disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship [...] to weaken the economic life of Cuba [...] denying money and supplies [...] to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”
So far this has been the vision that has embodied the inhumane, failed and anachronistic policy of 11 successive U.S. governments under which 76% of Cubans have been born. Our country has never been at war with or engaged in any hostile action against the United States. It has never consented to the perpetration of terrorist acts against the American people.
In 2008, presidential candidate Obama electrified Americans with his energy, his origins and his words, “Yes, we can.” Three months later, after being elected President, he announced, “a new beginning with Cuba” and stated, and I quote: “We can move U.S.-Cuba relations in a new direction and launch a new chapter of engagement that will be sustained throughout my administration,” end of quote.
However, the reality of the last four years has been characterized by a persistent intensification of the economic, commercial and financial blockade; in particular its extraterritorial dimension, despite the fact that this Assembly has approved by a consistent and overwhelming majority, 20 consecutive resolutions calling for an end to this policy.
Maintaining this policy in force is not in the national interest of the United States. On the contrary, it is damaging to the interests of its citizens and companies, especially in times of economic crisis and high unemployment. According to every opinion poll, citizens are demanding a change in policy. Why encroach on Americans’ constitutional and civil rights and freedom of travel by preventing them from visiting the island, when they can visit any other part of the planet, including places where their country is waging war?
Why renounce a market of 11 million people? Why continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars derived from taxes paid by U.S. citizens on useless and illegal subversion in Cuba? Why damage its relations with other states, including its allies, with extraterritorial measures which violate international law? Why resort to an approach contrary to the one animating its growing economic relations with states that have a different political system?
The blockade also damages the legitimate interests of and discriminates against Cuban emigres settled here in this country, who are overwhelmingly in favor of the normalization of relations with their nation. It damages the credibility of United States foreign policy, leads to its isolation, places the country in a costly situation of double standards. After 50 years, it has proven its ineffectiveness in pursuit of the ends envisaged and is an insurmountable obstacle in its constantly more uncomfortable relations with Latin America and the Caribbean. If ended, it would save its government from greater discredit to its humanitarian policies and cease being a persistent violation of Cubans’ human rights.
The United States could refrain from including our state on spurious lists such as the one classifying it as a sponsor of terrorism, with the sole purpose of justifying additional measures against financial transactions, and which is so damaging to the effectiveness and credibility of the international battle against this terrible scourge.
There is no legitimate or moral reason to maintain this blockade that is anchored in the Cold War. It is merely the weapon of an ever more exiguous, isolated, violent and arrogant minority which uses it for electoral profit, is contemptuous of the call of the majority and will not resign itself to the unshakable determination of Cubans to decide their own destiny.
Mr. President;
The use of a less strident and threatening rhetoric and a certain partial relaxation of travel restrictions on residents of Cuban origin and others for academic, scientific or cultural purposes have failed to conceal the intensification of the blockade during the last four years.
The UN Secretary General’s report, which includes the contributions of a significant number of delegations and agencies present here, broadly documents the multiple and diverse damages caused both to my country and many of the governments represented here.
In November 2011, the Treasury Department fined the New York subsidiary of the German Commerzbank $175, 500 for acting as consultant and guarantor of a Cuban national concerning a payment to a Canadian company.
In June 2012, the Department of Justice announced the imposition of a $619 million fine on the Dutch ING bank for alleged violations of the regime of sanctions against Cuba and other countries. This is the largest fine ever imposed on a foreign bank.
Referring to this unprecedented event, Mr. Adam Szubin, director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (ofac), attached to the Treasury Department, stated in a menacing tone, and I quote: “Our sanctions laws reflect core U.S. national security and foreign policy interests and ofac polices them aggressively. Today’s historic settlement should serve as a clear warning to anyone who would consider profiting by evading U.S. sanctions,” end of quote.
During President Obama’s administration, fines imposed amount to $2,259,732 billion, double those imposed under both terms of the George W. Bush administration.
The implementation of the blockade has moved beyond all conceivable limits. In December 2011, the Trinidad and Tobago Hilton Hotel, a national property operating under a management contract with the hotel chain, received categorical orders from ofac to prevent the 4th caricom-Cuba Summit of Heads of State and Government from taking place on its premises, which constituted a real scandal and a disrespectful act toward all the nations of the Caribbean and the international community.       Cont page 6Ô
In July 2012, two executives from the French subsidiary of the travel agency Carlson Wagonlit Travel (cwt) were sacked for selling tourist packages to Cuba. The company runs the risk of being fined $38,000 for each package sold sold.
On May 10, 2012, not even a year from the issue of the first and very limited licenses permitting U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba “for educational purposes and people-to-people exchanges,” the Treasury Department prohibited tours of recreational sites, financial transactions involving tourist activities and established new and stricter measures to ensure that all itineraries and programs were in accordance with policy on
Cuba. At the same time, it was announced that violations of these restrictions would result in fines of $65,000 and the suspension of licenses.
Mr. President:
The human damage caused by the blockade is enormous and impossible to calculate. It causes hardship, shortages and difficulties which affect every family, every boy and girl, every man and woman, people with disabilities, senior citizens and medical patients.
The William Soler Pediatric Cardio-Center does not have access to the medicament Levosimendan, used in the treatment of heart problems associated with cardiac output in infants. The hospital is unable to use this medicament supplies of it have been denied because it is manufactured by Abbott laboratories.
The cardiovascular surgery service of the same hospital provides medical treatment of 100-110 infants aged less than 12 months every year. More than 90% of those cases require parenteral nutrition before undergoing surgery with a better prognosis. Our nation has no access to the parenteral food supplements manufactured here in this country, recognized as among the most effective and of highest quality.
The impossibility of purchasing laminar tissue for tissue expanders - used in skin transplants - and their necessary acquisition in distant markets at a higher price, complicates and prolongs the treatment of girls and boys with severe burns, with the consequent increase in the length of surgery and hospitalization of these patients.
The pacemaker and electrophysiology service at the Cardiology and Cardiovascular Surgery Institute lacks the non-fluoroscopic three-dimensional mapping equipment used to analyze points of arrhythmia in the human heart, because of the withdrawal of the U.S. firm Saint Jude. This prevents the catheterization treatment and surgery for curing complex arrhythmias. Consequently, we are forced to send these patients to other countries in order to receive treatment.
On the evening of November 6, President Obama spoke of the recovery of the eight-year-old Erin Catherine Potter, a leukemia patient living in Mentor, Ohio. On October 28, 2009, we explained in this hall that Cuban children suffering from lymphoblastic leukemia, and who reject the usual medicaments, cannot be treated with Elspar, the medicament created to treat patients who develop intolerance, because its sale to Cuba by the Merck and Co. firm is prohibited. These children also deserve compassion and relief.
On October 25, 2012, we also denounced in this same hall that our ophthalmologic services are unable to use transpupillary thermotherapy to treat cancer of the retina (retinoblastoma), which makes it possible to preserve affected eyes in children. Since that date, 15 infants, like Lianna Aguilera Feria, aged one year; Maróa Sánchez Rosales and Rochely Mendoza Rabelo, aged two years; Erika Rodríguez Villavicencio, Fidel Valdés Márquez, Giovanna Álvarez Torrens and Magdiel Leyva Suárez, aged three years, have suffered the loss of their eyes because the government of the United States prevents the purchase of the necessary medical equipment from the American company Iris Medical Instruments.
Given its express intention and direct effects, the blockade of Cuba qualifies as an act of genocide in accordance with Article 2 (b) and 2 (c) of the 1948 Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It is a massive, flagrant and systematic violation of the human rights of an entire people.
We strongly oppose unilateral coercive measures and economic sanctions which only cause harm to human beings. As expressed by the leader of the Revolution at this very podium, “We want a world without hegemonies, without nuclear weapons, without interventions, without racism, without national or religious hatred, without outrages to the sovereignty of any country; a world which respects the independence and free determination of peoples, a world without universal models which totally disregard the traditions and culture of all the components of humankind, and without cruel blockades which kill men, women, children, young people and senior citizens like silent atom bombs.”
Mr. President:
As stated in the Secretary General’s report, the economic damages accumulated during more than 50 years through 2011 amount to $1,066 trillion -more than one trillion dollars -according to rigorous and conservative calculations based on the devaluation of the dollar in relation to the price of gold.
Any sensible person can imagine the living standards and development levels we could have achieved if we had been able to count on those resources.
The blockade is one of the principal causes of our country’s economic problems and a major obstacle to its economic and social development. It is in violation of international law; it is contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter and a violation of a sovereign state’s right to peace and security. It is an act of aggression, a permanent threat to a country’s stability. It is also a gross violation of the regulations governing international trade, freedom of navigation and the sovereign rights of states, given its extraterritorial nature.
Given that the blockade is a unilateral policy, it should be lifted unilaterally.
Mr. President:
The U.S. people, toward whom Cuba has sentiments of friendship and respect, have just reelected President Barack Obama. During his electoral campaign, he repeated dozens of times that he continues to be the “President for change” and that he will continue to “move forward.”
President Obama has the opportunity to initiate a new policy toward Cuba, different from that of his 10 predecessors during more than half a century.
Certainly, it will be a difficult task and he will confront serious obstacles, but the President has the constitutional powers allowing him to listen to public opinion and generate the necessary dynamic, by means of executive decisions, even without the approval of Congress. Doubtless this would be a historical legacy.
He would be committing a serious error and making everything all the more difficult for the future if he decides to wait for a new generation of Cuban leaders or for the impossible collapse of our economy. This option would inscribe him in history as the eleventh president to repeat the same mistake.
I reiterate, in the name of President Raúl Castro Ruz, the steadfast will of the Cuban government to move toward the normalization of relations with the United States through respectful dialogue, without preconditions, based on reciprocity and sovereign equality, without in the least undermining our independence and sovereignty.
Today, here and now, I am once again submitting to the government of the United States a draft agenda for bilateral dialogue directed at moving toward the normalization of relations, which includes, as fundamental issues, the lifting of the economic, commercial and financial blockade; Cuba’s exclusion from the arbitrary and illegal list of countries sponsoring terrorism; the repeal of the Cuban Adjustment Act and the “wet foot/dry foot” policy; compensation for economic and human damages; the return of the territory occupied by the Guantánamo Naval Base; the end of the radio and TV aggression; and the cessation of financing internal subversion.
An essential element on this agenda is the liberation of the five Cuban anti-terrorists who remain cruelly and unjustly imprisoned or detained in this country. An act of justice, or at least a humanitarian solution, would arouse the gratitude of my people and the response of our government
At the same time, I make the offer to the government of the United States to negotiate cooperation agreements in areas of greatest mutual interest, such as combating drug trafficking, terrorism, human trafficking and for the full normalization of migratory relations, as well as for the prevention and mitigation of natural disasters, protection of the environment and our common seas. We also propose a resumption of the talks unilaterally suspended by our counterpart about migratory issues and the resumption of postal service.
Your Excellencies: Delegates;
Whatever the circumstances, our people will defend, at any price, their achievements; they will uphold their ideas; they will recover from natural disasters such as the one that recently lashed Santiago de Cuba and the eastern and central provinces, and will resolutely continue to update and develop our socialism, “with all and for the wellbeing of all.”
In the name of this heroic people, their children, their women and the elderly, I ask all governments committed to the principles enshrined in the UN Charter and international law, to the norms of the multilateral trading system, to the freedom of trade and navigation, and which reject the extraterritorial implementation of a national law, to once again vote in favor of the resolution contained in document a/67/l.2, entitled “The necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed on Cuba by the United States of America.”
Thank you very much. •