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 (£25 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL [Post Office Registered.]  www.epsr.org  Contact@epsr.org.uk
No 1524 November 24th 2017                                                                                                   40p Fortnightly

Fake-“left” still fails to grasp or explain world imperialist plunge  towards the greatest Catastrophe in history and the increasingly obvious open Nazism of its chauvinism and  “anti-terrorist” warmongering. Declaring Trump a “nasty person”  is simply hopeless as a perspective for the working class which needs to understand the full crisis collapse of the monopoly capitalism, turning to fascist warmongering across the board by its very nature. Nor do they draw out the vital revolutionary implications. Monstrous hypocrisy of the blood curdling US bluster against the North Korean workers state for presuming to defend itself with justified nuclear weaponry is underlined by the White House overt backing for the long nuclear armed Zionist landtheft occupation of Palestine, its Jerusalem embassy move sanctifying the most aggressive illegal ongoing settlements. But whole Western backed creation of “Israel” is a monstrous nazi-colonialist monstrosity which needs overturning by revolutionary war - as does all imperialism. Fake-”left” cowed by Jewish freemasonry “anti-semitism” sophistry. Leninism needs to be built

How far down the road towards chaos, paralysis and fascist depravity does world imperialism have to go before the fake-“left” finally wakes up to the need for a revolutionary perspective?
Are red lights not flashing across all screens?
Y Brightest of all, the giant kick in the teeth to the endlessly butchered, genocidally blitzed and persecuted Palestinian struggle to take back their own land, - through the dominant imperialist power of the US effectively “granting” the land-grabbing Jewish Israeli-fascist occupation the “right” to endless blitzkrieg sovereignty over stolen Jerusalem and stolen Palestine.
Siting the US embassy there confers a “recognition” that tears up decades of promises and pretences of peace processes, “international legality” and “United Nations mediation”, proving their utter worthlessness and the hopeless opportunist delusion that the impossible, revisionist-promulgated “two state solution” has always been. 
But this boot in the head for the Palestinians is also one for the entire Arab world, beyond that to the world’s billion and a half Muslims, and beyond that for the whole Third World. It is kicking a hornets’ nest of already agitated Third World revolt and may possibly be the catalyst which begins to overcome all kinds of current self-defeating sectarian Muslim jihadist infighting, to focus on the real enemy, imperialism and its Zionist henchmen (as analysed further below).
Y There is the Trumpite’s support for vile barmy “British” nationalist nazi-mindededness, now elevating crude and backward racism like Britain First to virtually “official” status along with presidential insults to the British prime minister (despite her own appalling reactionariness).  
Y Also the Tories’ own domestic Brexit backwardness letting a tiny bunch of Orange colonist DUP reactionary thugs try turning the clock back on forty years of heroic and successful national-liberation struggle in Ireland – again trampling all over past agreements and the peace settlement (but destined to fail). 
Y Or the entire Brexit dragging of British population back into Little Englanderism and its opening up of crude and vindictive chauvinist hatreds in order to cover up the floundering and failures of this British “imperial” ruling class, now the most incapable, deluded and weakest link of all among the “great powers”.
It is succeeding only in driving the capitalist economy even further into the floor, as it is run rings around both by the viciously competitive cats-in-a-bag reality that makes up monopoly capitalist European Union and by the just-as-savage cutthroat “free market” competition outside the EU, whose hurricane force, as crisis deepens, will be all the stronger on an exposed, isolated island.
Y Another urgent signal is in the blood-curdling and unstable nuclear war “exercise” provocations and preparations being mounted once more by the US-stooge South Korean military forces and the even-vaster US occupying military on the peninsula, all ranged against besieged socialist North Korea to intimidate this small but defiant workers state, and also to bully and threaten the revisionist leadership of the much larger Chinese workers state, and potentially threatening uncontainable war.
Y Another warning is in calls for outright killing of “jihadists” by the boot-boy end of the Tory Party, including the new Defence Secretary (and touted “heir” to Theresa May), demanding summary execution by the state, turning over 100 years of pretences about “international law” and Geneva Conventions.
Y Most literally there are actual “red lights flashing” across all the international credit trading screens warning that a new global capitalist financial meltdown is imminent, which will go far beyond imposing another (minimum) ten years of universal stagnation and ever increasing “austerity” pain on poorer workers everywhere (and increasingly the younger middle class too) but will bring the world to unimaginable Slump disaster.
Coming collapse will be a hundred times more catastrophic than 2008 and without any possibility of taxpayer “bailout” or “rescue”. All possible Mickey Mouse QE money to keep things going has already been printed and its inflationary impact imposed within an system which even then was credit-stretched far beyond its “overproduction” limits (see Marx’s Capital); those bailouts (and the in-your-face contemptuous increases in already grotesque greed-ridden inequality along with them) are now an extra part of the problem both socially and economically, not an answer.
Bourgeois institutions and economists are increasingly nervous:
Financial markets are overheating and consumer debts at unsustainable levels, the global body for central banks has warned.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) said the global economy was similar to the pre-2008 crash when investors, seeking high returns, borrowed heavily to invest in risky assets, despite moves by central banks to tighten credit.
The BIS said attempts by the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England to choke off risky behaviour by raising interest rates had failed so far and unstable financial bubbles continue to grow.
The BIS said “vulnerabilities that have built around the globe during the long period of unusually low interest rates have not gone away. High debt levels are still there. And so are frothy valuations.
The warning came as Neil Woodford, one of the UK’s most high-profile fund managers, said stock markets were in danger of crashing.
Founder of Woodford Investment Management, he told the Financial Times that investors were at risk (like) the dotcom crash of the early 2000s.
Historically low levels of interest in developed nations over the last decade were pushing asset prices to unsustainable levels.
“Investors have forgotten about risk and this is playing out in inflated asset prices and inflated valuations.
“There are so many lights flashing red that I am losing count.”
The BIS said the benign global economy, which is predicted by the International Monetary Fund to accelerate next year, was encouraging investors to dismiss concerns.
The BIS was one of the few organisations to warn during 2006 and 2007 about risky assets such as the US subprime mortgages.
***********
Economist Peter Schiff correctly predicted the financial crisis. Ten years later, he says: “The US Fed has inflated a gigantic bubble [QE-ed], which is impossible to pop, but when it bursts, the consequences would be much bigger than the 2008 meltdown.
“This is the mother of all bubbles, and there is not a bigger one that the Fed can inflate to mask these problems. 
This time, the crisis is going to hit everyone, he said. “It is not going to be a financial crisis - it is a dollar crisis and a sovereign debt crisis. 
“It not going to be some subprime bond debt but the US government that people are going to be worried about.”
“How many straws can you put on a camel’s back? You don’t know until you put that final straw. So, can we go from $20 (current) to $25 trillion in debt? Maybe. At some point, we are going to break the back of the camel. 
“Everybody is going to lose. Everybody is going to get wiped out who has been partying in the stock market, the bond market and the real estate market. The dollar is going to tank, and purchasing power is going to be wiped out.”
Schiff says the current financial system would also fail to artificially curb the prices of precious metals.
“How long can they keep the price of gold suppressed? At some point, the price is going to explode because there is real physical buying, and all that paper can’t camouflage that.”
Donald Trump’s latest round of gargantuan tax cuts for the rich – (passed by, and cheered on by, the entire Republican establishment he notionally despises, and is despised by) – simply adds to this bubble too.
The EPSR’s Marxist-Leninist understanding has been warning for at least three decades that a total dollar collapse is the most likely form for the ultimate collapse coming, against the derision, complacency and philistinism of the entire fake-“left”, all hooting about “old hat Marxism” and “Catastrophism”. 
Even now they see the “crisis”only as an event from 2008 with a bit of austerity following, allegedly imposed “unnecessarily” because with “better policies there could be an upturn”, instead of understanding the process of crisis as an extended unravelling breakdown caused by the intractability of the contradictions in the private profit system.
They need to wake up. 
Raising these questions is not “getting a bit hysterical” or “exaggerating” but warning the working class of the crucial real world developments that the “left” neither can, nor wants, to see, because of illusions in the essential permanence of capitalism (for all their revolutionary posturing), derived from a petty bourgeois class position.
Deep down they are in thrall to the ruling class and clinging onto existing society and their relatively comfortable niche within it; all that is required are some “steady changes and improvements”, perhaps even going so far as needing a bit of “street action”, “left pressure” or strikes to push it along, and “defend our gains” but not really rocking the boat too much.
It is completely deluded.
Devastating chaos and breakdown is coming unstoppably, the collapse and disintegration of everything about society that has been taken for granted, as the contradictions within it reach breaking point – the revolutionary moment when only complete turnover of all the old class society can solve anything.
The working class is increasingly confronted with total Slump turmoil, deprivation and exploitation far beyond the social cutbacks, ramped up exploitation, workhouse “welfare” savagery, homelessness and food-bank despair seen so far. 
It will need rapidly to grasp what it is up against, and the revolutionary solution that alone can save the world from unprecedented disintegration and war.
For that the revolutionary party, able to develop and build correct understanding and leadership for the gigantic class war fights to come, needs to be built urgently, using the Leninist polemical method to take its grasp far beyond even the great achievements of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Lenin – all hugely important political/philosophical foundation stones (and everyone should read the original Communist Manifesto for example as a starter, and What is to be Done?, the State and Revolution and more, as well as 100 volumes of their collected works) but requiring huge advances in understanding too, as the EPSR has struggled for over nearly four decades (see Unanswered Polemics - against Museum Stalinism eg).     
It is in this context that all the other hair-raising developments need to be considered and the sudden lurch in the world towards the crudest belligerence and threats personified by Trumpism.
While the fake-“left” continues to promulgate faith in bourgeois “democratic” or “anti-war” pacifist paths, via some supposed “left” transformation of the always rank opportunism of the thoroughly and unchangeably bourgeois Labour Party (most of the Trots), or by supporting outright such flaky nationalism as the Assad regime in Syria and its oligarch serving Putin bonapartist backing (as the revisionists do), the ruling class knows only too well what is coming, and the gigantic spontaneous revolts and turmoil it will trigger everywhere, (as have already erupted on a small scale in some domestic riots here and there, and in movements like Black Lives Mater in the States, and in the much greater upheavals throughout the Middle East, mostly labelled “terrorism”).
That is why it is constantly intensifying its spying networks, electronic and other surveillance (pretended to be about “stopping terrorism” but actually aimed at all rebelliousness), is constantly stepping up school and press censorship and indoctrination in Prevent “British values” etc (i.e capitalist ideology and anti-communism) and has been lashing out to “solve” its difficulties with further horrific warmongering and destruction like that in Iraq, totally flattening great cities like Mosul and Falluja in a turn to overt, civilian slaughtering fascist barbarity and ruthlessness against the anti-occupation Sunnis, (and their recent ISIS manifestation) and in Yemen via the Saudi stooges.
Much more is now on the cards, via the military provocations in South Korea and the in-your-face Jerusalem embassy backing for the most overtly reactionary wing of the decades long nazi-Jewish landgrab of occupied Palestine, simultaneous with the skulduggery and plotting between Saudi Arabia and Zionism against Lebanon, Syria and Iran as spelled out in the last EPSR.  
Any of this could rapidly escalate to unprecedented levels dragging in all kinds participants – Japan, China and Russia over Korea, or the Arab world, Turkey, Russia again and others in the Middle East.
But to get there has required a turn to astonishing crude belligerence and an increasingly overt fascist tone, in the States particularly, reflecting the disastrous failure of two decades of warmongering so far from Kosovo onwards.
The Bushite New American Century blitzings (plus sidekick Blairism), the first attempts to intimidate the world with “shock and awe” ruthlessness on the ludicrous pretext of waging “war on terror” and on “rogue states responsible for terror” (or who could have responsibility pinned on them with a few stitched-up dossiers), had to be reined in because it saw so much financial and societal expense with so many body bags returning from the huge Third World resistance and revolt it stirred up (as predicted by all rationality from the moment the meaningless “war on terror” was launched).
Instead of successfully facing down the already rising Third World revolt in the world, and all constantly growing rival bourgeois challenges, like the long developing inter-imperialist trade war rivalries from powerful Germany and even faster developing and efficient Japanese capitalism (and to some extent the Chinese workers state use of capitalism) in advance of the crash that already bankrupt Washington knew was coming, the wars stirred and magnified both.
And it did nothing to stop the global collapse breaking soon afterwards anyway.
Obama-ism cynically pretended PC liberalism (feminism, black emancipation) to salvage the deeply unpopular presidency (shattered by these failures) but far from winding down things it just kept war and torture going, with covert droning assassination etc added in too, while buying time economically with the QE ploy.
Its money printing economic “rescue”, could never solve things for long either and came at great cost in forcing the crisis onto weaker economies (like southern Europe and Latin America).
The great upheavals deepened as the droning and occupations continued, exploding into the Arab Spring mass street revolt, a new level of Third World spontaneous rebellion that threatened to undermine imperialism’s grip on the whole Middle East (and leave its Zionist “smiting” force isolated) while further stirring anti-imperialist hatreds everywhere else.
The desperate moves to head that off have failed too. These tried to use the same methods that worked in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, and in the Iraqi occupation, infiltrating and provoking civil war conflict via stirred up jihadist backwardness and sectarianism (all reflecting imperialism’s weakness, unable to intervene directly because of domestic war weariness and economic crisis).
In Libya a hodge-podge of tribal monarchists, on-the-make bourgeois opportunism and “Islamists” fell flat on its face however and had to be rescued with a brutal NATO invasion (which Obama pretended was “led by Europe”); in Syria much of the jihadism eventually “blew back” as the anti-imperialist ISIS movement, which then merged (or re-merged) into the Sunni resistance in Iraq and nearly knocked out the American stooges in Baghdad. 
A huge military “special forces” intervention and air support for the Iraqi and Kurd US stooge forces have been needed to suppress this revolt in a welter of torturing butchery and savagery that has cut through civilians lives by the hundreds as it massacred and slaughtered the Caliphate-seeking jihadists, and has displaced hundreds of thousands.
But that meant a divided Washington abandoning its plans to topple the Syrian “rogue state” regime in the meantime, (despite retaining or recruiting, and funding other anti-Assad pro-Western groups over years to continue the barbarous destruction and devastation that has torn the country to shreds) a move itself reflecting uncertainty and division in the ruling class.
The original frantic 2011 strategy to contain the Egyptian revolution has only partially succeeded - with a bloody civilian slaughtering coup in Cairo in 2013, at huge cost in tearing up the great capitalist pretence of bringing “freedom, democracy and prosperity” and in the destruction of Libya and much of Syria. 
But nothing else has been solved; anti-imperialism is boiling in the Houthi revolt in Yemen for example (despite horrific US/UK “advised” and armed Saudi blitzkrieg, leaving civilian millions in famine and disease) and continues fermenting beneath the surface even in 90 million strong Egypt despite the repression of the General Sisi coup regime installed by CIA-Zionist coup in 2013. Syria’s regime has not been toppled and the Lebanese Hezbollah, whose military organisation is one of the few to have defeated the Zionist military, driving them out of Lebanon in 2006, is now battle hardened from Syria too where it was defending the Assad regime against the imperialist/Zionist skulduggery and the assorted pro-imperialist “rebels” it set going.
All this now coalesces in the Shia coalition around Iran’s Ayatollahocracy and with Putin’s continuing Bonapartist balancing act in the background.
And this is a further defeat for the original imperialist plans to try and stifle the Arab Spring, despite this great swirl of primarily Shia anti-imperialism (and anti-imperialist posturing) having its own weaknesses, most of all in the religious sectarianism which has been deliberately and systematically inflamed by imperialist skulduggery on all sides, and particularly in the Shia-Sunni Iraqi civil war early on in 2005-7 to head off the increasingly successful anti-occupation struggle.
For all the opportunism and confusion in the Shia Muslim coalition left standing, – itself taken in by the hopeless notion that some abstract “terrorism” is the source of the world’s problems instead of focusing on the only source of turmoil and war there is, imperialism itself, the picture remains one of disaster and setback for the US-Zionist grip on things.
It weakness is compounded by the unravelling of the stooge feudal monarchies in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, the latter particularly hammered by the world markets collapse impacting on its wealth, as oil, like every other commodity, suffers the impact of stagnation and “over production” (exactly the opposite of earlier glib “left” analyses, declaring the warmongering to be “all about (seizing) oil” - now noone wants (much of) it).
But that only adds to the desperation for this system to lash out even more, to impose the only possible answer it has.
So now a new level of fascist warmongering savagery is needed, as temporary QE stagnation comes to an end.
But it is even harder to get mass popular support for the worldwide warmongering and imposition of bullying savagery needed to not only continue but intensify the imperialist domination and exploitation of the world (to ride out the crisis), after the near universal experience of the two great world wars (the horrors still being recounted in centenary histories and recollections) and the mess and failure of the Middle Eastern disasters. 
And even harder after seven decades of demented anti-communist propaganda, pretending that the West is upholder of “peace” “prosperity” “decency” and the “rule of law” versus the supposed horrors and “tyranny” of socialism.  
Hence Trumpism and the stirrings of exaggerated chauvinism and backwardness everywhere.
Like all previous nazism it reflects the weakness and fearfulness of a desperate ruling class. 
It has much in common with the desperation and savagery of the 1930s Nazism, though not through the shallow, wooden, box-ticking of the fake-“left” and their mechanical “what is fascism” lists of jackboots and shiny uniforms, street violence and suppression of the press etc but in its whipping up of flag-waving chauvinism, finger-pointing scapegoating and fearmongering, and blaming of the other.  The “left’s” undialectical categorisation is the last way to understand events now, since if feeds the notion that “fascism” is something separate to capitalism’s normal rule, within which, it is declared overtly or by implication, the class struggle can be fought by “democratic” means.
So therefore, runs the logic, everyone has to “stand together” to “stop fascism” – the popular front delusion, (suppressing the class war understanding needed), which has fooled and misled the working class from the earliest days and particularly through revisionist delusions about “democratic” paths and “good imperialism” emanating from Stalin’s revisionist errors (see Unanswered Polemics as cited above). 
Fascism is not some other side of capitalism come from the “wrong kind of people” “hijacking elections” or secret “fascists” who need to be exposed, or from “mistakes” or a “failure to defend democracy” but is embedded within capitalism itself – is simply the aggressive face of capitalism in crisis which constantly generates and encourages such viciousness and reaction, both in various “freelance” groups and within its own establishment, to be unleashed or restrained as required, but especially in reserve for the most desperate times.
And it is all done in the best possible “democratic” taste, (just as Hitler was elected).
Trumpism like Hitler has a particular character, now a very brash American populism playing with some of the same alleged “anti-establishment” pretences, but actually acting for capitalism and the ruling class itself (as the Republican tax cuts make clear).
Until the working class takes firm action to overturn all capitalism, it will go as far down the road of complete depravity and savagery as it needs to.
But in doing so it will be teaching the entire world’s masses about the realities of the “free world” and its fraudulent “democracy” and “prosperity” as the crisis deepens.
Nothing illustrates this better than the Trumpites’ strident backing for the nazi-Zionist occupation of Palestine - the brutal colonial theft of another people’s land carried through by gunpoint, bombing terror, massacres and ethnic cleansing from the very beginning.
Its decision to site the US embassy in war-occupied Jerusalem, does not simply back the original monstrous 1947 UN “gift” to the Zionists of the Palestinian’s own territory, which they had occupied continuously for the last 1500 years at a minimum count (see archive pages), but validates every bit of the continuing foul genocidal repression and warmongering landgrab and aggressive and brutal “settler” occupation since, from the seizures and illegal annexations (that is - further occupations) of the 1967 war onwards and continued endlessly since.
It now merges together “might is right” world bullying of US “topdog” imperialism itself with the “might is right” blitzkrieging “punishment” and state terrorising which a permanent and continuous feature of the Jewish Zionist occupiers.
And in doing it sanctifies even the continuing violent land seizures and barbaric intimidation and repression imposed by the most reactionary of the Zionists “settlers”, let alone the long decades of bloody oppression that have gone before, a non-stop round of daily intimidation, killings, arrests, persecution and siege-deprivations, as well as the regular all-out blitzkrieg butchering onslaughts every few years to collectively punish the Palestinians for their presumption in daring to resist or fightback.
Every bit of the pretence that there is any “legality” or “fairness” or justification in this modern day colonist implant, based on the fraudulent notion that somehow the world was providing a “home for the Jews” etc etc in “land made available by the international community” is now torn up.
Most significantly of all it undercuts the still extant revisionist inspired nonsense of a “two state solution” in which the Palestinians were to be eventually “generously” granted a state on some 22% of their own original lands – all the most scrappy land with the worst access to water, fertile ground and other resources anyway.
The promise of this never-quite-to-be-attained “own country” - has sustained the rankest of Palestinian leadership opportunism and class collaboration for decades, from the time of the arch petty bourgeois compromiser Yasser Arafat through to the current Palestinian National Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, despite all kinds of revelations of the rank conniving and cooperation with the Zionist “Israeli” government and its security forces (eg in the 2011 Palestine Papers), retreat from basic principles on the right of return to Palestinian land and the acceptance of money and training from both Zionism  and the CIA for the PNA’s own security forces. 
At the heart of it has been the establishment of a “Palestinian capital” in east Jerusalem as well as “acceptance” of the 1967 borders.   
Now even this craven capitulation is gone.
Trumpism throws out the contemptuous notion that the Palestinians be satisfied with running the now disparate and isolated pockets of poor Palestinian land, like Bantustans, left among the ever growing seized-land illegal settlements taking over the West Bank and slicing through it with the apartheid-like “settlers only” highways.
Such insulting arrogance leaves the dispossessed and racistly discriminated against Palestinian people no choice but to see that there is and has never been any other way out of their endless persecution and repression but the total revolutionary war to end the vile Zionist-Jewish occupation.
And a first step is declaring that the entire so-called “state” of Israel is nothing but a vile colonialist land grab. 
The militancy of Hamas and some other groups like Islamic Jihad has at least kept this principle at its core, despite endless blitzing massacres, assassinations, torture and brutal intimidation (and not only by the Zionists but by the disgusting collaboration of the Mahmoud Abbas run Palestinian National Authority, which has imposed as much inhuman deprivation on the Hamas dominated Gaza strip as the Zionists themselves, by withholding basic resources like electricity, bringing its 2 million people to greater exhaustion and degradation than already imposed by ten years of Zionist blockade).
This cruel imposition by Abbas stoogery has forced the hand of the Gazan Hamas leadership into talks with the PNA recently, in which some concessions have been made towards accepting the so-called 1967 borders as the basis for a Palestinian state – which is the “two state” solution – though Hamas continues its refusal to accept the validity of the Israeli “state”.
Now that forced compromise is totally undermined by the US decision too. 
And the dogged resistance, of the Gazans especially, is not alone, but at the heart of the entire 250 million strong Arab world’s ever deepening hatred of both the Zionist implant in their midst and the imperialism which uses it as a weapon in the heart of the Middle East, to permanently blitz and smite all rebellion and resistance.
Behind that now is the entire Muslim world, already in a ferment of rebellion and now given new lessons in the direct connection between the Zionist occupation and imperialist warmongering which is encouraging it.
And seeing this direct link will begin to focus minds better across the planet on the real enemy, imperialism.
It may well cut through some of the sectarian enmities which have plagued the growing jihadist revolt in the Middle East and which see Shia fighting Sunni etc, divisions taken advantage of by imperialist skulduggery where it can (though at great risk of “blowback” as with ISIS in particular, and on nothing like the scale suggested by the “all run by the CIA” theories of assorted “left” groups, desperate to avoid having to go against the great deluge of Western hate propaganda and demonisation of “terrorism” as the cause of all the problems in the world).
If that happens, – and the Lebanese Hezbollah (Shia) has already declared itself on the side of the Hamas Gaza Palestinian leadership (Sunni), – imperialism’s grip on the Middle East will see further weakening.
Small wonder the rest of the imperialist world is appalled by the Trump declaration and particularly the “liberal” spectrum which wants to keep pacifist illusions going:
Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has drawn an angry and despairing response from global and regional leaders – who warned it would destroy the peace process, strengthen extremists and weaken the standing of the US in the world.
The UN secretary general António Guterres said he opposed “any unilateral measures that would jeopardise the prospect of peace for Israelis and Palestinians”.
“In this moment of great anxiety, I want to make it clear – there is no alternative to the two-state solution,” Guterres said. “There is no plan B.”
Earlier on Wednesday Pope Francis had issued a heartfelt plea to Trump to respect the status quo of the city, and to conform with UN resolutions. The pope told thousands of people at his general audience: “I cannot keep quiet about my deep worry about the situation that has been created in the last few days.”
He said he hoped “wisdom and prudence prevail, in order to avoid adding new elements of tension to a global panorama that is already convulsed and marked by so many cruel conflicts”.
At the regional level, the response was universally hostile, including from Saudi Arabia, a steadfast ally of the US. Riyadh said its continuing efforts to negotiate a peace deal, starting with a unification of the Palestinian leadership, would be damaged by the US plan. King Salman told Trump by telephone that a change to Jerusalem’s status would escalate regional tension, Saudi media reported.
The Turkish foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, said he had told the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, that Washington was making a grave mistake, and the whole world was against the decision. Turkey has suggested it might cut diplomatic ties with Israel if the embassy move goes ahead.
Lebanon said Trump’s decision had put back the peace process by decades, and that it threatened regional and perhaps global stability. Qatar’s foreign minister described it as a death sentence for all who seek peace. Jordan said Trump had violated “international legitimacy”.
There were reports of a protest outside the US consulate in Istanbul on Wednesday evening. In Tunisia, a labour union described the announcement as a declaration of war and called for a mass protest there.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, was the first western leader to reject the announcement, saying the final status of Jerusalem had to be settled by negotiation. He called for calm and for restraint from violence.
The British prime minister, Theresa May, said the UK opposed Trump’s decision on Jerusalem and called it “unhelpful in terms of the prospects for peace in the region”.
“We disagree with the US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem and recognise Jerusalem as the Israeli capital before a final status agreement,” she said. “The British Embassy to Israel is based in Tel Aviv and we have no plans to move it.
“Our position on the status of Jerusalem is clear and long-standing: it should be determined in a negotiated settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and Jerusalem should ultimately be the shared capital of the Israeli and Palestinian states. In line with relevant security council resolutions, we regard East Jerusalem as part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
Both Germany and France updated travel advice to their citizens, warning of possible clashes in Israel and the occupied territories.
At the request of Jordan and the Palestinians, an emergency meeting of Arab foreign ministers will be held on Saturday. The Arab League warned that any such recognition of Jerusalem would be a blatant attack on the Arab nation. The Organisation for Islamic Co-operation will meet in Istanbul on 13 December in a special session to co-ordinate a response.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said any move to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was made “out of despair and debility” because “their hands are tied and they can’t achieve their goals”.
Khamenei, who is stridently anti-Israel, told government officials: “Victory belongs to Islamic Ummah. Palestine will be free, the Palestinian nation will achieve victory.”
The UK’s response was at the milder end of the spectrum. Speaking before Trump’s announcement, Boris Johnson, the British foreign secretary, said he was concerned but that it was important to wait for the details of the president’s statement.
*************
Confirming the decision that Abbas would not meet Pence, the Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Maliki said Palestinians would also seek votes on resolutions at the UN security council and Arab League. Although the US has a veto on the security council, support for drafting a resolution would be seen as pressuring the US.
The fraught Palestinian deliberations – which are taking place amid widespread Muslim and international anger over Trump’s unilateral move that broke international diplomatic consensus – come as Palestinian medical sources confirmed two members of Hamas had been killed in an Israeli air strike following a missile launch from Gaza, bringing the death toll in the last two days to four.
Despite widespread fury, however, the Palestinian leader has been caught between his anxiety to avoid an escalation of violence, amid calls by some for a new intifada – or uprising – and his need to make a meaningful response.
But in a boost for Abbas, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and France’s Emmanuel Macron agreed they would work together to try to persuade the United States to reconsider its decision, following a phone call focusing on the risks to stability in the region.
The conversation between Erdogan and Macron followed hard on the heels of a meeting of the UN security council in which an isolated US struggled to defend accusations from European countries that its action was in breach of UN resolutions.
And as the diplomatic crisis continued, an increasing chorus of voices was asking precisely what Trump had actually achieved, as evidence of damage to the US standing in the Middle East and international forums continued to mount.
If there was one place at the weekend where no doubt had been allowed to enter, however, it was in Trump’s estimation of what he had achieved. On Thursday, as he greeted his guests to mark the Jewish new year, he indulged himself again with a moment of invited congratulation.
“Well, I know for a fact there are a lot of happy people in this room,” he told the guests, before adding to a ripple of applause: “Jerusalem.”
While Trump has been basking in both self- and mutual admiration of his decision to upend decades of US foreign policy by recognising Jerusalem – a city claimed both by Israelis and Palestinians – as the Israeli capital, across the Middle East US diplomats, their families and other citizens were contemplating the coming holidays in a region suddenly more hostile to America.
In Jordan and elsewhere – according to reports – diplomats’ children were advised not to go to school, other movements were heavily restricted and meetings cancelled as the anger continued to reverberate in flag burnings and demonstrations.
*************
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — About 10,000 people rallied Sunday outside the U.S. Embassy in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta to denounce President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Similar protests, mostly organized by the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party, or PKS, also were held in many other cities in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country.
The protests were the third and biggest in Indonesia since Trump’s decision on Thursday.
In the capital, protesters carried banners reading “U.S. Embassy, Get Out from Al Quds,” ″Free Jerusalem and Palestinians” and “We are with the Palestinians.” Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem.
Wearing traditional Islamic white robes, the protesters also unfurled Indonesian and Palestinian flags.
A written statement from PKS described Trump’s decision as “a form of humiliation and provocation against Muslims all over the world.”
Simultaneous protests also were held Sunday in at least 10 provincial capitals and cities across Indonesia.
*************
“Donald Trump is not crying fire in a crowded theater, he is deliberately setting fire to the theater,” Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberryy told the British Parliament.
“For all of us in this house, and beyond, who have worked tirelessly for decades in the hope of lasting peace in the Middle East, yesterday’s decision took an absolute hammer-blow,” Thornberry said of Trump’s Jerusalem declaration.
Hours after the US president’s move, protests were taking place worldwide. Jerusalem is claimed as a holy city by Jews, Muslims and Christians. Further protests are certain.
“Before [December 6], no other country would locate their embassy in Jerusalem, and no other major country would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, because to do either, let alone both at the same time, confers legitimacy on Israel’s occupation in East Jerusalem,” Thornberry said, calling Israel’s control of Jerusalem “an occupation with no basis in international law, a permanent barrier to achieving the political settlement we all wish.”
Thornberry said the “sheer recklessness” of the Trump decision needs no debate, adding that the POTUS had “the unbelievable cheek to claim that he’s doing this to move forward the peace process, when in reality he is setting it back decades.”
She called on Prime Minister Theresa May’s government to stand up to Trump and called him a bully.
“On Jerusalem, as on so many other issues before, [the May government] have been made to look like fools: weak, ignored, and entirely without influence,” Thornberry said. “When will they realize that bending over for a bully only encourages that behavior? What our country needs, and what our world needs, is a government prepared to stand up to him!”

None of this, including the craven Labourite posturing, which would not actually stand up to a Bagpuss soft toy, reflects anything but fearfulness at the revolutionary explosiveness that they can all see being clarified not least in the calls for a new Intifada, by Hamas and other groups.
It is not to support the struggle to get out from under this monstrous Zionist knife in the heart of the Arab world that they speak out, but the exact opposite, to keep it tamed and hamstrung by the two-state delusions.
Their “concern” is all of a piece with the endless “condemnations of terrorism” which have poured out of the “left” ever since 9/11. 
And while Marxist understanding does not usually advocate terrorism as the best method of fighting, it does not remotely go along with the “condemnations” and repudiations that have poured out of the Labourites, and fake-“left”.
The great eruptions of the Middle East in particular are the great stirrings of world revolt, for all their often confused and even backward self-defeating characteristics.
And they have struck often devastating blows and defeats on imperialism which are cheered to the rafters by the great masses of the planet. 
If a great wave of “terrorist” attacks are now made against this monstrous occupation, what will the “left” now say about it?
For the desperately besieged Gazans for example, what other way of fighting do they have than to pick up whatever weapons and methods they can find - including in the past the suicide bombing tactics and beserker knife attacks.
As the EPSR has said before:
It would be marvellous if there was a Palestinian Viet Cong to give Marxist-Communist leadership to the struggle against Zionist colonisation and tyranny, but it was precisely the Revisionism and Trotskyism which produced these arm-chair-revolutionary defeatists in Britain which also buried Leninism without trace in Palestine too,- ‘swamp’.
Hamas has a reactionary religious ideology and equally backward international sponsors and will undoubtedly fail to inspire the whole Palestinian nation, Vietnam-style, to a successful national-liberation socialist revolution. 
But that the Hamas guerrilla war is leading the fight against Zionist-imperialist tyranny is also indisputable, inspiring the whole Intifada.
The socialist revolution needs its own independent propaganda in Palestine and its own fighting units, but while marching separately, they need to strike together with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and anyone else willing to topple the Zionist colonisation.
Hamas suicide bombing, for all its flaws and weaknesses both long-term and short-term from a Marxist perspective, is nevertheless WHAT IS HAPPENING on the front line against Zionist-imperialist tyranny. As Lenin explains, the socialist revolution is abandoning the fight completely by simply rejecting what Hamas is doing. The only serious critique that will deserve a hearing is one which gives alternative anti-Zionist fighting leadership from the front. All other purely academic carping should be treated with the contempt it deserves as little better than pro-imperialist, class-collaborative defeatism.
As obvious as all this is from a Leninist point of view, unbelievably some theoretical confusion on the fake-’left’ has actually accepted the ‘logic’ of the generally confused and cowardly “condemnation” of Sept 11 and condemned Palestinian guerrilla-war terrorism as well. (EPSR 1118 07-01-02):

Even if there were a full on “properly organised” revolutionary movement the Labourites would still be cowed by the relentless CIA/Jewish freemasonry campaigns to label all anti-“Israel” opinion and resistance as nothing but “racist anti-semitism”. 
It is one of the most twisted and sophistic political distortions in all history as the follow on archive section discusses, a philosophical muddying of the water used to “justify” every crude and barbaric fascist-genocidal move made by this colonialist intrusion into the Middle East, and by extension all Western warmongering (as Trumpism makes explicit), now pretending to by “disciplining the world to stop this appalling terrorism without which all would be calm and prosperity”.
Again as said by the EPSR (No1212 09-12-03): 

The sneer that criticism of Zionist aggression is merely anti-semitism in disguise is more than just a tactic to prevent the genocidal obliteration of the Palestinian nation from being discussed.
This “racism”-sneer smokescreen is effectively the same propaganda racket that protects the West’s “right” to warmongering as a whole.
The big question is why should the armed might of Western interests be in the Middle East at all???
And the only answer is “because might is right”, no different from when Western imperialism staged its last great outbreak of self-righteous militaristic domineering in the cause of a “new world order”, namely World War II........Jews hope their “anti-semitism” self-righteousness will win the day via exactly the same prejudices by which Western warmongering in general hopes to prevail.
“We are innocent. The terrorists are starting everything. We are guilty of nothing,” etc, etc, etc.

No issue has as sharply exposed the opportunism and cowardice of the “left” Labourite Corbynism (still being supported by much of the Trot “left”) as its grovelling around in the face of this systematic reactionary campaign; instead of speaking out sharply against the nonsense of alleged “left racism” and clarifying for the working class the colonialist barbarism of the Zionists, it has given it credence by setting up “inquiries” to “weed out” such supposed reaction. The Zionists relentlessly push home the point:

A senior Israeli cabinet minister, tipped as the country’s next prime minister, has accused the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party of being antisemitic.
On a visit to Brussels, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s public security minister, said his government had become concerned by the views expressed by figures in the highest echelons of the Labour party.
“We recognise and we see that there are antisemitic views in many of the leadership of the current Labour party,” Erdan said. “We hope it will be changed. The views.
“That they will come to the right decisions about people in their party who don’t understand that Hamas is a recognised terror organisation, that you cannot have a regular relationship with a terror organisation.”
Asked specifically whether he was suggesting Corbyn himself was an antisemite, the Israeli minister paused, before adding: “I didn’t say it. I said there are views that are very close to antisemitism in the leadership of the Labour party today in the UK.”
This summer Corbyn told MPs investigating accusations of antisemitism in the Labour party that he regretted once calling members of Hamas and Hezbollah “friends”.
After a speaker at a fringe meeting at the Labour conference claimed free speech should include the right to question the Holocaust, Corbyn undertook a series of interviews to insist that antisemitism was “completely at odds with the beliefs of this party”.
Erdan was in Brussels to lobby key European parliament figures to stop funding for groups campaigning for boycotts of Israeli goods.

The outrageous modern disinformation myth that “left” opposition to “Israel” is “racist” is sustained by the endless fake-“left” wrangling over the difference between hostility to Jewishness and to Zionism. But in the modern world there is essentially no difference between the overt aggression of the most expansionist Zionists, and their vicious gun-toting persecution, sabotage and intimidation around the settlements, and the Jewish diaspora, except in how to maintain the continuing existence of “Israel” - the liberal “anti-Zionist” wing simply concerned that too much outright expansionism will provoke the resistance and therefore jeopardise what has already been “established” (and to which they all have the “right” to go to and settle). Again past EPSR analysis (No1212 12- 09-03):

The pressure now is going to be put on the anti-imperialist struggle everywhere to come to a decision at long last about whether there is any worthwhile meaning any more in distinguishing the international Jewish freemasonry from the international Zionist freemasonry, or whether continuing to do so just plays into the deliberate political-confusion hands of reactionaries like Sachs to try to double slander the worldwide anti-Israel movement as both “terrorist” and as “racist”.
Since the armed Jewish colonisation of Palestine began, what further use is the old distinction between “Jew” and “Zionist” since the number of Jews who do not believe in their right to a homeland in “Israel” are no longer worth counting as a significant international or domestic factor in politics.
All that the vast majority of “anti-Zionist” Jews want to do is separate themselves from the vicious Nazi-aggression tactics of the non-stop warmongering which has created their “Israeli national home” from the very beginning.
But an utterly negligible number come out to agitate for an end to the foul nonsense of an “Israel” altogether.
In which case “Jew” and “Zionist” are now completely interchangeable.

And now it could be added – without taking up the foul nonsense of the “war on terror” in general and imperialist fascist warmongering which is more overtly intertwined with this Zionist agenda than ever before.
Once again world war is the only possible end point for collapsing imperialism, the “logical” conclusion to the completely illogical anarchy of “free market” way of running things in a modern and interconnected world.
The signals are coming thick and fast of its provocations and drive to backward and aggressive chauvinism, international belligerence and domestic repression and nazi-scapegoating - increasingly overt from the Trumpites but everywhere else too, including the Brexit Little Englanderism used to drag in some of the working class, and now the bootboy “kill them all” brashness of the newer Tories like the new Defence Secretary, (sinisterly slipped into place after the forced resignation of old-style patrician Tory Michael Fallon on the back of a feminist protest):
MPs, families and legal experts have raised serious concerns about comments made by the defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, suggesting that British troops should break the law by carrying out targeted extrajudicial killings of British jihadists.
The Labour MP and former paratrooper Dan Jarvis said Williamson’s comments that Britons who had fought for Islamic State abroad should be hunted down and killed were “morally, legally and practically wrong” and contravened long-held British policy.
“His statement implies a desire for extrajudicial killing to form part of the UK’s security policy,” Jarvis told the Guardian. “That is so radical a departure from all that we should value, and the way we should conduct ourselves, it is hard even to countenance.
“Such a policy would not only break the Geneva conventions and UK law, but would undermine both our society and the way we defend it.”
Prof Philippe Sands, the internationally renowned barrister, said the comments were inappropriate and Downing Street should confirm British foreign policy had not changed.
Sands told the Guardian: “It sounds as though we have, or are on the cusp of having, on his terms, some sort of shoot-to-kill policy.”
The QC said a policy of targeting and killing British Isis fighters would be “inconsistent with English, European and international law, as well as with United Kingdom foreign and domestic policy for nearly a century since the end of the second world war”.
Sands said the comments were “the words of an inexperienced minister, like someone who has given no thought or reflection at all to the underlying issues”.
“We need a confirmation from No 10 Downing Street that the UK is committed to the totality of its legal obligations in domestic law and international law and it does not operate shoot-to-kill policy in relation to people who violate criminal law.”
Jarvis said Williamson’s comments to the Daily Mail could fundamentally undermine instructions to troops already under intense pressure. “We could no longer turn to our troops and require of them, in often the most difficult of circumstances, to obey the law of armed conflict,” he said.
“We could no longer turn to other nations and ask them to end the extrajudicial killing of their people; and we could no longer turn to the British public and ask them to trust in the rule of law, when we, the lawmakers, are not prepared to do so ourselves.
“The rule of law is key both to the society we are defending and how we defend it. If our response to terrorism is to destroy human rights and the rule of law, the terrorists have won.”
Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, told the BBC’s World at One: “It simply will not be lawful in all circumstances to kill jihadis, as the secretary of state seems to be suggesting.”
Hand wringing liberalism about international legalities or “inexperience”, or the fairness of warmongering, or the “importance of the Geneva Conventions” is all completely hopeless. 
Capitalism is turning quite deliberately to overt fascist aggression and irrationality because that is the only way out it has for its crisis.
It is escalating full on class war (and dragging some of the working class behind it, tragically, not least because of the total vacuum in understanding left by past “Labour Movement” class collaboration and fake-“leftist” anti-communism and confusion).
Williamson is not even the first to come out with this calculatedly crude incitement - his minister Rory Stewart floated out exactly the same two weeks ago and not by some “accident” - this is a deliberate and coordinated plan to inflame “patriotic” public opinion and stir up the most basic and backward scapegoating sentiments backed and inflated by the dirtiest of the bourgeois press, with a long record of outright “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” Nazi support.
To repeat: fascism is built into the very core of all capitalism as it runs into crisis and will emerge in all kinds of ways and none of them needing shiny jackboots, or silly moustaches. 
Fascism is nothing but the crisis face of capitalism, as brutal as it needs to be to keep the working class cowed and exploitation intensified (heading all the way to Third World slave levels in the desperately weak British capitalist economy).
And for all the hollowness of the Trumpite or Brexit bluster and crude reaction threatening even worse - the empty barrels making most noise as the proverb has it, - they indicate deadly threats and dangers as the world plunges unstoppably into the greatest crisis ever.
Revolution to end this stinking, degenerate ever more unequal and repressive system and its intractable failure, is the “logical” necessity for ordinary people. 
But still the fake-“left”, Labourite, “trade union”, revisionist and Trot, like turkeys before Christmas, see only in front of them, unable to grasp the significance and scope of the crisis, or lift things up to the wide horizon of a historic and world perspective that the working class needs.
All the old “No to war” nostrums are trotted out, the “fight for democracy” illusions backing the mountebank Corbynite frauds, the “defend our NHS” reformist rearguard retreats etc (the idea of “steady improvement for workers lives until we reach socialism” long abandoned) and the capitulation to small-minded chauvinism around Brexit.
But the revolutionary dimension that alone could transform such fights – and many others - from isolated reformist battles into the gigantic class war struggle to overturn this outmoded ruling class is resolutely avoided, and all debate and polemic that could develop it, is fearfully evaded or even suppressed.
Even those notionally arguing for overturn and the building of workers states refuse to examine past mistakes, and consider what went wrong with past leadership, particularly the errors of the Stalin led Soviet Union, whose theoretical mistakes evolved into the complacent revisionism of Gorbachev which eventually took the giant achievements of the working class to idiot liquidation in 1989. 
But revolutionary developments are inevitable.
Build Leninism
Brendan Jameston

EPSR Archives
edited extracts from past issues
Against the outrageous “anti-semitism” propaganda used to suppress and censor all criticism and comment on the artificial land theft imperialist implant of “Israel”

Post-1945 total Western brainwashing... pretends that the “free world” leadership only ever had good intentions for mankind.
To doubt these good intentions is worse than cursing God in church; and pride of place among these good intentions was, naturally enough, the founding of a homeland for the Jews in “Israel” (i.e. Palestine).
It is simply never the done thing to doubt the right of “Israel” to exist, or to doubt the benign purposes of Western imperialism in stitching up this armed colonial land-grab through the comatose United Nations stooge-shop and past the eyes of the brain-dead Stalinist Revisionists, paralysed by delusions of eternal “peaceful-coexistence”.
99% of the internet squawking is arising purely from the EPSR not accepting the fundamental premise that everyone else has been working around, — namely that “obviously, Israel is here to stay”.
The one certainty, however, is the exact opposite, of course.
This “Israel” is nothing but a current colonial land-theft in a new post-1945 era when precisely, these physical colonial empires owned by Western monopoly-capitalist and state interests are the one thing that has had to go (as no longer tolerable to Third World anti-imperialist sensitivities).
Past genocidal monstrousness, like the stealing of North America from its hundreds of native Indian nations, or the theft of Australia from the Aborigines, may still be doubted as ever likely to allow restitution to be made or much of the legitimate inheritance to be put back together.
But the Palestinian nation was only racistly and genocidally evicted at the point of a gun in 1948 within living memory.
And that homeland destruction continues today not only within the clear indignant comprehension of the ousted Palestinian nation, but physically within their sight on this small crowded territory.
The 7 million Palestinians can peer through the barbed wire of their encampments, refugee hovels, or concentration camps, and actually see their own land being ploughed by the armed colonising interlopers....
These are, in the first place, a formidable political and fighting force in themselves.
But beyond that they are part of the 300 million strong Arab nation which only 700 years ago was an advanced civilisation, more powerful, capable, and sophisticated than European civilisation.
Moreover, it is an Arab civilisation which is becoming increasingly angry against Western domination of their region and the world, and an economic and political power which potentially is in a position to do a great deal about it.
On top of all that, the Palestinians are part of the Muslim religion, — the fastest growing, vastest, and most militant anti-Western philosophy on Earth with an endless number of axes to grind, and enough driving spirit to face down the decadent and criminal West.
This insulting “Israel” implantation must be in the running to be the most outrageous and ludicrous and doomed provocation ever attempted in the whole of world history. 
It is only the innate mildness and servitude of the Muslim religion, and the cowed-by-Western-imperialism past 600 years defeats for the Arabs, which have kept the heroic Palestinian fightback against colonial genocide within the limits that it has so far been contained.
But the direction which this epic epoch-making struggle must take next is glaringly obvious....
It is in reaction to this stark projected reality that the emotionalism of the Jewish freemasonry starts hysterically to scream “Anti-semitism”, but only by hurling every scrap of objective reason out of the window.
It starts from a groundless abstract assumption that “naturally, the Jews have a right to a homeland just like every other nation”, etc, — which is endlessly repeated with such conviction that all analysis of this decidedly “unnatural” proposition simply ceases, and anyone having the “bad taste” or “ignorance” to dispute it, automatically qualifies as “eccentric”, “racist”, and “anti-Semitic” at the very least.
Closer examination, however, reveals grotesque and dangerous flaws in this completely abstract “self-determination” supposition.
What “nation”??? Adherents to the Jewish freemasonry are from scores of different national and racial backgrounds.
Their native languages are English, French, Italian, Dutch, Arabic, Persian, Polish, Hungarian, etc, etc, and the one “national language” which was claimed, Yiddish, is basically German.
Having been inserted by Western imperialist armed might into the heart of the Arab Middle East, this bogus “nation” then invented a new language, Modern Hebrew, based on a regional tongue in ancient times which had been preserved museum-like in the liturgy of Judaism.
Racially, the “Jewish nation” runs from black Ethiopians to the fairest of fair Scandinavians. There are no distinct racial characteristics whatsoever to mark out the “Jewish nation” comprehensively.
As a justifiably very famous religious freemasonry, one of the most talented in history, the changing role, meaning, and significance of “Jewishness” is as endlessly complex as that of any other self-identifying and self-protecting group, such as the Catholics, for example, and other famous Christian sects, — all variously persecuting or, mostly, persecuted all through history for a variety of local/political/dynastic/economic reasons, etc, etc.
All other religious freemasonries reveal the same fiendishly complex sectarian patterns of ups and  downs.
But it is precisely this ludicrously “religious” issue which “inspires” the most outrageous idiocies of all in the whole “Jewish question”.
It is insane enough to start an armed colonial war on Arab soil by armed and financed Western imperialist fanatics at all in the latter half of the 20th century.
But to try to get away with doing so on the basis of an obscure backward tribal voodoo from 1,000 years ago which prayed to a God who gave a “promised land” to his “chosen people” is gobsmacking stupidity. 
EPSR 1213 06-12-03

Modern colonial land grab nature of “Israel” never mentioned in debate on Palestine

Far worse than the problem of lumpen anti-Semitism from small racist parties is the scandal of the international Zionist lobby trying to brainwash the world into preventing the origins of the Palestine catastrophe from ever being discussed...
The aim is simple: Be as critical, controversial, or challenging as anyone could wish about any past or present deeds in the Arab-Jew conflict; but NEVER allow the 1947 implantation of the so-called state of “Israel” onto the land of the Palestinian nation EVER to be re-examined or even discussed.
This powerful and hugely well-connected Zionist lobby within the ranks of Western monopoly capitalist ruling circles has even managed to con the duffer archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster into declaring that it is “prohibited anti-Semitism and immoral” to even start talking about how “Israel” got there in the first place in a post-1945 act of deliberate Western colonial tyranny to genocidally usurp the country of the Palestinian people to make a “homeland for the Jews”.
The sickest and most destructive trick of all by the Zionist lobby is to keep on disingenuously asking: “Well, should not the Jews have their own country?”; — knowingly falsely implying that this is what the argument over the origins of “Israel” is all about, plus the further conversation-stopping sneering implication that it could only be anti-Semitism to doubt that the answer must be “yes”.
But that is NOT the question, — as the entire Zionist lobby is well aware.
The real question is about WHY and especially HOW did this armed colonial seizure take place post-1945 of the land of Palestine by Jews of the Western imperialist countries????
The totally abstract question of “Should the Jews not have a homeland at all?” is a consciously cynical TOTAL DIVERSION, — — provocatively thrown in purely in order to excite “anti-Semitism” hysteria. 
Of course they should; but then so should the Basques, and the Kurds, and the Irish, and the Kashmiris, and the Chechens, and the Australian Aborigines, and the North American Indians, etc., etc., etc., many of them more ancient, or more numerous, or with as rich a historical legacy, or with an even more precise or more just claim to a particular territory than the Jews have to Palestine, not least of all the Palestinians of course. 
Many have literature or culture far MORE notable than the Bible for their claim, but the Bible and its tacked-on Christian mythology was the religion adopted by Western feudalism, capitalism, and then imperialism in its long march to world domination, and therefore Jewish folklore has always received extra attention in the West’s ruling circles. 
Thus the rhetorical “abstract right” question is not only an obviously diversionary attempt to provoke an “anti-Semitism?” eyebrow raising, but thereby also manages to actually avoid any evaluation of which of the very many peoples on Earth, who are denied a state, really are the most deserving of nationhood , — bearing in mind all of the colossal upheaval, conflict, and warmongering any such re-running of history to achieve a more “just” outcome inevitably always entails.
Leaving aside that massive minefield of whether for example the Vikings, Celts, or AngloSaxons deserve England back (all losing their homeland to war or upheaval MORE RECENTLY than the Jews lost their place among all the Semitic tribes around Palestine); or whether the Iroquois and Sioux nations should get North America back, or the Aborigines Australia, etc, etc, etc; or whether even more ANCIENT claims than the one the Jews promote, such as the Basque or Cyprus questions, should be the issues demanding world sympathy more, — — there is even then little but obnoxious special pleading and rotten string-pulling behind the Zionist neo-colonial propaganda.
Even the Biblical history claim amounts at best to just a tiny part of Palestine compared to the Philistines (Palestinians) who were there first until overrun by the Israelites and many other Semitic tribes.
And unlike the Jews who were subsequently scattered, absorbed, and lost their language (Hebrew) like most of these ancient Semitic nations, — the modern Palestinians have been in Palestine for the last 1,500 years, and speaking Arabic, the dominant Semitic language.
Palestine has overwhelmingly been the country of the Arabic-speaking Palestinian nation for twice as long as England has been the country of the English-speaking nation, finally established only 700 years ago.
Hebrews stopped using Hebrew, (which effectively died as a language), and they became by-and-by Spanish Jews, Greek Jews, Italian Jews, French Jews, German Jews, English Jews, etc, etc,  all mostly growing up speaking the local language as their first native language. 
Hebrew has now been only artificially revived again as a deliberate political act to try to lend some legitimacy to this post-1945 colonial conquest by these Western imperialist Jews. 
But despite all this, the Jewish colonisers (especially the American ones, the largest and most aggressive contingent of the landgrabbing “settlers”), relentlessly pound out “their God-given right to all this land”, etc, etc, — bristling murderously with a NAZI “master-race” fanaticism.
It is all a complete joke and a complete con.
Even more obnoxious special pleading hype is then added in on account of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust, all round, was the “achievement” of Western imperialist “democracy”, both in the elected Hitler government which introduced it, and in the rest of the monopoly capitalist West which deliberately encouraged the rebuilding of German militarism under the National Socialist party as a bulwark against the Soviet workers state, and which took its time in Second World War counter offensives in order to let the USSR be destroyed as much as possible first, through fighting 90% of Germany’s mighty forces on its own virtually, for most of the war.
The Holocaust had nothing whatever to do with Palestine or the Palestinian people who live there.
But it is the Palestinian people who now have to bear the brunt of this hate-filled vengeance which self-righteously spews out of the most aggressive Zionist colonisers and NAZI-style assassination deathsquads Jews support. EPSR 1221 24-02-04

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.

***********

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

*********

"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.)

*******

" 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."

***********
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. (Lenin Dec 1916: Principles involved in the war issue.)

Name ............................

Address.........................

Postcode........................

For a £25 annual subscription to receive EPSR by first class post
every Wednesday, write to (but send no money initially):
EPSR, PO Box 50, L0NDON, SW17 9NL

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles
US CIA disinformation accusations of “acoustic sabotage” against Cuba, answered comprehensively by Havana

THIS past February 17, the State Department and the U.S. embassy in Havana, reported, for the first time, to Cuba’s Foreign Ministry and diplomatic mission in Washington, the alleged occurrence of sonic attacks between November of 2016 and February, 2017.
According to statements by U.S. authorities, these incidents were produced by long-range sonic devices, which affected the health of diplomatic personnel and their family members.
What is a sonic attack? A sonic attack is defined as the emission of high decibel sound to generate different physical and cognitive reactions, with the goal of neutralizing a person with the use of non-lethal weapons or equipment available on the market.
This type of technology does not exist in Cuba and the commercial import of any equipment with these functions is prohibited. Thus, its introduction into the country could only be accomplished in an illegal fashion.

THE INVESTIGATION
Since the first notification of the alleged sonic events, Cuban authorities took very seriously the information conveyed by the U.S. authorities. An exhaustive investigation was conducted, as indicated by the Cuban government’s highest leadership, in which multiple steps were taken in terms of procedural, expert, technical, and operative aspects, to clarify the alleged events in a novel area, since no precedents of this type of aggression exist in Cuba, or in any other part of the world.
In accordance with the Penal Procedural Law currently in effect in Cuba, investigative file number 10/17 was lodged, with the purpose of clarifying a possible crime of “Acts against leaders or diplomatic representatives of foreign states.”
In this regard, Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Estrada Portales, head of the Ministry of the Interior’s Criminal Investigation Department, revealed a series of actions that were taken, among them: the gathering of witness statements from residents in areas adjacent to the locations of the events; the emission of formal requests to different institutions to verify issues of interest in the investigation; measurements of the sonic and radio-electronic spectrum in the areas where the alleged events occurred; as well as the collection of specific sound samples in these environments.
He also said that when U.S. authorities supplied sound samples allegedly recorded during the events, these were submitted for expert evaluation.
A permanent working group was established to take charge of the investigation, with the involvement of a variety of specialists within the Ministry of the Interior, and a committee of experts in the field of acoustics was set up, including specialists from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment, and Public Health.
Immediately, given the situation described by U.S. authorities, the government of Cuba, took steps to fulfil its obligations as outlined in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and immediately stepped up measures to prevent any action against U.S. diplomats.
Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Estrada Portales stated, “In our interactions with functionaries at the United States embassy, they have recognized and appreciated the increased security and protection measures, and requested that these remain in place to ensure the tranquility of their diplomatic personnel in our country.”

DEVICES, PATIENTS, MOTIVES, SOUNDS...?

Via a diplomatic note, the State Department reported that the supposed sonic attacks were made with long-range devices, but offered no further information regarding the equipment.
The investigation conducted by Cuban authorities, however, found no evidence or facts that would indicate the existence of any equipment to emit sound as described by the U.S. parties.
Nor was any intention or plan discovered, to bring such equipment to the country crossing aerial or maritime borders, where surveillance was increased in coordination with General Customs of the Republic.
The United States government has publicly stated that its diplomats have experienced a variety of symptoms, such as nausea, dizziness, facial and abdominal pain, hearing loss, cognitive problems, and even brain damage, under very diverse circumstances and in different contexts, implying the use of several devices.
Internationally recognized scientists, authors of numerous investigations on acoustic phenomena in different fields, such as medicine and physics, have presented hypotheses that cast doubt on the occurrence of the alleged sonic attacks.
These experts, linked to prestigious academic institutions and research centers, consider unlikely that the great variety of symptoms reported were caused by any known device, and explain that it is not possible that these incidents could cause brain damage.
They have stated that hearing loss can only be produced by exposure to audible sound, and that there is no medical precedent regarding such problems caused by inaudible sound, as U.S. authorities and some media insist.
They argue, moreover, that no infrasonic weapons capable of causing the symptoms described exist, saying that experiments with such equipment have only been conducted on animals. Such harm could only be produced with the use of large, powerful equipment that would affect people in a wide radius, and not in a selective manner, as alleged by the United States.
Despite these supposed health problems, no embassy staff member sought assistance at any Havana hospital institution where they customarily receive medical attention.
Dr. Martha Beatriz Martínez Torres, an ear, nose and throat specialist and member of the investigation’s expert committee, stated, “To date, no patient, with symptoms associated with possible aggression with a sonic weapon, has appeared at any unit of our public health system.”
Lieutenant Colonel Estrada Portales, commented that health authorities in the municipality of Playa responded to the Ministry’s request for information, verifying that no patients had been treated for symptoms that could be associated with sonic attacks or abnormal, high-decibel sounds, adding, “Moreover, checks were made to determine if any persons, living in the area surrounding the homes where these attacks were supposedly occurring, had been affected healthwise, with negative results.”
Interviewed during the investigation were 20 witnesses, neighbors of the diplomats supposedly attacked, who reported not having heard any strange sounds, or experiencing any health or hearing problems, similar to those described by U.S. diplomats.
The head of the Ministry of the Interior’s Criminal Investigation Department confirmed that all witnesses underwent a thorough medical exam, and no case of hearing problems, that could be associated with the events being investigated, was found.
Audiology specialist Dr. Álida Suárez Landrian explained that hearing tests were conducted, as part of the work with witnesses living near sites where the hearing of U.S. personnel was allegedly affected.
“Among these auditory tests, not a single case was positive for auditory trauma, that is, their audiometric curves were not indicative of acoustic trauma. Likewise, tests of stapedial reflexes were also conducted, and all were negative,” she said.
The experts consider noteworthy the fact that none of the neighbors in the area were affected and did not even hear the noises described.
Otorhinolaryngolist Dr. Martha Beatriz Martínez Torres affirmed that if a 90 decibel sound were made inside a building, a significant noise would be heard outside, saying, “What are we saying with this? This means that not only the person who may be inside the house or locale, but rather in the entire environment, all persons in the area outside, would also suffer.”
In accordance with international norms, the acoustics experts studied environmental sound in areas adjacent to the residences of U.S. diplomatic personnel, at different times of the day, but no anomalies were detected.
The Interior Ministry’s central criminalistics laboratory conducted prolonged  acoustical surveillance and recorded environmental sound at random intervals, which produced results within normal parameters.
Among the limited instances of cooperation on the part of the United States, was the delayed delivery of some sound samples supposedly linked with the reported events, which were subjected to exhaustive, expert technical evaluations.
Lieutenant Colonel Juan Carlos Molina Campos, a telecommunications engineer, explained that after analyses of the recordings handed over by the United States were conducted,
“It can be said, without a doubt, that the people who made these recordings were not subjected to high levels of acoustic pressure,” since to cause harm, persons must be exposed to “levels of 80, 90, 100 decibels of sound.”
For his part, PhD physicist Carlos Barceló Pérez noted, “The levels we are able to measures were on the order of approximately 74 decibels, and this level does not reach the harmful zone of auditory trauma.
Around 120, 130 decibels are needed. But apparently, the sound recorded does not come close, even remotely, to a level that would cause damage to one’s hearing.”
Parameters established by the Amertcah Academy of Otorhinolaryngoly, Head and Neck Surgery, regarding damage suffered by human beings exposed to sonic weapons, indicate that the sound they experienced surpassed 90 decibels. In none of the cases did any of the recordings submitted by the U.S. reach this level, which was verified technically and scientifically by experts.
While the use of technical means to carry out these alleged aggressions intentionally was not confirmed during the rigorous analysis, the recordings showed similarities with sounds emitted by some insect species, crickets and cicadas in particular.
According to Lieutenant Colonel Molina Campos “We conducted a test, we made a recording in one of Havana’s parks and determined its particular characteristics.”
We applied the same digital processing techniques used on the audio samples we received, to the cicada sounds we recorded. The result was that this sound is above 7 kilocycles, with an approximate bandwidth of 3 KHz, and very similar in terms of audition. We also compared the spectrum of all the signals provided with the spectrum we recorded and, obviously, the noise is very similar to that produced by a cicada.”
These insects live in coastal, rural, and urban areas across the entire country and were identified during... field tests conducted in areas surrounding the residences of U.S. diplomats.
Researchers from the U.S. have acknowledged that the noise caused by a group of crickets can reach 90 decibels, while a similar concentration of crickets can produce a sound registering 95.
In both cases, prolonged exposure to these noises can cause hearing loss, irritation, and hypertension.
The Cuban investigators carried out an extensive study, which proved the similarity between the sound samples provided by the U.S and the noise produced by these insects. These results were offered to the U.S. as a plausible cause of some of the reported sonic incidents.
So far, the United States has not responded to the information provided. However, authorities from that country, cited by international media outlets on condition of anonymity, have noted that the sounds in question resemble the noise made by the aforementioned insects.
A TIMELY RESPONSE TO “SUSPICIONS”
Two suspected sonic attacks were reported on April 25, 2017. At that time, U.S. officials informed the Cuban Foreign Ministry that the incidents had occurred in rooms at the Hotel Capri, where a diplomat from the Embassy and one of the doctors who had traveled to the island to examine the supposed victims of the alleged incidents, were staying.
Despite fact that there was a lapse of several days between the alleged occurrence of incidents and when they were reported, Cuban authorities proceeded to conduct a diligent and rigorous investigation. Establishments, surrounding areas, and other zones were inspected, but no physical or material evidence of interest to the investigation was found.
Management and service staff, as well as various guests at the hotel, all denied having heard or being affected by strange noises.
As part of the investigation, window seals were checked and sound samples were taken, revealing a predominantly quiet environment. An experiment was also conducted, during which sounds of a higher frequency than those registered in the audio samples provided by the U.S., were emitted. These sounds were proven to be inaudible in both locations.
In this regard, Lieutenant Colonel Ernesto Pico Abello, senior criminalist at the Ministry of the Interior explained, “There are no buildings within a 150-meter radius of the hotel, at the same level as the room, where a sound device able to reach 120 decibels, considered damaging to the human ear, could be placed, or penetrate the closed windows of the rooms and produce noise pollution harmful to guests.”
Given the unknown cause of these alleged attacks on U.S. diplomats, security and protection measures should have been adopted with staff, whose movements on the island should have also be restricted, as well as visits to Cuba by officials and relations.
However, U.S. diplomats have acted in quite the opposite way. For example, from February 17, when the first incident was reported, through the 26th of that same month, U.S. diplomats notified the Cuban Foreign Ministry of 15 trips outside of the capital, for recreational purposes. Meanwhile, between February and June, the U.S. Embassy requested a total of 293 visas, of which 158 were for family members and friends of accredited officials on the island, who also took various recreational trips within the country.
With regard to this situation Lieutenant Colonel Estrada Portales highlighted an important detail. He revealed that “as soon as these incidents were reported by the U.S. Embassy, the head of minint’s Diplomatic Security Department called a meeting with the head of the embassy’s Security Department in order to clarify details for our investigation. However, after speaking with this official, it turned out that they had no knowledge of the incidents in question.”
He added, “This is very significant for two key reasons; firstly, because the same head of Security who was unaware of the incidents, was later reported to be one of the victims; and secondly, but just as importantly, this official had no knowledge of the attacks on staff and their relations, when their job in Cuba is, precisely, to ensure the safety of personnel and their family members.”
OBSTACLES TO THE INVESTIGATION
Thus far during investigations, U.S. authorities have shown a clear lack of willingness to cooperate in clarifying events, by failing to provide vital information, or collaborate with the Ministry of the Interior’s investigative efforts.
To date, Cuban investigators have only had belated access to the sites supposedly affected, and received new recordings of the alleged sonic attacks.
In this sense, Lieutenant Colonel Estrada Portales stated, “U.S. authorities left Cuba to investigate, determine, and sort the facts, without assuming the full responsibility of participating in the investigation, as befits the affected country.
They have not provided access to investigators or to the facts, because they were reported months, days, and hours after occurring - not to the victims, or witnesses. There is no way of knowing what details a victim can provide without interviewing them.”
He added, “What is more, U.S. authorities have refused to allow us to interview the victims, and have failed to provide the statements that were requested, not only to be used in the strict sense of a police investigation, but also to offer to experts, scientists, and specialists who could analyze what the victims said about what happened with regard to the reported incidents.”
The U.S. diplomats affected by the alleged sonic attacks were the main source of evidence that Cuban experts needed to clarify events. However, the U.S. government denied Cuba access to these individuals and recalled them to the country, preventing experts from making an informed assessment.
The United States has also failed to facilitate exchanges between Cuban scientists and investigators and the State Department’s medical team, which visited the island to assess the alleged harm to diplomats.
“We have, at all times, been willing to treat these patients, and investigate what had happened. The Cuban healthcare system has all the resources, but in truth we received no cooperation, just reports about what had happened, which in our opinion are not expert,” stated Dr. Manuel Jorge Villar Kuscevic, otolaryngologist and expert on head and neck surgery.
Meanwhile, the medical report for the 20 people supposedly affected by exposure to strong sounds, provided by U.S. authorities, is only a page long, very general, and lacking the technical elements such reports require.
Dr. Villar Kuscevic went on to note that the Cuban side has been investigating the case working off the basis of incomplete information. “We haven’t really had any scientific or credible information to be able to arrive at any kind of conclusion,” he stated.
Meanwhile, Dr. Alída Suárez Landrián noted, “The only thing we have received from our counterparts are these general reports. Apparently they conducted vestibular and audiometric tests, but where are these tests? Where are the results of these tests? If we don’t see the test, we don’t see the results, how then can we say that such and such damage has either been caused, or not? We don’t have a scientific foundation or solid base on which to make a diagnosis.”
“Neither have we been able to conduct a physical otorrinolaringology exam, nor do we have a general knowledge of the health conditions of the environments surrounding these individuals,” stated Dr. Martha Beatriz Martínez Torres.
Another recurring issue throughout the process has been the tardiness with which U.S. authorities have reported the alleged incidents. All were reported late, despite the fact that the Ministry of the Interior’s Diplomatic Security Department set up five exclusive phone lines for the U.S. Embassy in Havana, so that it could directly report any incident.
In this sense, Lieutenant Colonel Estrada Portales stated, “U.S. authorities have reported all the incidents in a delayed and partial manner. On April 25, they reported an incident which had supposedly occurred 30 days earlier, on March 30. On April 6 at 2pm, the Embassy reported an incident which allegedly took place the previous evening. When our forces arrived to investigate, they were denied access to the victims and the interior where the incident occurred; thus obstructing the police conducting the necessary investigations, to establish what happened, despite the delay in receiving the information.”
Meanwhile, although the alleged sonic attacks have been linked to sectors and technologies in which Cuba has little experience, U.S. authorities have not agreed to the island’s proposal for technical exchanges between experts, or facilitated the use of technologies related to sonic and infrasonic registers.
It seems contradictory that the United States has not wanted to cooperate fully at this level, given positive experiences between the two nations in matters of drug-trafficking security, money laundering and terrorism, the majority of which were undertaken before diplomatic ties were reestablished, proof of the results that can be achieved when there is genuine political will.
An example was the bilateral collaboration in the area of Information and Communications Technologies in 2013, when cyberattacks were reported against technological and military installations in the United States. In this event, Cuban computers were first controlled from abroad, in order to use national infrastructures as bridges and present the island as an alleged attacker.
On that occasion, bilateral exchanges were held at a technical, operational, and political level, which allowed for the swift clarification of the facts, and even the carrying out of investigative procedures by U. S. authorities.
In this regard, Lieutenant Colonel Estrada Portales reflected: “As has been reiterated to U.S. officials, this investigation is still ongoing. But in order to be successful, the complete and responsible participation of the authorities of that country is essential; that they allow access to their experts, who have been participating, as they have said, in the investigation on their part; that they allow access to the testimony of the witnesses, allow access to the real statements of the victims about what happened and what the symptoms were, and other details that are essential for police measures to be developed, in addition to the actions to be carried out by the multidisciplinary group of experts that are participating in this investigation.”
Today, after repeated requests from the Cuban side, it has only been possible to establish cooperation with U.S. specialized agencies to investigate the alleged events.
So far it has not been possible to exchange with the medical team that examined the alleged victims, or with experts in technological and acoustic matters.
In this regard, during the months of June, August, and September of 2017, three meetings were held on the island between specialists from the United States and their Cuban counterparts. The exchanges took place in a constructive and professional atmosphere, in which the U.S. side expressed its intention to cooperate more substantively in the investigation of the alleged incidents.
The members of the United States delegation stated that they do not have any evidence to confirm the occurrence of the aforementioned attacks, and noted the inexistence of any hypothesis regarding the origin of the health issues alluded to by their diplomats.
Spokesperson for the Department of State, Heather Nauert, publicly acknowledged that her government has been unable to determine the causes or any culprit of the alleged sonic events.
U.S. investigators noted that they did not rule out the possibility that the symptoms experienced by diplomats were triggered by other causes, unrelated to the so-called acoustic attacks, hence the investigations continue.
They also recognized the role played by Cuba in the investigative process.
Lieutenant Colonel Estrada Portales concludes: “In exchanges with U.S. officials, they have recognized that Cuba has no responsibility whatsoever in the execution of the attacks that they are denouncing.
They have also recognized that Cuba is a place where they have historically carried out their diplomatic activity in a peaceful and secure manner, and that our country has always guaranteed the necessary measures for the development of this work by officials of the United States Embassy.”

PARTIAL CONCLUSIONS OF THE INVESTIGATION
Cuban authorities pursued all investigative options based on the information provided by the U.S. side.
• There was no evidence to indicate the occurrence of the alleged sonic attacks;
• It has not been possible to establish investigative hypotheses regarding the origin of the incidents, which due to their nature are eminently sensorial and leave no tracks or traces, an aspect supported by the representatives of the specialized agencies of the United States who traveled to Cuba.
• Nor have any potential perpetrators or persons with motives, intent or the means to carry out this type of action, been identified. In the work undertaken by the Cuban team of investigators, and the information provided by U.S. officials, the presence of suspicious persons or means in or around the sites of the incidents has not been established.
• The Cuban medical and scientific team, after expert technical analysis of the sound samples provided by the United States, certified the impossibility of these causing the health issues described by diplomats.
Throughout the investigative process, Cuban authorities have kept their U.S. counterparts updated through notes verbal delivered to the United States Embassy, and diplomatic and security meetings.
Dr. Yamile González Sánchez, department head at the Center for Epidemiology and Environmental Health, and PhD physicist Carlos Barcelo Perez, conducted nocturnal ambient noise measurements.

POLITICAL MANIPULATION
The politicization of this issue, in recent decisions by the U.S. government to reduce its diplomatic personnel in Cuba to a minimum, and to request the departure of 15 officials from the Cuban Embassy in Washington, without this being based on evidence or conclusive results of the investigation in progress, only benefits a small group of the anti-Cuban extreme right, led by Senator Marco Rubio, that insists on maintaining a hostile policy toward the island, to the detriment of the genuine national interests of the United States and its people, who have expressed their support for the normalization of relations between the two countries.
Rubio, opposed to any rapprochement with Havana, recently sent, together with four other senators, a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, in which he requests the expulsion of all Cuban diplomats in Washington and the eventual closure of the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, in retaliation for the alleged “acoustic attacks.”
The decision to reduce U.S. diplomatic personnel in Cuba sparked the condemnation of Barbara Stephenson, president of the American Foreign Service Association, a 16,000-member union representing U.S. diplomats. The official noted that the alleged health problems do not justify a large-scale withdrawal.
This position has been backed by prominent U.S. figures and politicians, who described the White House reaction as excessive and mistaken. They considered it a return to failed Cold War policies, and stressed that it reflects the interests of certain  individuals in disrupting the normalization process.
The implementation of these measures, along with others such as the indefinite suspension of bilateral meetings on the island, visits to Cuba by official delegations, restrictions on the issuance of visas from the U.S. consulate in Havana, and the warning to U.S. travelers not to visit Cuba, constitute a step back in bilateral relations, as they are detrimental to exchanges and cooperation in various areas of common interest, especially the limited economic ties and in the area of migration.
This situation, triggered by political interests, jeopardizes the preservation of the national security of both countries, as it would affect agreements on, migration and law enforcement, with a direct impact on combating transnational crimes such as terrorism, drug trafficking, cyberattacks, and human trafficking, among others.
Throughout its revolutionary history, it has been demonstrated that Cuba fulfills its international obligations with rigor and seriousness, including the protection of all diplomats, without exception.
In addition, the island is universally recognized as a safe destination. A study by Data World, published early April, 2017, and based on travel warnings issued by the State Department over the last seven years, revealed that Cuba is one of the safest countries for U.S. tourists. Over this period, the State Department did not issue any travel warnings for Cuba, or include the island on the list of the 25 most dangerous nations for the physical integrity of its citizens.
In the last two years, as of the beginning of the process of the normalization of relations, the number of U.S. visitors to Cuba has increased, totaling more than half a million this year alone, without counting the trips made by more than 320,000 Cuban residents in the U.S.
Cuba would never attack, or allow the use of its territory to harm U.S. diplomats of citizens, or those of any other country.
However, more than 150 attacks have been perpetrated against Cuban diplomatic missions and entities in some 20 countries, including the Permanent Mission of Cuba to the United Nations, and the former Cuban Interests Section in Washington. These terrorist acts, carried out by groups based in the U.S., have resulted in a considerable number of dead or injured diplomatic officials, among which the case of Féliz García Rodríguez stands out, assassinated September 11, 1981, in New York.
Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the island has been the direct target of constant attacks of all kinds, backed by different U.S. administrations that practiced state terrorism.
The sabotage of the La Coubre freighter and the El Encanto store, the mercenary attack on Playa Giron, the blowing up of a Cuban civil aircraft mid-flight, and the bombings in different hotels and tourist centers of the country, among many other aggressions, marked the suffering of an entire people, with a total of 3,478 fatalities and 2,099 physically disabled for life.
In spite of these permanent attacks against the Cuban people, the Revolution has maintained as a principle the respect for the physical and moral integrity of all human beings.
As has been reiterated on many occasions, Cuba is willing to continue negotiations on bilateral issues with the United States, based on equality and absolute respect for our sovereignty and independence. Cuba and the United States can cooperate and coexist in a civilized manner, despite our profound differences, and promote the well-being of both peoples.*