Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
	Economic & Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions  £20 p.a. [P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50 London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd]  
No 0998 May 12th 1999                                                                                                                                        10p

Mad bombers losing support, left and right, as the warmongering's aimlessness anyway becomes clearer. No amount of destructiveness will solve the real civil war contradiction created by the KLA fascists, or be of the slightest use in solving the NATO imperialist powers' real problem, — their overproduction economic crisis. Fake-'lefts' now in a turmoil of confusion, making excuses for a war of NAZI aggression in non-existent circumstances for parading their 'self-determination' morality.

NATO imperialism's blitzkrieg insanity goes on in spite of the 'accidental' destruction of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the painful embarrassment to all the strands of bourgeois ideology which have helped prop up this monstrous fascist aggression.

Ruling-class circles throughout the monopoly-capitalist freemarket world who have turned a blind eye to the US-led plundering diktat on the Balkans are increasingly worried about how their own masses' resentment of imperialist economic crisis might escalate into rebellion as the planet watches the Serb nation put to ritual slaughter so as to assert Washington's 'New World Order' plans.

The middle-class swamp of fake-'lefts' and other 'socialists' is beginning to tie itself in moralising knots as its academic 'justification' for the bombing (based on a complete misunderstanding of the relevance of 'self-determination rights' in these imperialist warmongering circumstances) sinks increasingly into conflict with the glaringly irrational and devious barbarousness of the West's actual mindless destructiveness.

And as all shades of petty-bourgeois posturing about the imaginary 'justice' of the Albanian minority cause in Serbia begin to waver in step with the clearer emergence of the KLA's stooge role on behalf of CIA reactionary warmongering, the ferocious anti-imperialist response of the protests on China's streets has almost caused some of them to fall off their self-righteous perches.

Washington's KLA-fascist thugs are becoming increasingly bad news, — as the capitalist press itself is having to admit; reporting on the prostitution rackets, the drug-running, the extortion, and every other vicious mafia crime that this Albanian gangster regime is inflicting on the refugees from Kosovo, the very people that all Western hearts are meant to bleed in unison for while at the same time backing the same KLA that is exploiting them for its own reactionary ends:

Nato's deepening relationship with the KLA is accompanied by concern that it is in danger of squandering support because of high-handed tactics towards deportees.

In Kukes, the main border town in northern Albania, where more than 350,000 Kosovans have arrived in the last month, KLA men have been seen confiscating property from deportees.

"It's sickening to watch an exhausted family struggle into Albania from the Yugoslav border point, hungry, tired and terrified and see a KLA soldier demand their horse and blanket for the good of the cause," one international aid worker said yesterday.

It is now one of the worst kept secrets of the campaign that KLA men are using satellite phones to give Nato information about Serb movements, ironically in the light of Nato's previous insistence that it did want to become the "KLA's air force".

All western governments deny arming the KLA, but in the international bazaar for small arms they hardly need to. The CIA can use a variety of "cut-outs" to deny its assumed role in financing the purchase of weapons. But the main supply routes from sanctuaries in northern Albania have become hazardous in recent weeks.

Getting weapons and the men and women with the skills to use them into Kosovo is the key problem. Military analysts in Albania see this as the main unstated role of the powerful US Apache helicopters. If the terrain-hugging Apaches strike Yugoslav border posts and force the Serbs back in at least one area, the KLA could reopen the corridors from Albania.

Last month, just before Operation Allied Force began, few Nato governments had a good word to say about the KLA. During the year-long armed struggle against the Serbs it had been repeatedly dismissed as an anti-democratic terrorist group linked to drug-smuggling and intimidation of ethnic Albanians who did not share its militant approach.

Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, was only the latest Nato minister to deny yesterday that there were any plans to arm the KLA, only weeks after warning that its provocation were inviting Serb repression.

It started with such relatively 'mild' harassment being observed and the Western propaganda lies being quietly noted to cover up the planned reactionary role for the KLA to provide NATO with its warmongering 'excuse'.

These maverick Western press observations quickly became more startling:

They walked over the mountains and were separated from their families. They arrived at this squalid abandoned chicken farm in Fier — a lawless town in central Albania renowned for its export of prostitutes to Italy and Greece, as well as for its guns and kidnapping — to find an equally horrific scenario. They are being preyed upon by local men who enter their camps at night and abduct them into prostitution.

"We are frightened, really frightened," says Suzanna, 22, a student of German from Pristina, who is now living in the Grize refugee camp. "We have been told we can't leave the camp, even to go for a walk. I survived Pristina being cleansed and walking four days on foot over mountains, but this is worse."

Suzanna is not a simple village girl. She is beautiful, as are many of the tall, blonde, blue-eyed young women in this camp. With her tight jeans, platform boots and polo neck jumper, she could pass as any Western college student.

The realisation now that she is not only a refugee, but also vulnerable to Albanian thugs who can kidnap her into a world of forced prostitution fills her with unspeakable terror. Suddenly, without warning, she begins to weep.

"They come every night, these men in Mercedes, and say that they want to take the youngest girls away to train us to be teachers in Italy," she says. "Why are they doing this? Haven't we gone through enough?"

Maxe Goxha, a policeman posted inside the camp by local authorities — the camp is being run by Albanians with intermittent aid deliveries from Jewish and Norwegian agencies — confirms the story. He says: "Local men arrived with fake documents and said they had come to take young girls away to a teacher training course in Italy." Some of them, he says, spoke good Italian. Another night they posed as aid workers. "This week they had three girls in their early twenties and a boy, aged 28 in their possession, before we stopped them."

Since the first unconfirmed stories emerged last week that the refugee women were being forced out of their camps at night and brought back the next morning, the local authorities have posted security police inside the camp. Officials of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe are investigating the situation.

According to the OSCE, at least three women have disappeared from this area. But even the organisations sent to protect these refugees admit that dealing with a country with little infrastructure largely run by local gangs and clans is a daunting one.

Fier and Berat, a neighbouring city, are famous for prostitute-trafficking: it is estimated that since the 1992 creation of Albanian democracy, 10,000 local women have been taken to Italy and 20,000 to Greece.

In the chicken farm known as Grize camp, a squalid place inhabited by 600 people, other refugees timidly speak of a pretty young woman who was last seen doing her washing. "A local Albanian man approached her and she left with him," says one woman. "We have not seen her since."

The other women of the camp are in a state of panic. "This is no kind of life," says Suzanna, in tears. "Can you imagine this happening to you?"

This is the same Albanian mafia culture which, backed by Western imperialism, launched the civil war in the first place some years ago to try to dismember (or Balkanise) Serbia, the traditional imperialist method of pacification of local resistance (traditionally led by the Serbs) to general plundering imperialist plans for the region.

The Times went one further and then published the following British academic commentary on the thoroughly degenerate mafia quality of Western imperialism's warmongering stooges against the Serbs:

The announcement yesterday that Britain will receive 1,000 Kosovan refugees every week is excellent news — for heroin addicts, that is. The arrivals from Kosovo are the final link in a chain which connects European users with Central Asian producers. And the conflict in Kosovo is the latest in a series of wars in the former communist bloc fought to seize control of drugs trafficking routes. This war is criminal in every sense.

Just as previous wars were fought to control trade routes, whether for oil or other commodities, so this conflict is drug-fuelled. The "ethnic" uprisings which convulse formerly communist states invariably occur at strategically important points on the Eurasian drug route. It runs from the heroin fields of Afghanistan, through the former Soviet Central Asian states, the Caucasus. Turkish Kurdistan and into the Balkans. Eighty per cent of the heroin on sale in Europe now passes along this route.

Unlike normal trade, the drugs trade requires paramilitary control to be exercised over territory. Private armies are needed to control land supply routes to Europe.

Conflicts in formerly communist countries have an unerring tendency to take place over the mountain passes and ports vital to the drugs trade. The Chechen war in Southern Russia and the Ossetian conflict were battles for control of the main road through the Caucasus Mountains. The Abhkhaz uprising in Georgia in 1992-93, and the Albanian rebellion in 1997, were conflicts over the control of ports.

The war in Kosovo is only the latest, most horrific, of these turf battles. The KLA whose activities are at the heart of the conflict, is an outgrowth of the Kosovo Albanian mafia. These Kosovan criminals operate the most powerful drug-running network in Europe.

The Albanian mafia's growth, and involvement in the Kosovo conflict, is the horrific coda to a series of errors. First, the war in Yugoslavia between 1991-1995 disrupted the normal drugs route into Europe. Albanian criminals profited from this disruption.

Finally, a separate development in the mid 1990s made the need to control the new drugs hub of Kosovo even more urgent than before. In March 1995, the Schengen agreement abolished border controls throughout continental Europe. Schengen conveniently created an entire frontier-free zone on the KLA's doorstep, ripe for exploitation.

Albanians now control some 70 per cent of the heroin market in Germany and Switzerland. The KLA's two main offices abroad are, unsurprisingly, in those countries. There are now 2,000 Kosovan Albanians in Swiss prisons serving sentences for drugs smuggling. The new implantation of Kosovan refugees in Britain will give the KLA a new and unexpected, base for its trafficking here.

Not all the refugees, of course, will be drug-runners. But they will be vulnerable to control by them. Cherie Blair, who cried at the refugees' fate, may not have realised that they are also victims of the KLA, which controls the camps. Reports from Macedonia and Albania confirm that KLA "minders" ensure that all refugees peddle the same line when speaking to Western journalists. KLA gangsters rob them of any remaining cash. And KLA pimps driving Mercedes kidnap refugee girls for prostitution in Italy.

In spontaneously opening our hearts to these refugees, we are opening our country to organised criminality.

The author is an academic and writer on European affairs

This stuff borders on conspiratorial hysteria but this same story of Kosovo Albanian mafia control of much of Europe's heroin trade, - with continental police records to prove it, as the EPS Review has already reported in the capitalist press's own admissions, - is too frequently repeated to be that much exaggerated. And why would not such gangster big business try to take over their own 'state' by helping hoodwink willing Western warmongering public opinion into agreeing that Serbia's Albanian minority 'deserve their separatist self-determination'? (ripping out Serbia's southern province of Kosovo, which just, happens to be the historic heart of ancient Serb culture, - hence the bitter civil war which broke out, in effect years ago).

The Albanian minority in Kosovo is a very close-knit community with a long dubious history of opportunist stoogery for anti-Serb invading imperialist powers (the Ottoman Empire; the Austro-Hungarian Empire; German imperialism's Third Reich under the Nazis (after initially stooging for the Italian fascist invaders under Mussolini); and now US imperialism's CIA-generated warmongering plans to continue 'New World Order' domination riding roughshod through the coming monster economic crisis. 

This Times piece casually admits the one thing that the West's relentless propaganda hysteria against the Serbs pretends would be an unbelievable state of affairs, - that this Albanian minority community could all be being coached and rehearsed into spouting the same old lines about non-existent 'massacres', 'rape camps', 'ethnic cleansing', and the like, on their running away from or being booted out of Serbia for their community's part in bamboozling world opinion and deceitfully setting up this NATO imperialist opportunity to blitzkrieg the troublesome Serbs with their steadfast anti-Balkanising and anti-imperialist record.

This Times commentary also suggests another embarrassing difficulty which might be brewing to disturb the Western peace-of-mind over this barbaric blitzkrieg onslaught to wreck Serbia, - some real problems with the refugee crisis now that the insane blitzkrieg has actually created it and it no longer remains purely an anti-Serb propaganda gimmick but actually needs dealing with. But how? With these increasing amounts of bad publicity for this degenerate and unserious 'Kosovo-Albanian cause', the next likelihood is for the ferocious hostility to the consequences of this KLA opportunism as is now widespread in Macedonia which has borne the brunt of the 'refugee' wave, to start spreading all round the West. The Review long ago quoted a Sunday Times piece on the economic opportunism suspicions that had been raised about a proportion of the Albanian minority which had waged calculated war on the Serbian state, having done so partly in order to qualify for a hoped-for refugee passage to life in the West.

Now the Times (from a convinced reactionary pro-war, anti-Serb position) has front-page headlined a new angle on the refugee game(and the continuing extortion rackets as well) that this opportunist Albanian community are also now playing:

KOSOVAN refugees have been bribing their way onto the shortlists for mercy flights using corrupt middlemen operating a virtual "travel agency" charging up to £500 a person.

As two more planeloads prepare to arrive in Britain tomorrow, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has begun an investigation in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, where around 100,000 people are housed in tented camps near the capital Skopje.

Sivanka Dhanapala, a UNHCR research officer at the Brazde camp, said: "It seems that a Kosovar Albanian refugee who has access to the camp and the tents is inserting names somewhere between the stages of selection and booking people on flights.

"We have heard rumours that anything from 500 to 600 German marks is involved, even up to 1500. Nobody has confirmed it but we have launched an investigation."

They also suspect refugees put in homes with Macedonian families are trying to sneak back into the overcrowded camps because they have realised it is the only way to register for places on humanitarian flights to Europe and the USA. As he oversaw preparation of the lists for tomorrows flights to Prestwick in Scotland, Mr Dhanapala said his team was determined to eradicate the problem.

Around 30,000 people have been flown out to other countries of more than 200,000 who have crossed the Macedonian border from Kosovo. Refugees are chosen for humanitarian evacuation flights through a complex process of registration, screening and selection carried out by teams of expatriate workers and Kosovan volunteers working for the UNHCR, the International Organisation for Migration and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Until three days ago the workers used laptop computers inside tents within the Brazde camp itself, making it easier for refugees to gain access. The operation has now been moved to temporary huts behind security fences. Mr Dhanapala said they believed the suspects had two main schemes: approaching refugees in camps asking for payment to register them for flights and fielding approaches from people in nearby towns wanting to make it appear they were living on the camp and thereby eligible to be flown abroad.

"There is the kind of person that would go from tent to tent and offer their services and there is the scam going on in Skopje where people manage to get their names onto the list and they are willing to wait as long as it takes because they can wait in the comfort of their own homes. A travel agency of some kind is being run."

Suspicions were aroused when "fresh-faced" people arrived at camp gates claiming to be refugees who had only just arrived and walked from the border. Most are believed to have arrived in Macedonia weeks or months ago. UNHCR headquarters in Geneva was considering sending out investigators.

Even this most sensitive of human plights, the one of the genuine refugees (the many who have been forced to flee from Kosovo either by deliberate KLA pressure (it has long been the mafia's policy to stunt-up the 'ethnic cleansing' appearances so as to become even more indispensable to US imperialism's warmongering plans); or by the NATO blitzkrieg destruction of Kosovo; or by sheer war-induced hardship; or by actual Serb hostility (unsurprising when their country is being ruined thanks to this belligerent minority and its pact with demented imperialist blitzkrieg-warmongering)); - the plight which made Cherie Blair cry, - is subject to the same relentless Kosovo-Albanian racketeering as everything else. A few bribes would be bad enough, but understandable. But to have to remove the processing of the evacuation programme away from the refugee camps altogether because of the impossibility of securing it from gross and wholesale corruption, hints at a historically lumpenised community.

It is the totality of circumstances which decide which outcomes of any conflict would +better serve the overall aim of civilisation's progress (which currently is to topple the imperialist ruling classes and their monopoly-capitalist system), and which would make it worse. Which dominant forces are at work in this area now, and what are their aims? Which local forces have lent themselves to which purpose, and what are their prospects?

The fake-'left' of petty-bourgeois public opinion in the West is getting cold feet now about its preposterous 'justification' for the NATO-imperialist blitzkrieg support (or failure to oppose and call for the defeat of) based on the previously ludicrously abstract notion of "an absolute democratic right of all nations to complete self-determination" as if that could always add up to a progressive step in history (bearing in mind all of the vastly complex and difficult circumstances which might complicate the realisation of that ideal on the ground, right now, in the present world situation of deadly inter-imperialist economic crisis, and international class-war struggle against monopoly-capitalist influence by the overwhelming mass interests of mankind.)

The dawning understanding by some of these irresponsible Trot academic circles, endlessly loudly posturing their 'left' credentials in a self-righteous orgy of subjective self-promotion, - is causing them to stumble and hesitate a bit now, dimly grasping what a disgraceful mess their light-minded political performing is helping to create.

The Weekly Worker has just contributed this tortured and doubting self-justification, half aware that this Trot cover for NATO-NAZI blitzkrieg is playing with fire, but still sounding like it is a discussion of how a hand of bridge has just been played over the Brie and Bordeaux, or a tricky round in some obscure board-game:

The discussion which followed centred mainly on our defence of the KLA. While its fight for independence is a just one, clearly it is in danger of becoming simply a tool of imperialism.

At the moment Nato does not see the KLA as trustworthy - hardly surprising, given its pan-Albanian ambitions. However, it is far from impossible that the KLA could be moulded into a Nato sponsored army policing a Nato protectorate. If this becomes the case, clearly our slogans will change. While we would still be calling for self-determination for Kosova - this time against Nato - we would no longer give any support to the KLA.

Some comrades voiced concern that we need to be very clear with our slogans - that whilst we support the right of the KLA to be armed in its fight for self-determination, we are not 'KLAists' and certainly do not support its nationalist programme. We defend the democratic content of its programme as we did with the IRA. But, however much we need to criticise the politics of the KLA, the cause of today's crisis lies with the failure of the working class-movement to support Kosovar rights. Without that Kosovars are bound to look towards the KLA and nationalism.

Full marks for honesty; zero for good sense or for the faintest awareness of the brutal class-war realities that the present world is solely made up of (in true Marxist-Leninist understanding).

First, the conditions in the Balkans right now do not remotely fulfil any of the criteria for which Marxist science recognised the progressiveness of full democratic rights to self-determination for ALL peoples without exception, all the way to separatism, anywhere in the world. These crucial conditions were 

l) that under discussion were the circumstances for the total DEFEAT of imperialism, vaguely envisaged as a revolutionary push by the leading proletarian forces but which would achieve their task that much more certainly if able to unite with ALL proletarian forces of every nationality (precisely on the understanding that their best unity before and after the toppling of the imperialist system would be secured if full democratic rights to total self-determination was always on offer as the understanding between all the united forces).

Nothing remotely resembling this scenario is the issue currently in the Balkans.

2) equally crucial to the above full self-determination perspective was that the revolutionary working class was envisaged as the overwhelmingly dominant force behind this continued national self-awareness, but definitely NOT the forces of bourgeois nationalism in such revolutionary socialist circumstances.

Among the Albanian minority in southern Serbia now, there is not the remotest evidence of a single scrap of revolutionary proletarian forces at work. There is not even a scrap of genuine bourgeois nationalist forces at work, sincerely striving for worthwhile political and economic independence from reactionary feudal autocracy or anything comparable.

The problems in Kosovo have always been due to an endless reactionary-nationalist desire by opportunist Albanian circles to split off part of Serbia for their own plundering purposes. And currently, this striving has degenerated into the most backward stunt of all, - playing stooge for NATO imperialism's warmongering purposes against the strong regional influence of Serb national independence, and hoping to benefit from all sorts of scams and rackets in the process, - exactly as they are in fact now doing, as the capitalist press itself admits above.

And the idea that any of this civil-war conflict which was unleashed by the Albanian mafia in Kosovo has anything to do with the advance of Albanian revolutionary proletarian forces is just silly irresponsible fantasising.

No more is the Serb state response to preserve its sovereignty and territorial integrity anything to do with the revolutionary interests of the proletariat either, of course, but why does it have to be? And no serious Marxist-Leninist science has ever pretended it was so anyway.

The issue in this conflict is Serb resistance to the original imperialist plundering and anti-communist pressures which BRIBE their way into the break-up of the former multi-ethnic Yugoslav workers state. Serb resistance took a nationalist form because of the absence of any world-revolutionary grasp or leadership in Belgrade (or anywhere else, of course), and because the break-up of Yugoslavia into petty stooge regimes for Western imperialism was particularly disastrous for the huge minorities of Serb nationals stuck in all the other republics, the fascist persecution of whom the last time that Croatia and Bosnia, for example, had stooge 'independence' under outside imperialist tutelage, can never be forgotten and never will be.

Serbia's own aims are no longer particularly progressive from the point of view of world socialist revolution, but their resistance to imperialist domination certainly IS progressive. The wholehearted wish from the world socialist revolutionary point of view is that the NATO blitzkrieg warmongering should be seen as being a DEFEAT and a FAILURE from any angle possible, which is not in the slightest the same thing as wishing for a Milosevic victory, which is irrelevant, as is the wretched stooge civil-war racket which the Albanian mafia in Kosovo dreamed up. Let the tragedy which the ordinary Kosovo Albanians have been plunged into find its outcome in precisely a proletarian socialist revolt against the lumpen bourgeois nationalism which has dragged them into this pointless civil war in the first place, and now into being the cannon-fodder playthings of a plundering NATO-warmongering blitzkrieg.

The final phrase of the Weekly Worker apologetics is sectarian self-righteousness gone absolutely barmy.

"It is the rest of the fake-'left' at fault for failing to posture with us about completely abstract 'Kosovar rights'. How can the Kosovars be blamed, therefore, for falling into the clutches of the KLA (who one has to admit might just be a bad thing)". So that's all right, then.

Any mass support for fascism anywhere can be 'excused' on exactly the same basis. Why did the masses support Hitler? Because the Third International cocked it up. 'Oh, so that's all right then, you Germans supporting the NAZI party in Germany.'

So much for the 'logic' of the mentality of petty-bourgeois academic minds, in reality hostile to Marxist science despite all the hammer-and-sickle 'communist' posturing.

And in the light of KLA mafia realities, where does all this now leave the SLP whose current Socialist News which declares:

In Kosovo, the balance of land forces was overwhelmingly with the Serbs before the bombing began, and is even more so now. Neither Clinton nor Blair has any intention of putting their soldiers into Kosovo on the side of the Kosovar Liberation Army to change that fact. What will they do once Kosovo has been brutally emptied of its Albanian citizens, and the KLA has retreated to the borders?

Hopefully give up, and surrender to a much-to-be-welcomed DEFEAT for imperialist intervention in an internal civil war which was only ever provoked in the first place to suit the deranged ideological climate of imperialist interests, and which should be left for Serbia and its Albanian minority to sort out.

The sick logic and confusion of all 57 varieties of Trot anti-Revisionist philistinism will be further under strain from the anti-NATO stand taken by the Chinese workers state, likened to a 'slave state' by a prominent SLP leader writing in the Weekly Worker, and called as much in published Socialist News articles.

Beijing's Revisionist philistinism is as wretched as any, and needs telling so but its maintained workers-state purposes under the dictatorship of the proletariat still make the only sense in a planet that continues to be dominated by imperialist-system crisis. Beijing, and everyone else, needs Leninist science. 

Spread the EPS Review. Royston Bull

SLP shows negative balance-sheet despite Blairism's poor returns from its demagogic devolutionary game with anachronistic nationalist backwardness, sadly unexposed by feeble Socialist Labour. Rights march goes wrong too,  confirming the bankruptcy of philistine-clique politics.

Scargillism's manoeuvre to capture mass discontent with New Labour treachery via a centrist political-party launch can now be said to have failed on several grounds, speaking of initial developments.

1) Incurable anti-theory philistinism has not only made it impossible to produce any far-reaching understanding of the world imperialist crisis which has helped create Blairism and its Socialist Labour response, - it has resulted in quite laughably weak propaganda and agitation.

2) A mentality of incurable bureaucratic demagogy has set the scene for only the most shallow sycophantic relationships to prevail internally in the party, making it  impossible for any distinctive cadre-forces to develop.

3) This in turn has helped surround Scargill with a mafia-leadership clique of fairly limited talent.

4) The ever-lengthening list of unsuccessful activities and missed opportunities indicates that Scargillism's anti-Blair revolt has failed to coincide with, or to help provoke, any mass spontaneous uprising against New Labour (as opposed to the slightly dull, sour, and cynical resentment of Blairism that the latest election results and apathy have hinted at).

5) Although in time to come the SLP may catch the wind in its sails of a future mass spontaneous positive revolt against New Labour, what it is left as now is just
another small 'socialist' sect, and one particularly poorly equipped to survive and flourish in such an overcrowded, posturing, backstabbing swamp in spite of its leadership's efforts in this direction.

Against all this, Socialist Labour can still be said to provide a forum of sorts within which to argue for as scientific an understanding of imperialist crisis (and of the revolutionary-socialist programme, strategy and tactics needed to overthrow it) as possible.

The good contacts and relationships already formed from this are obviously worth persevering with, and they could even continue to expand.

But any vestige of naïve illusions about Scargillism should not be encouraged, or excuses made for the evolved established reality now of Scargillism's chronic dishonesty, incompetence, and boastfulness. Workers collectives continuing to develop within the framework of the SLP will have disastrous long-term damage inflicted from any reluctance to frankly assess the record of Scargillism itself, i.e. the ability,  the style of work, and the record of achievement (such as it is) of the immediate clique around Scargill himself.

The leadership line on the NATO warmongering remains ludicrously inadequate for exposing the crisis-driven destructive PURPOSE of this insane and hypocritical imperialist blitzkrieg, or routing the social-patriot illusions of the petty-bourgeois 'revolutionary' swamp which has found an 'excuse' for sticking with the West's anti-communist barbarism through a completely misplaced and, utterly irrelevant 'democratic solidarity with the self-determination rights of Serbia's Albanian minority'. And the latest Socialist News has stumbled even more catastrophically into incipient sympathy with the drug-running KLA bandits themselves, a completely stooge CIA outfit of right-wing gangsterdom which, Contra-style, will only put the entire Albanian minority in Serbia into the hands of extreme bourgeois reaction, - a fascist mafia in the making.

The line on Europe is as bad, pandering to Little Englander nationalism of the most brain-rotting variety, pretending to the working class that there is some 'solution' to the problems of living under the imperialist system and its incurable worldwide economic crisis via 'getting out of the EU European bosses club'. It is infamous chauvinistic nonsense, and is the 'start', not of 'socialism', but of playing into the hands of fascist-imperialist jingoism for the trade-wars and the shooting wars to come under the disastrous class-collaborating fraud of "everything must now be done in the national interest". This flag-waving against "the European bosses" is the most degenerate philistine gibberish imaginable, and it is coupled with the equally reprehensible pandering to Scots and Welsh nationalism in the SLP campaigns to participate in the 'devolution' rackets, - conning the working class that introducing bourgeois-capitalist parliaments into Scotland and Wales will provide the 'freedom' for the 'democracy of socialism' to eventually revive the local economies and social services in the local interest.

A more foul deception on workers for the SLP to get involved in could not be found, and it must be seen as fortunate that relatively few workers were taken in by this imbecile nonsense, - the SLP getting about 2% in Scotland and Wales of those that bothered voting where more than half the electorate expressed their contempt for the whole farce of capitalist 'democracy' by staying away from the polls altogether.

But with their electoral propaganda going along with this grotesque delusion of "self-government at last for the people of Scotland and Wales", the specific voter-appeals put out by the SLP will only have reinforced the reactionary shot-in-the-arm to crude nationalism which is all that this Blairite stunt has achieved (and possibly was all it was ever meant to achieve).

Rampaging reactionary nationalism has nothing to commend it to a completely integrated working-class in Britain who all have a COMMON enemy, - the monopoly-imperialist system which is English, Scots, Welsh, Australian, American, German, Japanese, Korean, etc, etc, ad infinitum. Devolution does not remotely put the Scottish working class just into confrontation with the Scottish ruling class, - it will be the same international imperialist ruling class as before, only now Scots workers will be WEAKER for that fight because of this mental-political process of atomisation away from the rest of the working class in Britain, and the delusion (thanks to the SLP and other pro-devolution propaganda) that 'being on their own' again, 'at last', - dealing with their 'own' economy, - is somehow better. But 
a) it is totally fictional rubbish; and 
b) it would be EVEN WORSE if it were true. A completely atomised, separated Scots economy would be the easy plaything of any imperialist intervention around, whenever the Scottish working class might try to unleash any mass move towards a socialist transformation of the Scottish economy.

The identical arguments apply to Wales, and also to England as far as Scargill's social-chauvinism towards the 'EU bosses' is concerned. At this stage of advanced evolved class-war history in Britain and of civilised working-class integration facing a joint state/ruling class enemy for so many generations, - the reaction back into atomised 'nationalist' working classes when monopoly-imperialist ownership still rules everywhere, and the socialist transformation of the economy and society has not even begun, - is a potentially disastrous setback for which the philistine political ignorance of the fake-'left' swamp, SLP included, has a lot to answer. Nothing but harm and confusion can come from this relapse back into parochial nationalism, and the only silver lining is that the majority of workers treated this 'gift' of 'devolution' from the monopoly-imperialist establishment with the suspicious contempt it deserves. The simultaneous introduction of proportional representation, a concession to 'European bosses' logic at last, (being a feature of European bourgeois democracy for over 100 years), as a further part of Blairism's wish to scupper the Liberal-Democrat appeal within decaying imperialism, - should not be muddled up with this main reactionary issue of re-invigorated petty nationalism.
 
With the exception of a good score or two (e.g. a high ethnic response in Handsworth), the SLP's election results were minuscule 'left fringe' affairs everywhere, a tiny minority activity, not even up to Communist Party voting patterns of old. And this special-preoccupation 'socialist' sect-appearance of the SLP seems to have been confirmed by the Reclaim Our Rights debacle (although conflicting reports still contest this). Certainly the sometime talk of '100,000 on the march' for a mass national protest in London against New Labour's continuation of the Tory anti-union laws, was in reality measured in just a few hundreds at best, if that, - lost within the London Trades Council May Day march which promptly refused to let Scargill onto its platform to even speak, to his own promised 'great rally'.

Such revisionist/conformist TUC wretchedness would be easier to jeer if Scargill himself had not introduced precisely such a gagging bureaucracy into the SLP and Socialist News. It underlines the absolute difference between the struggle for Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding and ALL the activities of the entire fake-'left' swamp of 'socialism'. Genuine Marxist scientific investigation LIVES FOR arguments, polemics, and splits, finding its richest sources of development in contradiction, and at the highest level inside the party and the labour movement itself. The philosophy of the EPSR has been produced only out of such conflict, and as soon as differences arise, the first urgent requirement is for encouraging all participants to have their full say, preferably in writing, and for this to be spread as far and wide as possible, - alongside a suitable polemical reply or exchange of views, of course. Such is the only serious pursuit of correct political understanding and the only possible basis for unity and agreed political actions.

There is an unbridgable chasm dividing such objective honesty and genuine concern to find the right way forward for the working class revolutionary forces and therefore for all mankind, - and the miserable hole-in-the-corner manoeuvring of the demagogic opportunist world that Scargillism inhabits alongside the pathetic Revisionist/conformist TUC, and running his own farcical SLP bureaucracy-clique along the same hypocritical lines.

There is no contest between an emotional attachment to the mass movement heroics of the miners strikes and the stubborn polemical grind to refine Marxist understanding in the light of endlessly enriched historical evidence. But in the long run, it is success in the latter endeavour which somewhere somehow will play the greater role, as all the records show. 

Build Leninism. Roy Bull

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles.)

It is the ethnic-cleansing essence of imperialism which has dictated a world where violent conflict is inevitable. To stop war, imperialist humbug would be better bombing itself

THE United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are discharging a deluge of missiles on Yugoslavia, or on the little that remains of what was Yugoslavia.

According to the official story, the aggressors are acting on behalf of the rights of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, victims of the “war of ethnic cleansing" instigated by the Serbian government of Milosevic. As President Clinton stated, the Western democracies couldn’t stand by with their arms folded in the face of that “unacceptable humanitarian disaster.”

 The most ferocious “war of ethnic cleansing” and the most “unacceptable humanitarian disaster” in the 20th-century history of the Americas occurred in Guatemala in recent decades, and particularly during the 1980s. Indigenous Guatemalans were the principal victims of this slaughter: the number of deaths there was a hundred times greater than those in Kosovo, and twice as many persons were displaced. During a recent tour of Central America, President Clinton said he was sorry for the backing given by his country to the military men (who exterminated Indians) who had been trained, armed and advised by the United States.

The U.S. president was embroiled in a sexual scandal, and Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman invented a war to distract the respectable public’s attention. In the movie called Wag the Dog, that fabricated war was waged in the name of the Albanian people’s salvation.

Today, likewise in the name of the Albanian people's salvation, the movie is continuing in other milieu. It’s like a movie: planes that seem to have been designed in Hollywood take off and, night after night, fireworks explode in the skies over Yugoslavia.
 
As was the case with the bombardments of Iraq, the show doesn't include footage of enemy deaths; and they have no dead of their own. While attacks are made from the air, this real war will continue in its guise as a virtual war. If troops invaded by land, and the aggressor countries began to receive their heroes in body bags, there would be a change of tune.

Meanwhile, NATO continues to celebrate its 50th anniversary in a big way. As they say, they’re going for broke. It’s the most expensive birthday party in history, without counting the lives and property annihilated in Yugoslavia, given that, at the end of the day, every enemy deserves his misfortune, and every night of bombings costs 330 million dollars.

According to calculations in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (March 30 edition), the United States spent as much money on the initial night of this war as the total aid promised by Clinton to the Central American countries devastated by Hurricane Mitch.

Little wonder. People have already been asking what was NATO’s purpose, since the communist threat had disappeared from Eastern Europe. The managing director of the enterprise, Javier Solana, has taken it on himself to dispel such insidious doubts. Twenty years ago, Solana shouted, “No to NATO!” Ten years ago, he uttered a historic phrase on behalf of the Spanish government, when the U.S. war against Iraq broke out: “We have been advised, but advised after the fact." And now he’s explaining that NATO is defending the peace, at one million dollars per missile.

The major powers are engaged in crime, and recommend it. Nobody violates the law with such regularity. These bombings are a travesty of international law, and of NATO’s own founding charter. Against a bloody dictator like Milosevic, we're told, everything’s allowed, including what's prohibited.

It was the same story with the wars against Iraq, in violation of all laws made and to be made, justified by the urgency of overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

Instead, how many Iraqis have fallen? According to official data published in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau, January 1992) some 145,000 Iraqis and 124 U.S. soldiers have died as a consequence of the 1991 war. And how many continue to suffer from the blockade? How many are being punished by the hunger imposed by international economic, sanctions? According to the latest Red Cross report, the number of Iraqi children with below-average birth weights has increased sixfold in this decade.

This war, like all wars, serves as a giant showroom for the exhibition and sale of arms. The show-stealer is still the F-117, which initiated its devastating career by killing Panamanians at the end of 1989. Anyone can trip up in life, and not all publicity operations are successful: one of these models, supposedly invisible to radar, was brought down. The mishap cost U.S. taxpayers 45 million dollars without counting the value of the arms it was carrying.

This war, like all wars, also serves to justify military budgets. The big Western powers,  armed to the teeth, need both clients and enemies.

Very recently, at the beginning of this year, when the second war against Iraq ended, the Pentagon generals warned that their stocks of missiles were reduced.

Immediately, President Clinton announced that he would increase by 12 billion dollars the huge military budget, totaling 15% of the federal budget, and which is called a defense budget for some unknown reason. Clinton is presiding over a nation that has 1.5 million soldiers, prepared to die for some unknown reason.

NATO was set up as the armed wing of the United States in Europe. Given that Russia no longer scares anybody, NATO is growing and, with it, U.S. hegemony and a market for the U.S. arms industry. The good-conduct exam for Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic includes their entry into NATO and the purchase of military innovations from the United States. Yesterday's bad guys are proving that they are today’s good guys by renewing their arsenals to attain the “interoperability" levels demanded by NATO.

To ensure that the U.S. Congress approves the new members, the Lockheed Corporation and other industries of death butter up legislators with legal bribes. 

Recently, a scandal broke out in Britain. It was revealed that the most prestigious universities, the most devout charities and the principal hospitals are investing their employees' pension funds in the arms industry. The people in charge of education, charity and public health explained that they’re putting their money into enterprises that yield the largest profits and those are, precisely, the arms corporations. A spokesperson for the University of Glasgow spelled it out, claiming that they don’t make moral distinctions. Their concern is that their investments should be profitable, not ethical.

If the bombs falling on Yugoslavia could talk, in addition to exploding and killing, would they confess the truth?

"Excuse me, dear bombs, are you the mortal Instruments of Good?”

“A bit more respect, gentlemen. We're big business.”

(Excerpts of an article published by IPS Special Service)

World Revolutionary Socialist Review 
(Edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
   
NATO Seeks Hegemony, Not Human Rights

BEIJING: The China Society for Human Rights Studies (CSHRS) strongly condemned NATO's air strikes against Yugoslavia.

"NATO's military action, headed by the US, has trampled on the norms of international law and brazenly violated the classical principles enshrined in the UN Charter, which defend peace and oppose war," said an announcement by the CSHRS.

At a time when the world is still divided into different countries, weak and powerful, and especially with the continued existence of hegemonism and power politics, human rights need the protection of national sovereignty, the announcement stressed.

China, like many other developing countries, has learned painful lessons. Under conditions of foreign invasion and imperialist bullying in the past, human rights were out of the question, as the nation had no sovereignty, the announcement pointed out.

The late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping emphasized that sovereignty is far more important than human rights. This truth has been attested by the concrete practice of history. Facts have shown that big and powerful countries can get away with serious infringing on other countries' sovereignty in the name of safeguarding human rights.

But, what about the human rights situation in the US? Racial discrimination is still rampant and shocking in that country, but no small and weak country is able to intervene because that would infringe on the sovereignty of the US.

Although the fallacy has misled some people, NATO’s air strikes against Yugoslavia will soon open their eyes, the announcement said.

What has NATO accomplished in Yugoslavia, waving the banner of human rights? It has caused the deaths of several thousand people made more than 600,000 others homeless, caused untold property damage and brought about environmental catastrophe, it said. People all over the world now have the uneasy feeling that they have been thrown back to the era of imperialism, when the Great Powers carved up the world between them in the name of "spreading civilization". The only difference is that NATO is engaging in aggression in the name of protecting human rights. Nevertheless, the essence is the same: It is a struggle to assert hegemony.

The humanitarian disaster caused by NATO in Yugoslavia is expanding and developing. Bloody facts show that the call for “the supremacy of human rights over sovereignty” leaves no room for both sovereignty and human rights  - only hegemony, it added.

The fact that NATO is carrying out air strikes against Yugoslavia in the name of the protection of human rights is an extremely dangerous signal. If this aggression is allowed to take its course, the world will end up in chaos, and human rights will suffer an unprecedented setback, the announcement warned. It called on all people who love peace and wish to safeguard human rights to take action to stop this threat to peace and human rights in the embryonic stage and to denounce the blood-stained hegemonic lie.

In the meantime, it noted, it is worth mentioning that NATO's military action has encountered resolute resistance from the Yugoslavian people, and aroused criticism from all over the world. As a result, NATO's scheme has suffered severe setbacks. Even some Western media organs have pointed out that NATO's attacks stemmed from an improper excuse, targeted an improper place and started an unjust war. With the approach of the 21st century, people everywhere are hoping for a world at peace, and are resolutely against entering the next century in the throes of a war, it said. The war started with the pursuit of hegemony, and is destined to end in defeat for the hegemonists, the announcement concluded.

“It is undisguised hegemonism," the CSHRS concluded.

The excuse of human rights transcending sovereignty concocted by some Western countries, including the US, is aimed at seeking hegemony and NATO's military strikes against Yugoslavia have put this absurd theory into practice in a massive way, the announcement said.

In their speeches marking the 50th anniversary of military alliance, leaders of some NATO members clearly stressed the importance of human rights transcending sovereignty and preached NATO's "new concept" in handling international affairs in a bid to legalize their practice of military interference in other countries' internal affairs.

The fallacy is a denial of sovereignty. Respect for and refusal to infringe upon another country's sovereignty are the basic norms accepted worldwide that maintain normal relations among countries, it noted.

The United Nations Charter has a stipulation on human rights, which says that all countries have the duty to avoid putting pressure on other countries which could lead to instability there by making use of or distorting human rights issues.

However, in the pursuit of hegemonism, the US has inevitably flouted the norms on respecting for and refusal to infringe upon another country's sovereignty, the announcement said. "It is the height of absurdity to deny national sovereignty on the excuse of advocating human rights," it said, adding that, as conditions differ from country to country there are different views and opinions on human rights.

The announcement noted that the "human rights" excuse peddled by some western countries is aimed at forcing all nations in the world, upon pain of extinction, to bow down to the powerful countries' standards and norms.

Any nation which refuses to do so will be subject to blockades and sanctions, followed by military action, including bombing. •