Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.

-V. I. Lenin

Economic & Philosophic Science Review 

No 1128 Mar 19 2002

Subscriptions (£25 p.a.) and circulation 0786 799 6074 P&P Bulletin Publications PO Box 50, London SW 17 9NL [Post Office Registered.)

www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk                                                                           25p Weekly

Inability to defeat the Taleban, stop 'terror' bombings, topple Mugabe, etc, etc, is part of imperialism's insoluble economic crisis, not the fault of the West's counter-revolutionary operatives. The injustice of slump-ridden monopoly-capitalist international domination is now intolerable to the world's masses; and US imperialism's  idiotic 'war on terrorism' plans to impose blitzkrieg and colonial-police control over every 'rogue state' on the planet is doomed to be capitalism's final terminal disaster. Every DEFEAT for the West's plans, by any source, is the only possible route remaining for  historical progress. The 'reformist democracy' of Western 'lefts' voted for US warmongering catastrophe to engulf the planet by 'condemning' Sept 11. The Third World fightback against Western imperialist tyranny will continue to spread by every means, - 'condemned' or not. All 'moral'  posturing is just a front for Western treachery and brutality continuing,  and will be swamped by the material forces of the Third World proletarian billions as 'over-production' trade war mayhem cripples the planet economically, and the masses resist re-imposed colonial policing. 

Humiliating defeat for Western imperialism is increasingly emerging as the key to the world's future, as the EPSR has long explained.

Nothing else will stop monopoly-capitalism's insane warmongering blitzkrieg plans to brutalise into submission any Third World 'rogue states' which refuse to toe the imperialist line on any matter declared to be a "Western interest".

And only the mechanics of anti-imperialist revolt can possibly create the kind of international revolutionary movement and understanding, eventually, which alone will be able to replace global capitalist barbarism with a totally-agreed planned world of socialist cooperation.

Western laws, censorship, and fake 'lefts' (from the Revisionists and the SLP to the Alliance) are all just missing the point of what is happening in the world with their attempts to 'condemn' or arrest any 'support' for so-called 'terrorist' responses around the world to imperialist domination.

The largely spontaneous acts of revenge on the West everywhere will inevitably INCREASE as the international economic crisis of 'over-production' spreads slump and collapse ever-more widely, - no matter how regimented becomes the ideological pressure on petty-bourgeois traditionalist politics to "denounce atrocities", etc, and no matter how ludicrously draconian becomes surveillance to harass so-called (sympathisers' in every way possible.

On the contrary, as 'liberal' critics keep on warning the West from the damp fence on which they sit, this hardline imperialist bullying in all directions is only ever going to add to the quantity of alienation in the world and provoke more bitter hostility to Western domination than even before.

In fact, that only tells the half of it. Monopoly-capitalism's corporate and military world-rule is congenitally doomed to now push its bullying tyranny against INEVITABLY unyielding Third World opposition all the way to total war.

The terrorist response against the American-attended Protestant Church in Islamabad on Sunday is absolutely typical of the pattern of future developments which imperialist warmongering will increasingly impose on the planet.

Only out of real fear and shock is the CIA's tightly-controlled news-manipulation of Western propaganda deliberately playing down this incident and its significance.

Similarly played down has been another hugely significant setback for the West in the failure of the imperialist propaganda subversion to topple the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe.

This huge defeat for the West, albeit not yet a military one, exactly captures the whole future world pattern of irreconcilable conflict and unyielding resistance in spite of the massive armoury of 'condemnation' and insulting contempt ranged against ZANU from the far right to the fake-'left' Socialist Alliance, and in spite of all the uncertainty of the current character or the past history of the anti-imperialism involved.
And the same applies to fake-'left' criticism of the 'limitations' (or even 'reactionariness') of the 'Islamic fanaticism character being ascribed to the epoch shattering events of Sept 11, or to the mold-breaking heroics of the suicide bombers, destabilising the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. 

Jeering the crudeness, incompleteness, or contradictions in the anti-imperialist understanding involved, misses the point entirely of what these dramatic real-life, real-force developments are loudly telling the whole world is the next phase of the historic class-struggle for power on Earth.

The Western bourgeoisie's system of monopoly-capitalist domination, having for 700 years taken material civilisation forward, is now causing such domineering contradictions with the Third World's massed populations (now being organised and transformed, economically and technologically) that its rule is CAUSING more problems for mankind than it is solving; history itself is finding imperialism's continuation intolerable.

Islamic fundamentalism is a purely incidental feature, and a temporary one, of this enormously powerful new surge of anti-imperialist sentiment and struggle in the world.

This can be seen even in the fascinating self-analysis of young Western Muslims themselves as they try to explain their somewhat unexpected 'throwback' interest in a completely out-of-date religious superstition and medieval culture; in a story told partly on Channel 4 television by a successful 30-year-old disc jockey;

As a people we have been a closed community for a long time. In Peterborough whole swaths of the town are no-go zones for ethnic minorities. As children we saw our parents work themselves to ill-health for a pathetic salary while being abused in the street. The choice was simple. Resign yourself to a below-average life, or go for broke and get it all.

The early Nineties was boom time for the dapper Asian entrepreneur. Trips to wholesalers in London would yield riches to be sold at a profit in Peterborough's Victorian streets.

The record shops would boom with the latest gut-wrenching beats and the mood among second and third-generation Pakistanis was up. The town was growing and for sharp entrepreneurs it was all about making money. Islam was something to be discussed disdainfully, if at all. Better to talk about who was going to marry whom and, er, when is the best time to tell the white girlfriend? This scene was being played out in towns all over Britain. A new confidence among Asians was making itself forcefully felt. Like the Teddy boys of the Fifties and the Mods of the Sixties, working-class Asians were making their mark and having a lot of fun doing it. The Pakistanis among them were still afraid to talk publicly about their religion, the embers of the Rushdie affair still lingering in the back of many people's minds. Islam had set the Pakistani community apart from the rest of British society but Pakistanis were trying to integrate as best they could.

Then, in the mid-Nineties, something happened to Asif that would change his outlook radically. Something that would grip young Pakistani men throughout the land.

"I was at home I flicked on the news and in a drugged-out haze I watched a report about Chechnyan Muslims being murdered. The faces of those Muslims burnt into my mind. In the coming months I realised that I felt trapped by the constant hustling for money, buying yet more stuff that I didn't need. I needed to do something. 

I talked about it with my friends and we began to read the Koran in English and travelled to Birmingham and Manchester and saw all of these other brothers and sisters in Islam."

Asif has described a common scene, one which I have heard replayed by other young men like him, to varying degrees: that Islam was the route out of being trapped in a cold and cynical world. We live in a consumer society in which money is a massive preoccupation. For many other new converts to Islam one of its most appealing factors is its inbuilt respect for sex and sexuality.

"I had a book full of contact numbers for women, and believe me they could do some freaky things, but I never talked to them," Asif said. "I talked at them and bought them stuff but it was all just a ploy to get into their knickers and walk away with another tale for the boys. But when I meet a Muslim woman nowadays with full hajib, covered up, I can talk to her, really communicate, because it's not about sex any more and I know she's not out for my money."

The constant bombardment of sexual imagery, which is used to sell everything, has led to a new, puritanical outlook for many Muslims. The return to basic moral values like marriage and the right way to bring up your children is the new rock'n' roll for my old friends. In Peterborough, as in the rest of Britain, orthodox Islam allows a young man to live a dignified, clean life far removed from a society that he feels is rapidly going to the dogs.

In the past five years there has been a change in mosques up and down the country. Lectures and the preaching of the faith now happen in the mother tongue, English. When I was a child I learnt to read the Koran in Arabic but had no real understanding of what I was reading. After school I would attend religious classes with my friends and the same thing would happen. A few years on, people who had failed in school, who never went on to further education, found themselves in the middle of an intellectual awakening. History had come alive, and guys who had never read a book before were devouring whole tracts about 1,400 years' worth of Islamic civilisation, and marvelling at how, when this country was in the dark ages, lslam had spread as far as Spain.

What were rigid rules about living your life became rooted in history. Spreading the word in English led to a boom in religious education and fuelled its rise in Britain. British Muslims felt connected to something bigger than Western life.

But if Islam is this clean, beautiful religion and all my friends want to do is to live a simple life, why are young men who grew up like me taking up arms and fighting in far-off lands?

The answer lies in the politicisation of Islam and some of the newer, more militant, followers. For them, Islam is being dismantled by the forces of the West, which has nothing but capitalist self-interest at heart. Omar Sheikh, the former British public schoolboy accused of murdering the American journalist Daniel Pearl, was just into his twenties when he kidnapped three British tourists and held them at gunpoint in his fight for the Muslims in Kashmir.

While I was making the documentary I met Shabir, who told me that he had gone to the LSE at the same time as Omar. Shabir thought that Oman had gone to Kashmir to do  humanitarian work,  to help rebuild Muslim lives. 

In November I travelled to Peshawar in Pakistan and met religious leaders in the madrassahs  or religious schools.

Omar Sheikh would have met the same people. I told them that I was a student willing to help in humanitarian work. They sat me down in a mosque and began to tell me how humanitarian work was a waste of time and that the real enemy was America.

Until that empire had collapsed, they said, Muslims would be forever on the run. The argument was persuasive and the mullahs told me how, as a British student, I was perfectly placed to lead the fight. That guns, not food packages, were what was needed. I know how this rhetoric would have been so seductive for Omar Sheikh because I felt myself being drawn in to the discussion. It's not brainwashing, which is what polite society, trying to get to grips with why a lad from London turns to terrorism, would like to think. It's more an opening of eyes.

Back in London I met Muslims who were just like me, people you wouldn't spot in a crowd but whose opinions of this country had gone beyond orthodoxy. They have decided that Islam is the only way forward and that the law of Islam should be enforced for the better of society. They meet in secret and harbour plans of destruction. Like George Orwell and the Spanish Civil War or the people who travelled to South Africa in the Eighties, these men have found a fight to call their own. A cause they can fight for and be proud of.

However, the causes in South Africa and the Spanish civil war were clear-cut. The protection of the innocent against evil forces. Unlike South Africa and Spain, Islam is seen by the West as the oppressor, not the oppressed. But for Muslims, Islam is the faith of the oppressed.

During the making of this programme I have joined the dots between Islam and the politics of global power, and between the frustration of what it means to be a young Pakistani and the dignity that Islam brings. When Islam gives you spiritual and intellectual awakening it becomes hard for reasonable Muslims to turn a blind eye to the fact that Islam is seen as the enemy of Western life and that the slaughter of innocent Muslims is cheap compared with the lives of hose taken on September 11. The more people who feel like that, the more the consequences may be too painful to bear.

The Islamic framework is not irrelevant because it has its own anti-Western history stretching back through early anti-colonial struggles to feudal era conflicts, usually with the overwhelming balance of injustice being inflicted on the Muslims.

But routine UK-produced anti-capitalism (such as millions of youth in Britain develop) is clearly an essential ingredient; and Third World-produced anti-West anti-imperialism is even more obviously the important factor in creating this superficial appearance of 'Islamic extremism'

The overwhelming issue is American imperialist domination, not Godliness.

And the one certainty is that with the Third World's masses coming forward in the world from a dozen different directions apart from the Islamic Middle East, and from a dozen different cultural and religious backgrounds, - but all with the same purpose of overthrowing American imperialist domination of the planet, - - - then what will prevail out of all of this is anti-imperialism.

And it is EVENTS which will basically educate this mass world movement into the only worthwhile 'socialist' understanding, namely a grasp of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science,- not the philistine platitudes of 'celebrity' public figures, comedians, actors, or trade union 'militants', eked out in occasional rally jamboree speeches or paid-for 'daring' articles or interviews with the bourgeois press or television - which NEVER ever mention the fundamental REVOLUTIONARY reality of the present world crisis-situation, or even breathe the word 'proletarian dictatorship' needed to replace the bourgeois dictatorship (US imperialist dictatorship) which the planet currently suffers under. 

Regardless of all the Islamic religious confusion and red herrings, it is EVENTS which will force imperialism's victims to develop effective REVOLUTIONARY struggle for their own survival, as is already happening in the anti-Zionist national liberation war in Palestine, for example, which has already seen levels of anti-colonial heroism and self-sacrifice which have never been surpassed in the whole history of the Third World's fight against imperialist domination, - an educational process which 'Western interests' (i.e. the need to continue the military and economic domination of the whole planet or risk losing the entire privileged Western way of life) are OBLIGED to continue providing by their unending tyranny:

Israeli forces swept through Deheishe refugee camp in the West Bank, ordering all men between 15 and 45 to present themselves at a nearby quarry.

They mainly stood in silence, identity cards in sweating hands, waiting to enter a large aluminium-roofed shed where they would be blindfolded, handcuffed and detained for hours while Israel checked their papers against its lists of wanted Palestinian militants.

"This is utter humiliation" a well-dressed man said before the queue began to move, and he was prodded forward.

For Israel, the round-up was the defining moment of a strategy of rolling offensives against the Palestinian heartland: the sprawls of cinderblock homes and alleys that are the militants' strongholds.

The high-risk strategy has been criticised by Israeli military commentators who say it is fueling Palestinian hatred. But the army has pushed on, invading camps in the northern towns of Nablus, Jenin, and Tulkaram before moving onto Deheishe on Sunday. Tanks also invaded the central town of Qalqiliya overnight. 

The aim of the Israeli assaults is to break up the cells of suicide bombers and gunmen who operate from these camps. The Palestinians see the invasions as an attack on the thousands of civilians who live in the camps -and they have retaliated with shooting and bombing attacks that have killed more than 50 Israelis in less than a fortnight.

Yasser Arafat said in an interview broadcast yesterday that the Israeli army's conduct in the Tlrlkaram camp amounted to "new Nazi racism":

"You saw what they put on the detainees from Tulkaram refugee camp -those numbers on their arms?" he told Abu Dhabi television. "Is that not what they say the Nazis did to the Jews?"

An army spokeswoman rejected the comparison to Nazi concentration camps, where Jews were tattooed with identification numbers, as "obscene and absurd".

A military source said 'detainees had been given numbers to ease the questioning process; these were written in ink that would wash off.'

Yesterday, the Israeli army appeared curiously willing to allow journalists to witness the chilling sight of hundreds of men moving towards the shed.

The interior of the aluminium shed was hidden from view, bar brief glimpses when an Israeli army jeep roared out of its gates. Inside, ranks of men squatted in the heat, hands bound in front of them with white plastic handcuffs.

The Palestinians waiting in line for their turn said soldiers had stripped some men of their T-shirts and used them as blindfolds. Others wore ready made blindfolds of white cloth.

In Irtas, men had half an hour to give themselves up. They were ordered to lift their shirts above their bellies - in case they had explosives or arms strapped to their bodies -and marched more than two miles to the quarry.

Ali Ahmed Sa'ad, 38, arrived at the quarry in his slippers. "One by one, they walked us, it was very fast," he said.

"Some of the soldiers, if you slowed down a little bit, hit people on the side of the head with guns. Some other people were kicked - not to mention the breaking down of the doors to our houses:'

No one was spared - not the 20 teachers from Deheishe's United Nations school or Othman Sa'ad,13. He was bundled out of Irtas village with his father and 15-year old brother to stand in the queue for hours. But when he came to the attention of foreign journalists, the soldiers let him go.

"These guys aren't scary," he said, before running off.

Now and then a soldier ordered the men to clasp their hands on their head. But as the day wore on, the soldiers moved faster, prodding men into the shed in groups of 50.

"Are you afraid?" we asked one man before he was led away. "We have nothing to lose, why should we be afraid?" he said.

Another called out over his shoulder: "They are the ones who are trying to show the whole world how strong they are, but look how weak they must be to punish innocent people and workers."

Hundreds of Palestinian boys and men, rounded up at gunpoint in Israel's sweep through the refugee camps of the West Bank, were left hungry and unwashed and were taunted by their captors during a  confinement that lasted as long as six days, the Guardian has learned.

The only apparent criteria for the mass arrests was that they were Palestinian and male, aged between 15 and 45.

The round-up has been condemned by Israeli and international organisations -including the United Nations who say such sweeping arrests are a gross violation of Israel's duties as an occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza.

The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem said that the army had "lost any moral compass'; and the Public Committee against Torture in Israel said the detainees had been subjected to "degrading and humiliating treatment".

"This is very bad and brutal," said Hannah Friedman, director of the Public Committee against Torture in Israel. "You are not allowed to arrest people without real evidence. This goes against all the conventions. They put numbers on arms, and closed their eyes. This was only to humiliate all the men and the people in the camps, and these mass arrests will make it more difficult to make peace with this people later on. We are creating our own enemies"

Amid the chaos of Israel's successive invasions of West Bank refugee camps, it is uncertain how many boys and men were taken from their homes. Israeli human rights groups have said the number may be more than 2,000; Israel's army chief, General Shaul Mofaz, said there were 1,500.

What is clear, however, is that by the army's own admission virtually none was a wanted militant, and the detainees had no access to lawyers or humanitarian organisations during their detention.

In Tulkaram, the round-up came in two waves, after Israeli tanks thundered into the refugee camp in the early hours of March 7.

"We were in the middle of the camp under the siege of Israelis. It was terrifying there were Apache helicopters over our heads and many, many snipers. Anybody moving in the street was shot;" said Faisal Salamah, 36, the local director of refugee affairs for the Palestinian Authority. "They called on all men from the age of 12 and up to go to the school, or they would destroy our homes. One of the men with me was 80 years old:'

At the school - which is run by the UN the men were handcuffed and in many cases blindfolded and left to wait for nearly 12 hours, until they were bussed to two holding pens at Ofer, an Israeli army base, and Kedumim, an illegal Jewish settlement.

Some of the men were held for as long as six days. At least 50 were unceremoniously dumped on a perilous stretch of road outside Jerusalem at around midnight on Tuesday, forced to pass Jewish settlements and Israeli army tanks to find their way to their homes, many miles away.

During the first stage of detention at the UN school, the men were allowed no phone calls, given no food or water and forbidden from using the toilet. "If anybody fell asleep, they would kick him to wake him up," said Mahmoud Abu Taha, 42, a father of six.

This is straightforward Nazi brutalisation, right down to the numbers stamped on human arms at gunpoint, exactly like German imperialism's concentration camp victims in their colonisation of East Europe.

But this Zionist occupation tyranny is already in the process of destroying itself, just as the imperialist system's World War II anti-slump blitzkriegs in all directions eventually provoked triumphant communist revolutionary resistance here and there(as well as ultimately- damaging, inter-imperialist slaughter and the totally fatal eventual disaster from unwisely invading the Soviet workers state).

Since they have officially been at it since 1948, and unofficially since long before that with the conniving of the then British colonial mandate of Palestine, the Zionist imperialists have long thought that they have historically basically got away with their theft of the Palestinian nation's homeland.

They are starting to have to think again.

Continuing the evidence taken solely from the Western imperialist system's own news
papers, it is slowly being admitted that the collapse-crisis of capitalism is now not only stirring every ancient enmity all over the planet, but in this case of colonised Palestine is stirring surely one of the most explosive potential powder kegs of all, - the driven-out original population of Palestine,  now more than 3 million strong and still living after 54 years in the same stinking refugee camps to which they were hounded by their Zionist colonial usurpers who took their homes and their land.

The 1948 war led to the exodus of the greater part of the Palestinian population from what became Israel. Many were thrown out; others fled in panic. Today millions of elderly survivors of that flight and their descendants still squat in the miserable refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Israel's recent "rolling" reoccupation of camps in Gaza and the West Bank is unlikely to achieve its declared objective of "eliminating the terrorist infrastructure". An editorial in Haretz, Israel's most respected newspaper, complained last week that the behaviour of Israeli troops suggested that "the idea of humiliation has apparently seeped down to the soldiers from the government". Young Palestinian males seized in the operation had numbers inked on their arms - evoking outrage from Tommy Lapid, a member of the Knesset who is a Holocaust survivor.

Even if some sort of cease-fire is patched up by Anthony Zinni, the American envoy who arrived in Israel last Thursday, the danger remains that "Islamic martyrs" will ignore it and continue their suicide bombings. The viciously inflamed mood on the Palestinian street was illustrated by the lynchings of three suspected informers last week. 

These barbaric scenes may presage a generational shift whereby the "young guard" of militants could sweep aside the greying Palestinian establishment, widely seen as composed of compromisers. Terror would then intensify.

Israeli blowhards like to boast that their society is resilient enough to withstand such attacks. This is the worst sort of self-deception, flying in the face of recent evidence.

The truth is that Israeli morale, both military and civilian, is reeling. The destruction on Thursday of a second Israeli Merkava tank (the prized centrepiece of the Israel armoured cops) underlines the inability of Israeli military strategists to cope with this new warfare. The impact of the terror bombers on the public is palpable.

Maddened by the terrorist onslaught, Israeli public opinion has moved sharply to the right. An opinion poll published last week disclosed that 46% of Israeli Jews now favour the so-called "transfer" of Palestinians out of the occupied territories. Transfer is an Israeli political codeword. Deciphered, it means expulsion.

These views amount to endorsement by nearly half the Jewish population of ethnic cleansing. They are no longer the preserve of the lunatic fringe. They have moved to the centre of political debate and command vocal advocacy by politicians such as Avigdor Lieberman and Benny Elon, two far-right ministers who resigned in disgust from Sharon's government last week. Lurking in the wings are other even more sinister figures. Take Reserve Brigadier-General Effi Eitam, who could emerge as the standard-bearer of the ethnic cleansers.  In a lecture at Bar-Ilan University in December 2000, he declared: "The Israel defence force can conquer Judaea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip . . . and expel the population overnight. It's not a problem to do that. We have a problem of having the will to do this."

Thus not only are the original 3 million turfed-out refugees to get it in the neck from their arrogant Zionist conquerors' vengeance. All the rest of the Palestinian nation as well, on the West Bank, in Gaza, and in exile outside of Palestine altogether, - are to be butchered and humiliated again as well, according to this inevitable colonial 'logic' of this Zionist imperialist conquest.

Insanely, the fake 'lefts' in the West join in with the rest of bourgeois-imperialist complacency and racist arrogance in either thinking that a)"none of this really matters or is very important and is just a little local difficulty in a very obscure small corner of the world which will no doubt all be sorted out in some way or other in due course; etc, etc; or b) that this "fanatical Islamic suicide bombing is all a bit foreign and eccentric and nothing really to do with properly successful politics which is all about winning trade-union office and getting leaflets out with reform promises for local elections"; etc; or c) the same outlook but arrogantly branding the heroic Palestinian struggle as "reactionary" out of the cocky anti-communist complacency that the fraud of 'Western democracy is the best possible of all possible worlds; or d) that the Palestinian cause deserves every sympathy and 'world reformist pressure' is needed to persuade both sides to re-enter peace talks for either a 'two-state solution' in unexplained (and inexplicable) coexistence harmony, or a unified state with similarly inexplicable 'guaranteed self-determination rights', etc, etc.

Not a single one of such barmy schemes (and many more besides) can even start to explain how the country of Palestine can possibly support the 7-million nation of Palestine whose home it is; and the artificially created nation of 'Israel' 5-million strong, which has been deliberately implanted in the homes and land of the Palestinians by the Zionist military colonial-occupation tyranny backed by a world imperialist system which must try to undermine or hold back anti-imperialist revolt everywhere or else it will not survive itself.
But far more ignorantly and complacently, the entire range of petty-bourgeois political opportunism in the West, from the SLP to George Bush, fails to make any-sense of the really crucial issue raised by the Palestinian question which is that STRUGGLE, CONFLICT, and CONTRADICTION have broken out which require deep examination of the historical context before, any glib 'compromise solutions' can be assumed, and even less any 'compromise solutions' which fundamentally still rely on the continued Zionist colonisation gains as part of the deal, and thereby revealing that the continued humiliating turfing out of the Palestinian nation from their homeland continues as part of the deal also.

The essential STRUGGLE involved makes it clear that either this is the epoch of the final defeat and overthrow of the whole colonial-imperialist system of world domination; or else this is the epoch of the re-establishment of total colonial-military Western control over the whole planet (as in the 200 years of Empire, just finished) if  Western imperialism's military engagement problems, and blitzkrieg threats over the whole planet currently, are also taken into account.

 Either US imperialism, driven by crisis-collapse to try to-reassert colonial-policing control everywhere, is going to succeed, or else it is going to fail so disastrously that the whole imperialist system is going to crash in ruins. Either Zionist colonial-imperialism is going to succeed in its TOTAL military-police persecution of the entire Palestinian nation, or else it is going to fail just as completely, losing everything.

STRUGGLE is the crucial historical ingredient, demanding answers not fudged compromises.

And the crisis nature of the epoch dictates that REVOLUTION will be the essential character of all upheaval.

And even if ignorance of Marxist-Leninist theory prevents this from being the obvious assumption to work on, the practical evidence from capitalism's own media of what a colossal existence-threatening crisis is menacing the entire system of Western imperialist world-domination, can only be being missed by the deliberately sectarian mentalities of tribal loyalism, first cousin to the petty-bourgeois mentality of trade unionism, (as described, and despised, by Lenin). 

The bourgeois press admissions of Zionism's astonishing jitters (after seemingly attaining for three generations an apparently unbeatable cocky arrogance, make remarkable reading;

For all its talk of not giving in to terrorism, Israel is now a nervous society; no more so than on Saturday evenings at the end of the Sabbath, after two bomb attacks in central Jerusalem on successive weekends killed 21 people.

Though within a mile of each other, the targets could not have been more different. The first, on March 2, was in an ultra-Orthodox district just as the faithful were emerging from prayer, the second was in the trendy Moment café just as young Israelis were heading out for the night

Although the town and city centres are by no means deserted, 44 per cent of Israelis in a recent poll said that they now refrained from going to cafes and shopping malls, where clubs, hotels and bars report dismal business.

Naama Gur, a spokesman for the Israel Hotel Association, said that last year was the worst since 1970, with Jerusalem's hotels having an average of 23 per cent occupancy. The latest figures, for January, this year, show a 37 per cent fall from 12 months earlier.

The problems are not confined to Jerusalem. Michal Tzdaka, a manager at Haifa's popular Amadeus Café restaurant, said: "There's been a constant decline in the past couple of months. It comes in waves.

"After every major attack there's a decline, but last week marked a drastic decline of over 50 per. cent On Saturn night, for instance, when its usually packed, there were only a few people sitting in".

One result of the fear is polarisation of political opinion. Although most people told pollsters that they are dissatisfied with Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister, his policy of responding to the recent spate of suicide attacks by laying siege to refugee camps and sending tanks into Palestinian towns has the support of 71 per cent of the Israeli population.

But if the military attacks are a product of Israeli nervousness, they are a source deep of deep and lasting anger among the inhabitants of the Palestinian refugee camps.

Many of their older inhabitants were displaced from their homes in towns such as Haifa when Israel won  independence in 1948 and now complain tat they have been humiliated again..

Sheikh Hassan Alaiyah, a blind teacher living in the Aida camp in Bethlehem, protested that Israeli troops had used a sledgehammer to smash through the wall of his house, then evicted him as a shooting match was going on outside.

"They are driving people to despair acting in this way," he said, "and when a person has nothing to lose, they will act out of desperation. They are encouraging extremists, even those who don't want to be extremists."

Despite their overwhelming firepower, routinely blitzing the defenceless Palestinian people with non-stop F16 jet fighter bomber runs,  missile-firing helicopter gunships, massed tank invasions of the refugee camps, and police-military roadblock persecution and arrests everywhere, - it is the Zionist Occupation of Palestine which feels besieged, and the Palestinian Intifada which feels increasingly confident and at home.

In their sour defeatism, even the renowned Jewish musician Daniel Barenboim was banned by Zionist vengeance from fulfilling a concert invitation in Palestinian Ramallah, as even a senior operator of capitalist television brainwashing almost admitted:

Last Tuesday less than 10% of the l00 rooms were occupied. The five-star hotel at the top of the Mount of Olives had one guest on Wednesday. Two of the city's biggest hotels are closed altogether.

Nobody ventures into Jerusalem's central district unless they have to. Many Israelis tell you they  no longer shop on the main streets it all, indeed that beyond taking their children on. the anxious route to school and going to work themselves, they now rarely venture out. It is a strange and disturbing condition for some of the most gregarious urban dwellers on earth. 

The religious-Jews have an increasing stranglehold on Jerusalem. The suicide bombings have not only emptied the streets, they have also confirmed the Arab's status as "second class". My Palestinian producer has Israeli documentation; he has worked with us for a decade. But on several occasions interviewing important people he was not allowed into the building. 

Ramallah is 11 miles from Jerusalem. In the good times of the 1990s, Israelis would tip out of Jerusalem on a Thursday night in their droves and make for one of the jazz haunts there.

Not any more. The process of getting through the Israeli. checkpoints is soul-destroying. Arabs can take five hours in each direction; .Israelis are prevented from going altogether. So it was for Barenboim - despite being invited by the Palestinians.

What strikes you coming into this town is how prosperous Ramallah is. A mass of well, designed stone office blocks and houses have gone up since I was last here.. There are brilliant yellow Mercedes taxis everywhere, and style too. Only later did I learn that the Mercedes flow from an infernal Russian mafia deal that involves stealing them in Israel and selling them on here. The great perestroikist Russian emigration to Israel has spawned one of the most virulent mafia cells outside Russia, a cell that ignores even Judaeo-Arab warfare in pursuit of business.

We soon discovered why the Israelis had prevented Barenboim from coming. Ramallah had closed down; every metal shop door grill was down. Machine-gun fire filled the air. Mourners packed the town centre, seething down the main streets, blowing sirens and shooting in the air. They were all men and many were armed. Their average age must have been 25.

The mood was not ugly but sombre, almost despairing: On three stretchers wrapped in Palestinian flags lay the still bleeding corpses of the three top leaders of Fatah's military wing.. An Israeli infrared guided missile had caught them in one car and blown them to pieces the previous night just as Barenboim was commencing his last Beethoven sonata.

If Ramallah had a queen, she would be Hanan Ashrawi, the wisest woman ever to sit within Arafat's inner councils. No longer. She is estranged from his circle over her campaign for human and civil rights and dedicates herself to keeping the world informed of what is happening here.

By night the windows of her cherished home are smashed by the blasts from Israeli shell and rocket fire raining in on the environs of Arafat's compound along the road. She and her husband have to take cover beneath the fruit trees of their lovingly tended garden. Ashrawi is a woman with no love of the military or of war, but this day I found her in greater despair than I have ever known her.

"These are the darkest days, perhaps even since 1948," she told me. "Even during the two Middle East wars they never attacked us like this. Now the occupation is in the open. They illegally occupy our land, illegally kill our people and treat us like subhumans."

Arafat's compound has an eerie Byzantine quality to it. A vast helicopter apron sits hot and unused in the sun. Rather good quality cars sit in a line at one end. His house is bolted  and  barred, but grand and untouched. Three sleepy teenage guards sit slumped on old chairs at the door. But other buildings have gaping rocket holes in their walls with every window blown out.

Israeli artillery has sketched a burnt arc round the main building beneath which Arafat presumably sits in his bunker. They are playing with him. Waking him at night with bombs, killing his commanders and reducing his European financed infrastructure to ash. His airport, which we paid for,  has been bulldozed. His deep-sea port, 	which we were building, has been bombed. His roads have been cratered.  His British-trained police have been killed in huge numbers:  Not to mention the children's welfare centre blown apart in, Gaza last week.   

In none of my previous visits have I felt uneasy, let alone fearful on the streets of Israel. This time I was looking at passing buses, bus queues and at people more keenly than ever before. Israelis talk about the suicide bombers all the time and there are many more incidents, many more suspects lifted than are reported. So I met many more Israelis who had experienced or witnessed such an incident.

In the occupied West Bank, the Israeli checkpoints are actively nasty. The soldiers seem almost to delight in lining up their automatics on unarmed civilians. They are jumpy and I sensed I was in the cross-hairs of their rifles just the same as any other gentile. By contrast the Palestinians are more confident, almost patronising, in their good-humoured endurance of Israeli firepower.

In complete contrast to this amazing spirit that these times of universal hostility to the failing system of Western imperialist economic domination have inspired in the shackled, tortured, and imprisoned Palestinian nation,- the foreboding-filled and guiltridden Zionist colonisers present an equally telling picture of doubt and demoralisation, in spite of the colossal armed superiority of their tyranny:

One of the seven Israeli soldiers killed by a Palestinian sniper at a West Bank roadblock on Saturday had considered joining the reservists who have refused to serve in the occupied territories, it emerged yesterday.

"We feel like sitting ducks," Lieutenant David Damelin told his mother in a phone call 24 hours before he was killed. She said he had thought of not going to the West Bank at all.

The seven deaths are likely to raise more unease over Israel's policy in the territories occupied after 1967, as soldiers believe the roadblocks are often put up merely to placate Jewish settlers.

Close to a thousand Israelis have already signed "selective refusal" petitions, saying they will only defend the Israel of the pre1967 borders. They are not against the risks but the repressive measures they are ordered to take.

In messages posted on the websites www.seruv.org.il and www.yesh-gvul.org reservists have begun to explain in anguished terms what has made them mutiny.

"Rightwingers see me as a traitor", says Assaf Oron, an infantry sergeant. "The political centre lectures me on undermining democracy. The 'moderate' left that only yesterday was courting my vote now turns its back. Almost no one asks the main question: why would a regular guy get up one morning and decide he's not playing the game any more?"

He continues: "Our parents' generation lets out a sigh: we've embarrassed them yet again. But isn't it all your fault? What did you raise us on? Universal ethics and universal justice, on the one hand. And on the other hand: 'The Arabs want to throw us into the sea.' 'They are crafty, primitive. You can't trust them.'"

As a 19-year-old draftee, Sgt Oron started army service as though he was on a sacred mission of courage, he says, but found himself violating people's dignity and freedom. He said nothing. "Without thinking, I turned into the perfect occupation enforcer. I tore up personal documents of men my father's age. I hit, harassed - all in the city of Kalkilia, barely three miles from grandma and grandpa's home. I was no 'aberration'. I was the norm:"

During the first Intifada he had three tours of duty and still said nothing. "I would turn into a hidden 'prisoner of conscience', guarding an outpost or a godforsaken transmitter on top of some mountain, a recluse. I was ashamed to tell most of my friends why I chose to serve this way. This was the easy way out;' he says.

"For years, the army had fed lines like: 'We were too nice in the first Intifada', and 'If we had only killed a hundred in the very first days, everything would have been different'. Now the army was given licence to do things its way.

"By then, I had two little kids, boys, and I knew no one will ever make sure that my sons won't have to serve in the occupied territories when they reach 18. No one, except me."

Captain Dan Tamir explains how during the second Intifada a young officer was ordered to survey a populated area near Jerusalem. "They took into consideration the topography, roads, main public buildings (schools, hospitals, shops) and many more details. The programme was written and saved in the regiment's headquarters.

"It was only a few weeks later that the intelligence officer understood he was actually planning ghettos for the Palestinian population. Of course, it was not done out of cruelty or viciousness. But that was the fact, no matter what you call this 'reorganisation of civil neighbourhoods'. By now you have probably guessed who this officer was".

THE prowess of the Israeli Army is in danger of becoming a casualty of the second Intifada, which has cost the lives of more than 1,000 Arabs and Jews since September 2000.

Yesterday's mea culpa for recent blunders by Israeli soldiers and their commanders comes as the confidence of the Israeli public in the army is falling away.

Ignoring these astonishing bits of evidence that all is not well with the West's 'war on terrorism', (let slip by a ludicrously biased capitalist press which routinely cannot pour out enough bilious hatred and lies against a chosen 'enemy' of the West, especially the likes of Arab Islamic 'fanatics') - - the fake-'lefts' assume, like the Second International 'Marxist' traitors of 1914 in voting war credits for each of their separate imperialist 'own' countries, - that the sheer wealth and military might of the West is bound to triumph in the long run against any opposition. 

Accepting the 'New World Order' is just part of 'reality' as far as fake-'left' electoralist-opportunist politics is concerned. 

These veterans of Trot and Revisionist anti-communism don't grasp world perspectives built around the notion of Western imperialism being internationally humiliated and defeated by revolutionary crisis.

So the facts of the practical evidence of imperialist failure in this insane bid to redominate the whole planet with direct colonial policing (the inescapable implications of the entire Bush-Blair 'war on terrorism' and 'blitzkrieg every axis of evil' project); - and the worried bourgeois media comments about these disturbing signs of failure; - are simply conveniently ignored by the fake-'left'.

Even the now obvious humiliating failure to even subdue the Taleban -Bin Laden revolt in, Afghanistan, with its huge implications for all 'condemners' of Sept 11, continues to sail right over all fake-'left' heads, despite the detailed confessions (in between the lines) by "the greatest imperialist power in world history" that its huge might has not the faintest idea of what it is supposed to be doing in Afghanistan, and even less of how to achieve it, and despite the pathetic admission of US failure that stooge Blair has inanely rushed forward by quickly sending another huge contingent of crack British troops into this bottomless quagmire, - acknowledged even by The Times after last week's ShahiKot debacle (see last week's EPSR):

THE United States will fail to drive the Taleban out of Afghanistan, and the new Kabul Government will never be able to tame the southeast, while it will face constant threats from enemies in Pakistan's tribal lands over that singularly wild and lawless border. _

Those, are the implications of the muddied, bloody and prolonged Operation Anaconda The worst battle of the war for American forces was coming to an end yesterday, although reports were contradictory, even by the standards of the Afghan battlefield.

Yet, even if that is true, the confusion that has surrounded the fight is more than the normal dust and noise of battle and the worries it raises about Afghanistan's stability are serious.

The operation to drive al-Qaeda and Taleban fighters out of the Anna Mountains south of Gardez began on March 2. It has been the biggest commitment of American ground forces in the Afghan War by a long way. There are still 1,000 there, as well as 1,000 Afghan allies, mainly Tajiks from , the Northern Alliance who helped the US to recapture Kabul. They have been supplied by the new Government's Defence Ministry but trained and paid $200 a month by the Americans.

Since the casualties in the first two days of the battle, there has been a cascade of accusations about what went wrong, with American forces and their Afghan allies accusing the other of chickening out in the heat of battle, leaving the other exposed.

The New York Times basing its report on "senior (American] military officers", said that "American troops were unexpectedly forced to do the fiercest fighting ... after an allied Afghan general retreated under withering fire". The newspaper went on to assert that "the Afghan retreat . . . led swiftly to American combat deaths".

But local Afghan commanders, reported yesterday in The Times, accuse the Americans of being inexperienced in fighting guerrillas, claiming that hundreds were pulled out of the ground battle because they were struggling. An American spokesman said yesterday that the US was merely "rotating" its troops and "repositioning" them but it seems that the American force in the region is several hundred shy of its level at the start of the battle.

It is no surprise that the pact between US and the Northern Alliance might fray under that tension but more worrying for the United States are reports yesterday that a senior Afghan commander was trying to negotiate a "peace proposal" for the safe exit of al-Taeda and Taleban forces.

Although the Pentagon denied that surrender talks were under way, the reports match similar ones coming from the Kandahar region. After all, Mullah Muhammed Omar, the Taleban's supreme leader, was tracked down to a fairly small area more than a month ago, said to be accompanied by only a dozen fighters and equipped mainly with motorcycles, yet no progress has been made in catching him. Instead, there are constant reports that local Afghan sympathisers would rather negotiate a deal than help US forces to seize or kill him.

Even if Operation Anaconda is nearly over, it is clear we should not expect the southeast, the heart of Pashtun lands, to be loyal to Kabul or the US. Its allegiance is more to the Pashtun villages in Pakistan's tribal lands over the border. The best that the Kabul Government can expect is to control the main cities and roads and hope that the southeast stays quiet.

It is clear, too, that the new Government still has a problem with the lack of adequate Pashtun representation, at least as the south of the country sees it. The attacks by  the Northern Alliance on Pashtuns during Operation Anaconda are hardly going to help matters.

AMID the rubble of Shah-i-Kot, the Al-Taeda terror network's last known mountain stronghold in Afghanistan, the only visible remains of Osama Bin Laden's foot soldiers last week were three charred and mangled bodies. A cheap digital watch still blinked around the broken wrist of one of them until a passing Afghan soldier tore it off as a trophy.

In Washington, the Pentagon claimed to have killed hundreds of fighters. In Shah-i-Kot, however, the talk was of the hundreds more who had slipped through the coils of Operation Anaconda, the American military's attempt to surround the village with an army of Afghan allies and crush the life out of it.

The scene in the village was apocalyptic. It had once contained dozens of walled mud forts and houses; all had been razed.

It could be at least two weeks before all the caves around Shah-i-Kot are searched and the final death toll is known. But there is no doubt about the hundreds of fighters who survived to seek refuge near Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. The most senior figure to get away was Saif Rakhman, the nephew of a former Taliban
agriculture minister.

Last week some 500 Afghan troops were preparing to open a new front against Taliban and A1-Taeda sympathisers in Kharwar, a village northwest of Shah-i-Kot, where Bin Laden supporters have been reported to be distributing leaflets calling on Afghans to fight back.

"This is what it will be like for months to come," said Said Isaaq, chief of police in Gardez, 90 miles southeast of Kabul. "They will find a pocket, bomb it, kill a few and declare victory while the others will escape further into the mountains." 

A member of the American special forces surveyed the aftermath of a battle that had claimed the lives of eight US soldiers and warned of more bloodshed to come. "This is far from over," said the soldier, who identified himself only as Mark. "We killed a lot of enemy fighters but many managed to escape further into the mountains. It's a difficult task. The terrain is very tough and they have good escape routes."

American forces would have to stay in the area for at least another month before moving on to seek out further pockets of resistance, he said. "We are trying to deny them areas where they can use bases. This is the only way of getting them - by shrinking the water in which the fish swims." .

But Afghanistan is three times the size of South Vietnam where US imperialism last tried a largescale colonial policing missions to wipe out 'terrorists' by "shrinking the water in which the fish swims".

And just like then, the only dimwitted imperialist 'solution' is to immediately hurl in more troops, armaments, and firepower to cover up the intrinsic failure of the whole project, - to force a nation to cower which does not wish to be subdued.

But even worse than Vietnam, almost none of the local mercenaries (recruited to help the repression) are in fact 'local' in Afghanistan. They are northern Tajiks and Uzbeks who are all thoroughly hated and despised by the majority Pashtun people to start with.

Hence Blair's ludicrous agreement to now rush 2,000 extra British Marines (together with support forces) into this lethal farce.
In January, Blair boasted that both the Taleban regime and Bin Laden's al-Quaeda forces were now "totally defeated and finished". But now, this wretched trade-union backed Labour Government is hurrying like the most intimidated poodle to show loyalty to his masters voice as US imperialism falls flat on its face in this crazed attempt to impose a colonial-stooge government of hated minority-group mercenaries on Kabul.

Afghanistan must be about the weakest, most impoverished, and most backward country on Earth, and yet the local majority population clearly has enough contempt for the "most magnificent and impressive imperialist power in all history" to humiliate its sick and clumsy attempts to impose colonial policing on Afghanistan. 

And with the anti-imperialist revolt rapidly spreading worldwide, from Argentina to Indonesia, involving scores of far vaster countries than Afghanistan, and with massive populations far more advanced in a proud and competent sense of independence, -  then how is this re-imposition of colonial policing against anti-imperialism worldwide possibly going to be anything other than the most catastrophic farcical failure in the whole history of Western monopoly-capitalist world domination???

The West's disasters just refuse to stop piling up, along with capitalist press admissions of imperialist failures which require putting on the record.

The most spectacular recent embarrassment is the collapse in humiliation of the monstrous propaganda subversion attempt to unseat President Mugabe in Zimbabwe in favour of another imperialist-favoured 'trade-union' stooge like Lech Walesa, the anti-communist Pilsudski fascist.

Academic bourgeois observations have not even been able to hide their contempt for this tyrannical Western stunt which ended in such damaging shame and catastrophe, hurting imperialism far more widely than just in its fear of workers-state measures being applied to try to get real socialist solutions going to the Third Worlds appalling capitalist-economic-crisis problems:

What entitles Zimbabwe's former colonial master to insist on a change of government in Harare was not explained. But since Blair's ministers began openly to champion the cause of the white farmers who made up the backbone of the former Rhodesian regime - while denouncing the black leadership which defeated it as "uncivilised" - British interference in Zimbabwe has been ceaseless.

Perhaps taking its cue from the government, most mainstream British media coverage of the Zimbabwean crisis has now abandoned even a veneer of even-handedness, as reporters and presenters have become cheerleaders for the opposition MDC. In a BBC television interview on Sunday with foreign office minister Baroness Amos, David Frost talked blithely of "100,000 people being killed by Mugabe supporters over the last two years": In fact, human rights groups estimate the total number killed on both sides during that period at around 160. Frost and the shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram, went on to denounce Mugabe as a "fascist dictator" and "black racist'; both urging more decisive British action. The same day an unrelentingly hostile BBC Correspondent programme passed without a single balancing interview.

There is little sense in any of this of Britain's responsibility for the rapacious colonisation of Zimbabwe and the continuing grotesque inequality of land ownership two decades after independence, which has left 6,000 white farmers in control of half the country's 81 million acres of arable land, while around 850,000 black farmers are crammed into the rest. It was after all a British Labour government which refused to put down Ian Smith's white racist rebellion in 1945 because of fears that the army would balk at acting against their "kith and kin"; provoking a war which cost 40,000 lives.

It was a British Tory government which imposed white parliamentary quotas and a 10-year moratorium on land reform at independence. Now the British government (through the Westminster Foundation for Democracy) and the Tories (through the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust) - along with white farmers and corporations - are all funding the MDC, committed as it is to free-market policies and the restoration of white farms to their owners. It is impossible to sustain the case that Zimbabwe has been singled out for international denunciation by the British government because of political violence, intimidation or restrictions on democratic freedoms, alarming as they are. 

Such factors are common to other African states supported by Britain, such as Kenya and Zambia (where an election was rigged earlier this year). And Blair is bosom buddies with dictators such as General Musharraf of Pakistan and the Saudi royal family. In Zimbabwe, the liberation war leader Mugabe is at least holding an election of sorts, there is a parliamentary opposition and anti-government newspapers are published. 

There are only two possible explanations for Britain's role. One is a racist concern for the privileged white minority. The other is that, unlike Zambia and Kenya, Mugabe is no longer playing ball with the west's neoliberal agenda and talking, credibly or not, of taking over private businesses and a return to socialism. That cannot be tolerated and, in the new world order, the US appears to have largely subcontracted supervision of Africa to the former colonial powers, Britain and France.

The struggle over power and land has brought Zimbabwe to a virtual state of civil war; unemployment and inflation are rampant; living standards have plunged:

For over the last decade, election observing has become little more than a tool for powerful states to interfere in the internal affairs of weak ones. Monitors delegitimise elections which elect a candidate the west does not like; while turning a blind eye to the deficiencies of-polls that produce the desired outcome.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking - and not least because we in Britain do not allow observers at our own elections. For instance, British TV viewers may have been surprised to see Nigeria's Abdulsalam Abubakar reading out the Commonwealth's condemnation of the democratic process in Zimbabwe. But Nigerians will have been even more surprised. General Abubakar was military dictator of Nigeria from 1998-99.

Now facing accusations of stealing more than $2bn from Nigeria's foreign reserves, Abubakar shares responsibility, as a member of Nigeria's top brass, for the cancellation by the military of the elections there in 1993. The man who won those elections died in prison while Abubakar was president. 

Less well known is the record of Kare Vollan, the head. of the Norwegian observers, who denounced the Zimbabwean poll as unfair because of pre-election violence. This same Kare Vollan found that the Ukrainian parliamentary elections in 1998 "were managed with professionalism" while his team "did not call into question the results" - despite what he described as the "violence, intimidation and harassment during the run-up to the election". 

Maybe it was because Ukraine was then the west's favourite former Soviet state that the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, for which Vollan works, was happy, unlike in Zimbabwe, to trust the Ukrainian authorities to investigate these allegations. 

Another charge levelled at Zimbabwe is government control of the media. But this did not bother the OSCE at the Montenegrin parliamentary elections in 1998. There, the local Mr Big, Milo Djukanovic, has received tens of millions of dollars in western aid - not bad for a country with half the population of Birmingham. Apart from using the money for his gigantic police force of 30,000, and for ensuring total state control of the media, Djukanovic habitually ensures that he is the only candidate with any election posters. For the west, though, he was a useful thorn in the side of Slobodan Milosevic. 

But even this cannot compare with the stifling of democracy in Russia with which the west wholeheartedly cooperated throughout the 1990s and in 2000. Having welcomed the shelling of the Russian parliament to put down recalcitrant backbenchers in 1993 the west and the OSCE turned a blind eye to the massive fraud in the subsequent constitutional referendum, which reduced the power of the Russian parliament to that of a library reading room. One observer, the Tory minister Kenneth Baker, declared that poll a resounding success even before it had closed. It later turned out that millions of votes had been added to the turnout to render the vote valid.

All through the 1990s, western observers turned a blind eye to the government's grip on the broadcast media. At the 1995 elections, the OSCE and Council of Europe even managed to ignore the fact that 17 people were killed in campaigning. And at Putin's election in 2000, the west ignored reports that millions of votes had been added to achieve the desired result.

In Slovakia in 1998, the west - via the OSCE - was determined to unseat the incumbent prime minister, Vladimir Meciar, even though (or maybe because) he is the most popular politician in the country. The main charge against him was bias in the state TV. When I asked the OSCE chief (Vollan again) why no one mentioned the greater bias in favour of the opposition of a far more popular foreign-funded private TV station, he promised "scientific proof".

When it came, in the form of a statistical survey by an Italian media monitoring organisation, the figures actually showed the state channel to be a model of neutrality and the private channel to be grossly partisan. But facts would not move Vollan. He just said icily: "You have the figures. Maybe your interpretation is different."

The Zimbabweans were vilified for the queues at polling stations in Harare. But at the Italian parliamentary elections last May, the socialist government reduced the number of polling stations by 30%. The chaos was so severe that the last Italian to cast his vote did so at 5am. So why were Francesco Rutelli's friends not accused of trying to stop Italians voting for Silvio Berlusconi?

Western election monitoring has become the political equivalent of an Arthur Andersen audit. This supposedly technical process is now so corrupted by political bias that it would be better to abandon it.

The stinking reactionary obviousness of the West's counter-revolutionary ploy against Zimbabwe's ongoing national-liberation revolution did not register at all with the UK Socialist Alliance, however, where leading propagandists followed the CIA-Walesa Solidarnosc anti-communist script to the letter, freely predicting the pro-imperialist 'trade-union' strikes now called by Tsvangirai, demanding a 'constituent assembly' counter-revolution, and insisting along with imperialist subversion that 'democracy' was all that mattered in Zimbabwe, not continued anti-imperialist revolt.

The Weekly Worker SA contingents fake 'left' guise tried admitting that imperialism did indeed back the MARC opposition to Mugabe, but still insisted that "communists do not hold back their own struggle to overthrow his regime from a diametrically opposite viewpoint".

This is a conscious disgusting travesty of Leninism, merely deliberately dressed up to resemble a bit of Marxist history.

The issue was the Kerensky government of the February bourgeois Revolution in Russia in 1917 which the Bolsheviks finally demanded the overthrow of when it refused to pull out of the inter-imperialist Great War, --  "just like we want Mugabe out but not for imperialism's benefit", these Alliance cretins would like to pretend.
But a fascist-military putsch in August 1917 wanted to topple Kerensky too, to restore the Tsarist autocracy.

Famously, of course, Lenin precisely did NOT continue with the anti-Kerensky revolution while the Kornilov putsch was still a danger. Exactly the opposite. The Bolsheviks insisted that all genuine workers and revolutionaries would make defeating Kornilov the immediate priority.

The crucial dialectical understanding of the complex situation came in with the absolute refusal, nevertheless, to declare any solidarity or confidence whatsoever in the Kerensky government, even while effectively helping willy-nilly to prop it up in office for a brief while longer.

These joke Alliance 'Marxists' get it all wrong. They fail to fight this grotesque imperialist subversion of Zimbabwe national-liberation which the CIA has built around the M.C.

And instead of avoiding helping the imperialist overthrow of Mugabe/Kerensky, they do the exact opposite and continue posturing for a (nonexistent) "Zimbabwe communist overthrow of Mugabe anyway, regardless of the imperialist interest in the same outcome".

These Alliance dilettantes become the evermore-open stooges for counter-revolutionary imperialist rackets. Build Leninism. EPSR