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 1129 Mar 26 2002 
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Indisputable circumstantial evidence of imperialism's growing and insoluble-crisis begins to find conscious expression and to cut the ground from under all varieties of traditional ideological anti-communism. Real-life spontaneous anti-imperialist revolt leaves all the non-Marxist 'left' sophistry completely bypassed and isolated, even though still a long way from revolutionary socialist perspectives itself. And despite the continuing anti-Leninist philistinism which renders the British labour and trade-union movement a laughing stock, the sheer relentless volume of capitalist-system management and government disasters is still successfully sending out its revolutionary message in spite of all censorship and propaganda controls and limitations. The Cold War's end (nominally) has also meant the end of brain-deadening 'safety & security' illusions of 'balance-of-power' false assumptions, shattered by the nastiness of imperialism's warmongering crisis and by the startling unexpectedness of some sources and avenues of renewed revolutionary anti-imperialism. The facts of serious anti-imperialist revolt will have their impact in spite of all the fake-'left' bad-mouthing. 
Hate-filled extremist reactions AGAINST the miseries, crimes, and unfairness of the imperialist-dominated world are now so disturbing and disruptive that the whole pattern and scale of past value judgments between capitalism and 'communism' are questioned for any worthwhileness in them at all, or relevance. 
The Cold War was deliberately kept by Revisionism and imperialism to essentially a diplomatic and propaganda grind, and a long ostentatious military stand-off between its major protagonists. The many serious revolutionary eruptions around the edges were consciously played-down within an overall framework generally seen as stable and abiding. 
Now, strange and foreboding CRISIS is in the air on all things, -alarming INSTABILITY, - rendered all the more so because of the seemingly dramatic, chaotic clumsiness of the difficulties the American imperialist world order is getting itself and the planet into so soon after supposedly having "won the battle of history",'completely', and 'for all time'. 
Instead of the anticipated ensuing of a 'peaceful American century' after the Soviet workers state had been liquidated by its Stalin-trained Revisionist bureaucracy, - international conflicts, war threats, and strife have on the contrary become pandemic. 
Although it will rarely if ever be broadcast, what people are now getting a flavour of is that many contradictions on Earth are utterly irreconcilable. 
The paradox is that this inkling is growing despite the apparent ENDING of the Cold War, and despite it having ended in the alleged 'victory of the Western way of life' and 'democracy' over the supposed 'source of all evil and strife in the world', - namely 'communism'. 
And as well as fast becoming irrelevant, there are more serious intellectual problems for the anti-communist 'chattering classes'. 
Although every kind of reactionary, individualistic, opportunist, or barmpot 'alternative anti-imperialism' (to Moscow Revisionism) but which was also viciously anti-Soviet as well, could finally have a chance to flourish after the demented Gorbachev liquidation of the USSR and the Socialist Camp, what was also freed at last from insurmountable limitations on development was an understanding of correct and successful anti-imperialist struggle-perspectives which demolished the Revisionist nonsense but which remained staunchly pro-workers states in every aggravation inflicted on them by bourgeois ideology and Western 'democracy' subversions, and for still pursuing the complete revolutionary break with capitalism. 
The Trotskyite mentalities of the Socialist Alliance have quickly joined forces with the 'left' remnants of Museum-Revisionism to continue the Cold War class-compromise of "condemning terrorism" (Sept 11, etc), in unison with all the pro-imperialist bourgeois 'chattering classes', - thus all effectively disqualifying themselves with dramatic suddenness from all further serious 'anti-imperialist' role apart from the traditional business of 'protest' parading and 'reformist' pressures, etc. 
Meanwhile, the really serious anti-imperialist struggle is at last beginning. 
Fidel Castro has been interestingly stirred by imperialism's crisis developments (see World Socialist Review at the end of this EPSR). These severely-edited comments from a rambling unscripted 3-hour epic of still unapologetic Revisionism nevertheless do make many useful propaganda points, as usual, but more importantly confirm that it is the objective facts of imperialist crisis which will return the world towards a Leninist understanding and not anyone's propaganda output, large or small. 
Even more interestingly, Castro actually makes this point himself, consciously confirming that the movement of events is everything, shifting everyone's response to the world. His 'rebellion of the peoples' still clearly remains bogged down by mostly reformist illusions, but with or without Castro, revolutionary Leninist understanding must still reconquer all rational thought sooner or later. 
Another veteran of Revisionist period anti-imperialist delusions, Mohamed Heikal, has also been fascinatingly stirred by events. The old Egyptian editor from Nasser's anti-imperialist revolution, never a communist, has nevertheless found his own way of telling Gadafy in an interview that a new wave of anti-imperialist struggles has a revolutionary content quite different from the nationalliberation content of the Cold War period: 
"The Americans control the world," he continued. "As for the Arab world, the Americans not only control it, they rule it. And what they are saying and doing is alarming. Their bias for Israel is absolute and they no longer even take the trouble to disguise their hostility towards the Arabs, to the degree that the Arab world these days hears nothing from Washington but threats and recrimination.
The entire Arab world is in a humiliating position.
"Yet, the Arab street, which the great powers would once take into their calculations because it is out of their reach and represents the voice of conscience that cannot be bullied into submission, is silent. What is wrong with the Arab street?"
I told my host that he was correct in his observation and that the phenomenon was palpable. But in my, opinion this silence in the midst ofthe current crisis has a meaning.
First, when the Arab street moved, as it once did, that. alone, did not produce change. The Arab masses, no matter how great their outpouring in an Arab capital, cannot possibly adopt a concrete course of action. The most they can do is to make an appeal. Generally, the Arab people address their appeal to a government they trust in, or to a leader they believe represents them, confident that this government or leader will act in their name and take a position that responds to their collective feelings and aspirations. This implies the existence of a certain bond between the people and those responsible for drawing up national policies and taking the decisions that affect their lives. Apparently, the Arab street has developed a profound sense that those whom it is asking to change the way of confronting the increasing hostility and violence of the US are the very individuals who surrendered the fate of the region to the US. After all, it is difficult for the defendant to serve as a competent advocate for a cause. It follows, therefore, that the Arab street feels that the bond between it and those that rule is broken, or tenuous at best, that mutual trust is lost, and, consequently, that its voice would simply drown in the winds. In short, I said, there is a deep-seated crisis of legitimacy in the Arab world, and this crisis is hampering the relationship between the Arab people and their systems of government.
We can sit in this tent until tomorrow morning, I said, discussing the causes for the gap between the feelings and aspirations of the Arab street and the ruling regimes in Arab capitals, and eventually we may or may not come to an agreement on a diagnosis. Ultimately, however, I believe that the key to the mystery of the current silence resides in the sense that the people feel their appeals would fall on deaf ears, or if heard, the response would be ineffective.
Is it not odd, I asked, that when the Palestinians look to foreign governments to help them, they, turn first to European rather than to Arab governments? This is because the Arab governments are doing little more than scrambling to get Washington's ear in order to alert it to the Palestinians' national and humanitarian plight. As long as this remains the case, the Palestinians believe that Washington would rather hear about them from the Europeans than from the Arab regimes, which have toyed at helping the Palestinians for so long that they no longer have any credibility left.
Gadafi had been listening to me patiently, but I added one more observation. I said, if we take this attempt at an answer to our question one step further, and if we grant that the world abroad is just as surprised by the silence in the Arab street, which had once roared from the Gulf to the Atlantic, the conclusion we must draw is ominous indeed. What mystifies international capitals should lx a source of great anxiety to the Arab regimes. This silence, which emanates from a crisis of legitimacy, is a very loud alarm.
As vague as this is, and only one man's opinion, and from a Revisionist source at that,- nevertheless Heikal's conclusions do not conflict with the news gossip about how wildly (if shallowly) popular with the Arab street are Osama Bin Laden's highly publicised challenges to American imperialist domination of the Middle East,and conflicts with Arab nationalist orthodoxy on these questions. 
The clear implication is that mass proletarian revolt is beginning to threaten the dominance of Arab bourgeois nationalism and its compromising proimperialist interests. 
And in reality, what could be less surprising. Much more remarkable is.how the Arab Street has put up with so much for so long without turning to revolution. 
In the admissions of the West's own capitalist press (below), the suffering described would scarcely seem bearable. Admittedly this is under the torture regime of Zionist Occupied Palestine, but the humiliation tolerated by the Arab nationalist bourgeois ie collectively, at the hands of imperialism everywhere, must make many aspects of intelligent life almost unbearable all over the Middle East. 
In the continuing festering situation in the absence of proletarian revolution, the overthrow of a key figure like Mubarak, as with Sadat before him, becomes almost predictable. 
The situation defies belief. The greatest colonial joke/con trick in history is being endlessly rammed up every Arab/Muslim orifice in sight,- the sick fiction that the deluded followers everywhere of the Jewish religious freemasonry have the 'right' to steal the Palestinian nation's homeland from them, - all based on a ridiculously primitive piece of self-serving voodoo about a "chosen people", and on a Western imperialist political stunt to implant permanent armed colonial disruption in the very heart of post-war Arab nationalist aspirations by pretending that the imperialist system's own Jew-baiting holocaust-fascism was reason-enough to inflict Zionist imperialism on Arab Palestine after 1945. 
This utterly crazed logic in all directions has kept everyone in total confusion ever since, and perpetuated an impossible colonial contradiction which can only be a permanent cancerous sore in ongoing world history until it is resolved in the only way possible,- throwing out this Zionist colonial usurpation in its entirety. 
There is no 'self-determination right' for the 'Jewish' people in Palestine since;a) there was no 'Jewish nation' there to start with, - just a few handfuls of visionary kibbutznik settlers, dropping out from persecution in Europe; and b) the idea of a Jewish 'race' is far-fetched anyway, including black-African Falasha Jews from Ethiopia, 40th-generation peasants from Russia and Poland, 40th-generation intelligentsia from Germany and elsewhere in Central Europe, but mostly modern American 'Jewish' entrepreneurial families from New York and Los Angeles who have got in on the colonisation because it makes excellent business sense, and because the CIA's world military domination plans for American imperialist colonial policing of the planet want to encourage this colonisation with everything possible. Hence the Zionist colony is the world's number one recipient of both American economic aid and American military aid. 
Cleverly, this imperialist invasion has united itself around the artificial revival of the Hebrew language and the UN-backed fiction of 'Israeli national rights', but the whole colonial racket is a fake and a fraud of 'self-determination' from start to finish. 
In the real world, Palestine is the homeland of the 7-million strong Arab Palestinian nation, and it must all be returned to them. History will continue to choke without end on any other 'solution'. Any visionary religious-minded Jews who want to continue their settlement can ask the future Palestinian state for permission to do so and for, hopefully, normal human-rights protection. 
Everything else is just a continuation of warmongering imperialist insanity still deep in colonial crisis which can only end in imperialism's whole defeat, - whatever class-collaborating nonsense any cowardly Arab bourgeois nationalist leadership (like Arafat) pretends it can agree to. 
It is impossible to see how the necessarily self-perpetuating colonial aggression of the Zionist imperialist entity can avoid being swept along with America's global warmongering domineering for as long as it lasts, - and being swept away too when the US imperialist insanity to impose colonial policing control over the whole planet crashes in ruins, alongside the crashed 'free-market' world economy. 
And even if within the unpredictable ebb and flow of imperialist crisis there is some temporary 'landsharing' two-state peace-deal patched together temporarily, this Zionist aggression, plus the awkward objective reality of the 3 million Palestinians who still have refugee status and who desperately want the right of return to the homelands they were originally evicted from by Zionist colonial war in 1948-49 (basically, all of 'Israel'), - -and which the Zionists can never possibly grant, - will ensure that the Palestinian national-liberation war will not diminish. 
When it meets up with the denouement-in-disaster of the imperialist system's overall global colonial crisis, then the Zionist usurpation of the Palestinian nation's homeland will be brought to a close. A peaceful solution willhave finally been found. 
Meanwhile Trot and Revisionist fake 'lefts' join with the imperialists, the Zionist colonists, and the cowardly Arab bourgeois nationalists to pretend that the astonishingly heroic self-sacrifice by the suicide bombers of the national-liberation guerrilla war is nothing but damnable 'terrorism', and will rule out any serious consideration of Palestine's rights 'until it is terminated forthwith; etc, etc. 
The many influences of Western bourgeois thought have plainly lost all touch with the real world, and are clearly inflicting domineering delusions of astonishing stupidity, bordering on insanity. 
Consider first, for example, the extremely limited glimpse of reality which the Western imperialist system's own bourgeois press, relentlessly pro-Zionist, - is prepared to admit about the impossibility of life under 'Jewish' colonisation: 

Mohammed, whose forebears were fishermen in an area north of the Gaza Strip before being forced to flee in 1948, says that immediately following the death of his baby daughter he wanted revenge.
"I felt so angry and confused. I thought, if they have killed my child, I have the right to do the same. When an Israeli child is killed, it is on the front page of newspapers around the world. When one of our children is murdered, little attention is paid". 
According to the Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem, in the 14 years from the beginning of the first intifada in 1987 to December 2001, a total of 443 Israeli civilians have been killed in the conflict, including 50 children. Over the same period, 2,137 Palestinian civilians have been killed, among them 432 children. In recent months, however, Mohammed, a policeman with the Palestinian Authority, has joined the ranks of other bereaved families working with the National Movement for Change. Mohammed, like many Palestinians, refers to the militants of Hamas as "freedom fighters" and praises the network of social services the Islamic movement funds to make up for the failings of the Palestinian Authority's corrupt and repressive[...]
"But many Israelis look at us as little more than animals. They think we are all aggressive. They do not see where our anger comes from. They do not know what our lives are like."
Nasser Waij Agha, a local organiser for the National Movement for Change whose teenage son was shot in the back of the head by an Israeli, soldier, says their work is becoming increasingly difficult. "Some bereaved families who were with us in the beginning are afraid to speak out now As the situation gets worse, they are giving up hope.'
The prospect of peace and reconciliation in the current climate certainly looks bleak. At the time of writing, the temporary lull in hostilities that brought the latest US Middle East envoy, Anthony Zinni, back to the region in early January to broker ceasefire talks has come to an end. Most believe the region will continue to spin further in its vortex of bloodletting before a new line in the conflict is drawn. 
Sharon's tactics of targeted assassinations, declaring Arafat "irrelevant"; strafing Palestinian towns and villages with helicopter gunships and bombarding key Palestinian Authority installations plays directly, and some say deliberately, into the hands of the Islamic extrermists. Allowing them to move into the power vacuum, it increases the violence,in turn used to justify an ever stronger crackdown by the Israeli military.
The position of extremists on both sides is uncompromising. The militants of Hamas and Islamic Jihad refuse to recognise Israel's right to exist; Israeli extremists want their Jewish homeland extended east to the River Jordan. Failing this, they want Palestinians in the occupied territories confined to an ever smaller space. 
This, in effect, is what has been happening over the past 10 years. In violation of international law and the Oslo accords of 1993, the number of settlers who have moved into the West Bank, Gaza and annexed East Jerusalem since then has more than doubled to about 400,000. Many settlements have been built in such strategically crucial locations - and connected with a system of roads, referred to as "security highways"- that they have broken those areas of the occupied territories to which Palestinians are relegated into ever more crowded, disconnected islands with limited supplies of electricity and water. In addition, there has been a sharp increase in the number of land annexations, expropriations and demolitions of Palestinian homes, justified through a complicated maze of bureaucracy and zoning laws. 
At the heart of such action is a battle over demographics. Despite a chronic housing shortage among the rapidly growing Palestinian population, they are denied permission to build on the majority of land in the West Bank. Permits to build on land deemed eligible for development can take years to acquire and cost the equivalent of thousands of pounds, putting them beyond the means of most. Houses built without permission are served with demolition orders; an estimated 17,000 Palestinian homes have been destroyed in the occupied territories since 1967, and in the past year the demolition programme has accelerated.
To highlight the misery this causes, a small number of Israelis, calling themselves the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, have formed themselves into an action group that mobilises when they are alerted by Palestinians that a demolition is imrninent. Often joined by activists from another pressure group, Rabbis for Human Rights, protesters sit in front of bulldozers to try to stop demolitions. Although they do not succeed, where possible they subsequently help fund and physically rebuild the destroyed homes.
The founder of the committee. Jeff Halper, a former professor of anthropology, smoothes out map after map to illustrate what he describes as the "matrix of control" being imposed on the occupied territories through the programme of settlements and demolitions. He draws an analogy with a prison where inmates may occupy the majority of the space but are still effectively confined because wardens command those areas that constitute the bars and walls. This makes more sense after visiting Palestinians whose houses have been torn down and seeing their proximity to settlements and "security highways".
Salim Shawamreh says he spent the equivalent of around £7,000 applying for permission to build on a plot of land he had bought in the Arab village of Anata on the outskirts of East Jerusalem. The process dragged on for years. Endless objections were raised, including the assertion that the land was a "green area" and no development was allowed. As Salims family grew, he built it anyway. Shortly after he, his wife and six children moved into their home in the summer of 1998, it was surrounded by soldiers and police sharpshooters. Tear gas was tossed through the windows and bulldozers moved in to demolish the building, despite attempts by Israeli activists, who were beaten and arrested, to stop the destruction. Twice more, Salim rebuilt his home with the help of Israeli volunteers. Twice more it was demolished. Standing in what remains of his home - a few pieces of twisted metal and broken lumps of concrete - Salim points a short distance away to where a settler bypass road is being carved across the landscape: "There is one law for the Jews and another forArabs."
In a village on the outskirts of Hebron, another father cradles his baby daughter as he shows me the site where his home was demolished two years ago. Despite documents that Atta Jaber says prove his family has owned this land in the Baqa'a valley since the days of the Ottoman empire, the Israeli army declared it had the right to confiscate it on the grounds that it was needed to protect the security of the nearby settlement of KiryatArba.When Atta protested, he and his wife, Rudaina, were beaten in front of their children. Atta was imprisoned, their fruit trees cut down and their home demolished. 'When they rebuilt a house nearby with the help of international aid organisations, settlers attacked it with pickaxes, scrawled graffiti on the walls and defecated in the basement. As Atta shows me the destruction caused, a bulldozer and an armoured car from the nearby settlement circle the house, then parks less than a hundred yards away, and their drivers sit watching us through binoculars. "I am very, very pessimistic;' says Ran-ii Elhanan.
Such sacrifices, he and other like-minded Israelis argue, should be based on a greater understanding by both sides of each other's history and suffering; an appreciation by the Palestinians of how deeply the catastrophe of the Holocaust is embedded in the Israeli psyche, and an understanding by the Israelis of how great a disaster the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 referred to as the naqba -was for the Palestinians. "Now we have a government in Israel that does not want peace. It concentrates its main efforts in trying to show that Osama Bin Laden and Yasser Arafat are the same. And if, as it argues, they are, there is no reason to negotiate. Sometimes I feel like a boy with his finger in the dam, talking about peace when the flood of violence and hatred has already swept away the wall. But I believe strongly that the minute the price of not having peace exceeds the price of peace, then peace will come. It might take four years or 400. It is just a question of how many more of our children must die before then. In the meantime, we continue with our work because to do nothing is to give up hope. But what we need is leaders with true vision both here and on the international stage. At the moment they are sadly lacking."
It is a sentiment echoed by others I speak to, many of whom are convinced that the cycle of violence will only be broken by strong international intervention, and not just by the United States. "Europe's position falls far below expectations. The Europeans could do a lot more, but seem constantly to be hiding behind the skirts of the Americans;' said one Palestinian businessman. Talking by the light of a gas lantern in Gaza City, blacked out at night because of an Israeli strike on the area's only electrical power station, Nasser Warj Agha laid more responsibility at Britain's door. "The British are partially responsible for creating this mess; let them show more courage in helping to clear it up." Nasser was recently invited to visit London, Germany and South Africa on a speaking tour with a group of other bereaved Palestinian and Israeli parents. It never happened. Most Palestinians are denied permission to travel beyond the confines of their refugee camps in Gaza, let alone leave the country.
The crippling effect of restrictions on movement of the Palestinian population is impossible to overestimate. The system of checkpoints, curfews and unmanned roadblocks - deep trenches,and massive soil ramps preventing vehicles from passing, often from one part of a town or village to anothernow holds just over 3m people in a complete stranglehold. The general closure of the occupied territories, imposed in the early 1990s in response to attacks by Palestinians in Israel, and eased to some extent after the Oslo accords granted certain areas limited self-rule,was reimposed with a vengeance following the outbreak of the latest intifada in September 2000. (See panel, page 29.) The resulting sharp rise in unemployment, hunger and hardship among the Palestinians has created a pressure cooker of resentment, rage and thirst for retaliation.
Some senior Israeli officials admit that the system of closure does little to contribute to security. Terrorists can easily evade detection by trudging across the open hillsides of the West Bank, entering Israel through a rabbit warren of dirt tracks. Some admit that closure has more to do with control than concern for safety. After criss-crossing the West Bank in buses and taxis and witnessing the casual but consistent humiliation of Palestinians at the Israeli army checkpoints that exist on every main thoroughfare, it is hard to disagree. One journey from Hebron to Jerusalem that should have taken less than an hour turned into a tortuous three-hour ride across rough hillside tracks, which had one elderly woman vomiting with dizziness after our bus was turned back at one checkpoint because its driver and most passengers were Palestinian.
In recent months a growing number of Israeli Army reservists have refused to serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Those who refuse, some of them senior officers in elite combat units with proud war records, face prison sentences for taking such a stand. Some have already been stripped of their command positions. Sharon has thundered that such action signals "the beginning of the end of democracy" : But in an open letter published in the Israeli press recently, the reservists argue that Israel's policies in the occupied territories amount to "dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people':"There are things that a decent person just does not do," says one. "A decent person does not... treat people as if they were dirt."
As reports of abuses of Palestinians at roadblocks have grown, a group of around 70 Israeli women has formed an organisation called Machsomwatch to monitor the action of soldiers and pohce. The women mount vigils in small groups at principal checkpoints throughout the West Bank in the early morning and late afternoon. Judith Keshet, one of the three founders of Machsomwatch, believes the women's presence holds those at the checkpoints accountable, briefly, for their actions. "It is particularly uncomfortable for young conscripts to feel they are being watched by women, most of us old enough to be their mothers. The younger generation seems to lack any sense of what human rights are about. There is a strong racist element to the. way they behave. They act as if they believe Palestinians are inherently inferior."
Practices the women regularly observe include ad-hoc strip-searches, Palestinians being forced to sit in cars or buses for hours with their windows open in the pouring rain and shut in extreme heat, or told to stand for long periods with their hands in
the air after having their ID cards confiscated. Where possible, the women intervene, pleading with soldiers and police to treat those they stop with more dignity and respect. This sometimes elicits verbal abuse. Keshet describes the women's action as "a drop in the ocean" : But, she says,"in these dark days, every drop counts':
More serious abuses are monitored by doctors belonging to the Israeli pressure group Physicians for Human Rights, involving Palestinians urgently seeking medical care such as kidney dialysis and cancer treatment, or women in labour being denied safe passage. Since September 2000, the group has recorded 221 instances of ambulances bearing such patients being turned back at checkpoints, resulting in 29 deaths. The group consistently lobbies the Israeli High Court for soldiers held responsible for refusing to let patients pass through checkpoints to be arrested and tried. One such case involves the treatment of a young expectant mother called Fatima Abed-Rabo, who was stopped at a checkpoint with her husband, Nasser, as the couple tried to make their way to Bethlehem for Fatima to give birth last October. It was early in the morning when Fatima, then seven months' pregnant, started to feel the first pains of labour. Certain that his wife would give birth within hours - the couple's daughter, Arij, had been born two months prematurely - Nasser convinced a neighbour in their West Bank vrillage of Wallaje to lend him the truck he used for transporting chickens, to get his wife to the nearest hospital in Bethlehem.
The couple had been trying for a second child for several years and undergone fertility treatment, Nasser says, after he suffered sexual problems resulting from abuse during a two-year spell in an Israeli jail. "When Fatima became pregnant," he says, "we were so happy, we celebrated by replacing the tin sheeting on our home with a concrete roof."
But when the couple, accompanied by Nasser's mother, arrived at the Israeli army checkpoint 100 yards outside their village, they were told to go home, despite the fact that Fatima had started haemorrhaging. In desperation they returned to the village and transferred to a taxi in case it might be allowed to pass. Again they were refused permission.
The couple sit huddled in a cold January Wind on plastic chairs outside their one-room shack as they describe what happened next. When Nasser got out of the car and started shouting that his wife could give birth at any moment, he says the soldiers laughed, walked over to the car, took his ID card and started imitating the moaning sounds of a woman in labour. As Nasser moved to hit one of them, he was struck to the ground.
"Then the driver called out to me to leave them, that it was too late, that my wife had already given birth,' says the 28-year-old electrician. "One soldier walked over, threw my ID card in the blood covering the floor of the car and told us to get out. I took off my jacket to wrap up the baby while my mother tied a rag around its umbilical cord. I was crying."
After driving back some way, they abandoned the car and started walking across the fields to avoid the checkpoint and attempt to reach Bethlehem by foot. Their baby son was small, but alive. After stumbling across the rocky hillsides for just over an hour, they flagged down a car, which drove them to the Holy Family hospital. Their baby weighed 1.4 kg (31b), his condition critical. He was blue, suffering from exposure. Seven hours later, he died.
Nasser and Fatima have buried the son they called Sultan some distance from their home; they can't bear to be reminded of their loss. "The Israelis talk about combating terror. They justify everything they do in the name of security and defence. But is this not a kind of terror --Is it not a crime' "Nasser asks. We sit in silence for a while. His question hangs in the air, unanswered by the Israeli courts, and also by the international community. It is New Year's Day. Nasser breaks the silence at last:"I hope this year will be a good one for everyone. It is a lie to say we do not want peace. Everyone wants peace. But there will never be peace as long as we Palestinians are denied our basic rights as human beings."
Then consider how 'extremist' or 'unnecessary' or 'artificial' or 'dispensable' or 'reactionary' or 'unprogressive', etc, etc, are these astonishing Palestinian martyrdom struggles, - as witnessed and described by a Western press correspondent writing in the same pro-Zionist imperialist newspapers: 
His face covered by a keffiyeh, or headdress, to conceal his identity, Yunis spoke first about the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci and Picasso, then abruptly changed the subject and described - with equal passion, - his urge to become a martyr.
"We are educated strugglers," he said. "We are not terrorists and the world should recognise that our acts are not intended to be pure, cold-blooded murder."
The Palestinian people had sought help from Arab countries, the United States and Europe in their attempts to establish an independent state, he said, but to little or no avail.
"Finally, I searched for my God in the holy Koran and found it filled with verses and commands on how to end my oppression," he added, eyes blazing. "I discovered late, that victory is only granted by God and not by [Tony] Blair or Bush. My aim is to liberate my land and to transfer the triangle of fear to [the Israeli] environment."
Delivered with emphatic gestures, this was his chilling justification for the mission he would soon undertake: "Israel attacked my honour, inflicted pain on our mothers and fathers and I have to inflict the same on them until Israeli mothers scream at their government and plead with the world to end the conflict. I will persist until they experience the same fear and pain our mothers feel daily.
"I know I cannot stand in front of a tank that would wipe me out within. seconds, so I will use myself as a weapon. They call it terrorism. I say it is self-defence. When I embark on my mission I will be carrying out two obligations: one to my God and the other to defend myself and my country."
Yunis lit a cigarette and declared 'that life was "precious". He would rather be enjoying "normal days and nights, parties, family gatherings and seaside picnics", he said. "We are denied this as, long as we are under occupation and until liberation we have no choice but to fight."
Until the day of his mission. dawns, Yunis will remain engrossed in study of the Koran. He is convinced he has no choice but to follow the path assigned to him, and nothing could sway him from it. "Freedom is not handed as a gift. History is testimony to the fact that major sacrifices have to be made to attain it," he said.
"At the moment of executing my mission, it will not be purely to kill Israelis. The killing is not my ultimate goal, though it is part of the equation. My act will carry a message beyond to those responsible and the world at large that the ugliest thing is for a human being to be forced to live without freedom."
Like Yunis, Abu Fatah, his commander, is an educated man - a second-year university student of international law. He delivered a brief history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that culminated in the first intifada, starting in 1987, the Middle East peace process and the second intifada, which began in September 2000.
He railed against Israeli settlements, political detentions and restrictions on the movements of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians within and between their territories.
After "self-restraint" during the first year of the latest intifada, he explained, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades - a branch of the Fatah organisation of Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader - decided to follow the example of the more radical Islamic group, Hamas, and launch suicide attacks. It has no shortage of volunteers.
A specialist unit is responsible for selecting candidates. Anyone under 18 is rejected; so are married men with children and anyone without a sibling who may be a family's sole breadwinner.
Those who excel militarily and show steely composure in stressful situations are most likely to be chosen. The young men must be reasonably religious, convinced of the meaning of "martyrdom and jihad [holy war]". They should also be of a build and shape that will enable them to move easily among Israelis - disguised if necessary in skull cap and wig, with ringlets down the side of the face - as they wait for the moment to strike.
The commander observes candidates over several days as they go about their routine business in public and at home. If the assessment is positive, he informs them of their selection.
"These men were not found on the streets. These are educated men who under normal circumstances would have the potential of being constructive members of society. If they did not have to carry out such a mission, they could have become a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher."
Once the bomber's preparations are complete, he is collected by another member of the unit who accompanies him on the final journey to his target. It is only just before the assault that he is told the details of his operation, whether he will be a bomber or will attack with grenades and guns until he is shot dead.
Ten to 15 minutes .before being dropped at the target, the bomber straps on a handtailored vest filled with about 10 kilos of explosive and five kilos of nails and metal. He is then given his final instructions about tile precise point at which he should detonate himself.
"The later he knows the better for the martyr, since he will not have much time to think of the target nor to experience doubts," the commander said. A separate unit has the job of finding potential targets for suicide attacks.
Asked whether the recent killings of innocent young civilians by suicide bombers in cafes and restaurants could be condoned, Abu Fatah's tone hardened. "Do you think when an Israeli tank shells a house it considers whether there are children at home?" he snapped. "There are ugly consequences for both sides in a war."
Ahmad, the second suicide attacker, has no reservations. A 27-year-old student. from the Gaza Strip, he carries the deeds and keys to the family house in Jaffa from which his grandmother was driven when the modern state of Israel was established as a Jewish homeland in 1948.
"My grandmother represented the history of the Palestinian people," said the quietlyspoken Ahmad, one of eight children who lives with his mother.
"She spoke to us of Jaffa, its grape vines and the seaside. She instilled in us a love for the home we did not know and over many tears recounted old stories of life once upon a time in Palestine. ' Ahmad said he fell in love with Jaffa through his grandmother's tales and longed for the day when he would have a chance to visit the old place. Instead, he grew up in a small concrete house allotted to the family by the United Nations.
He was 12 when the first intifada began and his anger at what he regarded as the humiliation of his family under occupation eventually made him determined to fight for "dignity".
"I did not join Fatah to kill. My aim in joining was to try and provide security, if only to my immediate family. Were it not for the occupation, I would not have become a Fatah member in the first place. I let go of my dreams of Jaffa and of ever reclaiming my grandmother's house. I was never a person who sought to annihilate the Israelis.
"I gave them the land that originally belonged to me but instead of accepting it graciously I found them still seeking to deprive me of the right to live freely and peacefully in my tiny few square metres."
The failure of the peace process meant "having to live in an area where most of us were denied the ability to move freely", he said.
"How can I live in a state without sovereignty where I am forced to show an identity card at an Israeli checkpoint for permission to move? They control our electricity and water supply and our lives, and people still ask why we are rising up."
A band of fighters gathering around him as he spoke nodded in agreement. "I am committed to carry out a martyr's mission to show my rejection of being forced to live under this oppression," he said to cries of "Allahu akbar [God is greatest]".
"My aim is to prohibit settlers from enjoying their lives here. My aim is to force the Israeli checkpoint out of my territory. If they leave in peace, I have no intention of following them into their areas. But if they remain here then I shall use the methods at my disposal to force them out.
"I and many others like me are now prepared and waiting to carry out spectacular attacks against the enemy. We are not afraid and will not cease until they withdraw totally from our areas. You can call us terrorists all you like, but we have faith that justice is on our side and that victory will be ours."
Casualties were described purely in terms of numbers, without reference to the gender or age of the victims. There was little room here for sentimentality.
They recited the names of all the group's previous attackers and talked about the "courage" of Mohammed Farhat, 19, who infiltrated the Israeli settlement of Gush Katif earlier this month, killing five Israelis before he was gunned down.
A few hours before his attack, he had called his mother from his mobile phone to ask her advice. His mother, Um Nidal, told me that she had replied: "Take care my son, remember God, repeat the verses, pay attention to everything you see, concentrate on the task ahead, pick your moment. May God bless you with success and may you be granted the martyrdom you deserve.
"Be strong, my boy, in this, your first major battle, and remember Allah in every move you make. Do not hesitate, my boy, and strike as harshly as you can against the enemy." She then asked him to switch off his mobile for the last time. Um Nidal stayed in front of her television waiting for news of her son's attack, fearful that he might be injured, arrested and denied the "martyrdom" he sought. She knew of her son's selection for a mission a month in advance: "I cried for a whole month every time I looked at him. I would tell him not to let my tears stop him from going on his mission. I watched him like a baby that whole month." "My heart is not made of stone," she added, but she had been "willing to sacrifice him for something more precious and sanctified than our earthly world".
The issue is not how 'strange' or 'different' these Islamic perceptions and attitudes are from 'normal' Western understanding, - true but irrelevant, - but whether this is really all happening in response to imperialist tyranny despite all the dreadful suffering and sacrifice involved and despite all the colossal obstacles put in the path of such a guerrilla-war fightback, and whether it is having a hugely successful impact or not. 
It is the bourgeois fake-'left' and the imperialists who are 'being misled by some other worldly reality', not this Palestinian Muslim cultural tradition. 
What anti-colonial national-liberation struggle could be more 'genuine' than this?? 
Or what could be more 'right' than this?? 
Let Islamic religious voodoo fall by the historical wayside as soon as possible, but this guerrilla war is the reality now of the genuine anti-imperialist struggle to prevent Western domination from destroying the planet with its colonial warmongering nightmare. 
It is a logical Washington decision to make this 'war on terrorism' and on 'rogue states' a global issue because resisting the bullying trade-war impositions of imperialist economic crisis in one place (e.g. Iraq, Colombia, Occupied Palestine, South Philippines, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc) can plainly be identified by colonial economic domination as quickly infecting an 'axis of evils virus elsewhere if not rapidly crushed. 
This is the reality of imperialist-crisis warmongering to try to divert the world from the destructive catastrophes of the freemarket economic crash and slump itself, so as to preserve the credibility and respectability of continued long-term planetary rule by the monopoly-capitalist bourgeoisie. In these initial circumstances, it is not absolutely essential at all that some of the forces of spontaneous mass resistance to Americas worldwide colonial domination should necessarily have clear-cut revolutionary socialist perspectives, or inspiration, at all. 
All that matters is that this monstrously decadent Western imperialist attempt to reassert colonial policing control over the whole planet should fail, and with it its warmongering 'solution' of 'suplus'-capital destruction as a cure for the crisis of 'over-production'. 
By all means let that failure and defeat eventually be dictated and administered by proletarian-dictatorship forces of conscious planned-socialist redevelopment for the whole planet. But let the miserable downfall of the 700-year era of Western imperialist economic tyranny be begun in any way possible and inflicted by any anti-colonial forces available. And that is exactly how the greatest crisis in history has begun: 
CAN President Musharraf survive? In physical terms, yes, if he is constantly protected from the militants who want to kill him. In political terms, it is suddenly looking nasty.
He is expected to announce yet harsher moves against these groups, after the lethal attack on Sunday's church service. That is just the latest in three months of mounting militant activity. Why is it getting worse? The main reason is Musharaf's drive to get rid of these radicals, itself inspired by his success in standing up to the mullahs in September, and the speed of the Taleban's fall. Militants took Musharraf's January 12 "zero tolerance" speech as a declaration of war.
But more subtly, they can also sense the fracture lines in his support inside the military, growing confidence of the mullahs, and a hesitation within the Government about how to deal with it.
There is no question that Musharraf suddenly faces a serious threat. The abduction of journalist Daniel Pearl, a string of attacks on Shias in Karachi, then the church bombing in the most closely guarded area of Islamabad this is a message that the militants can strike anywhere. There is no suggestion that they are Afghans. They are thought to be Pakistani militants, although some may have been in Afghanistan.
There may be only 500-600 radicals now active, but they clearly have the capacity to cause a lot of trouble, not least scaring away investment from Karachi just as it has started trickling in.
There are signs, too, that five banned groups have joined together to co-ordinate attacks, and they could have 5,000 supporters between them, according to American estimates.
But there are new signs of defiance. Musharraf banned the use of loudspeakers to broadcast political speeches; that is ignored, in effect, by many mosques every week.
What is more, the perennial questions about the loyalty of the intelligence services and the top military have come back with more life. Musharraf left the US in no doubt about his commitment to investigating Pearl's, murder, but there is less confidence about the intelligence agency. Accounts of the church bombing are muddled, despite intensive surveillance of the area.
Musharraf's problem is made worse by those in his Cabinet who warn against a further crackdown for fear of provoking yet more attacks. This is, they are fond of saying, the "Algeria scenario".
The bigger problem, however, is political. A military government, on its own, cannot command a political base. It needs the active, vocal support of moderate political groups. But the risk again, according to connoisseurs of Pakistan's military governments, is that Musharraf is getting locked into the "army mindset" and will not reach out to these parties.
So far, more comfortable with military crackdowns than with politics, he looks as if he is running away from this.
ROYAL, MARINES en route to Afghanistan will disembark at a base in the Gulf later this week after diplomatic efforts failed to persuade Pakistan to let them land at Karachi.
The Ministry of Defence was forced to make alternative plans after Pakistani authorities expressed continuing concern over British requests to move weapons and a 1,700man commando battle group through Karachi.
They found fewer than 20 bodies - and fewer than 20 caves. (US claims of numerous well-appointed caves were dismissed by their Afghan commander and ally, General Haider, as "propaganda".) Some 20 prisoners were taken, many of them, according to Haider, "simple farmers".
None of this adds up. If there were 1,000 fighters to begin with, 20 bodies have been found and 10 survivors spotted, what happened to the other 970? US officers suggested they may have been pulverised: more than three bombs were dropped per enemy fighter and some 165 for every corpse discovered, so perhaps it's surprising there was anything left of Shah-i-Kot at all. (Three villages in the valley were also reduced to dust. The casualties were unrecorded.) They also argue that, being devout Muslims, the survivors would have buried the dead. That requires us to imagine 10 known survivors burying 970 fallen comrades. The numbers, though, as the Pentagon official admitted in a masterpiece of understatement, are a little fuzzy.
Writing on guerrilla war, a subject he knew well, Mao Zedong, observed that "when the enemy advances, we retreat". The guerrilla moves among the people like a fish in water. The most likely explanation for Operation Anaconda's crazy numbers is that the Taliban fish of Shah-i-Kot have simply swum away.
One difficulty of fighting. such a war in a country that's not your own is the ability to tell one fish from another. In your eagerness to kill the enemy, you are tempted to drain the pond. Soon you are seen as a foreign invader and the oppressor of all native fish.
Meanwhile what is the 'free-from-reactionary-Muslim-fundamentalism' British fake-'left' achieving??? 
While so proudly still wearing its "condemn Sept 11" badge of Political Correctness, the Trot and Revisionist labour and trade union movement of 'left' reformism and anti-Leninism is letting the Blair imperialist government destroy the public postal service with 40,000 redundancies; reimburse £300 million from public funds to the failed Railtrack privatisation racket; tell total lies about a non-existent "al-Quaeda chemical and biological terror-weapons laboratory in Afghan caves" to justify UK combat units joining 
Bush's mad war; intensify the vicious stitch-up of impoverished Zimbabwe because of Mugabe's sensible land-nationalisation campaign; tell ludicrous lies about doctored 'crime statistics' to hide the growing breakdown in law-and-order in Britain; censor any discussion of cap italist-society degeneracy being the obvious inevitable cause of this crime and violence explosion, as resentment grows against the outrageous injustice of the poor still getting poorer (and ever-more disadvantaged) while the rich just keep getting richer,even in a failing economy which they are totally mismanaging; sow deliberately ever-increasing racial-strife to divide the working class (via the planned uselessness or discriminatoryness of asylum-seeker and immigration policies, & the hopeless emptiness of alternately 'integration' and then 'multi-cultural' policies, and continuing the posturing vendetta against Bowyer and Woodgate as a pretence that "racism will not be tolerated " etc); and incite an ever-worsening elitist scramble dividing the whole working class for the better educational opportunities by branding 'failed schools', 'failed teachers', 'failed yob kids', and now 'failed yob parents' as the "cause" of growing classroom chaos, school indiscipline, and social disorder in Britain, but never allowing the rottenness and injustice of cut-throat capitalist culture and economic anarchy to be even discussed as the only real cause of society's breakdown in Britain. 
The fake-'left' is losing the class war hands-down to warmongering imperialist degeneracy while it goes on contentedly pocketing its class-collaboration PC Brownie points for continuing to stay on the 'right' side backing imperialism against "reactionary Islamic fundamentalism" (i.e. in this case, the people of the Third World) over the Sept 11 bellow of rage and hatred.for the Western tyranny' taking the whole world to destruction. Build Leninism. EPSR 

World Revolutionary Socialist Review 
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles). 
Castro discusses crisis, revolution, and mistakes of first workers states during Havana conference. 
The brief history I spoke of is full of dreamers who did not see their dreams come true, because in addition to dreams, knowledge, awareness, desire and goodwill, the proper objective conditions are needed, and the objective conditions are brought about by history. There will never be profound changes, and there never have been, if they are not preceded by grave crises. That is the key. 
Great solutions have only ever emerged, from great crises. This is what I say to those who have asked what is to be done. One of the things that we can do is to be prepared, to sow ideas, to build awareness. With the optimism of those of us who believe our views are based on real facts, we are not even frightened by the prospect of an FTAA coming along and swallowing the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean. 
I believe in realities, and I believe that in the near future, even if we are swallowed, the 500 million of us living in Latin America and the Caribbean will emerge intact from the belly of a whale that will never be able to digest us. (APPLAUSE) 
And so we should not harbor any fears. We must believe in the laws of history, the laws we have come to know through reflecting on them, through making deductions, through study and observation of the realities. The problem with the system, as has already been said, is that it simply cannot sustain itself, and anything that cannot sustain itself eventually collapses. 
Right here, when we were gathered for the Sao Paulo Forum, from this very same podium, I said to the Argentines: Don't worry, don't spend too much time thinking about a strategy. Don't despair searching for a strategy; it isn't necessary. That government will collapse on its own; you do not even need to blow on it. (LAUGHTER) That is what I told them. And I had said the same thing even before then, because we had foreseen these realities in our analysis and discussions. 
We studied the history leading up to 1929; the difference between 1929 and what was happening now, when the stock markets were more inflated than ever. What guarantee was there that it would not collapse and the bubble would not burst, with even worse consequences this time, given that the role played in the world by that country was greater than ever, and 50% of U.S. citizens had their money invested in these shares, which had become so inflated that some that had cost 1000 dollars were now worth 800,000 dollars? 
They had grown 800 times in value. It was outrageous, insane, it could-not be sustained. Nobody ,knew when it would begin, or how it would begin. But it would certainly begin, even without the terrorist attack. What the terrorist attack did was to speed up the process, as you all know so well. 

The system managed to gain a bit of time by inventing new formulas, Brady bonds, and so on. It gained a bit of time. All that it could manage to do was to gain a little bit of time when that was still possible. But now there is not much time left to gain. Things have now become so complicated that they have very few possibilities left, and every solution carries the cost of aggravating the future damage. Giving things away? They are not going to give anything away. Those who control the world economy are fundamentalists about this: 
I was speaking about something that they have ignored until now; and that they are perhaps beginning to understand: the fact that we are facing a crisis. And I said that no solution has ever sprung forth from anyone's head, or from ideas, or from propositions; solutions must come from realities, and they must dome from a crisis. 
And crises do not come when people want them to come, either. They simply come, and sometimes they come fast, because events now travel faster than ever, too. Do not believe for a minute that today's empire can last as long as the Roman Empire did, or the British Empire later, or the other empires or semi-empires in history. Today, events occur at a faster pace. You could almost say that they move at the speed of light, at the same speed with which operations can be carried out from one side of the world to another, in a fraction of a second, or the .way communications take place over the Internet in a fraction of a second. This is the speed at which events move today, and they cannot move any other way, because this is the speed at which science and technology have developed. This much history shows. 
Without going too far back, the French Revolution could not have come about 50 years earlier or 50 years later than it did. Theoreticians came along, as the crisis became more obvious, but it was not the theoreticians who made the revolution. They formulated ideas and principles, but it was hunger and the unsustainable situation that led to the revolution at that precise moment in time. 
If you want another moment in history, well, in the 17th year of the last century, the conditions were created for a major social revolution, the Russian Revolution. Before that there was the Mexican Revolution, after Porfirio Diaz. Under those tremendous conditions the crisis was set off, and the leaders emerged with the crisis. 
The subjective factors can only move too quickly or too slowly, but they start and develop, and subjective factors can have a decisive influence. It is possible for a revolution like the Bolshevik revolution to end up like it did, although it was authentic. And I totally agree that when the revolution expected in all the industrialized countries did not take place, the revolutionaries did not give up but decided to build socialism in 'a single country' which was in fact in contradiction to the theories of Marx, and yet they did not hesitate to do so. 
Many things could be said, different views and opinions. When the balance of powers in the world could have been broken, it was prevented by subjective factors. And in the end, we too have carried out the Revolution in a single country, here, among all the countries of Latin America, where with the exception of Mexico, all of the other socalled governments, and I must use that term, joined with the United States against Cuba. Sometimes we blame governments for problems, when in fact neither independence nor governments exist anymore. Their power is being ever more diminished to a minimum. 
We are very much aware of the conditions in which we undertook the Revolution. During the first years, of course, the existence of a socialist camp was very useful to us. I would not call what they had real socialism, but rather virtual socialism, because something imported is not the same as something autochthonous. A political process or revolution achieved through artificial insemination, or cloning, is not the real thing. And what really happened was a sort of cloning of the experience of a country that jumped from feudalism to socialism, where 80% of the people were ignorant campesinos at the time of the revolution; a handful of the proletariat in the least industrialized country in Europe, which, as a result of World War II, spread to encompass the most underdeveloped, agricultural region of Europe. 
We now reach the stage when the United States emerged from that war as an invincible power; with all of its industry intact and 80% of the world's gold. This allowed it, to impose the infamous Bretton Woods Agreement, until two-thirds of that gold was misappropriated and squandered, and it had only 10 billion troy ounces left, with a known value of 35 dollars an ounce, and a mechanism that guaranteed the stability of this price by buying gold when it was in abundance and selling when it was scarce. It worked like a precisely well-oiled machine until after the VietNam war, when 500 billion USD were spent tax-free and only a third of the original gold remained, bringing an end to the gold standard. Gold was replaced with paper, with the bills printed by the Department of the Treasury or the-Federal Reserve, and since then they have used paper to cover their enormous deficits, and an internal debt that has grown fivefold in a few years. 
They use this paler to buy our goods and services. They use this paper to sustain a deficit of up to 400 billion dollars, while we are prohibited from having any deficit whatsoever. "Close schools, close hospitals, cast the people down into hunger, onto the streets, into unemployment," they say. We know all of this, because we hear it from all of the doctors, teachers and professors who come here to participate in meetings and recount the tragedies they face in Latin America. 
These are the rules applied, one law for them and another law for everyone else. And besides paying us with paper, they force us to sell them our natural resources and industries, and in some places even the trains, parks, streets, highways, and so on and so forth. 
What is the reason behind these enormous expenditures on war? Is it perhaps an attempt to inject money into the economy? From my point of view, the answer is no, This administration is also Keynesian in its own way. They have injected a bit of money into circulation, in the hopes of renewed growth, for a short while; if they can manage it. Their fundamental formula is through lowering or practically eliminating a large number of taxes. They have in fact given up on the dream of the five trillion USD that were supposed to be accumulated over the course of 10 years as a result of surpluses. Now they know this will not happen, and they have a growing deficit once again. 
Many people in the United States dreamed that the surplus would be spent on ensuring health care, improving schools, ensuring pensions for the large numbers of retiring Americans, that is, the post-war generation. All of these dreams have been shattered, and furthermore, the reduction and elimination of taxes is much more beneficial for those who have more money to begin with. 
Does it make any sense to inject money into a country whose people have lost the habit of saving, where personal income savings are below zero? Yet, they want to boost the economy by injecting money. 
The increase in military spending falls far below the injection of money into circulation through tax cuts. These are desperate measures, like the Japanese lowering interest rates to zero to promote investment, and the United States lowering them to 1.75%, the lowest rate I can remember; I do riot know if it has ever been lower. 
So why, is this happening? Why such a huge military budget? Why such huge investments in new technologies? It is because they are beginning to understand that the world is becoming ever more ungovernable, that it can no longer sustain itself merely through the enchantment of its commercials, that it needs force, that it needs more aircraft carriers and more aircraft and more sophisticated aircraft. It needs to declare a world war and threaten 80 countries - because they say there are now 80 countries that could be the targets of its attacks. 
What is all this about threatening to use military force? And against a list of countries that is said to include as many as 80. What happened to the idea of an organization called the United Nations? What about that organization's legal standards? What happened to legal and ethical principles? 
When you ask why all these seemingly absurd and inexplicable things are happening,, it is because what they are really afraid of is not actually terrorism. What they fear more than that is the rebellion of the peoples. What they fear are the movements that build an awareness and mobilize public opinion, which have already waged major and memorable battles in numerous venues, and have made it almost impossible for them to even meet together. That is why the promoters of this policy have reacted with such fury and arrogance, resorting even to haughty treatment of their own allies and to flirting with the idea of using their formidable, brutal, blind and seemingly invincible power to sow panic and terror among all the peoples of the world. 
The consequences of this will be even greater resistance, even greater opposition, even greater protests; even greater discontent on the part of this species threatened not only by the worst form of slavery and colonialism, ever known, but also endangered in terms of its very survival. It is this awareness that has mobilized many people from the middle classes of the industrialized countries, who have gained ever greater knowledge of the dangers looming over the environment and over their-very lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren. 
This struggle against neoliberal globalization is a common cause shared by all the peoples of the world, who cannot calmly accept the breaking of the Kyoto Protocol, which offers some hope; who cannot understand why in the world nuclear shields are being built, with who knows how much money being spent on them; when the cold war is supposed to be over and the adversary has long,ceased to be a superpower, and is national budgets are smaller than the United States' military budgets.