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 
Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074   www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk     [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.] 
No 1155 October 08 2002                                     25p

LATE NEWS

1. The attempted coup d'état by Unionism to destroy the Good Friday Agreement (which is delivering a reunited Ireland) remained unresolved at publication time. Discussion next issue.

2 Bush's promised destruction of Iraqi state independence "because of possession of weapons of mass destruction which might reach terrorist hands" could equally be used to justify enforced state castration of China, Pakistan, Israel, India, France, Russia, or possibly other countries like Iran, Brazil, or South Africa in time. This is a declaration of World War III, and flows inevitably from the insoluble economic collapse of the world imperialist "freemarket" system.

*****************
Fake-'left' continues to conceal the irresistible revolutionary conclusions to be drawn from contemporary imperialist crisis developments, - at last accepting that 'revolution' is back on the agenda, but only in order to castrate it of all real meaning, and distort Marxism to 'prove' that 'peaceful is best' 'if possible'. Their actual aim is to regroup around a bogus 'revolutionary left' of the Labour Party so as to maintain a false 'progressive' cover to prevent the Blairite movement from imploding as capitalism collapses (putting the mark of doom on all 'private finance initiative' believers), and as Labour imperialism sinks to condoning US and Zionist imperial-colonial tyranny and butchery more dishonest and sickening than Nazism, relying on the fake-'left's "condemn terror" hypocrisy to shield them.

As anticipated, the question of revolution has finally forced itself back onto the agenda of the fake-'left' to the background of out-of-control economic crisis and unrestrained American warmongering declarations (to cover up the crisis and to use the USA's overwhelming military superiority for salvaging most out of the destruction of 'over-production' surpluses via inter-imperialist wars - the tradition of World War (parts I & II) by which these slump and trade-war crises have been 'solved' in the past).

But as usual, the arguments starting in one corner of the Socialist Alliance are being conducted in entirely academic historical terms, as a matter of 'principle', - and not as a result of the irrefutable evidence piling up of insoluble imperialist economic collapse resulting in panic-stricken warmongering hysteria in the US Establishment which has most to lose from a world slump, - an aggressive militarism to divert the blame for the crash from capitalism itself onto others abroad.

This monstrous deceit may start with the vacuous "war on terrorism", and then persecute Iraq and other "axis of evil" candidates, but it can only terminate in a generalised fascist-colonial onslaught on the world outside of the US monopoly-bourgeoisie's narrow imperialist interests.

In the end, this collapse of the existing global economic order will need as much class-war tyranny inside the USA for the American bourgeoisie to survive (in its exalted historical position) as will be needed of national-war tyranny against the anti-imperialist movements of the middle East, Asia, Latin America, etc, and of inter-imperialist war as a consequence of that colonial pillaging.

NOTHING BUT revolutionary situations can possibly be seen as arising from such an Armageddon scenario, - worldwide socialist revolution. And if the philistine hostility to Marxist-Leninist science on the fake-'left' blinds them to these obvious conclusions based on the irrefutable evidence of international developments facing the world, then the capitalist press itself is increasingly frankly admitting that warmongering colonial tyranny is precisely now the whole point of the West's very existence:

Some fear that war is inevitable whatever the outcome of the negotiations. A senior official on the UN staff said yesterday that there was now a wariness in the office of secretary general Kofi Annan that whatever the outcome of the backstage negotiation, the guiding forces behind the Bush administration had already decided when to strike Iraq. 

The official, who is in regular contact with Annan, said that intelligence had reached the UN that so far as the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney were concerned, the war was slated for mid-November.

'It's hard sometimes not to be tempted by the notion that some people in the administration see the deliberations here as a charade to which they have to pay lip service, and the declaration of war is a done deal,'  he said.

OIL IS emerging as the key factor in US attempts to secure the support of Russia and France for military action against Iraq, according to an Observer investigation.

The Bush administration, intimately entwined with the global oil industry, is keen to pounce on Iraq's massive untapped reserves, the second biggest in the world after Saudi Arabia's. But France and Russia, who hold a power of veto on the UN Security Council, have billion-dollar contracts with Baghdad, which they fear will disappear in 'an oil grab by Washington', if America installs a successor to Saddam.

A Russian official at the United Nations in New York told The Observer last week that the $7 billion in Soviet-era debt was not the main 'economic interest' in Iraq about which the Kremlin is voicing its concerns. The main fear was a post-Saddam government would not honour extraction contracts Moscow has signed with Iraq.

Russian business has longstanding interests in Iraq. Lukoil, the biggest oil company in Russia, signed a $20bn contract in 1997 to drill the West Qurna oilfield. Such a deal could evaporate along with the Saddam regime, together with a more recent contract with Russian giant Zarubezhneft, which was granted a potential $90bn concession to develop the bin Umar oilfield. The total value of Saddam's foreign contract awards could reach $1.1 trillion, according to the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2001.

The Russian official said his government believed the US had brokered a deal with the coalition of Iraqi opposition forces it backs whereby support against Saddam is conditional on their declaring - on taking power - all oil contracts conceded under his rule to be null and void.

'The concern of my government,' said the official, 'is that the concessions agreed between Baghdad and numerous enterprises will be reneged upon, and that US companies will enter to take the greatest share of those existing contracts... Yes, if you could say it that way - an oil grab by Washington.'

A government insider in Paris told The Observer that France also feared suffering economically from US oil ambitions at the end of a war. But the dilemma for Paris is more complex. Despite President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany agreeing last week to oppose changing the rules governing weapons inspectors, France may back military action.

Government sources say they fear - existing concessions aside - France could be cut out of the spoils if it did not support the war and show a significant military presence. If it comes to war, France is determined to be allotted a more prestigious role in the fighting than in the 1991 Gulf war, when its main role was to occupy lightly defended ground. Negotiations have been going on between the state-owned TotalFinaElf company and the US about redistribution of oil regions between the world's major companies.

Washington's predatory interest in Iraqi oil is clear, whatever its political protestations about its motives for war. The US National Energy Policy Report of 2001 known as the 'Cheney Report' after its author, Vice President Dick Cheney, formerly one of America's richest and most powerful oil industry magnates - demanded a priority on easing US access to Persian Gulf supplies.

Doubts about Saudi Arabia - even before 11 September, and even more so in its wake - led US strategists to seek a backup supply in the region. America needs 20 million barrels of crude a day, and analysts have singled out the country that could meet up to half that requirement: Iraq.

The current high price of oil is dragging the US economy further into recession. US control of the Iraqi reserves, perhaps the biggest unmapped reservoir in the world, would break Saudi Arabia's hold on the oil-pricing cartel Opec, and dictate prices for the next century.

This could spell disaster for Russian oil giants, keen to expand their sales to the West. Russia has sought to prolong negotiations, official statements going between opposition to any new UN resolution and possible support for military action against an Iraqi regime proven to be developing weapons of mass destruction.

While France is thought likely to support US military action, and China will probably fall in line because of its admission to the World Trade Organisation, Putin is left holding the wild cards.

Russia recognises the potential benefits of reaching a deal with the US: Saddam's regime is difficult to work with. Lukoil's billion-dollar concessions are frozen and profitless to Moscow and Baghdad under UN sanctions, leading to fears that Saddam might have declared the agreement null and void out of spite. Iraqi diplomats say Zarubezhneft won its $90bn contract only after Baghdad took it away from TotalFinaElf because of French support for sanctions. 

Russia stands to profit if intervention in the Gulf triggers a hike in Middle East oil prices, as its firms are lobbying to sell millions of barrels a day to the US, at two-thirds of the current market price. Moscow's trust of Washington may be slipping after what a Russian UN official calls 'broken promises' that followed negotiations over Moscow's support for the Afghan campaign.

Russia turned a blind eye to US troops in central Asia, on the tacit condition that US-Russian trade restrictions would be lifted. But they are still there, and other benefits expected after 11 September have also not materialised. 'They've been making this point very strongly,' a senior Bush administration official conceded to the Washington Post, 'that this can't be an all-give-and-no-get relationship ... They do have a point that the growing relationship has got to be reciprocal.'

This is as revealing an admission of the predatory warmongering at the very heart of the 'free market' monopoly-imperialist economic system as could be wished for from the bourgeoisie's own sources, short of actually expressing it in bluntly Leninist terms.

Exactly as the EPSR has always explained, the splits in the imperialist camp will included denouncing each other for "unnecessary warmongering", etc, to try to milk public opinion as France and Germany have done against the USA over Iraq, but ONLY in order to achieve an international warmongering pattern more suited to their OWN needs.

When the German imperialist economy says it will not take part in a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, it is only done out of calculating where the advantage of its own global economic interests lies and how the detriment to the USA's interests might be maximised.

Similarly with France and Russia in this Observer admission. Chirac is trying to put Bush and Blair's hysterical warmongering in the worst possible light for international and domestic consumption, but it is confidently declared that France will be in at the spoils once war starts, adding its own aggression to ensure a bigger share of the proceeds. Russia the same.

This was almost the theme tune of all Bolshevik propaganda throughout World War I, that the entire conflict was solely about a redivision of the spoils between the world's strongest economic imperialism powers, grabbing markets and colonial influence off each other.

That all resulted in the INEVITABLE first beginnings of the world socialist revolution in Russia, and a spluttering but quickly extinguished start elsewhere.

That Soviet workers state did lead to a huge impact on the 20th century of dozens of imitative, non-capitalist, anti-imperialist states adhering to the non-aligned movement or to the Socialist Camp; and although most of that huge development has now been misled into self-liquidation by Stalin's Revisionist imbecilities which brainwashed the world towards "two-system peaceful coexistence" instead of preparing it for the next revolutionary wave arising out of the next warmongering imperialist economic crisis, the Marxist-Leninist science of INEVITABLE revolution has not lost a scrap of its validity.

Any number of Third World countries will shortly find that only a Bolshevik proletarian revolution can get imperialist tyranny off their backs, and that national-democratic revolution can no longer maintain any semblance of 'independence' or national advantage.

For weaker imperialist economies which lose out in the collapse, and even more certainly if they lose out in the inter-imperialist warmongering as well, - only proletarian revolution will be able to offer any convincing way forward out of imperialist tyranny and breakdown.

And even in the strongest imperialist countries, conditions for the vast mass of people will have so deteriorated because of the catastrophes of the economic slump and the horrors of inter-imperialist warmongering that socialist REVOLUTION will prove to be essential for ditching bourgeois-imperialist degeneracy and reactionary intrigue as rapidly and as securely as possible.

The Weekly Worker contribution to this fake-'left' argument about revolution admits that

"Socialism can never come through parliament. The capitalist class will never willingly allow their wealth and power to be taken away through a parliamentary vote. They will resist, using every means at their disposal."

So far, so good, but then comes the foulest cess pit of anti-Marxist confusion that workers could ever be misled into sinking under:

"Communists favour using parliament," it goes on, "and winning the best possible working class representation. But the workers must be readied to make revolution, -  peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must."

This is the perfect example of the hopelessness of 'left' politics originating in narrow academic petty-bourgeois sects.

The colossal world historic influence of Marxism cannot safely yet be totally ignored by these 'Alliance' posturers, and so lip-service still has to be paid from time to time to just a word or two of traditional communist understanding, but what emerges? The worst, disarming mish-mash that workers could ever be hampered with.

This demagogic posture of "Peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must" coming from a stable of longtime, relentless, anti-communist counter-revolutionary politics amounts to an absolute guarantee that any workers misguided enough to follow this dishonest opportunist 'Alliance' will remain as unaware as ever of the actual irresistible REVOLUTIONARY FORCES soon to be smashing 800 years of bourgeois world-rule to pieces, as no longer remotely suitable or tolerable to the further progress of world civilisation).

This is the gang that want a workers party to tail-end such incurable opportunist muddleheads as Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn, Dennis Skinner, and other reactionary MP philistines whose traditional role for the British imperialist state is to provide a 'left' cover for Labour Party imperialism to commit all the worst crimes of Western colonial militarism since 1945 such as re-conquering Malaya, Greece, etc, from their communist liberators; letting in the Zionist military colonisation of Palestine; scarring India with partition to keep it permanently weak and divided; helping US imperialism encircle the Socialist Camp with nuclear-weapon warmongering; and inflict counter-revolutionary roll-backs in Korea, and Vietnam, etc; militarily maintaining repressive colonial occupations in Ireland, Aden, Cyprus, Africa, etc, etc; blitzkrieging Serbia; continuing the bombing-destruction of Iraq; invading Afghanistan; protecting the Zionist tyranny over Occupied Palestine; and now preparing for bloody new massacres of the Iraqi people; etc, etc, etc.

This is the gang of 'Alliance' reactionaries who backed the CIA/Vatican's neofascist stooge Walesa to restore pro-imperialist misery to Poland and smash the working-class gains under the planned socialist state, - all in the name of "real rank-and-file socialism" around Solidarnosc, and some of whom still call for the "revolutionary overthrow" of the Castro regime in Cuba to provide a cover for US imperialist counter-revolution under the guise of a pretended belief in the silly fiction about nonexistent "political revolution for real socialism" against the workers states.

This is the gang who deliberately sneered at the Good Friday Agreement triumph for the IRA/Sinn Féin guerrilla-war national-liberation strategy as "failure" - "routed by an imposed 'peace' from the unbeatable US imperialist New World order", etc, etc, simultaneously covering up the crucially significant DEFEAT for British imperialism that the GFA represented, dismantling the British 'Northern Ireland' colonial tyranny for ever; misleading people about the real overall WEAKNESS historically of the imperialist position generally, including the American part; and rubbishing the heroically successful guerrilla-war tactics of the IRA and Sinn Féin which inspired anti-imperialist struggles worldwide.

This "peacefully if we can" is not just suicidally complacent and misleading, it is CONSCIOUS reactionary brainwashing to disarm workers and prolong the counter-revolutionary anti-communist influence that these sectarian academic haters of Leninism have always represented, - a disgusting amalgam of ex-Stalinist Revisionists and Trotskyite Walter-Mitty opportunists.

Every scrap of this insincere, theatrical 'left' posture is deliberately shallowly misleading, done purely for effect.

Communists don't "favour" using parliament. It is utter brainrot. Communists want the TOTAL OVERTHROW and TOTAL EXPROPRIATION of the ruling class as securely and finally as possible, yet as rapidly as possible.

Every other consideration is a purely tactical question, which will overwhelmingly be governed by what the threatened ruling class will DO, not by what any self-appointed 'socialist' academics would 'prefer' to see happen.

And it is the absolute bedrock of Marxist-Leninist science that ONLY the unrelenting DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT will ever guarantee the secure overthrow of the ruling class, and even that will only become permanent once proletarian dictatorship is the SOLE form of state and social power over the whole planet, as has been proved by the revival of a Russian capitalist class on the Revisionist-created ruins of the deliberately-liquidated Soviet proletarian dictatorship, undermined in part by precisely the worldwide anti-Marxist philistinism which Britain's 'Socialist Alliance' so repulsively embodies. 

And workers will not be "readied" to make revolution by the 'Alliance' (least of all by them in reality), OR BY ANYONE ELSE. 

Revolutionary forces are largely spontaneous historico-social forces in their essence, and BEYOND THE CONTROL OF ANYONE in the final analysis. They can be led well or badly once a revolutionary situation has arrived and been recognised as such; but no revolutionary situation can just be manufactured at the whim of a Trotskyite sect, - as pretended here (thus adding to the certainty that this is all a load of posturing, purely for theatrical effect).

In defending this anti-Marxist muddle from attack, the 'Alliance' sectarians put forward the usual propaganda smokescreen, accusing those who question "peaceful" of wanting "bloody revenge on the bourgeoisie for its own sake", which would be "CRIMINALLY WRONG" (emphasis added).

Which merely reveals the petty-bourgeois moralising soul of these "peaceful road" dunderheads.

It might be poor tactics to let the pursuit of hot-headed vengeance govern the struggle for power. It might even be sickeningly primitive and wasteful, or treacherously self-righteous and likely to do more damage to the revolution than good in the long run, etc, etc, etc.

But the only place that "criminally wrong" is coming from is the direction of people who basically would prefer there to be no revolution at all rather than one that might have all sorts of blemishes in it.

The only position from which attempts to further the revolutionary overthrow of the ruling class could be condemned as "criminally wrong" must be mentally anchored on THIS side of the event in time and place.

Revolutionaries, determined to press on with the revolution, might consider all gratuitous violence and destruction by the risen masses to be tragically wasteful and regrettably savage.

Only a bourgeois, basically content for there to be no revolution at all, however, could in advance denounce possible violent excesses as "criminally wrong", thereby in effect adding to society's fears of (and resistance to) a mass uprising. 

For these decrepit sectarian CPGB academics to then try pretending that "of course we wouldn't jeopardise the revolution for fear of violent excesses" won't wash.

Their whole philosophical position is precisely summed up in these matters, - a counter-revolutionary anti-communist one.

Where does this discredited "peaceful road" come from anyway? Why introduce it in the first place?? Does it not at the minimum express some hidden contempt for the proletariat that they are all in reality just bloodthirsty degenerate hooligans of little or no culture whose revolution will have to be abandoned as "criminally wrong" the moment that things get out of hand???

It is WORSE than that. This is the Weekly Worker message to the bourgeoisie. It EXACTLY continues the CPGB's whole cowardly historic stance of Revisionist anti-communism and anti-Sovietism, - started by Stalin's anti-revolutionary "peaceful coexistence" confusion;  extended by Eurocommunism's embarrassment at the dictatorship of the proletariat (especially when it had to be used to stop CIA counter-revolutionary provocations); and finally adopted by Gorbachev to dismantle, in idiotic shame, the Soviet workers state in its entirety.

The message is: "Please love us. We mean you no revolutionary harm whatsoever".

And that message is the WHOLE POINT of this "peacefully if we can" disarming confusion and rank anti-Marxist stupidity.

It EXACTLY continues the entire "peaceful road to socialism" reactionary class-collaborating drivel which Stalin's Revisionist imbecilities (e.g. as represented in Economic Problems - 1952) destroyed the whole Third International with.

If the revolutionary overthrow of the ruling class can be carried through with very little bloodshed, or destruction, or loss of life in any direction, WHO among revolutionary workers does the CPGB know who would NOT be delighted and relieved at such an outcome????

So who is this message directed at? Once again, it can only be the bourgeoisie:

"Don't take us too seriously. We have to mention revolution or we would have no followers at all, but please note that we are telling everyone to cool it, and we are joining you to condemn as 'criminally wrong' all those who become too violently agitated in this political struggle".

And this is EXACTLY the same message too that these bogus 'revolutionaries' rushed to send out to the international imperialist bourgeoisie when anti-imperialist hatred of Western colonial tyranny drove a score of young men from the Middle East to sacrifice their lives in the suicide-bomb attacks on the Twin Towers World Trade and Pentagon imperialist symbols on Sept 11.

"We condemn this terrorism", the Alliance parliamentary cretins all quickly reassured the world's bourgeoisie.

The Marxist-Leninist position on such matters was made crystal clear by Lenin in his Sept 1906 article on Guerrilla Warfare:

Marxism demands an absolutely historical examination of the question of the forms of struggle. To treat this question apart from the concrete historical situation betrays a failure to understand the rudiments of dialectical materialism. At different stages of economic evolution, depending on differences in political, national-cultural, living and other conditions, different forms of struggle come to the fore and become the principal forms of struggle; and in connection with this,  the secondary, auxiliary forms of struggle undergo change in their turn. To attempt to answer yes or no to the question whether any particular means of struggle should be used, without making a detailed examination of the concrete situation of the given movement at the given stage of its development, means completely to abandon the Marxist position.

The phenomenon in which we are interested is the armed struggle. It is conducted by individuals and by small groups. Some belong to revolutionary organisations, while others (the majority in certain parts of Russia) do not belong to any revolutionary organisation.

The usual appraisal of the struggle we are describing is that it is anarchism, Blanquism, the old terrorism, the acts of individuals isolated from the masses, which demoralise the workers, repel wide strata of the population, disorganise the movement and injure the revolution. Examples in support of this appraisal can easily be found in the events reported every day in the newspapers.

But are such examples convincing?

The fact that "guerrilla" warfare became widespread precisely after December, and its connection with the accentuation not only of the economic crisis but also of the political crisis is beyond dispute. The old Russian terrorism was an affair of the intellectual conspirator; today as a general rule guerrilla warfare is waged by the worker combatant, or simply by the unemployed worker. Blanquism and anarchism easily occur to the minds of people who have a weakness for stereotype; but under the circumstances of an uprising, which are so apparent in the Lettish Territory, the inappropriateness of such trite labels is only too obvious. The example of the Letts clearly demonstrates how incorrect, unscientific and unhistorical is the practice so very common among us of analysing guerrilla warfare without reference to the circumstances of an uprising. These circumstances must be borne in mind, we must reflect on the peculiar features of an intermediate period between big acts of insurrection, we must realise what forms of struggle inevitably arise under such circumstances, and not try to shirk the issue by a collection of words learned by rote, such as are used equally by the Cadets and the Novoye Vremya-ites: anarchism, robbery, hooliganism).

It is said that guerrilla acts disorganise our work.

It is not guerrilla actions which disorganise the movement, but the weakness of a party which is incapable of taking such actions under its control. Being incapable of understanding what historical conditions give rise to this struggle, we are incapable of neutralising its deleterious aspects. Yet the struggle is going on. It is engendered by powerful economic and political causes. It is not in our power to eliminate these causes or to eliminate this struggle. Our complaints against guerrilla warfare are complaints against our Party weakness in the matter of an uprising.

What we have said about disorganisation also applies to demoralisation.

		[]condemnation and curses are absolutely incapable of putting a stop to a phenomenon which has been engendered by profound economic and political causes. It may be objected that if we are incapable of putting a stop to an abnormal and demoralising phenomenon, this is no reason why the Party should adopt abnormal and demoralising methods of struggle. But such an objection would be a purely bourgeois-liberal and not a Marxist objection, because a Marxist cannot regard civil war, or guerrilla warfare, which is one of its forms, as abnormal and demoralising in general. A Marxist bases himself on the class struggle, and not social peace. In certain periods of acute economic and political crises the class struggle ripens into a direct civil war, i.e. into an armed struggle between two sections of the people. In such periods a Marxist is obliged to take the stand of civil war. Any moral condemnation of civil war would be absolutely impermissible from the standpoint of Marxism.

We fully admit criticism of diverse forms of civil war from the standpoint of military expediency and absolutely agree that in this question it is the Social-Democratic practical workers in each particular locality who must have the final say. But we absolutely demand, in the name of the principles of Marxism that an analysis of the conditions of civil war should not be evaded by hackneyed and stereotyped talk about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, and that senseless methods of guerrilla activity adopted by some organisation or other of the Polish Socialist Party at some moment or other should not be used as a bogey when discussing the question of the participation of the Social-Democratic Party as such in guerrilla warfare in general. 

The argument that guerrilla warfare disorganises the movement must be regarded critically. Every new form of struggle, accompanied as it is by new dangers and new sacrifices, inevitably "disorganises" organisations which are unprepared for this new form of struggle. Our old propagandist circles were disorganised by recourse to methods of agitation. Our committees were subsequently disorganised by recourse to demonstrations. Every military action in any war to a certain extent disorganises the ranks of the fighters. But this does not mean that one must not fight. It means that one must learn to fight. That is all.

When I see Social-Democrats proudly and smugly declaring "we are not anarchists, thieves, robbers, we are superior to all this, we reject guerrilla warfare", - I ask myself: Do these people realise what they are saying? Armed clashes and conflicts between the Black Hundred government and the population are taking place all over the country. This is an absolutely inevitable phenomenon at the present stage of development of the revolution. The population is spontaneously and in an unorganised way - and for that very reason often in unfortunate and undesirable forms - reacting to this phenomenon also by armed conflicts and attacks. I can understand us refraining from Party leadership of this spontaneous struggle in a particular place or at a particular time because of the weakness and unpreparedness of our organisation. I realise that this question must be settled by the local practical workers, and that the remoulding of weak and unprepared organisations is no easy matter. But when I see a Social-Democratic theoretician or publicist not displaying regret over this unpreparedness, but rather a proud smugness and a self-exalted tendency to repeat phrases learned by rote in early youth about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, I am hurt by this degradation of the most revolutionary doctrine in the world.

It is said that guerrilla warfare brings the class-conscious proletarians into close association with degraded, drunken riff-raff. That is true. But it only means that the party of the proletariat can never regard guerrilla warfare as the only, or even as the chief, method of struggle; it means that this method must be subordinated to other methods, that it must be commensurate with the chief methods of warfare, and must be ennobled by the enlightening and organising influence of socialism. And without this latter condition, all, positively all, methods of struggle in bourgeois society bring the proletariat into close association with the various non-proletarian strata above and below it and, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become frayed, corrupted and prostituted.  Strikes, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become corrupted into "alliances" - agreements between the workers and the masters against the consumers. Parliament becomes corrupted into a brothel, where a gang of bourgeois politicians barter wholesale and retail "national freedom", "liberalism", "democracy", republicanism, anti-clericalism, socialism and all other wares in demand. A newspaper becomes corrupted into a public pimp, into a means of corrupting the masses, of pandering to the low instincts of the mob, and so on and so forth. Social-Democracy knows of no universal methods of struggle, such as would shut off the proletariat by a Chinese wall from the strata standing slightly above or slightly below it.

That being so - and it is undoubtedly so - the Social-Democrats must absolutely make it their duty to create organisations best adapted to lead the masses in these big engagements and, as far as possible, in these small encounters as well. In a period when the class struggle has become accentuated to the point of civil war, Social-Democrats must make it their duty not only to participate but also to play the leading role in this civil war. The Social-Democrats must train and prepare their organisations to be really able to act as a belligerent side which does not miss a single opportunity of inflicting damage on the enemy's forces.

This is a difficult task, there is no denying. It cannot be accomplished at once. Just as the whole people are being retrained and are learning to fight in the course of the civil war, so our organisations must be trained, must be reconstructed in conformity with the lessons of experience to be equal to this task.

We have not the slightest intention of foisting on practical workers any artificial form of struggle, or even of deciding from our armchair what part any particular form of guerrilla warfare should play in the general course of the civil war in Russia. We are far from the thought of regarding a concrete assessment of particular guerrilla actions as indicative of a trend in Social-Democracy. But we do regard it as our duty to help as far as possible to arrive at a correct theoretical assessment of the new forms of struggle engendered by practical life. We do regard it as our duty relentlessly to combat stereotypes and prejudices which hamper the class-conscious workers in correctly presenting a new and difficult problem and in correctly approaching its solution.

• The Bolshevik Social-Democrats are often accused of a frivolous passion for guerrilla actions. It would therefore not be amiss to recall that in the draft resolution on guerrilla actions (Partiiniye Izvestia, No. 2, and Lenin's report on the Congress) the section of the Bolsheviks who defend guerrilla actions suggested the following conditions for their recognition: "expropriations" of private property were not to be permitted under any circumstances; "expropriations" of government property were not to be recommended but only allowed, provided that they were controlled by the Party and their proceeds used for the needs of an uprising. Guerrilla acts in the form of terrorism were to be recommended against brutal government officials and active members of the Black Hundreds, but on condition that, 1) the sentiments of the masses be taken into account; 2) the conditions of the working-class movement in the given locality be reckoned with, and 3) care be taken that the forces of the proletariat should not be frittered away. 
GUERRILLA WARFARE		Proletary, No.5, September 30, 1906

It is not just violence that Lenin refused to condemn but even the tactical damage which may well be caused by spontaneous struggle.

Simple solution, says Lenin. Work the revolutionary party into a position where it can LEAD such spontaneous combustions into more productive channels if the revolutionary cause really is being damaged.

But "condemnation" of violence???  Lenin was disgusted by such degrading stupidity by so-called 'revolutionaries'.

The 'Alliance' parliamentary cretins can only respond with lying distortions of Marxism:

"Put another way, in respect of Britain, Marx ADVOCATED peaceful revolution."

Put "another way" indeed. Two quotes are intertwined to produce this nonsensical lying conclusion totally manufactured by these CPGB counter-revolutionaries.

A reporter in the US newspaper The World quoted Marx as saying in July 1871: 

"In England, the way to show political power lies open to the working class. Insurrection would be madness where peaceful agitation would more swiftly and surely do the work."

He then asked Marx if violence could be avoided in Britain. Marx refused to be prescriptive. While conceding that the UK bourgeoisie 

"has always shown itself willing enough to accept the verdict of the majority so long as it enjoyed the monopoly of political power," he warned that: "As soon as it finds itself outvoted on what it considers vital questions, we shall see here a new slave-owners' war".

It is lying distortion verging on plain insanity to try to pretend that with these words "Marx ADVOCATED peaceful revolution in Britain".

His words give the EXACT OPPOSITE warning; Prepare to fight an all-out bitter war for power.

And when the Trots keep repeating that Marx and Engels consistently maintained that the amount of violence in a revolution depended entirely on how the ruling class conducted itself, that was the obvious scientific truth but does not remotely imply approval of the working class announcing on its banner: "peacefully if we can".

What purpose does such guilt-ridden self-incrimination serve except to boost society's existing bourgeois 'morality' hypocrisy, pretending that "we all hate violence, don't we".

That phrase sums up the putrid essence of bourgeois world rule, - preaching 'freedom', 'democracy', 'morality' and 'Christianity' in its 'parliamentary law-and-order' joke, but in reality imposing the most relentless brainwashing censorship and merciless arms-race imperialist dictatorship of any international power system history has ever known.

And who do we find propping it up long after most of the planet has seen through its ghastly hypocrisy but the leftest of the fake-'left' around the 'Socialist Alliance'.

In what serious way can the 'left' Labourites that the 'Alliance' supports at the polls be said to be "against violence" when the Labour Government sits silently by as the Zionist tyranny inflicts this week's latest massacre on unarmed civilians in the Gaza Strip concentration camp, defying so many more UN Resolutions than Iraq has ever disputed that they cannot be counted.

They could express such outrage at these criminal atrocities that they could bring Parliament to a standstill.

They could have brought last week's Labour conference to a standstill.

But from such prestige-loving bourgeois opportunists, held up by the 'Alliance' for workers to follow and emulate, - not a single peep of protest.

The price for joining this sick parliamentary love-in for so-called 'revolutionaries'? Just keep hyping the bourgeois 'morality' nonsense of "peacefully if we can.."

Or consider Labour's long term imperialist savagery of knowingly helping impose Zionist colonial genocide onto Palestine in the first place, as is now openly being boasted of by notorious Zionist historian Benny Morris in calling for this one real postwar giant crime of ethnic cleansing to be completed in full at last:

The idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century. And driving it was an iron logic: There could be no viable Jewish state in all or part of Palestine unless there was a mass displacement of Arab inhabitants, who opposed its emergence and would constitute an active or potential fifth column in its midst. This logic was understood, and enunciated, before and during 1948, by Zionist, Arab and British leaders and officials.

As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl, the prophet and founder of Zionism, wrote in his diary in anticipation of the establishment of the Jewish state: "We shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country... The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

By the 1930s, matters had crystallised, with Arab gunmen attacking the British Mandate authorities and the Zionist settlers. The Arab Revolt (1936-39) aimed to force an end to Jewish immigration to Palestine and to eject the Jews' British protectors. Whitehall sent out a royal commission, chaired by Lord Peel, to investigate. It published its report in July 1937. Peel was unable to avoid the logic of transfer. The commission recommended that Palestine be partitioned between its Jewish and Arab inhabitants - and that 225,000 Arabs be transferred out of the 20% of the country it earmarked for Jewish sovereignty, (and the handful of Jews, some 1,250, living in the Arab areas be transferred to the Jewish state). A "clean and final" solution of the Palestine problem necessitated transfer, the commission ruled.

Both David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Zionist movement and Israel's first prime minister, and Chaim Weizmann, the movement's elder statesman, supported transfer. The background was the Arab revolt and the growing anti-semitic persecutions in Europe, which heralded the Holocaust; the need for a safe haven for the Jews in Palestine had become acute just as Arab violence was pushing the British into closing the doors to immigration.

Ben-Gurion hailed Lord Peel's recommendations: "The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had...during the days of the First and Second Temples...an opportunity which we never dared to dream in our wildest imaginings." In August 1937 he told the emergency 20th Zionist Congress, convened in Zurich: "We do not want to dispossess, [but piecemeal] transfer of population [through Jewish purchase and the removal of Arab tenant farmers] occurred previously, in the [Jezreel] Valley, in the Sharon and in other places...Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out...Transfer is what will make possible a comprehensive [Jewish] settlement programme. Thankfully, the Arab people have vast empty areas [in Transjordan and Iraq].  Jewish power, which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out the transfer on a large scale."

Weizmann also supported a transfer scheme and in 1941 told Ivan Maiskii, the Soviet ambassador in London (according to the envoy's own account): "If half a million Arabs could be transferred, two million Jews [i.e., Jewish immigrants] could be put in their place. That, of course, would be a first instalment...According to Maiskii, Weizmann had proposed "to move a million Arabs...to Iraq, and to settle four or five million Jews from Poland and other countries on the land where these Arabs were."

When Maiskii queried how 4-5 million Jews could be expected to settle on lands previously inhabited by only 1 million Arabs, Weizmann replied: "The Arab is often called the son of the desert. It would be truer to call him the father of the desert. His laziness and primitivism turn a flourishing garden into a desert".

But it was not only the Zionist leaders who believed transfer was the solution to the problem of Palestine and its successful partition. In July 1948, midway in the first Arab-Israeli war, by which time about 400,000 Arabs had been displaced from their homes, Britain's foreign secretary (and no Zionist), Ernest Bevin, wrote: "On a long-term view... there may be something to be said for an exchange of population between the areas assigned to the Arabs and the Jews respectively..."And" he added, in explication "It might be argued that the flight of large numbers of Arabs from the territory under Jewish administration had simplified the task of arriving at a stable settlement in Palestine since some transfers of population seems [sic] to be an essential condition for such a settlement." 

A few days later, London's central intelligence office in the area, the British Middle East Office, chimed in: "The panic flight of Arabs from the Jewish occupied areas of Palestine has presented a very serious immediate problem but may possibly point the way to a long-term solution of one of the greatest difficulties in the way of a satisfactory implementation of partition, namely the existence in the Jewish state of an Arab community very nearly equal in numbers to the Jewish one." 

It went on: "Now that the initial difficulty of persuading the Arabs of Palestine to leave their homes has been overcome...it seems possible that the solution may lie in their transference to Iraq and Syria."

By the end of the 1948 war, some 700,000 Arabs had been displaced - to become refugees - in the jargon of the day. Most came to rest elsewhere in Palestine, in those parts today called the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. According to the UN, there are today close to 4 million Palestinian "refugees", meaning those driven out in 1948 and their descendants - and they constitute the single most difficult and vexing component of the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

But Bevin's and the BMEO's understanding that this massive transfer pointed the way to a "solution" of the Palestine problem was by no means a surprising mid-war discovery. Already in the early and mid-1940s Arab leaders and senior British officials understood that transfer (as an accompaniment of partition) offered a way out of the impasse.

In April 1944 the executive of Britain's Labour party published its platform for a postwar settlement. It included full-throated endorsement of the transfer of the Arabs out of Palestine and, indeed, the expansion of the mandatory borders to facilitate the absorption of large waves of Jewish immigrants. The relevant paragraph was formulated by Hugh Dalton, the chancellor of the exchequer.

Earlier, in January 1943, an under-secretary of state at the Colonial Office, the Duke of Devonshire, proposed that Britain set up an independent Arab state in Libya and that, in exchange, the Arabs acquiesce in the establishment of a Jewish state "in Palestine". He added: "The Arab population in Palestine might be dealt with by an offer of assistance to migrate to Libya for those families who find conditions in Palestine unendurable."

General John Glubb, the British commander (1939-56) of Transjordan's army, the Arab Legion, thought there was no evading a partition solution - and that the Arab population in the areas earmarked for Jewish statehood were best transferred to the Arab areas or out of Palestine altogether. In July 1946 he penned A Note on Partition as a Solution to the Palestine Problem. He wrote: "The best course will probably be to allow a time limit during which persons who find themselves in one or other state against their wishes, will be able to opt for citizenship of the other state...It is not, of course, intended to move Arab[s]...by force..."

Glubb, who in his support of partition and transfer faithfully mirrored the thinking of Transjordan's and Iraq's leaders, seemed to be speaking here of a "voluntary" transfer. But in a follow-on note, written a few weeks later, he moved toward the acceptance of some measure of compulsion as well:  "When the undoubtedly Arab and undoubtedly Jewish areas had been cleared of all members of the other community...every effort would be made [in the frontier areas] to arrange exchanges of land and population so as to leave as few people as possible to be compensated for cash."

Two years earlier, in May 1944, the director of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, Moshe Sharett, hesitantly predicted that "once the Jewish state is established it is very possible that the result will be transfer of Arabs." In the 1948 war, a transfer of 700,000 of Palestine's 1.25 million Arab inhabitants duly took place.

Both before and during 1948 all understood the logic of transfer: Given Arab opposition to the very idea and existence of a Jewish state, it, could not and would not be established, as a viable, lasting entity, without the displacement of the bulk of its Arab inhabitants. But the transfer of 1948 was incomplete: The overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people, both local inhabitants and refugees, remained in Palestine, many of them in poverty, a quarter of a million in the Gaza Strip, some half a million in the West Bank, and 150,000 in Israel proper. These populations today stand at 1 million, 2 million and 1.2 million respectively.

In 1967 Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip and today, directly and indirectly, rules over more than 4 million Arabs (alongside the country's 5 million Jews). And the basic problems remain: Infinitely higher Arab birthrates; an intermixed population that cannot live in peace in one multi-ethnic state; and Palestinian opposition both to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and to Israel's very existence (vide what is taught Palestinian children in West Bank and Gaza schools and statements by even so-called Palestinian moderates, such as Marwan Barghouti and Faisal Husseini, not to mention the oft publicised views of Islamist leaders such as Sheikh Ahmed Yassin). When Israeli rightwingers today speak of "transfer",  they think in terms not of facilitating a partition of historic Palestine but of making a clean sweep and ridding the country of its Arab inhabitants.

Or consider the Sabra massacre elsewhere this issue. No wonder Palestinians have been driven by such unpitying tyranny to suicide bombs by now against anything Zionist. But "condemn" is once again the verdict of the UK fake-'left' on Hamas and Islamic Jihad. "Peacefully if you can, remember..."

And when some understandable revenge-seeking might be pursued when this Nazi brutality and murderous colonial humiliation is finally overthrown, the fake 'revolutionary' petty-bourgeois in the UK 'Alliance' will be on hand to demand a halt to such "criminally wrong" revolutionary violence, and to "condemn" it outright.

But Leninism will triumph against this sick and reactionary posturing. Build the EPSR.

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

"In the Roman Empire only the Romans voted. In modern capitalism, only the Americans vote. Not the Brazilians."  -  George Soros
Events in South America are bringing a new dynamic to left-wing politics worldwide.

Argentinean crisis tells us something very fundamental about the nature of the world economy. It is an indictment of neo-liberal hegemony and its underlying imperialist rationale. Argentina was merely the 'weakest link' of the chain of economies in South and Latin America; a region which experienced generalised deflationary periods in the 1980s.

Since the end of last year, deflationary effects have begun to ravage other neighbouring 'Cone' economies. In July, Brazil's government bonds fell to half their face value in a matter of weeks, because of fears of a governmental default. In August, the Brazilian Real touched its lowest point since going into circulation as the national currency in 1994 (dropping 19% against the dollar).

Paraguay is currently teetering on the edge of a banking collapse and a deepening recession. In Uruguay, traditionally dubbed the "Switzerland of Latin America" for its 'rock solid' financial system, the Government is seeking an immediate loan from the International Monetary Fund to stave off a debt default. 

Against this backdrop, Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva - a former metal worker with a long record of left-wing agitation looks set to be elected as President of Brazil. Not something that the Brazilian oligarchy, its banks, foreign investors or the Bush Administration will be happy about. Indeed, in addition to the more usual orchestrated rightwing media attacks directed on the personality of the charismatic 'Lula', the Bush administration patronised a record $30bn International Monetary Fund credit to the debt ridden country to try to boost the chances of right-wing candidates.

Sometimes a slip-up by a leading figure can illustrate what's really going on to the heads of the people who are trying to coerce an entire planet into implementing market ideology irrespective of its impacts on human suffering, human development or the environment. One such moment was an interview conducted with George Soros, the world's most celebrated currency speculator, by Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading financial newspaper, in August.

The logic of Soros' argument was that Brazil would not be allowed to elect Lula because of the massive international speculative press pressure on the Real that would result. He suggested that, if elected Lula would be forced to declare a moratorium on Brazil's debt, precipitating a much larger version of the catastrophe that has been played out, to the general indifference of the world, in neighbouring Argentina.

He admitted that this market interference in the democratic process was tough but he added: "In the Roman Empire, only the Romans voted. In modern global capitalism, only the Americans vote. Not the Brazilians." Coming from a man with such influence as Soros, this statement is of huge significance.

Indeed, it is not occurring in isolation. Recently many close to the Bush presidency have made references to the 'Roman Empire'. Such imperial quotes are not without justification.

In history, the roots of the modem 19th Century empires were economic conglomeration and the thirst for raw materials and resources (including those of the human kind), not qualitatively different from the current basis of 'national self-interest' as expressed by the USA, Russia and Britain.

It is heartening that such comments have failed to scare people in Brazil as they may once have. At this stage in the great neo-liberal experiment, there are few voters in Latin America who have failed to notice that the net result of those policies has been that the gap between rich and poor, already preposterously wide in Brazil, has grown wider.

In South America, as in Europe, voters want jobs, healthcare and education. But in South and Latin America they also now know that the IMF and neo-liberalism cannot deliver in a world in which imperial interests can unilaterally invoke 'protectionist' measures. The miseries of Argentina, once touted as a neo-liberal model, illustrated the point to populations throughout the region.

Argentina has suffered serious difficulties as a result of it defaulting on repayments on its bulging debt burden. The country has  been left hanging by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which has dangled the carrot of a further loan to pay off repayments at the cost of massive cuts in social-welfare spending and privatisations. 

This scenario is not unique in the Third World, or those countries that might be classified as victims of today's imperialism. Argentina was unlucky enough to have linked its national currency, the Peso, to the dollar (in an attempt to re-assure world markets of its continued future fiscal responsibility). Brazil didn't. That meant that as the Peso climbed in value, alongside the stronger dollar, Brazil's Real didn't. Argentina's goods cost more than those from Brazil. Brazil began to displace. Argentina in the worldwide beef sector and in the other export sectors that both countries focused on. The net result was that Argentina couldn't keep pace with its debt repayments. 

The default on payments and subsequent devaluations wiped out much of the middle classes' bank holdings. There was a run on the banks to withdraw 'hard cash', the Government enforced limits on 'withdrawals' and there was subsequent economic chaos. Since last December, Argentina has had five Presidents and new words have been added to the local lexicon such as 'Cacerolazo' (where professionals who have lost savings go out and bang pots in demonstration at corruption or the inability of their politicians).

The response of the USA to the election of Lula in Brazil may not follow precisely the lines which we might anticipate, given its involvement in the coup against Allende in Chile (11 Sept 1973) and in the failed coup against Chavez in Venezuela in April of this year. Brazil is South America's biggest economy and a default there will lead to massive instability around the world.

The possibility exists that the USA itself may fall into a deflation.

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

Zionist domination causes worst terrorism

The massacre at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps occurred between 16 and 18 September 1982, after the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), then occupying Beirut and under Ariel Sharon's overall command as Israeli Defence Minister, permitted members of the Phalange militia into the camps. The following extract is from the book Pity The Nation by Robert Fisk, first journalist present at the scene of the massacre.

"In the panic and hatred of battle, tens of thousands had been killed in this country. But these people, hundreds of them had been shot down unarmed. This was a mass killing, an incident - how easily we used the word "incident" in Lebanon - that was also an atrocity. It went beyond even what the Israelis would have in other circumstances called a terrorist activity. It was a war crime.

Jenkins and Tveit were so overwhelmed by what we found in Chatila that at first we were unable to register our own shock. Bill Foley of AP had come with us. All he could say as he walked round was "Jesus Christ" over and over again. We might have accepted evidence of a few murders; even dozens of bodies, killed in the heat of combat. But there were women lying in houses with their skirts tom up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies - blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition - tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US Army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey.

Where were the murderers? Or to use the Israelis' vocabulary, where were the "terrorists"? When we drove down to Chatila, we had seen the Israelis on the top of the apartments in the Avenue Camille Chamoun but they made no attempt to stop us. In fact, we had first been driven to the Bourj al-Barajneh camp because someone told us that there was a massacre there.

All we saw was a Lebanese soldier chasing a car thief down a street. It was only when we were driving back past the entrance to Chatila that Jenkins decided to stop the car. "I don't like this", he said. "Where is everyone? What the f**k is that smell?"

Just inside the southern entrance to the camp, there used to be a number of single storey, concrete walled houses. I had conducted many interviews in these hovels in the late 1970s. When we walked across the muddy entrance to Chatila, we found that these buildings had been dynamited to the ground. There were cartridge cases across the main road. I saw several Israeli flare canisters, still attached to their tiny parachutes. Clouds of flies moved across the rubble, raiding parties with a nose for victory.

Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot point-blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines.

The eyes of these young men were all open. The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old. They were dressed in jeans and coloured shirts, the material absurdly tight over their flesh now that their bodies had begun to bloat in the heat. They had not been robbed. On one blackened wrist a Swiss watch recorded the correct time, the second hand still ticking round uselessly, expending the last energies of its dead owner.

On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and several children. The women were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short dark curly hair, her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead.

Another child lay on the roadway like a discarded doll, her white dress stained with mud and dust. She could have been no more than three years old. The back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed into her breast had killed the baby too. Someone had slit open the woman's stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror...

As we stood there, we heard a shout in Arabic from across the ruins. "They are coming back," a man was screaming. So we ran in fear towards the road. I think, in retrospect, that it was probably anger that stopped us from leaving, for we now waited near the entrance to the camp to glimpse the faces of the men who were responsible for all of this. They must have been sent in here with Israeli permission. They must have been armed by the Israelis. Their handiwork had clearly been watched - closely observed - by the Israelis who were still watching us through their field-glasses.

When does a killing become an outrage? When does an atrocity become a massacre? Or, put another way, how many killings make a massacre? Thirty? A hundred? Three hundred? When is a massacre not a massacre? When the figures are too low? Or when the massacre is carried out by Israel's friends rather than Israel's enemies?

That, I suspected, was what this argument was about. If Syrian troops had crossed into Israel, surrounded a Kibbutz and allowed their Palestinian allies to slaughter the Jewish inhabitants, no Western news agency would waste its time afterwards arguing about whether or not it should be called a massacre.

But in Beirut, the victims were Palestinians. The guilty were certainly Christian militiamen - from which particular unit we were still unsure - but the Israelis were also guilty. If the Israelis had not taken part in the killings, they had certainly sent militia into the camp. They had trained them, given them uniforms, handed them US army rations and Israeli medical equipment. Then they had watched the murderers in the camps, they had given them military assistance - the Israeli airforce had dropped all those flares to help the men who were murdering the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila - and they had established military liaison with the murderers in the camps." At the time of the massacres, the Israeli Defence Minister was Ariel Sharon, who although indicted by his own government's investigation into the events of complicity in these murders, was never put on trial. Today, says the IPSC, this same man is leading a vicious campaign of death, destruction, torture and humiliation against the Palestinian population.