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 1159 November 06 2002
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www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk
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The planned plunder and carve-up of Iraq is most importantly about inter-imperialist conflict to pass on the slump's burdens, and about total and unrestrained warmongering as official imperialist policy, not about oil as such. Scargillite insistence that it is just an oilgrab question, and that this warmongering can be halted by anti-armsrace protests, including condemnation of North Korea for getting nuclear weapons, is on a par with SLP reactionary treachery in condemning the Middle East victims of Western imperialism for daring to fight back against impossibly unequal odds with the legitimate weapon of guerrilla war terrorism. The knowall posturing about the police spies riddling the labour movement amounts to even worse criminal complacency in the absence of the clear conclusion that this makes it unavoidable to build an openly revolutionary party in Britain before there will ever be a chance to end the capitalist dictatorial state and build socialism. 

The so-called 'triumph' in history for the 'Western way of life’ has just passed two crucial milestones on the way to the most degenerate and humiliating disaster for any ruling class system in civilisation's record.

Firstly, the insoluble economic crisis news is now so dire that all pretence of a "war on terror" is being dropped for open admissions that the monopoly imperialist rival powers are just using Iraq as the cover for the ultimate in cut-throat competitiveness,  warmongering aggression to make the losers bear most of the burdens of the catastrophic global slump that is about to devastate the world.

Secondly, the worm is finally beginning to turn on the question of what was the longterm significance for a healthy society of the remarkable achievements of the workers states in the 20th century,  building slow-developing but stable and enlightened communities without the cultural depravity, criminality, and grotesque economic unfairness and unevenness of capitalism.

On the first question, the beginnings of World War III are coming in sight,  the continuing of the colossal inter-imperialist sort-outs for global economic and colonial exploitation supremacy known as World War I and its conclusion (after a brief 22 year interval) World War II, when the older established colonial economic powers Britain, France, America, and allies asserted their WARMONGERING dominance over their newer and more successful economic rivals in Germany, Japan, Italy, etc.

The so-called 'over-production' economic crisis (which left the profit exploitable world too small to accommodate the growth ambitions of all the rival imperialist powers, sparking off World War 1) is back again with a vengeance in 2002.

The capitalist press itself (see below) is describing the virtual economic collapse facing Germany and Japan once again (easily the most dynamic and successful freemarket traders and technological powers) because of entrenched American imperialist positions all round the globe which are under profits collapse pressure themselves but have the military backed trade war political influence to make Germany and Japan suffer first and most from this insane 'overproduction' nonsense.

But the problem from the worldwide slump that is coming is that ALL the economic imperialist powers suffer hugely from collapsing industries, mass unemployment, and devastated living standards.

Political crisis engulfs them all, and for each capitalist ruling class to escape the humiliating mess with their lives and profiteering future intact from the mass revolutionary anger which will erupt everywhere, the blame culture and scapegoats become the burning warmongering propaganda issue.

Tradewar accusations between the great powers are just beginning to get going, inside the European Union; between the EU and the USA; and by both against Japan.

All kinds of ‘bad policies’ and 'economic failures' are blamed on government trade and monetary tactics, and on corporate behaviour, for allegedly "causing” the damaging economic repercussions reverberating in a domino effect all round the world. 

And ALL of the imperialist powers simultaneously gang up collectively to pass off as much of the blame and burdens of the slump as they can onto the Third World where the economic suffering is already infinitely greater anyway.

This in turn leads to terrifying growing revolutionary implications for the whole international capitalist imperialist system which begins driving the fears, splits, and bitterness between them to fever pitch.

In this now totally developed and exploited world, with the giant corporations finally competing with each other via transferring their operations to ever-cheaper labour markets abroad in order to win (or at least survive) in the market by cost-cutting methods rather than go completely bankrupt, -- the conflict for international influence and control harks back EXACTLY to the situation of inter-imperialist suspicion and rivalry in the years before the final outbreak of World War I

It is the fear of loss of international influence which shines through these astonishing capitalist-press revelations about the obscene jostling for positions among the imperialist powers in the old-fashioned grab for warmongering booty, already planned following the recolonisation of Iraq (down as the first victim of the World War III 'solution' to the global economic 'overproduction' crisis):

THE LEADER OF the London-based Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, has met executives of three US oil multinationals to negotiate the carve-up of Iraq's massive oil reserves post-Saddam. 

Disclosure of the meetings in October in Washington - confirmed by an INC spokesman -  comes as Lord Browne, the head of BP, has warned that British oil companies have been squeezed out of post-war Iraq even before the first shot has been fired in any US-led land invasion.

Disclosure of talks between the oil executives and the INC -which enjoys the support of Bush administration officials - is bound to exacerbate friction on the UN Security Council between permanent members and veto-holders Russia, France and China, who fear they will be squeezed out of a post-Saddam oil industry in Iraq.

Although Russia, France and China have existing deals with Iraq, Chalabi has made clear that he would reward the US for removing Saddam with lucrative oil contracts, telling the Washington Post recently: 'American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil.'

Indeed, the issue of who gets their hands on the world's second largest oil reserves has been a major factor driving splits in the Security Council over a new resolution on Iraq.

Planning for Iraq's post-Saddam oil industry is being driven by a coalition of neo-conservatives in Washington think-tanks with close links to the Bush administration, and with INC officials who have long enjoyed their support. Those hawks have long argued that US control of Iraq's oil would help deliver a second objective. That is the destruction of Opec, the oil producers' cartel, which they argue is 'evil' -  that is, incompatible with American interests.

Larry Lindsey, President Bush's economic adviser, recently said that a successful war on Iraq would be good for business.

'When there is a regime change in Iraq, you could add three to five million barrels [per day] of production to world supply,'  he said in September. 'The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy.'

Opec is already starting to implode, with member nations breaking quotas in an attempt to grab market share before oil prices fall.

Russian concern over a future INC inspired carve-up of Iraq's oil to the benefit of the US has become so intense that it recently sent a diplomat to hold talks with INC officials. At that meeting in Washington on 29 August the diplomat expressed concern that Russia would be kept out of the oil markets by the US.

A model for the carve-up of Iraq's oil industry was presented in September by Ariel Cohen of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which has close links to the Bush administration.

In The Future of a Post-Saddam Iraq: A Blueprint for American Involvement, Cohen strikes a similar note to Chalabi, putting forward a road map for the privatisation of Iraq', nationalised oil industry, and warning that France, Russia and China were likely to find that a new INC-led government would not honour their oil contracts.

Cohen's proposal would see Iraq's oil industry split up into three large companies, along the areas of ethnic separation, with one company in the largely Shia south, another for the Sunni region around Baghdad, and the last in the Kurdish north.

Confirming the meetings to US journalists, INC spokesman Zaab Sethna said: 'The oil people are naturally nervous. We've had discussions with them, but they're not in the habit of going around talking about them.'

Next month oil executives will gather at a country retreat near Sandringham to discuss Iraq and the future of the oil market. The conference, hosted by Sheikh Yamani, the former Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia, will feature a former Iraqi head of military intelligence, an ex-Minister and City financiers. 

Topics for discussion include the country's oil potential, whether it can become as big a supplier as Saudi Arabia, and whether a post-Saddam Iraq might destroy the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

As of last month, Iraq had reportedly signed several multi-billion-dollar deals with foreign oil companies, mainly from China, France and Russia.

Among these Russia, which is owed billions of dollars by Iraq for past arms deliveries, has the strongest interest in Iraqi oil development, including a $3.5 billion, 23-year deal to rehabilitate oilfields, particularly the 11-15 billion-barrel West Qurna field, located west of Basra near the Rumaila field.

Since the agreement was signed in March 1997, Russia's Lukoil has prepared a plan to install equipment with capacity to produce 100,000 barrels per day from West Qurna's Mishrif formation.

French interest is also intense. TotalFinaElf has been in negotiations with Iraq on development of the Nahr Umar field.

It is obvious that the essentially DESTRUCTIVE purpose of these imperialist warmongering plans for 'overcoming' the world slump has not sunk in at all yet with these capitalist reporters, the staggering implication likewise being studiously ignored by the entire bourgeoisie (from the ruling class to the fake-'left' - see below).

But under the capitalist system of production only for profit, then no other mechanisms exist other than to DESTROY the alleged 'surpluses' of products and investments worldwide which are superficially 'causing" the slump.

And it is this unalterable reality, of course, which is irrefutably demonstrated in the never-ending armsrace/world-war pattern of imperialism since the late 19th century when the process of dividing up the world into different spheres of colonial/ trading influence by the competing monopolies first began to run into the problem of finite limits on what was available for exploitation, and the major powers turned to robbing each other of colonies at gunpoint, - world war as a conscious deliberate act of glorious policy. Bush's declaration of renewed worldwar aggression in mid-September was unmistakable:

"The United States will not hesitate to strike preemptively against its enemies, even if it faces international opposition, and will never again allow its military supremacy to be threatened" (EPSR 1150).

The idea that the USA is seriously "threatened" by anybody is insane. It already spends more on armaments each year than the next six strongest powers combined. The underlying message of Bush's war declaration is: "Solve this economic over-production crisis AT ALL COSTS". Instinctively, the whole bourgeois world automatically understands what that means, hence the unmistakably fearful tone immediately inserted, without coaching, into how the present imperialist rivals to the USA interpret what America is up to in its warmongering aggression against Iraq.

It is a carving-up, - of the oil wealth in this instance, - but very specifically AT THE EXPENSE OF THE USA's IMPERIALIST RIVALS.

And THIS is the overwhelmingly important political factor, not the oil question as such which is purely incidental.

Watch out for the extension of arse-kicking by America which will not concern oil at all but quite other aspects of what needs to be done by the USA to make sure it remains undisputed top dog in the midst of a raging international slump-crisis where inconceivably harsh economic burdens are going to have to be passed on to any countries, Third world or First World, which can be forced to take them.

This international crisis has nothing whatever to do with oil as such, but is entirely about a) the MILITARY supremacy over the world that US imperialism is not just determined to keep but has already publicly declared that it will GO TO WAR over, in order to ensure that no other country should ever again dare to rival the USA in armaments;  and b) the propaganda intention by Washington (and its stooges) to use any and every development on Earth as an EXCUSE for putting the world onto a total warmongering footing, whereby America is then ASSURED of "success" in surviving the slump as top dog, no matter what economic catastrophes hit big business (many of the worst of which will happen to the US corporations themselves because of their own frequently unbelievably incompetent and profligate ways).

The fake-'lefts' like Lalkar and the SLP are CRIMINALLY MISLEADING the working class by not just saying nothing at all about imperialism's preparations for WORLD WAR but actually helping the West in its global brainwashing by Scargill's latest denunciation of North Korea's alleged nuclear weapons.

And the continued academic posturing of the "we know all about the oil question" variety only prolongs the misunderstanding about this imperialist crisis. It isn't really about oil at all, as such.

It is about global 'over-production' in general, - the insane 'surplus' of economic investment of all kinds; and about warmongering DESTRUCTION to eventually end that 'overproduction' and the catastrophic slump in world economic activity that it is going to cause.

And like these Lalkar petty-bourgeois academic 'left' frauds, the capitalist press commentary on the oil carve-up above also misses the ESSENTIAL point which is that the oil industry needs seizing, along with everything else, as part of a controlled DESTRUCTION of ALL so-called 'surpluses' which are deemed to be "causing" the world slump.

The clues are in the report's comments about OPEC which is "already starting to implode,  with member nations breaking quotas in an attempt to grab market share before oil prices fall".

In other words, the slump is coming, and the only 'profitable' oil production continuing is likely to be from the very low-cost Middle East oil fields after the present surge beyond output-quotas merely adds to the 'over-production' glut and starts driving oil prices to rock bottom, particularly hitting high-cost American oil.

The key phrase in this capitalist press report is "the destruction of OPEC", whose production-limiting cartel for price maintenance is already being broken by the OPEC members own disorganised panic.

So what else remains to be "destroyed"?  The 'surplus' oil capacity itself.

Hence the nervous fears by the other major oil users that far from the easing of the oil-supply question by 'freeing' the huge Iraqi reserves from "dictatorial" Saddam Hussein and by disrupting the OPEC price cartel, the American imperialist invasion of Iraq only wants control of the oil industry as a pawn in the INTER-IMPERIALIST WAR that is to come:

Germany's banking system is facing a crisis of confidence. Profits are evaporating and share prices crumbling, prompting uncomfortable comparisons with Japan's troubled finance houses.

The latest indication of the German disease comes this morning from Deutsche, the country's largest and once the world's biggest bank.

There is little doubt that the third quarter figures will make grim reading. In just three months Deutsche's profits are expected to have fallen to €129m (£81.5m) from €721m, according to analysts at Lehman Brothers.

What is doubly grim is the expectation that they will still be better than those of its stock market-quoted peers, Commerzbank and  HVB.

HVB has already reported a third quarter loss while Commerzbank has hinted it might finish the year in the red.

So what has gone wrong with the German banks? In the short term, the simple answer is the German economy. It has virtually ground to a halt. Even Jürgen Stark, the vice-president of the Bundesbank, Germany's central bank, acknowledged yesterday that the country was on the verge of stagnation, although he denied it would slide into recession. Next, year doesn't look much better, either.

A struggling economy matters to all banks, but to Germany's it matters more than most. A huge slice of the economy is accounted for by the Mittelstand, the small and medium-sized sector. Significantly, and unlike other similar sectors elsewhere in Europe, these businesses rely far more on borrowing from the banks than raising equity capital. So when the bad times hit, more go bust, leaving the banking sector, rather than investors, to suffer. Corporate insolvencies are expected to reach 35,000 this year and could approach 45,000 next, according to a Commerzbank estimate.

Real estate has played a part in dragging down returns. Speculative building in cities such as Berlin and Leipzig have created a surfeit of empty offices. Voids mean no income, no income means paying the bank loans becomes a problem.

Slumping stock markets have taken their toll too, as banks have seen the value of their equity portfolios fall steeply.

The downturn in the economy and rise in bankruptcies has merely served to highlight structural faultlines in the sector.

Germany's banking industry is a paradox. On one hand it is too competitive, on the other it is not sufficiently competitive. 

Germany is in the middle of the worst market crash since the Depression. Two weeks ago, the German stock exchange pulled the plug on its hi-tech offshoot, the Neuer Markt. The index, which aspired to be the European equivalent of the US Nasdaq - has lost 96% of its value since its peak in March 2000.

"All the euphoria about recovery has gone up in smoke," says David Brown, Bear Stearns' chief European economist. "Germany is flirting with recession. It is bad sentiment, it is the worries about geopolitical risks - and it's structural"

It was not only the firms that indulged in tech speculation that got their fingers burnt. The banks who paid too much for shares have been forced to liquidate their portfolios as prices have collapsed, reinforcing the market slide and taking them dangerously close to their solvency levels.

As a result they have begun tightening lending criteria, pushing firms far removed from the new economy into bankruptcy. According to the Bundesbank, lending to manufacturing fell 3.3% in the year to August, a clear sign that distress in the financial sector is hitting the rest of the economy.

"German companies are facing difficult financing conditions at a time when they are having to deal with a less competitive currency and faltering demand from abroad," says Colin Warren of GFC economics. "The heavy toll of bankruptcies is helping to push up unemployment, which in turn is undermining consumer confidence and household spending."

A further danger looms, however. Most analysts believe the euro will, sooner or later, resume its upward rise against the dollar. With a current account deficit running at over 5% of GDP, the dollar's high level seems unsustainable. Mr Warrep thinks a rise in the euro could be a final straw, crushing any hopes that German exporters could rescue the economy and the markets from the doldrums next year.

Danny Gabay at JP Morgan says German investors are suffering from the fact that the firms they bought into went on a transatlantic spree just as share prices reached their peak in 2000. They spent the equivalent of 3% of national output; buying up or taking over US hi-tech firms.

"German corporates seem to have come to the conclusion that if you can't beat them then buy them. They came across the Atlantic with their shopping trolleys and just hoovered them up."

With no domestic savings to rely on to fund its investment boom, America's stock market bubble in the late 1990s was funded by sucking in massive foreign invesment. The hitech bubble may have been an American phenomenon, but it was European - and in the main German - companies that paid the bill.

"Every penny they made in Europe from 1997 to 2001 they shipped over to buy up US companies," says Mr Gabay. And as long as the US stock market was rising, this seemed a good strategy. It certainly excited local investors, who powered the Dax to a peak of 8,064 in March 2000.

But what it disguised was how weak growth was at home. Germany's economy has been faltering since the fading of the post-reunification boom of the early 90s. In the last five years, output growth has averaged 1.6%, well below the 2.8% achieved by the other countries in the euro zone.

David Walton of Goldman Sachs says Germany is still struggling with the burden of absorbing east Germany.

The decision to convert the old eastern ostmark to the deutschmark at a rate of one to one locked in long term uncompetitiveness. Germany faces a situation where its workers cost 40% more than their French counterparts and 60% more than the average Italian.

Faced with an uncompetitive cost base at home, German firms seem to have decided to hitch their wagon to the US tech boom. "Their view seems to have been that all they had to do was sit back and watch the profits roll in," says Mr Gabay.

But when US investors woke up to the fact that dotcoms were never going to make money, Germany's corporate sector was saddled with worthless investments and a pile of trouble at home. The European version of the tech bubble was a telecoms industry which had massively overpaid for third generation mobile licences. Germany's equity markets were further hit by fiscal limits imposed by Brussels and the world economic slowdown.

The drama of the inter-imperialist conflict was more graphically expressed by the whingeing comments of BP boss Browne in a corporate review of slump difficulties. These astonishing remarks amounted almost to a public warning by British big business to Blair's political stooging on behalf of the Bush oil mafia about the dangers of being made a complete fool of by the obvious rapaciousness of the US imperialist warmongering plans, - an almost unprecedented Establishment admission about what the idiotic propaganda campaigning against Saddam Hussein is really all about:

Lord Browne, chief executive of BP and one of New Labour's favourite industrialists, has warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of any future war.

Britain's biggest company is reviewing what impact a regime change in Baghdad would have on its own business and global crude supplies.

Both London and Washington have been lobbied by the UK oil giant, which is concerned that European companies could be left out in the cold.

"We have let it be known that the thing we would like to make sure, if Iraq changes regime, is that there should be a level playing field for the selection of oil companies to go in there if they're needed to do the work there," said Lord Browne yesterday at a briefing on the company's results.

Lord Browne said that most exploration for new supplies had halted there when the Iraqis nationalised their industry. But he believed there was a plenty of oil and gas waiting to be discovered in Iraq and that BP should be in prime position to capitalise because it had found most of the country's oil before being thrown out in the 1970s.

BP said it had had no contact with Baghdad since 1989. Iraq's reserves amount to 115bn barrels of oil, making it the biggest source of oil in the world behind Saudi Arabia.

Lord Browne's views will be listened to carefully in Downing Street because the BP executive team has such close links with the UK government that it was once dubbed Blair Petroleum. A number of former BP executives, such as Lord Simon, have been seconded into Whitehall while one of Mr Blair's personal assistants, Anji Hunter, joined Lord Browne's team.

Impending war with Iraq has given a financial boost to BP and other western oil firms by driving up the price of oil to $27 per barrel.

The comments from the most senior European oil executive, who has impeccable political connections in the UK, will be seen by anti-war protesters as further proof that US president George Bush has already made his mind up about an early attack.

They will also serve to underline concern that the US is primarily concerned with seizing control of Saddam Hussein's oil and handing it over to companies such as ExxonMobil rather than destroying his weapons of mass destruction.

The reactionary folly of Scargill's ‘peacenik' blather about there being "no defence for having nuclear weapons" and "no defence for breaking agreements not to develop nuclear weapons", - insultingly delivered against North Korea from a complacent, deluded, and racist position of make-believe 'rational Western civilisation' which kids itself that anti-war campaigning and protests will 'put an end to war' one day, - was also spelled out by another remarkable capitalist press admission about the utter contempt which Western states have for disarmament 'agreements', and about the relentless determination of American imperialism to drive the arms-race forward to world breaking point:

Respected scientists on both sides of the Atlantic warned yesterday that the US is developing a new generation of weapons that undermine and possibly violate international treaties on biological and chemical warfare. 

The scientists, specialists in bio-warfare and chemical weapons, say the Pentagon, with the help of the British military, is also working on "non-lethal" weapons similar o the narcotic gas used by Russian forces to end last week's siege in Moscow.

They also point to the paradox of the US developing such weapons at a time when it is proposing military action against Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is breaking international treaties.

Malcolm Dando, professor of international security at the University of Bradford, and Mark Wheelis, a lecturer in microbiology at the University of California, say that the US is encouraging a breakdown in arms control by its research into biological cluster bombs, anthrax and non-lethal weapons for use against hostile crowds, and by the secrecy under which these programmes are being conducted.

"There can be disagreement over whether what the United States is doing represents violations of treaties," Mr Wheelis told the Guardian. "But what is happening is at least so close to the borderline as to be destabilising."

In a paper to be published soon in the scientific journal Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist,  the two academics focus on recent US actions that have served to undermine the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. In a move that stunned the international community last July, the US blocked an attempt to give the convention some teeth with inspections, so that member countries could check if others were keeping the agreement.

Mr Dando believes Washington's motive for torpedoing the deal, which had the support of its allies, was to maintain secrecy over US research work on biological weapons. He said that work includes:

• CIA efforts to copy a Soviet cluster bomb designed to disperse biological weapons

• A  project by the Pentagon to build a bio-weapon plant from commercially available materials to prove that terrorists could do the same thing

• Research by the Defence Intelligence Agency into the possibility of genetically engineering a new strain of antibiotic resistant anthrax

• A programme to produce dried and weaponised anthrax spores, officially for testing US bio-defences, but far more spores were allegedly produced than necessary for such purposes and it is unclear whether they have been destroyed or simply stored.

In each case, the US argued the research was being done for defensive purposes, but their legality under the BWC is questionable, the scientists argue.

For example, a clause in the biological weapons treaty forbids signatories from producing or developing "weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile, purposes or in armed conflict".

Furthermore, signatories agreed to make annual declarations about their biodefence programmes, but the US-never mentioned any of those programmes in its reports. Instead, they emerged from leaks and press reporting. 

The focus on Washington's biological and chemical weapons programme comes at an awkward time for the Bush administration, which is locked in negotiations at the UN for a tough resolution on arms inspections of Iraq. According to Mr Dando, British and US research into hallucinogenic weapons such as the, gas BZ encouraged Iraq to look into similar agents. "We showed them the way," he said.

Mr Dando added that the US was currently working on "non-lethal" weapons similar to the gas Russian forces used to break the Moscow theatre siege. Those include "calmative" agents which are designed to knock people out without killing them.

"What happened in Moscow is a harbinger of what is to come," Mr Dando said. "There is a revolution in life sciences which could be applied in a major way to warfare. It's an early example of the mess we may be creating."

He added that Britain "is implicated as well", as the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate has worked with British officers on its research. The directorate refused to comment last night.

Jonathan Tucker, a chemical weapons expert at the US Institute for Peace in Washington, said much of the work on non-lethal weapons was being carried out by an institute under the US justice department but was funded by the Pentagon.

"They are trying to keep it at arm's length, but it is problematic especially for military purposes. The chemical weapons convention makes a very clear distinction between riot control and incapacitants," he said.

While Mr Tucker believes that such knock-out gases are: explicitly banned under the treaty, Mr Dando and W Wheelis believe the Pentagon has exploited a loophole that allows for such weapons for "law enforcement purposes".

But by blurring the edges of, the treaty, they argue the US is inviting other countries to do the same. The US, Mr Dando said, "runs the very real danger of leading the world down a pathway that will greatly reduce the security of all”.

This unmistakable warmongering threat to the world by a superpower already far beyond any serious rivalry, - together with more BBC revelations about the extent to which the 'left' in Britain has always been totally riddled with police spies and secret agents of all kinds, - adds up to the clearest picture imaginable of what a total fraud is all Scargillite posturing about anti-war protests being the answer to the degenerate conflict ridden collapse of the capitalist system.

Campaigning throughout the entire labour and trade-union movement and its 'peace' arm for a rational 'parliamentary democracy' answer to the arms-race warmongering crisis being inflicted by the global imperialist system is just a joke.

Just campaigning at elections on a programme of 'sensible, if far-reaching, reforms’ without explaining that the capitalist state is an unelected dictatorship over all of the people and will have to be destroyed before the chance of any real working-class socialist development in Britain can even begin, - is pure disarming of workers,  setting them up for the slaughter of the imperialist warmongering crisis that is to come.

There can be no point in riddling the labour movement with spies and police agents if the only purpose of it is to take notes of the names, addresses, and agendas, etc, etc.

The only point of such a mammoth, illegal police-state operation has to be for giving the hidden establishment dictatorship its exact detailed battleorder for SUPPRESSING that entire labour movement the moment that any 'left' pressure looked like actually winning the day at Labour Party or TUC conference for a complete socialist take-over of Britain.

There is no other purpose for such a massive expensive spy operation being there.

There is no need for it, just to find out if socialist motions are being proposed, discussed, and won. These results, and ‘left' election successes, etc, are always instantly joyfully shouted out loud by the 'left' the moment that they happen.

No, the only aim of such infiltration can be to exactly pinpoint the precise key 'militant' figures, right down to rank-and-file levels, who must be rounded up in their thousands in their entirety to ensure that the Pinochet-style coup is immediately completely successful the instant that it has to happen,  should something like an Allende electoral victory for 'socialist' policies occur in Britain.

But given that warning that this is the ONLY policy that the capitalist state bothers to prepare for in the event of a total 'socialist' programme being voted for in Britain, then why does the whole fake-’left’ including Lalkar and the SLP just carry on spouting for reform agitation as if nothing has happened?

What is this but the crassest Allendeism, - just waiting to be rounded up by a police state coup.

The other great turning point in how 'democracy' is to be assessed for evermore, is indicated by an eye-opening essay which the Guardian has just seen fit to print, - presumably in its occasional safe posturing mode of academic liberalism.

It reads as follows:

When people ask me what it was like growing up in Hungary in the 1970s and 80 s, most expect to hear tales of secret police, bread queues and other nasty manifestations of life in a one-party state. They are invariably disappointed when I tell them that the reality was quite different and that communist Hungary, far from being hell on earth, was in fact rather a good place to live.

Victor Orban, the recently defeated rightwing Hungarian prime minister, described my generation - those whose fate was sealed by the "failure" of the 1956 uprising - as "the lost generation". But Hungarians like myself, who grew up in the years of "goulash-Communism” were actually the lucky ones. The shockwaves of 1956 bought home to the communist leadership that they could only consolidate their position by making our lives more tolerable. Stalinism was out and "Kadarism" - a unique brand of liberal communism (named after its architect, Janos Kadar) from which Mikhail Gorbachev would later draw inspiration for perestroika - was in. 

Instead of a list of achievements in health, education, transport and welfare, let me offer some personal observations on what living under goulash communism was really like. 

What I remember most was the overriding sense of community and solidarity, a spirit I find totally lacking in my adopted Britain and indeed whenever I go back to Hungary today. With minimal differences in income and material goods, people really were judged on what they were like as individuals and not on what they owned. Western liberals may sneer at such movements as the Young Pioneers, which sought to involve young people in a wide range of community activities, but they reflected an ambition to build a cohesive society in contrast to the atomisation of most "advanced" nations today. 

I was proud to be a Pioneer; contrary to popular belief we did not spend all our time sitting round campfires singing songs in praise of Lenin, but instead learned valuable life skills in social interaction and building friendships. I was also privileged to be bought up in a society where the government understood the value of education and culture. 

Before the war, in the Hungary idolised by snobbish, reactionary writers like Sandor Marai, secondary education was the preserve of the wealthy classes. My mother and father had to leave school at 11; under the Kadar regime, they were given a second chance to resume their studies as adults. 

Communism opened up new opportunities for people of my background and led to a huge increase in social mobility A corollary of the government's education policy was its commitment to the arts. Again, the emphasis was on bringing the maximum benefit to the largest number of people, and not just the wealthy in Budapest. Theatres, opera houses and concert halls were all heavily subsidised, bringing prices dowm to a level everyone could afford. The government opened up "cultural houses" in every town and village, so that provincially based working class people, like my parents, could have easy access to the arts

Book publishing was similarly supported, so that prices remained low and bookshops proliferated. With 1 forint (1.5p) editions of a wide range of classic works available, reading became a national obsession. For those who believe a rigorous censorship existed, I can tell you that among the most popular published foreign writers were PG Wodehouse, Aldous Huxley and W Somerset Maugham, hardly Marxian propagandists. 

Now, 13 years after "regime change", much of this cultural heritage has been destroyed. Museums, theatres and galleries have had to sink or swim in the new economic "realism". As ticket subsidies have been withdrawn, once again it is only the rich (and German tourists) who can afford to go to the opera. Hundreds of smaller art cinemas have been forced to close; while the big Hollywood multiplexes move in. 

Television has dramatically dumbed down, too. When I was a teenager, Saturday night prime time meant a Jules Verne adventure, a poetry recital and a Chekhov drama; now it means the same dreary diet of game shows and American action movies as in Britain.

Reform politicians sarcastically refer to Kadar's 'velvet prison" yet they have surely created a prison of their own, where large sections of the population have been sold to the foreign-owned multinationals, which control 70% of the nation's production and threaten to pull out of the country if wages or workers' rights are improved. My best friend's husband works for such a company, and tells how visits to the toilet are strictly timed and taking a full lunch break is seen as showing lack of commitment to the firm. It's all a far cry from the paternalistic state-owned companies of 20 years ago, with their nurseries, subsidised canteens, holiday homes and free sports facilities.

Communism in Hungary certainly had a downside. While trips to other socialist countries were unrestricted, travel to the west was problematic and only allowed every second year. Few Hungarians (myself included) enjoyed the compulsory Russian lessons. There were petty restrictions and needless layers of bureaucracy and, of course, we were living in a one-party system where freedom to criticise the government was limited. 

Yet despite all of this, I firmly believe that, taken as a whole, the positives outweighed the negatives. Today Hungarians have the theoretical right to travel to the west whenever they like, yet the fall in real wages has been so dramatic that few of them can now afford even to go to take Balaton. The "patriotic" politicans who shouted so loudly about Hungary's "occupation" by a foreign power under communism, are now strangely silent when the country is effectively controlled by New York financial institutions and unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. 

As a young adult in Hungary, I grew accustomed to a diet of news stories about the "imperialist" west and its wicked plans for global domination and control of the world's resources. We were all aware that this was the official party line and so its effectiveness as propaganda was limited. Now, more than 10 years on, with the US (and Germany) having connived in the breakup of Yugoslavia, colonised Afghanistan and now planning to invade Iraq for control of the world's oil supply, it is surely obvious that what we were told about western intentions was true.

I have seen both communist and western news management and know which is the more devious - and therefore the more effective. I witnessed the way media manipulation works in the "free world'; when we were told the Stop the War march I went on in London recently was attended by just 150,000 people and in the dismissive coverage Britain's biggest-ever peace demonstration was given in most newspapers. 

Education, or rather the denial of it, is the key to all attempts at social control. Gorbachev said that education, in his view the greatest achievement of 70 years of communism, also paradoxically helped bring about its downfall. Put simply, the communist regimes educated their people to such an extent that they developed the critical faculty to challenge, and eventually overthrew the system. After three years of living in Britain, I see no danger of that happening here.

Presumably, the gamble is that this was all long ago and far away, and that neither socialist-camp reality nor nostalgic individualism are ever likely again to have the slightest influence on events in East Europe where unstoppable US imperialist stooging and mafia capitalism are degenerating the new capitalist-state regimes there ever deeper into backwardness and ignorance.

Such cynical defeatist calculations are missing something.

If this woman has been able to work out such a profound and convincing understanding of all of modern life’s problems, both East and West, - then what is to stop virtually the whole of the former East European socialist populations sooner or later reaching the same verdicts themselves???? 

And in time, of course, what is to stop the Western populations coming to similar conclusions about the sterile emptiness of life on the cut-throat competitive merry-go-round of the capitalist system and its anti-community cynicism, philistinism, and individualism.

Once again, this remarkable capitalist press admission challenges, - from the opposite direction this time, - all of the stupid, self-damaging assumptions by which 'left' reformist pressure has limited itself for more than a century to proposing a mere parliamentary majority' as the pretended "socialist answer to all the problems of the working class", something which even the most limitedly class-conscious workers will never have regarded as anything but utterly unrealisable 'pie-in-the-sky'.

Taking state power into the hands of the working class is what matters, nothing else, - as this woman's moving testimony demonstrates.

But far from ever acknowledging what has been plainly understood by all class-conscious workers for more than a century, - that without a workers state (dictatorship of the proletariat), no real socialist transformation of the economy and society can even begin, the fake 'militancy' of "left"-Labour and 57 varieties of Scargillism, Revisionism, and Trotskyism has never once dreamed of making the proletarian-dictatorship ESSENCE of the actual living SOCIALIST states (see above) the heart and soul of their anti-capitalist propaganda and agitation.

In that sense, the whole history of over 100 years of fake-'leftism' in Britain has been one giant fraud on the working class, especially when viewed from the aspect of the utter theoretical bankruptcy in which the labour movement has now been left, menaced by renewed imperialist warmongering but totally incapable of even uttering the word 'revolution' as the only plausible answer to the towering warmongering crisis of the police state tyrannical capitalist system, - anti-socialist spying regimes (Pinochet-CIA style) more completely and universally intact than ever before.

Theoretical uncertainty continues on the difficult national question in the wake of the EPSR's initial stance over the Chechnya revolt that Russian domination (of the unequalpartnership kind) no longer had anything to commend it now that the bonapartist regime in Moscow was so subservient to mafia capitalism domestically and to US imperialist warmongering machinations internationally.

The charge of inconsistency on the grounds that the EPSR has not embraced Scottish or Welsh separatism, so why embrace Chechen separatism, fails on several points.

The working class in this country has been fighting a fully integrated and united battle against capitalist central government for at least 300 years or more. A positive cultural cosmopolitanism has been achieved even under the strains of capitalist exploitation, an enormous social evolutionary achievement with colossal significance for the future socialist-community development of the whole planet.

The whole of anti-capitalist reformist history in Britain (for its strictly-limited social and economic and political worth as opposed to its longer-term anti-revolutionary disarming aspect) has been the stronger for English, Scottish, and Welsh working class unity rather than the weaker because of it.

The next necessarily revolutionary stages of the struggle for socialism within this economy would undoubtedly be indescribably weaker if fought totally separately from one another by workers in Scotland, Wales, and England, - each presumably against their "own" ruling class (which would be impossible to find, of course, since it is not even just mixed British in inextricably interwoven and complex connections, but is as much international as anything into the bargain). 

Fighting for state power just in Wales, say, against the international power of counter-revolutionary monopoly-imperialist intervention (especially pouring over the border from England) seems like pure idiocy, not political wisdom. Ditto for Scotland or England separately. A united workers state power in Britain, on the other hand, would be a vastly different proposition, especially in the likely circumstances of an already totally fragmented imperialist world in an already advanced condition of revolutionary international upheaval, as would be the case by the likely time of breakdown here.

In theory, the same arguments could also apply to the Chechens and the Russians, and clearly did in Bolshevik propaganda prior to 1917.

But the issue now is that the Chechens have actually started a national liberation war against the Russians after the bitter and catastrophic experience of the Revisionists abandoning the Soviet socialist workers-state community in 1990 and handing power to international mafia capitalist exploitation.

With the scale of the destruction and the bloodshed already unleashed (more than 100,000 dead), the battle-lines are already drawn up.

If the Welsh and Scots had been persuaded/provoked into a similar scale of all-out bloody warmongering conflict, there would be no point whatever, equally, in still arguing that separatism was naff reformist nonsense and recommending that Welsh, Scottish and English workers should continue to fight a united class war for the socialist overthrow of the British (Welsh, Scottish, and English) imperialist state. The national liberation war would already be a fait accompli, as it surely already is in Chechnya.

The situation now in the Caucasus is also slightly different from the foul mess which engulfed Yugoslavia in which the EPSR saw no virtue in joining in the general Western imperialist condemnation and subversion of the Serbian heart of the Yugoslav Socialist Federation, even while fully aware and critical of the hopeless Revisionist opportunism of the Milosevic regime, which was helping rather than hindering its break-up.

Blatant imperialist meddling lay behind much of the separatism which was BREAKING UP the Yugoslav socialist federation, especially the wretched opportunism of the Albanian criminal mafia which had long been cultivated by the CIA to provoke conflict by preparing to annexe the Kosovo province from its native Serbian population and its tradition Serbian connections.

It is not clear what Russian traditions Chechen separatism is challenging (other than Tsarist imperialism's rotten record); or if any imperialist power is provoking Chechen separatism (the evidence seems the opposite,- of Western imperialist support for Russian colonial brutality); and it is not clear what relics or hopes for continued socialist federation are now being threatened by Chechen separatism (unlike what was still hanging on by the skin of its teeth in Yugoslavia at the time of the initial opportunist chauvinist stunts from Croat, Bosnian, and Albanian reactionary circles who all had historic connections with proven pro-Nazi collaboration with German imperialism against Serbian nationalism.)

Having said all that, it simply is not the case that the EPSR declared particular sympathy for the Chechen independence cause anyway, dismissing supposed Chechen nationalism under the USSR to be of little account; repeating a general suspicion that the internal Chechnya situation is a confused and vicious factional mess; and accepting that nothing particularly inspiring or encouraging for the future of anti-imperialist struggle could be anticipated from the Chechen conflict. 

But the national liberation war is a fait accompli. And the bonapartist regime, fronting Russian mafia capitalism: and stooging for US imperialist warmongering, might well be LOSING that war, which could only be a good thing.

What purpose is it thought to be being served by supporting Putin's repression of Chechnya????

EPSR supporters

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

The negative side of the "civilisation" which Western colonial exploitation has brought to some of the world's oldest cultures

For indigenous nations, the colonisation of the Americas began in 1492 and was built on the backs of Indian and African slaves as well as of European indentured servants. The trend repeats itself today, many considering corporate globalisation and US imperialism the second colonisation of the Americas.

On the eve of this year's Columbus Day, Amnesty International issued a report on the continued undermining of the identity of indigenous people and violations of their rights in a number of countries, especially Guatemala and Mexico. Human right abuses also occur in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Panama and Nicaragua.

In Colotenango, a village on the border between Guatemala and Mexico, thousands of Mayan Indians blocked roads across Central America and Mexico on Saturday 12 October, protesting Columbus Day and celebration the region's Indian heritage.

Hundreds of Zapatista sympathisers marked the day by blocking the entrance to the main military base in the southern state of Chiapas, joining a nationwide protest against the subjugation of indigenous peoples.

In Chile, the Mapuche nation demonstrated in the capital Santiago and around the city of Concepción calling on the government to return the land that is being robbed from Mapuche communities by big landowners and corporations.

Indigenous activists marched from Costa Rica to Panama City, a distance of over 200 miles, to protest the ecological destruction caused by mining on their lands. In Managua, Nicaragua, there were protests against the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB), condemned as a corporate welfare institution. Activists argue that the IDB has never been interested in supporting grassroots initiatives for economic, environmental and social justice.

"Basic rights of indigenous communities, including the right to land and to cultural identity - in the use of language, education and the administration of justice - are systematically violated" in a number of countries, states the Amnesty International report. From Canada to the southernmost tip of Chile and Argentina, Indians are often treated like "second class citizens," and are among the poorest, most marginalised communities, it adds.

The rights group also underlines that racism and discrimination entrenched in most societies make indigenous people more vulnerable to human rights violations including torture and ill-treatment, 'disappearance', and murder.

Amnesty says that governments across the Americas lack the political commitment to enforce the rights of native communities, as demonstrated by the way authorities have been "dragging their feet" with respect to the adoption of the American Declaration on Indigenous People.

One illustration of government apathy towards the question of indigenous rights is the failure of Guatemalan authorities to bring to justice those responsible for the genocide against indigenous communities. During the country's 36 year armed conflict, around 200,000 civilians - mainly indigenous men, women and children - were killed or 'disappeared' in what was described as 'genocide' by the Historical Clarification Commission.

"In a number of countries, including Guatemala and Mexico, non-Spanish speaking indigenous people are often questioned by police and have their statements taken without the assistance of an interpreter. In Guatemala, indigenous people have stood trial in capital cases in Spanish, which they do not speak," says the report.

In Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile. Guatemala and Nicaragua, indigenous claims to their ancestral territories have "come up against violent opposition from landowners and companies exploiting natural resources, often supported by the authorities".

	However, these policies and attitudes not only affect indigenous nations in the less well off American countries, but also 	the Indian nations living under US or Canadian administration. For American Indians, 12 October is a day of action against 	the legacy of Columbus the slave trader, racist and murderer.	

As Colorado AIM 	explained in its letter to the organisers of Columbus Day in Denver the Sons of Italy - New 	Generation: "We find Columbus as an individual, as well as celebrations of him, to be especially harmful and offensive... The main purpose of this correspondence is to request you, or perhaps more accurately to implore you in the spirit of community goodwill, to consider changing the name of your parade scheduled for 12 October. We are asking you to consider, after 500 years of invasion,, death, and destruction of our indigenous nations, if you can find it in your hearts to change one word in the title of your parade?"

Their plea was again ignored. Seven people were arrested at the protest against the Columbus Day parade in Denver.

They called for an end to the new era of corporate colonialism driven by the forces of the free market and imposed on indigenous communities throughout the Americas.

Before his journey across the Atlantic, Colombus was a slave trader for the Portuguese, transporting West African people to Portugal to be sold as slaves. Later, he initiated the first Trans-Atlantic slave trade and, together with his brother and son, continued slave trading of indigenous peoples from the Americas to Europe and from Africa to the Caribbean. Under his administration as viceroy and governor of the Caribbean Islands, eight million people were killed, making his ‘contribution' to history the first mass genocide of indigenous peoples.

By conservative accounts based on Spanish surveys, the Taino numbered as many as eight million in 1493. During Columbus' tenure as "viceroy and governor" of the Caribbean islands and the American mainland from 1493 until 1500, he instituted policies of slavery (encomienida) and the systematic murder and rape of the Taino population. 

Dominican priest Bartolome de Las Casas was the first European historian in the Americas. He was an eye witness and wrote in painful detail of the tortures he witnessed. In a survey conducted in 1496, he estimated that over five million people had been exterminated within the first three years of Columbus' rule. By the time of Columbus' departure, only 100,000 Taino were left, and by 1542, only 200 remained alive.

Las Casas estimated that 50 million Indians perished in Latin America and the Caribbean within 50 years of Columbus' landing. Scholars now reckon that 90% of the indigenous population of the Americas was wiped out in a century and a half - the greatest demographic collapse in the history of the planet and the proportional equivalent of nearly half-a-billion people today. This is genocide, the wholesale killing of an entire race of people.

The Columbus legacy is steeped in blood, violence, and death. His actions set the foundation for legal and social policies - still used today in the United States, Mexico, Canada, South America, and in many countries around the world. These policies justify the theft and destruction of indigenous peoples lands and knowledge by corporate and government interests. Media, films, judicial systems, educational systems, and other political and social institutions support this continued assault on the natural resources of indigenous peoples.

Indigenous peoples today remain at the margins of technological society - struggling to overcome the destruction of land, culture and language In many ways all peoples on this planet are affected. These attacks on indigenous peoples and their land and their knowledge contribute to the destruction of ecosystems and the erosion of human rights for all people. Today, not a single country in the Americas recognises native peoples as distinct nations with the right to self-government.

THE 'brave' and ‘heroic' Columbus was not exactly what mainstream history books would have us believe.

ON 12 OCTOBER, known as Columbus Day (US) or Race Day (Spain and Latin America), thousands of indigenous activists and supporters, from Canada to Chile, blocked borders, closed main roads and conducted various other direct actions to demand basic human rights for all native peoples. Throughout the American continent, indigenous people marched in anti-Columbus Day parades to oppose governments' sponsored celebrations in remembrance of the Genovese sailor who changed history, bringing a legacy of blood, suffering and discrimination.

World Revolutionary Socialist Review

(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

Bloody Sunday

The former member of the Parachute Regiment, identified only as 027, told the Inquiry that his colleagues opened fire on the civil rights march "without justification".  In his written statement, Soldier 027, who is on the witness protection programme because of possible reprisals, said that he did not see any gunmen or bombers in the Bogside on 30 January 1972.

Soldier 027's statement says that when he arrived in Rossville Street, another Paratrooper began firing "without hesitation" straight at a crowd behind a rubble barricade. Other soldiers also began firing but 027 said that when he scanned the crowd through his rifle sights he could not see anyone resembling a gunman or bomber. Six people were killed at the barricade.

After some minutes he relayed a ceasefire order but two paratroopers went into Glenfada Park, where they killed a further four people. He followed them into the area and saw a crowd fleeing, in panic. He told the inquiry that he could not identify any targets for the soldiers and that the crowd posed no threat to them.

In his original statement given to the Royal Military Police a few days after Bloody Sunday, Soldier 027 had said he had seen a gunman in Rossville Street and a petrol bomber in Glenfada Park. The reason he said this, he explained, was that he had come under intense, pressure from other members of the regiment and did not want to "stick his neck out". He said that the sections of his statement were "fabricated" in order to place other paratroopers in "a better light".

The soldier, who was not called to give evidence to the Widgery Inquiry has said that when he told a lawyer about his colleague firing at the crowd at the barricade, the lawyer ripped up his statement and returned later with another for him to sign. This statement, submitted to Widgery, contained the claims about the supposed gunman and bomber.

	The Bloody Sunday Inquiry heard that documents which were supposed to accurately record instructions given via radio to British Paratroopers in Bogside do not match events on the ground.

The inquiry was told that an order was given verbally at 4.07pm on a secure radio network, Bid 150, for a unit of 1 Para to go into Bogside. They were ordered to go through Barrier 14 at William Street. However, three more units of 1 Para went into the scene at different sites, some of them in armoured personnel carriers.

Soldier IN0 2091 said that a verbal order would have been passed on to a watchkeeper who would ensure that it was accurately written down, for later transcription. However, there is no record in the transcribed log - the original having been destroyed - of the order to send in three more units of the Paras after the initial burst through barrier 14. The official log does also not tally with the recordings taken of British Army communications by a local radio enthusiast.

Also giving evidence on Monday was General Tickell, the former British Army Chief of Staff, who told the inquiry that although he recalled "some talk" that intelligence had been received "to the effect that the IRA would hijack the march", he could not recall the name of a single member of HQ staff with whom he had discussed the matter or from where such intelligence had come.

In his statement to the Inquiry, Tickell had said that he could not remember what the march on Bloody Sunday was for. "It was general knowledge that there was to be a large procession taking place from the Creggan/Bogside on 30 January 1972," he said. "I cannot now recall the reason for the procession..."

Despite his senior position, Tickell also denied ever seeing a number of important documents concerning the situation in Derry, including the proposed shooting of rioters, which passed between the various department of the British Army, many of which are annotated to the effect that he was included in the circulation. For example, he said he had no recollection of General Ford's memo dated 14 December 1971, dealing with future British military activity:

“The risk of casualties is high [this is in relation to a number of options, one of which is going into the Bogside or the Creggan] and apart from gunmen or bombers, so-called unarmed rioters, possibly teenagers are certain to be shot in the initial phases; much will be made of the invasion of Derry and the slaughter of the innocent."

Tickell's belief that there was intelligence prior to 30 January to suggest that the IRA would be present on the march was questioned by Lord Gifford QC.

"There was, I suggest, in the early part of the week, no fear that there would be any confrontation with the IRA,' he said. "I do not know the answer to that," said General Tickell.

Matters appeared to suddenly change after the matter was discussed by the Joint Security Committee - of which John Taylor was a member - which met on 27 January. Minutes of the JSC record that "the operation might well develop into rioting and even a shooting war".

A paper by General Dalzell-Payne of the military operation branch, also dated 27 January, states: "It is not possible to enforce the ban rigidly with the force levels available and we can only hope to deal with two or three large scale demonstrations at any one time. In order to deal. with them effectively, however, we must take stronger military measures which will inevitably lead to further accusations of 'brutality and ill-treatment of non-violent demonstrators'." Tickell told the Inquiry that he could not say what "stronger military measures" meant.

The author of that paper, Major General Henry Dalzell-Payne, appeared before the Inquiry. He said that senior officers had merely wanted to introduce "firmer measures" to arrest hooligans after they had refused a request for more troops. However, apparently anticipating poor publicity for the army in relation to the 30 January civil rights march, Dalzell-Payne had written: "The only additional measure left for physical control is the use of firearms ie 'disperse or we fire’ - Inevitably it would not be the gunmen who would be killed but innocent members of the crowd. 

This would be a harsh and final step, tantamount to saying all else has failed and for this reason must be rejected except in extremes. It cannot, however, be ruled out."

Harvey asked whether his paper reflected the British Army's inclination to apply "martial law to civilian situations". Dalzell-Payne said that on reflection, he felt it was "not clear enough in some respects and was open to various interpretations, one of which you have adopted".