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 1189  June 17 2003                                                                                                                                        25p

NW Seminar Sept 20 -  Public debate Jul 27 London Conway Hall

The tyranny of US/UK establishment pressure to silence critics of the West's catastrophic, neocolonial, warmongering strategy for avoiding a slump, is only going to speed the revival of a proper Marxist revolutionary understanding of imperialist crisis. American firepower is no answer to the Third World billions who are throwing off all domination and exploitation by a corrupt and collapsing capitalist system. Washington's fascist revivalism will be an even bigger disaster second time round. Many Vietnams loom. Conscious Revisionist confusion from the fake-'left' will not rescue "democracy" from justified, mass, revolutionary contempt.

Evidence goes on piling up that the crisis-ridden imperialist global economic system has run into a historical brick wall in its neo-NAZI attempts to blitzkrieg its way out of slump.

It poses the questions more poignantly than ever of when and how capitalist profiteering and colonial exploitation degenerates towards total collapse; and when and how the epoch-making movement of class and national forces is obliged to put an end terminally to Western imperialist domination and mismanagement of the Earth.

The richest and most all-powerful empire in world history is bogged down in futile paralysis everywhere its blitzkrieging turns, because the planet's population is rapidly outgrowing the old subservient relationships, exactly as Marxist science has always predicted would be the end of the capitalist epoch.

Western imperialist occupation of Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq, for example, is simply being rejected, no matter how brutally and repeatedly the blitzing, the collective punishments, the assassinations, the concentration-camp round-ups, the house demolitions, the sanctions starvations, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, are inflicted.

The scarcely credible heroism of the Palestinian resistance to the Zionist seizure of their country, in 1948 and subsequently, can stand as a worthy symbol of where the overwhelming majority of mankind (and its civilisation's future) has got to be heading.

This defiance of the most viciously cruel and thorough repression in all the annals of imperialist tyranny, i.e. Zionist state terror, totally gives the lie to the fake-'lefts' (SLP, etc) whose undeclared (and wrong) notions about vengeful American invincibility lie behind their rush to "condemn" Sept 11 and other "terrorism" so as to avoid having to denounce this "invincible vengeance", - a mental confusion on the same wavelength as other fake-'lefts' who smirked that "the New World order will now sort them out unfailingly" after Sept 11.

For all individuals on Earth, and for all countries on Earth, it is fair enough to doubt that many would have the unbelievable courage and determination of the Palestinian people in refusing to be crushed despite 55 years of indescribably torments, or of the Vietnamese people before them, or the Irish or Turkish Hunger Strikers, etc, etc, etc.

Yes, but the fact remains that the CLASS and NATIONAL forces, which have thrown up these titanic phenomena of anti-imperialist struggle, ARE universal; and history is merely waiting to bring out that revolutionary potential EVERYWHERE.

Without being glib about the immense suffering and sacrifice involved, imperialism is doomed because PEOPLE will everywhere not tolerate for much longer the humiliating injustice and destructive brutality of monopoly-capitalism's grotesque unfairness and ludicrous waste and incompetence.

An interesting admission (from the collapsing bourgeois world itself) of this PROCESS at work in society comes, paradoxically, from the scumbag Labour Party of all places, and from a black, Jewish, woman MP at that (how prone to politically-correct delusions is it possible to be?). But note this belated, attempted adaptation to the real world:

The no man's land separating Israel from the Gaza Strip gives way to what can only be described as desecrated land. Razor wire and crushed buildings line the route. Torn slabs of concrete look like tattered cardboard on a rubbish heap. In front of us two Israeli tanks block our path. Behind us, the border will shortly be sealed to prevent Palestinian reprisals for the helicopter attack launched hours earlier.

A Palestinian woman and her young child, on their way to hospital, are dead, and 35 are injured. Later that afternoon we hurriedly leave the building we are in when a missile lands nearby. For Gaza residents this is business as usual. 

More than 1 million Palestinians live on this tiny piece of land (smaller than the Isle of Wight) - more than three-quarters of them on less than £1.30 a day. Life below the poverty line for these Palestinians contrasts with the 5,000 Israeli settlers who occupy one-third of the land and enjoy watered gardens, first world housing and protection by the Israeli army. This protection means Palestinians wait for hours - sometimes days - at Israeli checkpoints, trying to find work or get access to essential services such as medical care. 

From my hotel balcony I hear demonstrations in the street below. It occurs to me that I can put on a headscarf and slip into the crowd as a Palestinian. No one will guess I'm Jewish still less that I'm a British MP. The sounds lead me to the hospital where Rantissi is being treated. Cars rush into the compound, horns blaring, people hanging out of windows. A man carries an injured girl into the hospital. But most of the Palestinians just stand waiting. They wait for Israelis to stamp their permits, and they wait for a Palestinian state. 

They are no different from us: deny them human rights and they will respond with unacceptable terrorist violence. That's what Jews did when they set up the Stern Gang and blew up the King David Hotel in the 1940s. Ninety-four people, died. The leader of that terrorist group, on Britain's "most wanted" list, went on to be the Israeli prime minister. Many Jews revere him, even while they abhor the terrorism that ruins their lives today.

When the Israeli government chose Tuesday to launch an attack in Gaza (as it did again after yesterday's bombing), it cannot have been ignorant of its effect on the peace process and the certainty of Palestinian reprisals. The original founders of the Jewish state could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in a hell similar in its nature - though not its extent - to the Warsaw ghetto. Any visitor to the Palestinian ghetto can see the signs: residents are sealed off and live under curfew; the authorities view torture as acceptable and use collective punishment as a means of control; soldiers drive families from their homes, confiscate property and demolish neighbourhoods; unemployment runs in places at 80%, and utilities such as water are withheld; the economy has "client" status, and is subservient to the occupiers in every way.

As the occupying power, Israel must uphold the fourth Geneva convention and end all collective punishments. Illegal settlements must be dismantled. Repair of water, sewage, and other essential infrastructure should take place immediately.

Just under 80% of all water resources in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are redirected from Palestinians to Israelis. The international community has to recognise the scale of the humanitarian disaster facing Palestinians

I have sadly come to the conclusion that, given the scale of the atrocities and collective punishment waged by the Israelis against the Palestinians, I have no choice but to boycott Israeli products.

"Oooh, Oona!" is a tempting comment. No question of any serious anti-imperialist revolt, such as utterly denouncing this Labour Government (and past Labour Governments) for their PERMANENT, TOTAL SERVILITY to this post-1945 final epoch of Western imperialist tyranny, continuing now in London constantly completely condoning this endless Zionist genocidal torture of the Palestinian nation. 

For non-existent "ethnic cleansing" in Serbia's oldest region of Kosovo, an instant NATO blitzkrieg of Serbia is inflicted, and Serbia is illegally partitioned. For a historical process which has been NOTHING BUT ethnic-cleansing to steal the land of Palestine to give it to Western Jewish imperialism supporters to create the criminal colonial "state of Israel", just turn a blind eye to all the non-stop butchery and torture ever since 1948.

But the lady MP is at least going to buy herself a few less trinkets and luxuries, in future, which bear the slave-labour label "Made in Israel". Nice. 

Other protesting voices in the bourgeois era "democracy" movement are less easily being quietened. Harold Pinter had to be subjected to an all-out character-assassination ambush by the BBC on Newsnight Review to try to undermine his outspoken denunciation of the West's imperialist-fascist blitzkrieg policy, which Pinter has summarised in poetic lines strewn with four-letter Anglo-Saxon expletives to express his disgust at the phallic shittiness of US master-race warmongering brutality. 

Being Pinter, his verse had to be reviewed, just as his political perspective at their publishing launch had to be reported in the capitalist press:

The playwright Harold Pinter last night likened George W Bush's administration to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, accusing the US of charging towards world domination while the American public end Britain's "mass-murdering" prime minister sat back and watched.

Pinter, 72, was at the National Theatre in London to read from War, a new collection of his anti-war poetry that had been published in the press in response to events in Iraq.

Pinter said the US government was the most, dangerous power that had ever existed.

The American detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where al-Qaida and Taliban suspects were being held, was a concentration camp.

The US population had to accept responsibility for allowing an unelected president to take power and the British were exhausted from protesting and being ignored by Tony Blair, a "deluded idiot" Pinter hoped would resign.

After a big operation for cancer, Pinter returned to public life last year to speak out against American belligerence. He called it a return from a "personal nightmare" to an "infinitely more pervasive public nightmare".

The playwright said: "The US is really beyond reason now. It is beyond our imagining to know what they are going to do next and what they are prepared to do...There is only one comparison: Nazi Germany.

"Nazi Germany wanted total domination of Europe and they nearly did it. The US wants total domination of the world and is about to consolidate that.

"In a policy document, the US has used the term 'full spectrum domination', that means control of land, sea, air and space, and that is exactly what's intended and what the US wants to fulfil. They are quite blatant about it."

Pinter blamed "millions of totally deluded American people" for not staging a mass revolt.

He said that because of propaganda and control of the media, millions of Americans believed that every word Mr Bush said was "accurate and moral".

The US population could not be let off scot-free for putting the country under the control of an "illegally elected president - in other words, a fake."

He asked: "What objections have there been in the US to Guantanamo Bay? At this very moment there are 700 people chained, padlocked, handcuffed, hooded and treated like animals. It is actually a concentration camp.

"I haven't heard anything about the US population saying 'We can't do this, we are Americans'. Nobody gives a damn. And nor does Tony Blair." Pinter added: "Blair sees himself as a representative of moral rectitude. He is actually a mass murderer. But we forget that - we are as much victims of delusions as Americans are."

In a British society where people were increasingly encouraged not to use their brains, the only way to protest was by "thought, intelligence, and solidarity".

Which is even nicer. Although still a million miles from a revolutionary perspective, Pinter's historical observation about the NAZI similarities of these US colonisation blitzkrieg strategies, is spontaneously close to a crucially important theoretical understanding that it is the level of CRISIS for imperialism that dictates the amount of "fascism" that can be ascribed to the warmongering unleashed, - not the colour of the bullies' shirts or their specific style and delusion of master-race ranting.

Which is WHY the sinister and scurrilous attempt was made on the BBC (courtesy of such feminist and Revisionist-connected willing stooges of imperialist establishment servility in Greer, Buford, and Kermode) to publicly humiliate Pinter, and NOT because of his emotional-outburst abuse poems, - dismissed with utterly lunatic "logic" as being "not real poems", and as "mere expletives".

The reality is that they were truly, sensationally, arresting lines of verse, - which is precisely why they have caused such a furore, drawing attention to their anti-imperialist content, which is exactly what these BBC turds cannot stand.

The Female Eunuch's "personal rights" diversion from the West's Cold War tyranny, has given way to the female prostitute's bare-arsed subservience to Bush's shitty brutalism.

But Pinter's getting close to the mark raises the crucial historical points about this half-cock US imperialist NAZI degeneracy of why there should be some superficial half-heartedness to this fascist onslaught; and what role will that play; and also what inevitable, ultimately uncontainable, response will these symptoms of reborn NAZI warmongering eventually force forward.

The point has been made that the lunatic theatricality of the Third Reich's mission for "saving the world from Bolshevism" was no less than needed so that the total irrationality and propaganda nonsense of the whole western imperialist arms-race warmongering enterprise for dragging the world out of the 1930s Depression (which would have eventually terminated capitalism through communist revolution, even despite Stalinism's retreat towards Revisionist imbecility) could be got away with.

All the "racial purity", uniformed martial choreography, Lebensraum, and "historical injustice"-performing, was necessary in order to get at least a minimal quorum for the fascist "New World Order" fantasies, (which were nothing more than the same old capitalist-colonial arms-race warmongering which had just sickened civilisation to its core with World War I's horrors and futility).

Bush's US remake of "the NAZIS ride again" in the wake of 58 years of postwar "peaceful and democratic worldwide cooperation, free-trade, and freedom, solving all problems at UN negotiations", etc, etc, is going to surely need some brainwashing, mindwarping, razzamatazz of an almost psychedelic trip quality to get much of a movement marching to that sort of degenerate, colonising, warmongering nonsense again.

And hoping to achieve the "world order" bit with merely vast volumes of lethally murderous explosives and military hardware, etc, etc, failed totally in Vietnam, and is already proving its utter uselessness in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is LIVING PEOPLE who have to be controlled at the end of the day, not dead bodies or ruined cities.

But the only relationships now available in 2003 are of TOTAL DEFIANCE EVERYWHERE to American monopoly capitalist domination.

And blitzkrieging everyone is only going to make the imperialist system's global economic crisis relentlessly worse.

The lack of any real widespread movement of strutting, NAZI, self-belief inside the USA is already a real problem, causing splits over the warmongering offensive; and the neo-con Christian revivalism (that wards off the bogeyman in Bush circles) is a pathetically inadequate substitute in this scientific age. The more cautious monopoly corporate voices are already urging some restraint in how US imperialism throws its weight about, fearing a crippling cost from any unsuccessful colonisation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and wondering whether better economic housekeeping inside the USA, and a better-directed trade war against the USA's real challengers on Earth, - Germany, the European Union, Japan, etc, would not be wiser than this quixotic pursuit of "rogue states", "axis of evil", "terrorist threats", and non-existent "weapons of mass destruction", etc, etc, which could bankrupt the dollar in due course.

And beyond the United States, the neo-NAZI bullying is playing just as badly. The bad blood created by Washington's decision for a unilateral imperialist blitzkrieg on the Middle East, keeps on spilling over into more and more divisions between the NATO "allies":

FRANCE and Germany, who led opposition at the UN to the war in Iraq, joined in a new protest against America yesterday when both abstained in a Security Council vote extending US peacekeepers' immunity from the new International Criminal Court in The Hague.

A carbon-copy of a resolution adopted unanimously by the 18-nation Security Council last year won only 12 votes yesterday in a sign of a growing rebellion against Washington's decision to oppose the new court.

France, which last year voted in favour, this time abstained with Germany, which only joined the Security Council at the start of the year, and Syria. Human rights activists hailed the result as a sign that the United States would find it increasingly hard to reject the new court, which is due to begin work in The Hague later this year.

"Everyone is scared and apprehensive operating in opposition to the US. But this has destroyed any hope in Washington that this renewal would be automatic," Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch, said.

"This is really the beginning of a trend of opposition, chipping away at this resolution's duration on the Security Council's books." 

The Bush Administration renounced the former President Clinton's signature of the Rome Statute setting up the world's first global criminal court, complaining of inadequate safeguards against politically motivated prosecutions of Americans. The statute has been signed by 139 countries and ratified by 90.

Last year, Washington threatened to veto UN peacekeeping operations unless the Security Council grant immunity to prosecution by the new court to all Americans serving on them. France and Britain crafted a controversial compromise that effectively exempted American peacekeepers for one year.

The resolution passed yesterday extends that immunity for a further year. Britain, voted for the resolution.

Zagreb: Croatia said yesterday that it would not sign a deal protecting US citizens from extradition to the court.

"We will not sign the agreement such as it has been presented to us because of legal and political obstacles," Ivan Simonovic, the deputy Foreign Minister, said after meeting a US delegation which included officials from the State and Defence Departments.

The US is turning up the heat on the countries of the Balkans and eastern Europe to secure war crimes immunity deals for Americans and exemptions from the year-old international criminal court.

In an exercise in brute diplomacy which is causing more acute friction with the European Union following the rows over Iraq, the US administration is threatening to cut off tens of millions of dollars in aid to the countries of the Balkans unless they reach bilateral agreements with the US on the ICC by the end of this month.

The American campaign, which is having mixed results, is creating bitterness and cynicism in the countries being intimidated, particularly in the successor states of former Yugoslavia which perpetrated and suffered the worst war crimes seen in Europe since the Nazis. They are all under intense international pressure, not least from the Americans, to cooperate with the war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia in the Hague.

"Blatant hypocrisy," said Human Rights Watch in New York on Tuesday of the US policy towards former Yugoslavia.

Threatened with the loss of $73m (£44m) in US aid, Bosnia signed the exemption deal last week just as Slovenia rejected American pressure and cut off negotiations.

The EU has sent letters to all the countries in the region advising them to resist the US demands and indicating that surrender will harm their ambitions of joining the EU.

Regional leaders are waiting to see what kind of offers or promises this month's EU summit in Greece makes to the region before deciding on their stance towards the ICC. One idea being floated is that the EU could make up the lost US aid money in return for Balkan refusal to toe the American line.

Although the eight east European countries joining the EU next year are expected to follow the Brussels policy and reject the US demands, the Poles in particular are also being pressed to reach an immunity deal with Washington.

Sources in Warsaw say that the US state department has made several requests in recent weeks for a deal by July 1. Poland is the biggest American ally in the region but has not yielded to the US requests.

While the Slovenes have said no to the Americans, probably forfeiting $4m in US aid, Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia are now being pressed to join the 39 other countries worldwide with which Washington has sealed bilateral pacts granting Americans immunity from war crimes.

"While the United States rightly insists that the former Yugoslav republics must fully cooperate with the [Hague tribunal], it is turning the screws on the very same states not to cooperate with the ICC," said Human Rights Watch.

Croatia is sitting on the fence, refusing to accept what the prime minister, Ivica Racan, dubbed "an ultimatum"; but still hoping to reach a compromise with the US. The American ambassador in Zagreb published a letter in the Zagreb press last week warning that Croatia would lose $19m in US military aid if it did not capitulate by July 1.

In Serbia, too, where the issue of war crimes is explosive, the US pressure is being attacked as a ruthless display of double standards.

The US has bitterly attacked European leaders for trying to stop the UN security council voting to renew America's exemption from prosecution by the new war crimes tribunal.

The Bush administration has accused the EU of "actively undermining" American efforts to protect its peacekeepers from prosecution by the international criminal court, which was set up to try cases of genocide, war crimes and systematic human rights abuses.

A note written by a US official says Europe's objections "will undercut all our efforts to repair and rebuild the transatlantic relationship just as we are taking a turn for the better after a number of difficult months"  according to the Washington Post. "We are dismayed that the European Union would actively seek to undermine US efforts."

THE US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, threatened to disrupt Nato business until Belgium revoked its unique war crimes law yesterday.

Mr Rumsfeld accused Belgium of acting against its allies by allowing charges to be brought regardless of where an alleged war crime happened. The US would block any further funding of Nato's new $351 million headquarters, in Brussels in protest, he said.

He further raised the possibility of Nato officials quitting Belgium until the law was changed. "It's perfectly possible to meet elsewhere," he said.

Belgium's "universal competence" law, passed in 1993, allows its courts to rule on alleged war crimes, regardless of where they were committed or the nationality of the accused. Last month Tommy Franks, the US General who commanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, became the latest in a long line of political and military leaders to face legal action under it. Other Americans who have been indicted include the first President Bush, Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, and General Norman Schwarzkopf, the 1991 Gulf War commander.

Mr Rumsfeld delivered his ultimatum in Belgium, which defied the US during the build-up to the Iraq war by voting with France and Germany to block the deployment of Nato forces to Turkey. He was on the latest stop of a European tour, described without irony by aides as a fence-mending visit. "By passing this law Belgium has turned its legal system into a platform for divisive politicised lawsuits against her Nato allies," he said at Nato headquarters.

"It would obviously not be easy for US officials or potentially coalition officials, civilian or military, to come to Belgium for meetings. Certainly until this matter is resolved we will have to oppose any further spending for construction for a new Nato headquarters here in Brussels."

M Michel said. "No we can send the suits to the country of origin" of any given suspect, he said, adding: "We cannot do any better." 

Mr Rumsfeld is viewed by European officials as the most divisive figure in Washington as far as the transatlantic alliance is concerned. Before the war in Iraq the Defence Secretary crystallised US feeling towards Europe by branding France and Germany as "old Europe".

Mr Bush used his trip to Europe last week to make soothing noises to European allies who had opposed the war. He urged them to put the war behind them and work together to fight terrorism, combat Aids and bring hope to Third World countries. 

But Mr Bush made it clear that he would put future co-operation before historic transatlantic ties, and that good relations with the US would depend on European countries working to Washington's agenda.

And at the same time as inter-imperialist rivalries are being incurably deepened by the insoluble "overproduction" difficulties of the economic crisis itself, - the brutal-NAZI character of Americans unilateral blitzkrieging is registering increasingly clearly with bourgeois public opinion in general.

The British Journalism Review splashed this edited version of murder accusations, effectively, against Washington, being discussed in press circles following the alarming catalogue of deaths suffered by reporters of the US blitzkrieg on Iraq:

Brigadier General Vince Brooks, deputy director of operations, has told us he Americans do not target journalists. But some war correspondents do not believe him, and Spanish journalists have demonstrated outside the US embassy in Madrid shouting 'murderers'. 

I believe that the traditional relationship between the military and the media one of restrained hostility - has broken down, and the US administration has decided its attitude to war correspondents is the same as that set out by President Bush when declaring war on terrorists: 'You're either with us or against us.'

Journalists prepared to get on side and that means 100 per cent on side - will become 'embeds' and get every assistance. Any who follow an objective, independent path, the so-called 'unilaterals', will be shunned. And those who report from the enemy side will risk being shot.

The media should have seen it coming. Last year the BBC sent one of its top reporters, Nik Gowing, to Washington to try to find out how it was that its correspondent, William Reeve, who had just reopened the Corporation's studio in Kabul and was giving a live TV interview for BBC World, was blown out of his seat by an American smart missile. Four hours later, a few blocks away, the office and residential compound of the Arab TV network Al-Jazeera was hit by two more American missiles.

The BBC, AI-Jazeera, and the US Committee to Protect Journalists thought it prudent to find out from the Pentagon what steps they could take to protect their correspondents if war came to Iraq. Rear Admiral Craig Quigley was frank. He said the Pentagon was indifferent to media activity in territory controlled by the enemy, and that the Al-Jazeera compound in Kabul was considered a legitimate target because it had 'repeatedly been the location of significant al-Qaeda activity'. It turned out that this activity was interviews with Taliban officials, something AI-Jazeera had thought to be normal journalism.

All three organisations concluded that the Pentagon was determined to deter western correspondents from reporting any war from the 'enemy' side; would view such journalism in Iraq as activity of 'military significance', and might well bomb the area. This view was reinforced in the early days of the war in Iraq, when the Pentagon wrote officially to Al-Jazeera asking it to remove its correspondents from Baghdad. Downing Street made the same request to the BBC. 

In the US a Pentagon official called media bosses to a meeting in Washington to tell them how foolhardy and dangerous it was to have correspondents in the Iraqi capital. But no one realised it might also be dangerous to work outside the system the Pentagon had devised for allowing war correspondents to cover the war: embedding.

For the rest of the embeds the conclusion of veteran New York Times journalist Sydney H Scbanberg applies: 'Embedded means you're there,' he said. 'It also means you're stuck.' 

But that is what the Pentagon wanted, and after the death of ITN reporter Terry Lloyd, and the probable deaths of two of his team (they're still listed as missing) who had been operating unilaterally, the Coalition Commander, General Tommy Franks, pointed out that no embedded correspondent had been killed.

What Franks did not reveal was exactly how Lloyd died. Now, more than a month after Lloyd's death, neither the Ministry of Defence nor the Pentagon has told ITN what the investigation into his death has revealed. It may turn out this was an unfortunate accident, another 'friendly fire' incident. But what happened at the Palestine Hotel was a different matter. On 8 April, three war correspondents were killed when an American tank fired a shell at the suite on the 15th floor. Tarek Ayyoub, a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, was killed when a US plane bombed the channel's office in Baghdad. American forces also opened fire on the offices of Abu Dhabi TV, whose identity is spelled out in large letters on the roof.

In the Iraq war the Pentagon regarded Al-Jazeera as an enemy propaganda station, putting out devastating accounts of Iraqi civilian casualties to a vast Arab audience, fuelling anti-American sentiment. Al-Jazeera was apprehensive about US reaction and repeatedly informed the US military of the exact coordinates of its Baghdad office. It was a waste of time: The Pentagon has offered neither explanation nor apology.

When the news of the Palestine HOW attack first came, the American command said nothing until it emerged that the French TV channel, France 3, had filmed the tank aiming and firing. Then the coalition put out a series of contradictory accounts. Colonel David Perkins, commander of the Third Infantry Division's Second Brigade, said Iraqis in front of the hotel were firing rocket-propelled grenades at the tank. The division's commander, General Bouford Blount, issued a statement saying the tank had come under sniper fire from the hotel roof and had fired at the source of the shooting, which had then stopped.

Correspondents in the Palestine Hotel insisted there had been no grenades and no sniper fire. But the most telling evidence is that France 3's cameraman had started filming some minutes before the tank opened fire, and his camera's sound track records no shots whatsoever.

More puzzling was an official Spanish government statement that the coalition had actually declared the Palestine Hotel a military objective 48 hours before, it was attacked and that the correspondents should have left. This was news to the correspondents, all of whom denied knowledge of any warning.

I am convinced that in the light of all the evidence the Pentagon is determined there will be no more reporting from the enemy side, and a few deaths among the correspondents who do will deter others.

And the Pentagon's policy will work. Al-Jazeera seriously considered pulling all of its correspondents out of Iraq because it could not guarantee their safety. Arab TV and British media bosses will think twice in any future war of sending staff reporters to the enemy side - not least because insurers will refuse to underwrite the risk. I think the Pentagon is not concerned in the slightest about its attacks on journalists.

THE Pentagon made it clear from the beginning of the Iraq war that there would be no censorship. What it failed to say was that war correspondents might well find themselves in a situation similar to that in Korea in 1950. This was described by one American correspondent as the military saying: 'You can write what you like - but if we don't like it we'll shoot you.' 

The figures in Iraq tell a terrible story. Fifteen media people dead, with two missing, presumed dead. If you consider how short the campaign was, Iraq will be notorious as the most dangerous war for journalists ever.

This is bad enough. But - and here we tread on delicate ground - it is a fact that the largest single group of them appear to have been killed by the US military.

Let's finish with a look at the image that everyone will still remember when the debate and all these issues are long forgotten. As seen on television and on the front pages of newspapers around the world, cheering Iraqis attach a rope and a chain to Saddam's neck then call on the services of an American vehicle to haul him down. The statue hesitates, bends at the knees and topples into the dust. In an information war heavy with symbolism, this marked the end of Saddam Hussein and the coalition's victory. But this image was not quite what it seemed. The statue was pulled down by American troops using American equipment - the Iraqis on their own would not have been able to do it.

Although there were lots of other statues, the toppling of this one took place opposite the Palestine Hotel, where most members of the international media were still staying. Without the media, the event would have meant nothing. Long-distance shots show that the Iraqis who helped topple the statue and later celebrated its fall numbered no more than 100.

So what happened? Was it as portrayed - a spontaneous outpouring of joy by ordinary Iraqis? Or was it a photo opportunity, a staged event in the theatre of propaganda? Excited TV presenters told their viewers they were witnessing history. But whose history?

Pinter's charge of neo-NAZI butchers against the USA gains more credibility by the hour, as do his charges against their Goebbels propaganda lies and hypocrisy:

AN OFFICIAL British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist.

The conclusion by biological weapons experts working for the British Government is an embarrassment for the Prime Minister, who has claimed that the discovery of the labs proved that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction and justified the case for going to war against Saddam Hussein.

Instead, a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told The Observer last week: 'They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.'

The conclusion of the investigation ordered by the British Government - and revealed by The Observer last week - is hugely embarrassing for Blair, who had used the discovery of the alleged mobile labs as part of his efforts to silence criticism over the failure of Britain and the US to find any weapons of mass destruction since the invasion of Iraq.

The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons will also cause discomfort for the British authorities because the Iraqi army's original system was sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command & Control.

COLIN POWELL, the US Secretary of State, defended the Bush Administration against fresh allegations over Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction yesterday, saying that pre-war evidence of such weapons was not "a figment of somebody's imagination".

The contention that illegal weapons would be found was undermined, however, by details yesterday of the failure of a US special operations team inside Iraq to find any illegal weapons. The covert unit has been operating in Iraq since before the war, according to the Washington Post.

Despite sending initially promising reports about possible weapons of mass destruction sites, and conducting scores of raids, the unit has come no closer to finding banned weapons than UN inspectors or the regular Army.

There were also new allegations about the Administration's use of forged intelligence documents before the war, which were cited as evidence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. 

According to The New York Times, in March 2002 the CIA and State Department were briefed that the documents were bogus. The office of Dick Cheney, the VicePresident, was also briefed, as was the White House's National Security Council, the newspaper said, but the Administration continued to cite the  documents.

THE Pentagon's intelligence officials said last September that there was "no reliable information" that Iraq had chemical weapons or even the ability to make them.

The classified report on Iraq's weapons capabilities, produced by the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and seen by The Times, was read by senior Bush Administration officials at the time that America and Britain began to make the case in earnest for disarming Saddam Hussein. It coincided with the publication of the British Government's controversial dossier giving warning of the dangers of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The DIA's cautious tone contrasts starkly with the sense of urgent and imminent threat conveyed at that time by the Bush and Blair administrations and will intensify the pressure to justify the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction as a cause for war.

The report says: "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has - or will - establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities."

The Pentagon report casts significant doubt on Iraq's ability to produce nerve agents. Although it retained the chemicals and equipment to produce mustard gas, "its ability for sustained production of G-series nerve agents and VX is constrained by its stockpile of key chemical precursors and by the destruction of all known CW [chemical weapons] production facilities during Operation Desert Storm and during subsequent Unscom inspections."

While stating that Iraq "probably" possesses chemical agents in munitions, "possibly" in artillery rockets and bombs, the report contrasts with the statements made by the Bush Administration at the time. On September 19 Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, presented his first detailed case to Congress on the Iraq threat Saddam had "amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin and mustard gas", he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. The following month, President Bush stated that Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons".

Mr Blair's dossier, published on September 24 said that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. It stated that "intelligence shows that Iraq has continued to produce chemical agents" and named nine possible sites for chemical, biological or banned ballistic weapons.

Hans Blix, the United Nations'chief weapons inspector, further embarrassed the Government yesterday by saying that he was shaken by the poor quality of British and American intelligence on Iraq's WMD. He said that the nine sites named in the British dossier had all been all checked by UN inspectors and found to be clean. 

"Only in three did we find anything at all, and in none of these cases were there any weapons of mass destruction, and that shook me a bit, I must say," Dr Blix told the BBC.

UN inspectors had been promised the best information available, he added. "I thought, my God, if this is the best they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?"

The Pentagon report was first leaked to US News and World Report by DIA officers who feel that their findings were misconstrued and ignored by an Administration determined to skew the evidence to rally Congress and public opinion behind the war. One told The New York Times: "As an employee of the DIA, I know how this Administration has lied to the public to get support for its attack on Iraq."
The DIA's uncertainty about Iraq's weapons extended to germ warfare. "Iraq is assessed to possess biological agent stockpiles that may be weaponised and ready for use. The size of those stockpiles is uncertain and is subject to debate. The nature, size and condition of those stockpiles are also unknown."

A DIA official told The Times that the report would have been read by "senior policy-makers", including mili-[quote ends suddenly - ed]

The debunking of the Bush administration's pre-war certainties on Iraq gathered pace yesterday when it emerged that the CIA knew for months that a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida was highly unlikely.

As President George Bush was forced for the second time in days to defend the decision to go to war, a new set of leaks from CIA officials suggested a tendency in the White House to suppress or ignore intelligence findings which did not shore up the case for war.

The interrogation reports of two senior al-Qaida members, both in US custody, showed that the CIA had reason to doubt the allegations of a connection between Saddam's regime and the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. 

Such assertions, promoted vigorously by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, were used as an additional justification for war, after the central argument that Iraq's arsenal of banned weapons posed an imminent danger.

The charge of a link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam was contentious even at the time, and yesterday's report in the New York Times that the two al-Qaida members Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed dismissed the idea deepened the impression that Americans had been deliberately misled to support the decision for war.

In recent days that impression has become sufficiently widespread to put officials on the defensive.

With the White House fighting for its credibility, the New York Times reported that the two al-Qaida lieutenants had dismissed the notion of cooperation between Saddam and Bin Laden.

Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March last year, told his CIA interrogators that Bin Laden had considered and then rejected the idea of working with Saddam because he did not want to be in the Iraqi leader's debt.

His information was supported on the eve of war after Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan on March 1. Mohammed, who had been al-Qaida's chief of operations, told the CIA the group did not work with Saddam.

While the CIA shared its interrogation record of Zubaydah with other intelligence agencies, it did not release its conclusions to the public.

That omission could prove extremely damaging to the administration because it suggests that officials ignored intelligence that did not fit with their plans for Iraq.

"This gets to the serious question of to what extent did they try to align the facts with the conclusions that they wanted," an intelligence official told the New York Times.

Three decades on from the crisis faced by Richard Nixon, the British prime minister is embroiled in a scandal which, as one Labour backbencher put it, may be "more serious than Watergate".

The allegations that Downing Street embellished raw intelligence material in order to legalise the invasion of Iraq simply will not go away. Tony Blair has been accused by two former cabinet ministers of "duping" colleagues over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and of making a "monumental blunder" over the war.

Blair's six-day trip, including his "victory tour" of Kuwait and Iraq, had been sidetracked by leaks from intelligence sources claiming that Downing Street had "sexed up" their assessments in its dossier on Iraqi WMD published last September.

Clare Short, the former international development secretary, had also challenged the dramatic claim that Iraqi forces could launch WMD within 45 minutes of receiving the order from Saddam Hussein, which was at the core of Blair's argument for going to war. And Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, suggested the government had made a "monumental blunder".

John Reid, the Commons  leader and Blair's favourite bruiser, was also unleashed. He told The Times: "There have been uncorroborated briefings by a potentially rogue element - or indeed rogue elements - in the intelligence services."

The Sunday Times can reveal that, far from accepting the judgment of the intelligence services, Downing Street rejected an intelligence dossier about Iraq because it failed to establish that Saddam posed a growing threat.

Early last year, when Blair and President George W Bush had already agreed in principle that Saddam's regime posed a major threat, Campbell told American journalists in Britain that the government would produce an intelligence dossier providing proof that Iraq was building WMD.

Blair, who had been praised for producing a comprehensive dossier on Osama Bin Laden shortly after the 9/11 attacks on America, decided a similar document on Iraq would help the British public understand why it was necessary to take a hard line against Saddam.

A six-page dossier was drawn up for him by staff from the joint intelligence committee (JIC) and presented in March 2002. But it contained no evidence that the threat , from Iraq had increased significantly since the end of the Gulf war in 1991.

That dossier has never seen the light of day.

According to insiders, a template for a new dossier was drawn up by Campbell and Sir David Manning. Once again, the JIC staff were tasked to produce the goods.

The new dossier went back and forth between Campbell and the JIC secretary, John Scarlett, at least six times. Much of the debate during last summer was over questions of presentation. M16 was dismayed by Downing Street's attempts to turn finely judged assessments into hard facts.

So fraught was the process that the day before Blair addressed parliament on the dossier, one of his foreign policy advisers wrote to senior officials with a copy of his speech asking them to let him, know of any facts that were "false".

The 55-page dossier itself was mostly measured, but Blair's introduction and speech included the now notorious "45 minutes" claim.

The prime minister insists that the dossier was the unadulterated work of the intelligence officers. Perhaps, legalistically, it was; but die-hard anti-war MPs remain determined to "bring Blair to account", as they put it.

One, the former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle, said yesterday: "This is not going to go away. The government has made a major mistake in not having an independent inquiry. It looks like a cover-up."

Blair has also been warned by loyalist MPs that he will lose the trust of his party and the public if he is not wholly open about WMD. The latest YouGov poll shows that 62% of people believe the government is not "honest and trustworthy".

Ironically a blow to Blair's reputation could come from America, where two congressional inquiries are underway into pre-war assessments made by US intelligence agencies.

The inquiries have greater powers than the Commons intelligence committee and their activities are much more transparent.

There are already growing signs of a falling-out between the British and American intelligence agencies over the blame for the assessments.

Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector, lashed out last night at the "bastards" who have tried to undermine him throughout the three years he has held his high-profile post.

In an extraordinary departure from the diplomatic language with which he has come to be associated, Mr Blix assailed his critics in both Washington and Iraq.

Speaking exclusively to the Guardian from his 31st floor office at the UN in New York, Mr Blix said: "I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media.

Washington, he claimed, was particularly upset that the UN team did not "make more" of the discovery of cluster bombs and drones in March.

He said Washington's disappointment at not getting UN backing for an attack was "one reason why you find scepticism towards inspectors".

"There are people in this administration who say they don't care if the UN sinks under the East river, and other crude things".

Similarly it would be much more "credible" if a team of international inspectors were sent into Iraq instead of the 1,300-strong US-appointed group now conducting the search for weapons of mass destruction, he said.

"INQUIRY MUST FIND OUT IF WE WERE TOLD WAR TRUTH" was the headline on an Express leader. But perhaps its own hacks could volunteer some evidence of the "large underground laboratory complex in Iraq which has begun to produce a virus that mimics foot-and-mouth disease" which they reported last September.

The Mail could also help out: it knows a thing or two about "intelligence sources", having quoted one of its own last August who claimed that "Iraq is developing an underground biological weapons laboratory about a hundred miles north of Baghdad - it is said to have 85 employees producing the deadly Ebola virus".

The Times, meanwhile, had some specific criticism. "Arguably, there was too much reliance on the reports from defectors;" its leader column pontificated. That would be defectors like Adrian Saeed al-Haideri, whose "first-hand knowledge of more than 30 secret biological weapons laboratories inside Iraq" the paper recounted at length last July (despite rubbishing the same claims as vague, unverified and biased when al-Haideri first made them in 2001). 

The Telegraph had also re-evaluated al-Haideri by 17 November when his claims were backed up by "US spy plane missions" which "detect underground voids -  such as bunkers and tunnels - through variations in the earth's gravitational field". Unfortunately this hi-tech method appears to have been less reliable than the digging and looking that has been going on since, because nothing has been found. 

Another Iraqi defector's revelations, however, struggled for space. General Hussein Kamal, Saddam's son-in-law, defected to the west in 1995. He formerly ran Iraq's WMD programme and exposed these programmes to the weapons inspectors. He was later tempted back to Iraq and assassinated. In an extraordinary scoop, John Barry in Newsweek got hold of a copy of the transcript of Kamal's interview with the weapons inspectors this January - including the revelation that Kamal claimed the chemical and biological agents had in fact been destroyed. As Kamal's revelations about Iraq's past WMD programme are central to all claims about Saddam's arsenal - his evidence informs every dossier, his name is still cited by Jack Straw - this was a major story. The Guardian, Independent and Mirror slowly gave small space to the story (long after Newsweek published it in the UK). But the more credulous Times, Telegraph, Mail and Express have yet to let their readers know that Iraq's top defector actually told the west there were no remaining stocks of WMDs.

This distrust of the Western warmongers' hypocrisy and lies has obviously been brewing a long time, and some of all the above capitalist press disgust may yet be partially muddled by discovering any serious Iraqi WMD. But the rot has already set in, and although majority public opinion is said to still "approve" of the war on Iraq, the growing dislike of the Blair/Bush treacherous Goebbelsian nonsense over "justification", - and brutal catastrophic incompetence in the governing of Iraq; could soon find growing numbers of people having sympathy with popular Iraqi resistance getting as many weapons as possible to drive out imperialist tyranny with. It can hardly be doubted that the humiliation of Blair over the Iraq-war lies has begun to undermine his general confidence and his standing inside his own party, judging by the rash of resignations and the widespread contempt for clumsy confusion of the reshuffle.

This rotten and failed imperialist warmongering tactic for "restoring order" to this crisis-ridden and collapsing Western monopoly capitalist domination of the planet, might have begun the process of bringing the Blair regime down.

Accumulating corporate and public service economic disasters, plus disappearing pensions and rising unemployment, could quickly turn this slide into a rout.

And which credible figures from any walk of life could the British imperialist state then turn to for some "new, alternative, leadership"???

The monopoly ruling class's own Tory Party is just a joke.

And there is not a single industrial FatCat left who is not now generally viewed with the greatest public contempt or suspicion over the grossly abusive Golden Parachute and Golden Handshake racketeering even though corporate disasters are now more frequent than corporate triumphs.

Westminster gossip is that Brown will succeed after the next election and a rigged pro-Euro referendum, but this is shallow, episodic, petty bourgeois, journalistic impressionism at its worst, - totally ignoring the crisis.

Another reptile, piping up just in order to "disappear" the crisis and its essentially revolutionary dynamic, is Hobsbawm.

He "boldly" denounces the new American Empire ruling the world, and its dangerous self-righteousness, and jeers its universal unpopularity, but then declares the sudden US warmongering outburst to be without any purpose or reason at all.

Skating over this most crucial question of all modern history without another glance, Hobsbawm, the world's greatest history professor, quickly moves on to declare that this declaration of war on the world will not succeed, which was nice.

He explains that without popular support, American colonial domination via local stooge regimes will no longer work (Why??), and global military control will not work without imperialist allies (Why???).

America's unilateral antagonistic militarism will endanger US domestic life, destabilise international relations, and ruin "another of the great world achievements since 1945: prosperous, democratic, social, welfare states", Hobsbawn concludes.

This Revisionist scumbag supports the abstract "disappearance" of the Saddam regime and the Iraqi state, but then pointlessly declares that doing it was not worth the danger the world is now in from rampant Washington warmongering. I.e. in an ideal never-never land somewhere inside Hobsbawm's head, this blitzkrieging would have been done by someone else, or in some other way. (Cue man from the Fast Show).

How is the world to confront US imperialist warmongering, Hobsbawm interestingly asks.

But then simply does not provide any answer at all, or refer to the question again.

Like all empires, it won't last forever, he reassures.

Probably, the international US warmongers will just return home again, and go back to running their corner stores, he adds. It will be better for their business, he explains.

And what should we all do next while cowering from the anticipated next blitzkrieg???

Turkey has the answer, says Hobsbawm, "simply by saying there are things they are not prepared to do, even though they know it would pay."

So that's all right then.

"Enlightened self-interest and education have to take over," he ends.

This nasty, sad, degenerate drivel is beyond a joke. 

This is a "Marxist" in the service of the world imperialist establishment who wants to destroy all notion of capitalist CRISIS at all costs. 

Because if it is incurable economic CRISIS, threatening the collapse of America's world domination, which is driving the USA towards military armageddon, then how it will all end, and what to do about it, automatically raises vital REVOLUTIONARY questions at some stage.

Stooge regimes certainly won't work around the world any more BECAUSE CAPITALIST CRISIS IS DRIVING THE WORLD'S PROLETARIAN MASSES TO REFUSING TO ACCEPT WESTERN MONOPOLY IMPERIALIST DOMINATION AND EXPLOITATION ANY MORE, AS IT ECONOMICALLY DEGENERATES IN CRISIS.

And rival imperialists' help for American warmongering will not be forthcoming and will spike the USA's guns BECAUSE INCURABLE ECONOMIC CRISIS OF "OVER-PRODUCTION" WILL PIT THE MONOPOLY CAPITALIST POWERS AT EACH OTHER'S THROATS IN DEVASTATING TRADE-WAR CONFLICT WHICH WILL DRIVE THE WHOLE WORLD ECONOMY TOWARDS BANKRUPTCY.

And Turkey is about the right word for Hobsbawm's "final solution" of "Just say No, and pray for enlightenment".

What a sinister oaf.

Meanwhile, the "free market" will be helped to try to stagger on with more and more dollar credit expansions of virtually totally fictitious capital, thereby merely adding further to the grotesque "surplus capital" poisoning of worldwide capitalist profitability which has already put the imperialist system on the brink of collapse.

And Washington's warmongering blitzkrieg "solution" seems to be meeting only EVERGROWING resistance in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, etc, etc.

And what holds back a worldwide REVOLUTIONARY comeuppance for the failed, degenerate, NAZISM-bent, warmongering imperialist system is precisely Hobsbawm's "democratic" social welfare delusions, in fact alienating people from the capitalist system just as rapidly as the raw "free-market" exploitation itself, for which this "reformist" superficiality is just a rotten cover.

The entire stinking fake-'left' postures under the same foul deception that determined "democratic" campaigning and organising can force "socialist" changes on society eventually by finally "reflecting the real will" of the majority of ordinary people.

Lenin had the profoundest contempt for such SLP-type electoral delusions:

In a democratic republic, Engels continues, "wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely", first, by means of the "direct corruption of officials" (America); secondly, by means of an "alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange" (France and America).'

At present, imperialism and the domination of the banks have "developed" into an exceptional art both these methods of upholding and giving effect to the omnipotence of wealth in democratic republics of all descriptions.

The reason why the omnipotence of "wealth" is more certain in a democratic republic is that it does not depend on individual defects in the political machinery or on the faulty political shell of capitalism. A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell (through the Palchinskys, Chernovs, Tseretelis and Co.), it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois democratic republic can shake it.

We must also note that Engels is most explicit in calling universal suffrage an instrument of bourgeois rule. Universal suffrage, he says, obviously taking account of the long experience of German SocialDemocracy, is "the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state".

The petty-bourgeois democrats, such as our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, and also their twin brothers, all the social-chauvinists and opportunists of Western Europe, expect just this "more" from universal suffrage. They themselves share, and instil into the minds of the people, the false notion that universal suffrage "in the present-day state" is really capable of revealing the will of the majority of the working people and of securing its realisation.

We have already said above, and shall show more fully later, that the theory of Marx and Engels of the inevitability of a violent revolution refers to the bourgeois state. The latter cannot be superseded by the proletarian state (the dictatorship of the proletariat) through the process of "withering away", but, as a general rule, only through a violent revolution. The panegyric Engels sang in its honour, and which fully corresponds to Marx's repeated statements (see the concluding passages of The Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist Manifesto with their proud and open proclamation of the inevitability of a violent revolution; see what Marx wrote nearly thirty years later, in criticising the Gotha Programme' of 3$75, when he mercilessly castigated the opportunist character of that programme) - this panegyric is by no means a mere "impulse", a mere declamation or a polemical sally. The necessity of systematically imbuing the masses with this and precisely this view of violent revolution lies at the root of the entire theory of Marx and Engels. The betrayal of their theory by the now prevailing social-chauvinist and Kautskyite trends expresses itself strikingly in both these trends ignoring such propaganda and agitation.

THE STATE AND REVOLUTION

State and Revolution, - and just about everything else in 100 volumes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, provides the only serious modern scientific history and worthwhile commentary on what to do about the world of imperialist crisis. It is the only scientific way to build on from Pinter's raw, emotional, break from reformist delusions, expressed in his own poem called "Democracy":

"There's no mistake.
The big prick's out.
They'll fuck everything in sight.
Watch your back."

If Pinter's arresting bellow of rage and hatred, discovering how "democracy" is precisely the ROUTE to fascist tyranny, can push his circles back towards Marxist science, it will become a very good poem indeed. Build Leninism. EPSR

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

The "free world' in all its filthy rottenness, as protected by US imperialism's corporate bulwarks and IMF stooges.

The paramilitaries opened fire on Gil and he dropped to the ground, fatally wounded. An hour after he was assassinated, paramilitary forces kidnapped another leader of the union at his home; however, he managed to escape and fled to Bogotá. At 8pm, another paramilitary group broke into the union's offices, destroyed the equipment there, and burned down the entire house, destroying all the union's records.

The next day, the same heavily armed group went inside the bottling plant, called the workers together, and gave them until 4pm to resign from the union. They said that if they didn't resign, the same thing that happened to Gil would happen to them: they would be killed," recalls trade unionist Edgar Paéz. Not surprisingly, union members resigned en masse. A number of workers also quit their jobs outright, undoubtedly fearing that they would be killed simply for showing up.

Gil's is not an isolated case in Colombia, where Coca-Cola and other transnational and national companies are using right-wing mercenary paramilitary groups to force workers into submission. 

'In Colombia, the trade unions' struggle is a struggle for life," explains María Ermelina Mosquera, an executive member of the Colombian trade union SINATRAINAL

After the death of Gil, the company abandoned ongoing negotiations with the union. Twenty-seven workers in 12 departments left the plant and the area. All the workers had to quit the union to save their lives, and the union was completely destroyed. For two months, the paramilitaries camped just outside the plant gate and Coca-Cola never complained to the authorities. The experienced workers who left the plant, who'd been earning between $380 and $400 a month, were replaced by new employees at minimum wage - $130 a month. "In the last five years, CocaCola has replaced 10,000 contract workers for temporary staff contracted through agencies," states Ermelina.

United Steelworkers of America and the International Labour Rights Fund (ILRF) decided to take the case of Gil to the American courts and present a lawsuit against Coca-Cola in its home country, the US. On 31 March, a Florida court decided that the lawsuit presented against two bottling plants of Coca-Cola in Colombia Coca-Cola Panamerican Beverages (Panamco) and Bebidas y Alimentos (Bebidas) in Colombia, could progress. Lawyers for the families expressed their satisfaction with the judgment of Florida judge José E. Martinez, though they will appeal the judge's decision to exonerate Coca-Cola itself.

As Mariá Ermelina Mosquera explains: "It cannot be said that Coca Cola is directly involved in the shooting, but the company is accomplice with those companies in getting the workers killed." 

The suit charges that plant manager Ariosto Milán Mosquera told the workers that "he had given an order to the paramilitaries to carry out the task of destroying the union." Workers believed him because he had a history of partying with the paramilitaries.

The level of violence against Colombian trade unionists is staggering: according to Héctor Fajardo, general secretary of the United Confederation of Workers (CUT), Colombia's largest union federation, 3,800 trade unionists have been assassinated in Colombia since 1986,

In 1994, two other Coca-Cola union activists, José Davíd and Luís Granado, were murdered in Carepa, and at that time as well, paramilitaries demanded that workers quit the union. In 1989, unionist José Avelino Chicano was killed in Coca-Cola's Pasto plant. This year, again during negotiations, a union leader at the Bucaramanga plant, Oscar Dario Soto Polo, was murdered. When the union denounced the killings, the plant's chief of security charged its leaders with terrorism and rebellion. Five were arrested and jailed for six months, then released.

In the year 2000, three out of every five trade unionists killed in the world were Colombian, according to a recent report by the United Steelworkers.

Trade unionists and human rights activists hold Colombia's right-wing paramilitary forces responsible for almost all the trade-union assassinations - though those forces aren't working simply for themselves. Robin Kirk, who monitors abuses in Colombia for Human Rights Watch, says that there are strong ties between the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the nation's leading paramilitary grouping, and the Colombian military. 

"The Colombian military and intelligence apparatus has been virulently anti-communist since the 1950s," she says, "and they look at trade unionists as subversives - as a very real and potential threat." The AUC is also quietly backed by elements of the nation's business and economic elite.

The Colombian Government's answer has been the criminalisation of trade unionists - who have been imprisoned for their union activities under charges of rebellion and lately of terrorism. The government views union activity as a threat because it challenges its basic economic policies. The Colombian administration is under intense pressure from the International Monetary Fund to cut its public-sector budget, in part through privatising public services. Union leaders who oppose privatisation have also been targeted. After leading a fight to maintain public service in the city of Call, Carlos Elíecer Prado, a public-sector union leader, was murdered in May.

The companies, meanwhile, disclaim all responsibility. Coca-Cola spokesperson Rafael Fernández asserts that Coke has a code of conduct requiring respect for human rights. Coke's Colombia spokesperson, Pablo Largacha, insists that "bottlers in Colombia are completely independent of the Coca-Cola Company". 

The bottler, Bebidas y Alimentos, says it had no way to stop the paramilitaries from doing whatever they wanted. "You don't use them, they use you," owner Kirby told a reporter. "Nobody tells the paramilitaries what to do."

During a subsequent investigation by the Colombian Justice Ministry, the plant's director and production manager were detained, along with a local paramilitary leader. All three were later released, with no charges filed against them.

SINATRAINAL is calling for an international solidarity campaign involving a boycott of all Coca-Cola products, condemnation of the violence against trade unionists and Coca-Cola workers in Colombia and the creation of an international body to observe the activities of multinational companies and investigate possible human rights violations. They are seeking support from trade unionists around the world to put an end to the killing and harassment of their colleges in Colombia.

International labour cooperation, the unions believe, is the only means left to them to counter the power of. the corporations that they think are the instigators and beneficiaries of the repression.