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 
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No 1190 June 24 2003                                                                                                                           25p

Serious, global, anti-imperialist struggle will get no further than mere protests unless a perspective of working class state power is adopted, and that won't happen without a clearer and more vigorous understanding of where insoluble imperialist economic crisis is taking the planet (into generalised warmongering-destruction and slump) and how soon. No leadership is possible for serious anti-imperialism for as long as fake-'lefts' of every description continue refusing to make a committed judgement about the disaster capitalism is already inflicting. And until the shallow hysteria about "bureaucracy" publicised by police spy Orwell's childish books is faced up to, and a rational history of its Cold War balance with imperialist warmongering drawn up ON ALL QUESTIONS, then the Trot and Revisionist swamp will continue to be trampled on by the dictatorship of monopoly capital. Only exposing the wretchedness of Stalinism's cowardly theoretical weaknesses will make it possible to restore proletarian dictatorship to its crucial role in Marxist scientific understanding of how civilisation MUST proceed at some stage.

The vital dividing line in politics is the philosophical one over whether "reasonable reforms" can change the world, or whether history's only natural and inevitable process is class-war revolution.

On one side, the tiny following for Leninism; constantly analysing the imperialist-system economic crisis for evidence of how, where, and WHEN the revolutionary breakdown in the West's control of the planet draws near, so that working class support can mobilise to build a CONSCIOUS revolutionary party to combat imperialism's total chaos and warmongering disaster.

On the other side, everyone else, urging a non-committal stance on the imminence of capitalist crisis, and pressing for "full socialism" in various fake-'left' (Trot & Revisionist) appeals to workers.

The whole history of the Stalinist destruction of the Third International flowed from corrupting workers' understanding by a belief that "good imperialism" (that which fought Nazi Germany) would eventually be persuaded to "peacefully coexist" with the workers states, thus making "peaceful roads to socialism" possible.

This philosophical rottenness lives on today in continuing vast swathes of world politics (UN; social democracy; "voting for REAL socialism"; anti-fascist movements; nationalism of all kinds; environmentalism; stop-the-war movements; etc, etc, etc) which STILL expect "justice" from imperialism, continuing Moscow's Soviet-era influence - typified by Arafat and the PLO.

And the arguments and "justifications" remain the same, too.

"What else could the USSR have done in 1945 faced with the American atomic bomb?", echoed in "What else can the PLO do but seek a two-state compromise deal from vastly stronger Zionist imperialism?", etc, etc.

In an earlier period of Revisionist nonsense, the socialist revolution in Spain was told to trust in Republican parliamentary democracy as the best bet for halting fascist dictatorship; and the German socialist revolution told to rely on a Hitler-NAZI failure at bourgeois government to open the door for the Communist Party.

In scores of cases throughout the Third International's record (and after), Stalin's Revisionist delusions meant that Moscow's influence repeatedly backed the wrong programme, strategy, or tactics in the international anti-imperialist struggle.

Although a post-1945 attack on the West would have been a fruitless and idiotic policy, the alternative did not have to be the even greater imbecility that "peaceful coexistence will guarantee the eventual victory of socialism worldwide".

However long the post-1945 capitalist boom was going to last, the only rational science of society that exists demanded that nothing but a REVOLUTIONARY analysis of imperialist crisis should continue.

A world communist movement pursuing a Leninist programme, strategy, and tactics non-stop, may have provoked even more US imperialist counter-revolutionary interventions around the globe than actually did take place anyway; and maybe it would still have been unwise or impossible for the USSR to have openly gone to the assistance of legitimate revolutionary governments in many cases. But could US imperialism have invaded and conquered the Soviet Union as its ultimate counter-revolutionary policy????? It is utter nonsense. It would have been the end of imperialism. Imperialism was either incapable of inflicting counter-revolution, or was defeated in the attempt, in very many revolutionary situations post-1945, including failed or defeated American attempts to roll back the clock as in Korea, China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc, etc.

But it was Stalin's delusion of "world socialism through peaceful-coexistence reformist-pressure' which prevailed, - a deliberately ANTI-revolutionary influence, fearful of "adventurism" - and "theoretically grounded" on the infantile, anti-Marxist, shallowness of Economic Problems, 1952 which invented the nonsense that expansionary economic booms were no longer possible in the imperialist world following the spread of the Socialist Camp, and that socialist production and living standards would relentlessly overhaul the West, and put an end to the Cold War on a positive, peaceful note for socialism.

As a result, the entire international working class, virtually, is just about totally disarmed now from any preparedness at all to meet the rapidly escalating REVOLUTIONARY crisis of the whole global imperialist system. 

The fake-'left' everywhere is dominated by addle-brained Revisionist remnants (CPB, NCP, SLP, etc, etc) who no longer have the faintest idea of even what the role is of a "party of revolutionary theory", let alone any notion of what theory to put in it; or by the "Trotskyite" cover for pure anti-communist venom, fuelled by a petty-bourgeois hatred of the dictatorship of the proletariat, typified by George Orwell, the "hero" of middle-class "socialism", which slides its fear of the workers state behind fantasy-nightmares about "bureaucracy" and childish daydreams of leadership-less "rank-and-file socialism", born in never-never land,- a "hero" admitted by the bourgeoisie itself to have been a common-or-garden police spy for the imperialist state against "communists" after an earlier career as a colonial policeman, an anti-semite, and a "revolutionary" dilettante in Spain:

George Orwell, venerated as "the wintry conscience of a generation", gave the British government a list of 38 suspected or actual communist sympathisers, the Guardian reveals today.

A carbon copy of the document - which the government still treats as secret 54 years later - is reproduced for the first time in today's Review.

The find confirms evidence first raised seven years ago. Among those singled out for suspicion by the author of Animal Farm and 1984 in the late 1940s, sometimes highly tentatively, were the comedian Charlie Chaplin, the bestselling novelist JB Priestley, the actor Michael Redgrave, the Soviet historian EH Carr, the historian of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, and the leftwing Labour MP Tom Driberg.

The list is revealed in a 4,000-word article in Review by the political historian and commentator Timothy Garton Ash. He says that what brought the creator of Big Brother and the foe of bureaucratic power into the hands of a real-life bureaucracy was the love of a beautiful woman - "or at least his quest for her affection".

The woman was Celia Kirwan, a friend of Orwell's who worked in 1949 for a secretly funded Foreign Office section, the information research department (IRD).

She asked his help in countering waves of communist bloc propaganda in the intensifying cold war. Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, offered to compile from his notebooks a list of those "who should not be trusted as propagandists [for the west]".

When Kirwan died last autumn, her daughter, Ariane Bankes, found among her papers a carbon of the list which Orwell had finally sent her.

Conclusive evidence appears to exist that the typescript is genuine. It has a Foreign Office document number, with the words Not Released written in red ink, indicating it was thought too sensitive to be made public when the carbon was sent to Ms Kirwan, apparently in 1994.

Its discovery proves Orwell, after conscientious second thoughts and deletions, did send the Foreign Office some names from his notebook drafts.

The existence of these drafts was first disclosed in Peter Davison's 20-volume edition of the author's complete works in 1998. Prof Davison does not doubt the list's authenticity.

	It contains 38 names of journalists, scholars and actors who "in my opinion are crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or inclined that way and should not be trusted as [anti-communist] propagandists". 

One man on the list, Alaric Jacob, later had his BBC pension rights suspended for two years but no evidence has so far emerged that Orwell's naming of him caused this.

Yet - says Garton Ash - nobody knows how IRD staff used Orwell's information in their contacts with MI6. "What remains unsettling about the actual list sent to Celia is the way in which this symbol of political independence and journalistic honesty is drawn into collaboration with a bureaucratic department of propaganda, however marginal the collaboration".

Unlike MI6, whose very existence was denied by the government, IRD appears in the Foreign Office list but much of its funding came from the Secret Vote. An internal Foreign Office description from 1951 says "it should be noted that the name of this department is intended as a disguise for the true nature of its work, which must remain confidential".

In the beginning, that "true nature" was mainly to gather reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it, often in the form of precooked articles supplied anonymously to the media, and to fund anti-communist publications by authors including the philosopher Bertrand Russell. However, unlike the scrupulous Conquest and Watson, other IRD officers almost certainly did not stop there. Using methods they had learned in the previous war, working for the cloak-and-dagger Political Warfare Executive or MI6, they tried to combat what they saw as communist infiltration of the trades unions, the BBC or organisations like the National Council for Civil Liberties by tip-offs, spreading rumours - and perhaps worse.

At the time of fevered speculation about the list in the 1990s, when Gerald Kaufman MP was writing in the Evening Standard that "Orwell was a Big Brother too", Celia Kirwan (by now Celia Goodman) said "I think George was quite right to do it." 

But if this was Britain's McCarthyite witch-hunt, then it looks quite amateur, scrupulous and mild by comparison with the American McCarthyism that prompted Arthur Miller to write The Crucible and Charlie Chaplin to flee back to Orwell's Britain.

The only case that I have yet found of something like a possible "blacklisting" is that of Alaric Jacob. According to Mark Hollingsworth and Richard Norton-Taylor's book Blacklist, Alaric Jacob joined the BBC monitoring service at Caversham in August 1948, but in February 1951 was "suddenly refused establishment rights, which meant he would receive no pension". 

	A two-year loss of BBC "establishment rights" is hardly Darkness at Noon or a session with the rats in Room 101.  Anyway, there is thus far no evidence that Orwell's list had anything at all to do with the temporary blacklisting of Alaric Jacob 20 months later.

	If the charge is that he was a secret police informer, the answer is plainly no. IRD was a rum cold war outfit, but it was nothing like a Thought Police. Unlike that dreadful genius Bertolt Brecht, Orwell never believed that the end justified the means. The Freedom Defence Committee, of which he was vice chairman, thought political vetting of civil servants a necessary evil.

We may, according to taste, be more shocked or amused by the entries in his notebook. There is about them a touch of the old imperial policeman, a hint of the spy, as well as a generous dose of his characteristic, gruff black humour. (He includes someone from the "Income Tax Dept".) But all writers are spies. One thing that does shock our contemporary sensibility in the notebook is his ethnic labelling of people, especially the eight variations of "Jewish?" (Charlie Chaplin), "Polish Jew", "English Jew" or "Jewess" (Marjorie Kohn). Orwell's whole life was a struggle to overcome the prejudices of his class and generation; here was one he never fully overcame.

And note the line that these extreme reactionaries like Garton Ash, now apologising for Orwell, have to take to "justify" this self-important, idiot-fink.

Using Orwell's "left-author" posture to fill British imperialism's anti-communist blacklists "was hardly Darkness at Noon or a session with the rats in Room 101", he smirks.

But Room 101 and Darkness at Noon happen to be fiction. Pure invention. By venomous anti-communists and wholly unsavoury bourgeois individualists. Orwell's role as a stoolpigeon for the imperialist secret police was REAL.

"IRD was a rum cold war outfit, but it was nothing like a Thought Police" Ash goes on. But Thought Police is sci-fi, an imaginary world invented by a feverishly anti-communist bourgeois. The IRD, for which Orwell was a nark, was a REAL Secret Police.

And "all writers are spies" only in the cynical world of bourgeois hypocrisy which feeds off its individualist conceit to invent "the horrors of a world run by a faceless bureaucracy" but then delivers the names of its friends and acquaintances to be stabbed in the back by precisely such a REAL LIFE faceless bureaucracy.

Between them, the fake-'left' have almost brought about the abandonment temporarily in history of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the only scientific alternative to the continuing filthy world of imperialist warmongering, capitalist exploitation tyranny, and bourgeois lies and hypocrisy, - the Revisionists through weakminded cowardice, and the Trots through petty bourgeois anti-workers-state hysteria and treachery.

But the revolutionary bureaucracy is precisely what has to be defended in history.

The old monopoly enterprise order of monstrous class privileges; grotesque tyranny against the Third World; and monumental, periodic, war-destruction, waste, chaos, and cruelty; etc, will NEVER be left behind in history without a New Revolutionary Order taking temporary charge (for a century or two?), KGB and all.

The Soviet "totalitarian nightmare" just benignly closed itself down at the end of the 1980s, (foolishly believing (under the delusions of Revisionism) that the 'taming-of-imperialism' task was now completed), - having already ceased to terrify its anti-communist enemies for 30 years previously (half its lifespan).

But the REAL "totalitarian nightmare" of warmongering imperialism????? After the horrors of World War I and World War II, - and 400 acts of warmongering bullying or fascist/military putsch since, it is just getting into its stride again.

The capitalist press itself struggles to digest just how monstrous is the West's counter-revolutionary hypocrisy, still failing to grasp the full Goebbels mendacity of pro-imperialist propaganda such as the totally play-acted, stage-managed "military rescue" of Jessica Lynch from a wounds hospital behind Saddam's Iraq front line, - a US soldier PoW already safe in the hands of anti-Saddam Iraqi medics.

Lynch and others have been ordered not to speak to the press so as to preserve the Goebbels Big Lie:

American papers have been slow to discover the truth about Private Lynch. This week, however, The Washington Post caught up with the British press, which has cast doubt on the official account of Private Lynch's capture and rescue.

What the Post discovered is far from heroic.

Jessica Lynch, a 20-year-old maintenance engineer, became the first squaddie celebrity of the war when news of her capture was relayed to an anxious American public. It was said she fought like a vixen, emptying her M16 into Iraqis as she tried to escape. As the Post put it, "early reports suggested that Lynch fought fiercely, was stabbed and shot multiple times and killed several of her assailants".

An overnight star was born.

"It was irresistible and cinematic, the maintenance clerk turned woman warrior from the hollows of West Virginia who just wouldn't quit," the Post said. An anonymous US intelligence officer said: "She was fighting to the death. She did not want to be taken alive."

Little wonder, then, that Hollywood wanted to make an instant film about her. An industry quick to jump upon any topical yarn, be it the "Hillary Clinton Story" starring Sharon Stone, or the story of Aron Ralston, the climber who hacked his arm off in a remote Utah canyon, could hardly wait to realise the potential of "Free! The Jessica Lynch Story."

Add to this the dramatic rescue of the wounded Private Lynch by American Special Forces and it was what an NBC executive described as "as good a story as you can get from this war. It's uplifting, heroic, compelling and dramatic."

The truth, however, is less romantic. After military blundering, in which the tailend of an eight-mile convoy was misdirected into hostile territory, the vehicle containing Private Lynch was caught in an ambush.

She did not return Iraqi fire because her gun jammed.

When the lorry was hit by a grenade and overturned, her arms and legs were crushed and bones protruded from her skin. She was taken by Iraqis to the Saddam Hussein General Hospital in Nasiriyah, where her arms and legs were put in plaster. Although the hospital also served as a military headquarters, the Iraqi brass were too busy saving their own skins to take any interest in her.

Long after the Iraqi military had made their getaway, members of a US special operations unit mounted a 'dramatic rescue'.

She is deliberately and falsely being portrayed as a hero in a war with few genuine heroes because Americans would like to feel good about a war that has an ambiguous ending, and the entertainment industry needs to please them.

The elevation of Private Lynch is perhaps inevitable in a nation which, since watching the mundane procession of bodybags bringing back the dead from Vietnam, has found it difficult to bear the cost of armed conflict in human lives

"The 'Saving Jessica Lynch' saga gets weirder by the day ... Early accounts circulated by the military portrayed her as the ultimate heroine, suffering gunshot and stab wounds as she mowed down Iraqi soldiers with her M-16.

"The Washington Post, whose early reporting on Pte Lynch helped venerate her supposed swashbuckling, pointed out in a startling article on Tuesday that she was neither stabbed nor did she kill anyone. Her fabled gun jammed ... [The Post contends] the strategy was to create a photo-op that would thrust a living symbol of patriotic valour into the battle for hearts and minds ... 'The rescue turned into a Hollywood concept,' one unnamed military public affairs officer told the Post. 

"To some, the rescue of Pte Lynch has now been transformed into a symbol of lingering scepticism about whether the American people were given valid information leading up to, and during, the war against Iraq. The bigger concern now is the truth. There's no reason that some of those who risked their lives that night couldn't be made available for interviews ... "It looks as if the first accounts of the rescue were embellished, like the imminent threat from WMD, and like wartime pronouncements about an uprising in Basra and imminent defections of generals. There's a pattern: we were misled".

... We weren't quite lied to, but facts were subordinated to politics, and truth was treated as an endlessly stretchable fabric. The Iraqis misused our prisoners for their propaganda purposes, and it hurts to find out that some American officials were misusing Pte Lynch the same way." 

Almost 30 years ago Phillip Knightley chronicled in The First Casualty how journalists get duped into spreading the government's propaganda. At least during Vietnam, the media eventually grew sceptical. But in today's quick, high-tech wars, there's little time for the seeds of dissent to sprout and the media seems eager to please a patriotic public. It's no coincidence that the name Jessica Lynch is much more recognisable in the US than Ali Abbas, the 12-year old Iraqi boy who lost both arms in the bombing of Baghdad, or even Lori Ann Piestewa, the first American female soldier killed in Iraq." 

In an article on Monday, [the New York Times] revealed the depths to which the major networks will sink to drag Pte Lynch, the badly injured former POW, into the klieg lights and force her to weep, on cue, for the patriotic glory of the Nielsen ratings machine. An interview with Pte Lynch, who is still hospitalised, is the biggest 'get' available to the network newsies right now. The Times article spelt out just how much power the entertainment conglomerates, which own the major TV outlets, are willing to exercise to get to her first ...

"There was a time when it was considered a fatal breach of journalism ethics to offer so much as a dime for a news interview. The networks have fallen so far off the wagon that if the goods are hot enough they'll offer instant fame and fortune ... What we're seeing here is the darker side of the culture that we sent Pte Lynch to Iraq to defend, and it's not a pretty sight"

Let me translate a line from the CBS proposal. Here's how it reads in part: 'From the distinguished reporting of CBS News to the youthful reach of MTV, we believe this is a unique combination of projects that will do justice to Jessica's inspiring story.' Translation: 'If we can just get this kid to sign on the bottom line, we'll make Iraq's oil look like the penny ante in a game of five-card draw'."

And the Big Brother mythology, turned into real life ONLY in the "free world" (as defended by Orwell's Freedom Defence Committee), - is even less amusing than the Lynch farce:

The US military clashed with British journalists yesterday at Camp Delta in Guantánamo Bay after inmates shouted to a BBC Panorama team who had been invited to tour the maximum security camp.

As the journalists walked through the camp, detainees shouted that they wanted to tell their story and the US soldiers immediately halted the tour, ordering everyone out.

About 680 people, including possibly nine Britons, are being held in Guantánamo Bay naval base in US occupied Cuba.

An audio recording made by the Panorama team was seized by US forces and the BBC reporter Vivian White was banished to a section of the bay away from Camp Delta.

From behind a fence one man in his late 20s shouted out: "Are you journalists? Can we talk to you?"

White responded: "We're from BBC television, we are from BBC TV". US officials immediately then tried to order the reporters out.

The detainee said: "We've been waiting to see you."

A melée broke out as the reporters stood only three metres away. One US officer said: "Either you keep moving or the tour ends."

One detainee said: "We've been here a long time ..: we will talk to you later."

US officials then confined journalists to a bus, before allowing those reporters not with the BBC to continue the tour. A US official told the Guardian that the BBC Panorama team had been told they would have to hand over their audio recordings if they wished to do any more filming. The source said sections containing the detainees' voices had been erased before the tapes were handed back and filming, away from Camp Delta, was allowed to continue.

The US military maintains the detainees cannot speak to the press because of the Geneva convention, but that claim is disputed by the international Committee of the Red Cross.

THERE is a gap in the tight green mesh fence where the boys can peer longingly at the sea. High chicken wire prevents them from leaving their small, isolated compound, which is guarded night and day. There is no privacy, even in sleep, and no knowing when they may be able to reclaim their freedom. - This is Camp Iguana on Guantánamo Bay, where at least three children from Afghanistan between the ages of 13 and 15 are held.

Their guards call them juvenile enemy combatants. They were captured on the battlefield and brought to the US naval base on the tip of Cuba at the beginning of the year. Sixteen-year-old detainees are kept in the adult camp. Neither the names of the children nor the causes of their imprisonment are known to the outside world. No charges have been brought; nor are they likely ever to face a military tribunal. Even their nationality is meant to be a secret.

Their incarceration without access to family or lawyers raises uncomfortable questions about their human rights. They have been interrogated and are considered a military threat.

The presence of such adolescents at Guantánamo Bay was revealed in an unguarded moment last month by camp commanders. Stung by the public outcry, the US military is beginning to lift the veil of secrecy. It is proud of the boys' regime and invited me to judge conditions for myself.

First Lieutenant David Wodushek, 36, is in charge of the guards and living arrangements. "We don't want to traumatise [ ] but the children's confinement is absolute. The mesh around the compound prevents them from looking towards the beach where army families gather at the weekend for barbecues.

Unlike adult detainees, who are deprived of a view, they can see waves crash against the cliff' through the 30ft by 7ft gap that is protected by the chicken wire. Occasionally a cruise ship passes on the horizon. Before breakfast they tidy their rooms and shower. But the bathroom door never closes. A short, blue curtain gives scant privacy from the guards.

Lights are out at 9pm but only in the bedrooms. The living room is constantly lit and a mirror above the left bed gives guards an uninterrupted view. Outside, the compound is illuminated at all times.

Wodushek declined to say whether any of the boys were on anti-depressants, but he admitted that they got stressed and homesick.

"They haven't asked why they are here but they have wondered when they are going home," he said. "I have not seen them cry but certainly they have had some low points." 

According to Major-General Geoffrey Miller, - the commander of the US taskforce at Guantánamo, the boys are as potentially dangerous and valuable as the adult detainees. "All enemy combatants go through a very thorough screening process. They must have intelligence value and be a military threat," said Miller.

He declined to comment on whether the boys had killed or wounded any US soldiers.

Interrogations are conducted by intelligence officers but not as aggressively as those of adults.

How long the youngsters remain at Camp Iguana is for politicians rather than the military to decide. The guards feel they are doing a humane job in brutal circumstances.

"I respect the outcry but I just hope there's as much condemnation of the countries that use child soldiers," said Wodushek. "That's the real tragedy.''

Last April, having watched the Americans invade Afghanistan, kick out the Taliban and promise to bring democracy to my country, I decided to go home. I took comfort from Tony Blair's words in the aftermath of the war: "The conflict will not be the end. We will not walk away as the outside world has done so many times before." I felt very excited about rebuilding my life in the country I loved.

But as soon as I got back to Quetta in Pakistan, the border town where my family has lived as refugees for a decade, I knew something was terribly wrong. My mother began: "Dear son, we must all accept God's will. Three of your sister's sons were shot near Kandahar a week ago. Shahdaud was killed, Shahzada is paralysed and Karimullah was shot in the wrist. We buried Shahdaud three days ago." I didn't want to believe it. Shahdaud, 25, and Shahzada, 23, had lived with us. I'd taught them English; they weren't just my nephews, but my friends. Karimullah was just 10.

When America crushed the Taliban the family had gone back to Helmand province, near Kandahar, where Shahmaqsood, my brother-in-law, was born and had land. For the first time they believed they could live without warlords or the Taliban disrupting their lives.

But they found that the defeat of the Taliban had meant the resurrection of the local warlords in the form of two brothers: Allah Noor and his brother Takrah, who with American blessing were now in charge. Takrah was far from happy to see my brother-in-law return to claim his birthright. Neither he nor Allah Noor liked Shahmaqsood's independence. The tradition is that people visit and pay homage to the warlord, but Shahmaqsood did not do that. Why should he in a country that is supposed to be free?

The fact that Shahmaqsood had four sons (Zabha, 18, was away when the shooting happened) who were not working for Allah Noor or Takrah was an added affront. Young men equal money these days, as warlords deck them out in American-provided uniforms and claim their salaries from the administration. The warlords wanted my sister's family to leave. Initially, Allah Noor asked my nephews to sell the land. They refused. It had been in the family for generations. The matter rumbled on. My nephews said a decision must wait until their father returned from his work with a non-governmental organisation in Kandahar.

Then, six weeks ago, a young soldier took matters into his own hands. Wearing an American provided uniform and carrying a Kalashnikov, he arrived at the house asking for Shahmaqsood. Shahdaud, a carpenter, came out to meet him. The soldier started shouting. "You don't take us seriously and I don't think you understand the rules here," he said.

Then without another word, he shot Shahdaud, killing him instantly. He collapsed in front of his three-year-old son. His brother Shahzada, who had been studying inside, heard the shots and ran out to see what was happening. The soldier shot him three times; in the kidney, liver and leg. The youngest brother, Karimullah, was shot in the wrist. As their mother, aunts, sisters and daughters followed, the soldier emptied his magazine into the crowd before fleeing to Allah Noor's base. Miraculously, nobody else was harmed.

When I heard the story I went straight to see my poor sister. The whole neighbourhood was outraged - my nephews were well-behaved boys from a good family.

I volunteered my help: if the Afghan police or other authorities could not help I could at least air my English to talk to the Americans. I started with the local police chief. The first shock was discovering I had to pay a bribe even to report the case. Nobody else was at all surprised.

Finally Shahmaqsood and I managed to meet the governor of Helmand province. He told us he could not interfere because Allah Noor was not of his tribe and that we needed a letter from the commander of Kandahar.

After 10 days of machinations we got the letter that permitted the governor of Helmand province to disarm Allah Noor and bring the murdering soldier to justice.

But back in Helmand province it took another 10 days to see the governor again, who told us that despite our letter he couldn't interfere because it would become a big tribal issue. "You'd better take care of yourselves," he said, handing us three Kalashnikovs and permission to carry them. The implication was that if we saw the soldier we should finish him off ourselves.

These days guns are only allowed to be carried by those who work with the Americans although the Taliban have hidden ones too. The UN says 40% of Afghanistan is a no-go area.

I decided to go to the top and headed to the United Nations human rights office in Kandahar, where Shahmaqsood worked. It was run by an Italian called Pascal who could make calls to officials in the UN and American army in a second. Without him it would have taken us months to be heard.

The woman in charge of human rights in the region was sweet, giving us tea and saying she would make a note of our case and tell the American forces guarding Kandahar airport. But she said: "We are not a combat force."

I asked if she could use some of the £2.7 billion that Afghanistan has received in aid to help pay our medical bills, or if she could get the family moved elsewhere, since Allah Noor was furious. She said nothing like that was available. What about the UNHCR protection programme, I asked? She said: "The western countries are fed up with bogus asylum seekers and won't sponsor any more Afghans, even if we know they're at risk."

While we were fighting for justice, Shahzada had deteriorated. A friend who'd worked as a translator told the Americans he'd been wounded fighting Al-Qaeda to try to get him treated. But although the Americans initially took him in, they had so many of their own wounded they could not treat him.

I couldn't believe that even with seven years' experience of working in the UN and my close contacts with the local authorities, I, a middle-class, educated Afghan, couldn't get anyone to help my family. I decided to take Shahzada to Pakistan for treatment.

Three of us - Shahzada, his father and myself - set out via the airport to pick up his American medical report. But for three days we stood outside the airport in 35C heat. It was impossible; the gate was manned by Afghan soldiers who couldn't care less. These were the same soldiers I had seen a few days before, openly sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy while guarding the checkpoint to the American base - exactly the kind of warlord activity the Taliban had been so popular for stamping out.

I tried to approach the Americans in the city but, every time, they nearly shot me. They think all Afghans could be Al-Qaeda.

Finally, we put so much pressure on Pascal that we got the medical file. When we got to Karachi the doctor told Shahzada he would be paralysed for life. His spine was severed. I brought him back to Kandahar. All the money I had brought with me was gone; we couldn't even afford antiseptic. His whole family, including his father, prayed for him to die.

I couldn't do that because in Britain I'd seen so many disabled people living full lives. One night, his family and I watched a programme about Stephen Hawking on BBC World. They couldn't believe a man could be so paralysed and be capable of such important work. They said maybe it was possible in Britain but not in Afghanistan. Shahzada is now a terrible burden to his family, who are destitute.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. There was I, who had lived for seven years in a country where if you reported a noisy neighbour he might end up in court. But here I'd reported a massacre and, if anyone bothered to listen, all they said was: "Sorry, I can do nothing."

I came back to Britain earlier this month with my faith in American "democracy" in Afghanistan shattered.

If America carries on as it is now, only interested in fighting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and not clearing up the mess it created in bringing back the corrupt and ruthless warlords, eventually the Afghans will turn their aggression on the Americans - just as they did on the Russians and British before them.

On the other hand, if the Americans simply give up and leave, there will be chaos as warlords jostle for-power. Not to mention the ex-Taliban soldiers who gather by their thousands every evening in the park beside my mother's house in Quetta. They wear black turbans and salwar kameez and look like an army awaiting orders.

Tony Blair's words haunt me.

This is the REAL world, the only "freedom" there has ever been. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is defending its imperialist power, in whatever way is necessary.

This is precisely the sly, hypocritical world of the Information Research Department secret police, backed by Orwell's Freedom Defence Committee.

But when the dictatorship of the proletariat obviously has to take superficially similar measures to disarm or neutralise its internal and external enemies, hysteria about "totalitarian bureaucracy" drowns out every other voice the length and breadth of Western culture.

Arafat and the world is still suffering from decades of pulled punches by Moscow's "anti-imperialist" propaganda. And the one remote chance of the Palestinians getting a scrap of real "justice" out of America's belated re-entry into the Middle East "peace process" rests not on "the West taking its reform responsibilities seriously and humanely" but on precisely the opposite, the possibility that the warmongering divisions, anger, and upheaval driving the imperialist camp towards trade-war loggerheads (see below) has now become so chaotic and fraught for US imperialism's top-dog survival that more than just its "Western allies" might have to be sacrificed in Washington's demented determination to terrorise the world with the mailed fist.

Not all of Zionist aggression's wag-the-dog warmongering (to please the USA's master-race-plans to kick arse worldwide as a cover and diversion from insoluble economic crisis), is necessarily going to please Washington all of the time.

It is not completely impossible (although still a long shot) that American blitzkrieg repression might just have to exert some of its authority on Zionist colonial-military wildcatting itself in order to preserve its credibility in the world's eyes, and possibly to see through any particular aspect of strategy or tactics that the US warmongers decide, in their confusion, is "vital" for imperialism's chaotic "plans".

Even the ludicrously pro-Zionist bourgeois press has noted these new sounds:

Israelis have begun to wonder about the intentions of the prime minister and his defence minister, General Shaul Mofaz, after the failed attempt to kill Dr Rantissi. In an opinion poll 40% said the attack, which set off a week of killing that led to nearly 70 deaths on both sides, had been aimed at derailing the road map.

Mr Dahlan said he had faith in the Americans partly because of his encounter with Mr Bush there. Also in the room were Mr Sharon, Gen Mofaz and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister.

Mr Dahlan gave a five-minute synopsis of the Palestinian view of the security situation and the difficulties he faces because the Israelis have destroyed much of the Palestinian security infrastructure. At they end of the briefing, Gen Mofaz, jumped in.

"Well, they won't be getting any help from us; they have their own security service," he said. Mr Bush turned on Gen Mofaz. "Their own security service? But you have destroyed their security service," he said. Gen Mofaz remained firm. "I do not think that we can help them; Mr President," he said. Mr Bush replied: "Oh, but I think that you can and I think that you will."

A similar confrontation followed with Mr Sharon.

	Towards the end of the summit, Mr Bush is reported to have told Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser, that he liked and trusted Mr Abbas and Mr Dahlan but Mr Sharon was "a problem". 

Mr Powell also emphasised that the road map had to start delivering results for ordinary Palestinians.

Mr Powell said it was important for ordinary Palestinians to see their lives improved to build confidence in the road map, and the first step should be a swift agreement on terms for a withdrawal of Israeli forces from most of Gaza.

"That would be a very powerful and important first step ... It would give them confidence that Hamas and other terrorist organisations perhaps do not have the right answer," he said.

Mr Powell said the pullout from Gaza should not be held hostage to negotiations to win a Hamas commitment to a ceasefire. But he also told the Israel prime minister, Ariel Sharon, that the assassination. of Palestinian militants had to stop; except where it would deter an imminent attack by a "ticking bomb", because it is a threat to the road map.

"We can understand the need to intercept a terrorist and deal with that individual and make sure that innocent lives are not lost," he said.

"When one goes beyond that and expands those kinds of activities to individuals or situations where it might not be a ticking bomb, then ... the consequences of such actions and how they play into our broader efforts for peace must be taken into consideration.'

Only if the uncontrollable capitalist economic crisis continues harming the finances of both the USA & Zionland, splitting them, will it bring Arafat some hoped for crumbs from the imperialist table.

But this will still not cease amounting to outdated Revisionist defeatism, - 100% the wrong mentality for the epoch.

PLO nationalism needs to think in terms of an international revolutionary tide against world imperialism, the brilliant way that the Vietnamese did, for example, in spite of endless pressure from Moscow (and partly Beijing) for Hanoi to settle for a "self-determination" half-loaf all the time.

Total war on Zionism may not be possible for a long time. But the alternative does not have to be settling for permanently handing over two/thirds of the land of Palestine for the so-called state of "Israel" under the colonial occupation monstrosity of the "two-state solution".

A tactical provisional acceptance of some scraps of "Palestinian state territory", prised out of reluctant imperialist hands, might at any time have been a useful practical strategy for the next phase of the liberation struggle.

But revolutionary theory should have remained absolutely clear throughout this entire Palestinian nightmare disaster that the world's revolutionary advance would undoubtedly resume sooner or later, making the TOTAL defeat of ALL imperialist/colonial aggression certain at some stage.

Stalinist Revisionism's hand in the subjugation and bourgeois-nationalist demoralisation of the Palestinian people has been disgracefully influential from the start.

Only the insanity of believing that imperialism would eventually spontaneously crumble away could have persuaded Moscow into accepting the establishment of a Zionist colonial state on occupied Palestinian territory in the first place, plus whatever other daft delusions this decision encompassed.

"Revolutionary" anti-imperialist influences in the Middle East have ever since been deservedly suspect, because of their association with Moscow's rotten compromise with Western imperialism's Zionist mailed fist, called, "Israel".

To this day, all Revisionist remnants without exception still go along with the wretched "two-state solution" as the final settlement, an almost certain impossibility because of the continued inevitable Zionist bullying domination behind this paper-thin cosmetic façade.

To this day, all Revisionist rottenness, including Lalkar, still creeps along in this "reformist" groove, incapable or unwilling to get their brains round the ludicrous stupidity of Moscow's original "recognition" of an imperialist neocolonisation taking place at gunpoint in the second half of the 20th century, in the epoch of terminal imperialist revolutionary crisis.

That collapse-in-chaos denouement draws relentlessly closer, - as the quieter corners of capitalism's press itself reveals, away from the wishful-thinking headline hysteria about "a new bull market shaping up".

The deeper thinking is that deflation and trade-war are poised to shatter the Western "free world" for good:

Actions speak louder than words, so we should know just how seriously the Federal Reserve is taking the risk of deflation in the United States. The fact that financial markets are debating whether Alan Greenspan will cut interest rates to 0.75% or "merely" to 1% tells its own story. The Fed is taking the threat very seriously indeed.

Nor do the markets believe that the anti-deflation package will end there. They are looking for Greenspan to signal that the US authorities will start buying back government bonds, a move that would reduce bond yields and so bring down long-term, interest rates for companies and individuals. As John Shepperd of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein said last week, the Fed is insisting that the US should be safe from deflation yet is prepared to act to make sure that it is right.

"The acrobat should not fall, implies Greenspan, but the safety net has been taken out, fully checked, and has been firmly tied in place.'

Deflation threat

This is a sensible move. Winning the war against Saddam Hussein was the easy bit; the right image for the global economy is not that of a formula one car with the pedal to the metal - rather a trick cyclist wobbling across a high wire. A safety net seems a very good idea.

The DKW team thinks it quite possible that interest rates in the US will stay below 1% for the next two years, that rates in the eurozone will hit 1% once the European Central Bank realises the extent of the deflationary threat, and that rates in the UK will come down to 3.25%. These rates are extraordinarily low by any standards, but rather than being evidence of a global economy in glowing health are a sign of how close it is to severe trouble.

"We are not quite at deflation but we are close," eminent American economist Lester Thurow said in London last week. Computerisation, offshore production, outsourcing, deregulation, privatisation - the full nine yards of globalisation, in other words - had resulted in excess capacity in every industry in the world, he said.

In an environment where inflation is already low, excess capacity plus inadequate demand equals a big risk of deflation, the biggest since the depression. Given that the 1930s have left an indelible mark on the conduct of US economic policy ever since, it is hardly surprising that Greenspan should be worried.

He dropped a pretty broad hint about his concerns earlier this month, when he said he had "not yet seen any major impetus to a pick up", adding that the Fed 'was "far more inclined ... to be taking out insurance against economic weakness" and saw the need for a "wider firebreak" to contain deflationary forces. 

The warning signs are certainly there. Japan's descent into deflation was presaged by its measure of core inflation, excluding food, shelter and housing costs, with a broader measure of price changes following it down after a lag. The US seems to be following a similar pattern, with core inflation excluding housing and medical care rising only marginally above zero in recent months.

This may seem strange at a time when the US economy is still expanding, but the problem is that it is not living up to its potential. There is downward pressure on prices all the time that actual output falls short of potential output, and the size of this output gap is growing. At some point disinflation - ever lower levels of inflation - turns into deflation unless something stops it.

Greenspan rightly appears unconvinced by those who argue that Japan was a special case and that therefore it could not happen in the west. As Graham Turner explains in his timely new book about the Japanese descent into deflation, the root cause of its difficulties lay in "unbridled speculation, excessive borrowing and overinvestment". The US has had all three. Personal sector borrowing in the US is now well above the levels witnessed at the time of the Wall Street crash of 1929, and falling interest rates have not resulted in lower debt servicing costs because the level of borrowing has risen so quickly.

And, as Japan showed, once inflation turns negative, the real cost of borrowing rises because nominal interest rates cannot fall below zero. In those circumstances, the real value of debt increases, consumers stop spending in anticipation of even lower prices and companies go bust because the "stickiness of wages" means the cost of labour falls far less quickly than prices thereby leading to big falls in profitability. Even when prices were falling at 15% a year in the depression, wages - for those lucky enough to be employed - were still going up, Thurow said last week.

Various reasons have been put forward to explain why the US will not be the new Japan, but Turner argues that none of them is especially convincing. While it is true that the Fed has moved more rapidly to bring down short term interest rates, US companies have not seen any fall in their aggregate borrowing costs since the bear market in shares began three years ago. 

The reason for this is that US business is highly dependent on the corporate bond market, where investors have taken fright at the wipe out in equities and demanded a higher risk premium for lending to companies. This has been especially true for highly leveraged companies in the junk bond market. Net corporate interest payments are actually higher than in the first quarter of 2000, when the stock market bubble burst.

Nor, says Turner, should we be taken in by all the talk of America's productivity miracle. Japan's productivity in the 1980s was impressive, and over the past two decades it has grown 15% faster than America's. But productivity is not the same as profitability, and in both cases what happened was that the expansion in productive capacity meant that supply exceeded demand. Low inflation, seen in Japan in the late 1980s and the US in the late 1990s as evidence that the good times would last for ever, was in fact a warning sign that companies were unable to raise prices in a highly competitive business climate. The bubbles were the result of investors failing to look closely enough at the bottom line: in the case of the US, profits did rise in the second half of the 1990s, by 30%. In the same period the S&P index of shares rose by 300%. Wall Street still looks overvalued, with the risk that the recent run-up in shares is a repeat of the rallies in the Nikkei seen in the 1990s.

Another downward lurch in equities would make deflation even more likely.

Foreign direct investment into Britain collapsed last year as the weakness of the global economy; the prolonged hangover from the dotcom bubble and growing fears of deflation choked off mergers and acquisitions, the west's leading think-tank said yesterday.

The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said FDI Into Britain more than halved in 2002 from $62bn (£40bn) to $25bn as part of a continuing worldwide slump since its peak three years ago.

In its annual report on FDI, the OECD said investment into the west's 30 richest countries had fallen by two-thirds in two years and warned that the additional uncertainty created by the war in Iraq meant that this year could see a further decline of almost one third.

A total of $490bn in investment flowed into OECD countries in 2002, down from $615bn in 2001 and $1.2?3 trillion in 2000, the survey said.

Britain and the US accounted for the entire decline in OECD-wide inflows of FDI. The two countries - traditionally the largest recipients of FDI within the OECD - saw their inflows drop by $138bn, with the US attracting just $30bn of investment, down $100bn on the previous year and one tenth of the level reached in 2000.

"These figures point to the huge risks and costs of staying out of the euro," said Philippe Legrain, chief economist [ ] at Britain in Europe. "Every pound of foreign investment we lose makes us all poorer and, while the euro countries are increasing both their share and volume of foreign investment, we are losing out - big time."

By contrast, FDI flows into France fell only slightly from $52.6bn to $48.2bn, while those into Germany rose from $33.9bn to $38.1bn. 

If the downward trend of mergers and acquisitions in the first five months of the year continues, OECD countries could be heading for a further drop in FDI in 2003 of 25%-30%, said the report.

Individual sectors such as the airline and tourism industries had been especially hard hit by fears of terrorism' and the build-up to war in the Gulf, while the "new economy" - the focus of much of Britain's FDI in the late 1990s - was burdened with sizeable debts. 	

'The American defence secretary believes the US is the only military, economic and financial power in the world. We do not share this vision,' defence minister Michele Alliot-Marie told Le Monde, calling on European defence firms to combat 'American industrialists pursuing a logic of economic war'.

She will soon issue a report questioning the influence of US shareholders over European defence companies. In a mirror image of these moves, US legislators are attempting to put a de facto bar on the award of military contracts to foreign transport firms.

But the skirmish over defence is only the latest development of a bad month for US-European trade relations. First, the EU acquired the right to issue $4 billion of trade sanctions by the World Trade Organisation in response to a long-running dispute over US tax subsidies to exporters through Foreign Sales Corporation (FSC) measures.

A week later, the US took its dispute over an EU ban on imports of genetically modified foods to the WTO.

American aviation companies were left smarting after suggestions that Airbus blackballed a $2.8bn US bid to supply engines for the Europrop plane, thereby allowing the European consortium to re-tender with a lower bid. President Bush is being lobbied to issue retaliatory sanctions if international trade laws have been broken.

Last week, the EU referred the US back to the WTO over measures that stop products being sold below cost price, known as anti-dumping duties. And then there are large-scale disputes looming over US steel tariffs and Europe's agricultural subsidies. 

Throw in the fact that many in Europe believe that the US has unleashed the weapon of mass devaluation - falling dollar - on the world economy and there's a whiff of the 1930s. Of beggar-thy-neighbour devaluations. Of disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs. Of the globalisation process tripping up and the dreaded deflationary spiral.

'We haven't been here before; the probability of a catastrophe has increased markedly,' says Alan Winters, a leading trade economist from Sussex University. 'When the sympathy disappears from international trade talks then out come these weapons. I'd have no doubt that if the Americans push hard on GM, the EU will push right back over FSC. It's close to that really nasty scenario.'

Both parties can resort to a 'nuclear' option. The EU's weapon - its $4bn list of WTO- approved sanctions to compensate for the FSC - is loaded and ready to fire at will. The US arsenal - similar 'counter-measures' to compensate for Europe's GM ban - is being prepared.

Fear of mutually assured destruction will prevent either side firing, it is said. But there are signs that the nuclear analogy is not quite on the money. The truth is that both sides are developing their alternatives to genuine multilateralism. If the impasse continues, both have fallback options based on regionalist free trade areas.

AS IS the fashion with real wars these days, there was no formal declaration of this 'economic war'. But in the eyes of a senior member of the French cabinet, it came in an unprecedented American snub to last week's Parts Air Show. It was just the latest front of a transatlantic trade battle. Top executives from Boeing and Lockheed Martin boycotted the prestigious show after the US military greatly scaled down its presence at the biennial event. Just another move in this intricate game of snub, spin and sideline.

But the US has, in the words of Robert Zoellick, the US trade representative, been pursuing a policy of 'competition in liberalisation' of trade. It has been striking deals bilaterally and regionally as well as through the multilateral WTO framework. Recently, special free trade deals have been signed with Singapore and Chile. This weekend, the US is pushing proposals for a free trade area, linked to the US, in the Middle East. These sweetheart agreements with favoured nations are a threat to more generalised free trade. 

'It could end up with little happening in Geneva and the world carved up into regional blocs and overlapping agreements that encourage firms to invest for legalistic reasons rather than specialising based on comparative advantage,' says Philippe Legrain, a former special adviser at the WTO. A much bigger game is being played out by the US negotiators. The menu of. different side deals offers the US enhanced leverage over Europe. Zoellick believes that it was the establishment of North American and Asia-Pacific free trade areas in 1994 that forced Europe to close the Uruguay Round of trade talks, although that is disputed in Europe. Europe, too, has been puffing up its regional base, either through expansion to eastern Europe, or through preferential trade treatment around the Mediterranean rim.

	'Each of the two sides is now building' up its own bloc with regional client states. Regionalism could undermine the multilateral system,' says Winters.

	The military analogy stretches to the manner in which the US has attempted to 'intemationalise' its dispute over GM. Australia and Argentina were brought on board for its attack on Europe's attitude to GM. 	

In the background to all this gloom, fear, and hatred, - international corporate results continue to record ever new and ever-worsening disaster stories, headed by General Motors' huge pension-debt problems and the downgrading of the American manufacturing icon's credit-rating; and by the terrifying financial mess got into by the leading US Loan Mortgage company, gambling in derivatives trading to the tune of $700 billion, which is now looking dodgy, a potential bankruptcy avalanche five times greater than that which nearly wiped out the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund in 1998, almost taking the whole of Wall Street with it following the Russian currency default.

Known as Freddie Mac, inquiries are under way into management shenanigans at this Federal giant, central to US housing-market health and security.

Just to add to capitalism's misery, Japan's banks have once again slid closer to collapse.

But is the system really "on the brink" of a crash??

One large and vital British industry is saying just that:  

The crisis facing global civil aviation is taking its toll on British industry with the sector suffering its worst job losses for two decades.

Research to be published by the Society of British Aerospace Companies within the next few weeks is expected to show that the industry shed 20,000 jobs in the year to April from a total of just under 150,000.

At the Paris air show yesterday SBAC president Gordon Page warned that the downturn was not over. Some estimates suggest that another 5%-10% of the workforce - up to 13,000 jobs - could be lost in the next two to three years. Keith Hayward, the SBAC's head of economic and political affairs, said the decline in employment was "the steepest single fall for 20 years".

"Things are not going to get better quickly," he said but added that further falls were likely to be smaller than the recent decline.

The SBAC's figures, which are also expected to show a 10% fall in turnover, are likely to increase pressure on the government to back the BAE Systems bid to provide Hawk jet training facilities to the RAF. Though the decision lies with the Ministry of Defence, the Treasury is reported to have concerns about value for money. If BAE does not get the Hawk deal it would place a question mark over hundreds of jobs at its Brough plant in Yorkshire as well as dashing company hopes of winning significant export orders.

The downturn in the industry has been driven by lacklustre economic growth, the impact of 9/11, the war in Iraq and the Sars outbreak.

Many of the British industry's small and medium sized companies have additional causes for concern beyond the immediate downturn.

George McAuley, skills and competitiveness manager at the Lancashire-based North West Aerospace Alliance, which represents more than 700 mainly smaller companies, said the industry was facing a crisis.

"The big prime contractors like BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and GKN are placing work with low cost manufacturing countries," he said. "They are complaining that because of cost pressures they are having to subcontract work to the Far East and eastern Europe. The question is how to get the aerospace manufacturing sector to be competitive so that the big contractors will place their work here.

"From my perspective I think the industry is on the edge of a cliff."

The whole stinking capitalist racket is on the edge of a cliff, which brings the argument round full circle to Orwell's "bureaucracy" again, and the wretchedness of Trot and Revisionist anti-communists, who duck the all-important HISTORICAL challenge to the "parliamentary democracy" sneers that "state bureaucracy" can "never match the efficiency and innovations" of private finance initiatives. A few lone voices will still defend the nationalised industries' records, but on the really vital historical questions of the USSR's achievements for 60 years, 99% of the fake-'lefts' avoid the argument because of ignorance, fear of political vilification, or their eager and delighted anti-communism.

But the question of "state bureaucracy" or "free enterprise" needs facing squarely on its Cold War experience which for most of the 20th century was the pivotal question for civilisation, - could communism triumph or would capitalism survive.???

This is not to slight the achievements of the National Health Service or the nationalised industries in postwar Britain, or their advocacy in the face of the threat, or disaster, of future or past privatisations that they are deservedly currently receiving.

But the issue is not really about just management as such, or staff loyalty and a sense of collective, worthwhile, endeavour, etc, etc.

This is a deeper democracy matter of a state's whole achievements based on its class structure and ethos, and based on what international balance of class forces is prevailing to constantly encourage, or deliberately undermine, or belligerently sabotage (the planned publicly-owned-economy alternative to the free market, from which no workers state, attempting to construct socialism, is ever going to be free for as long as the current imperialist-dominated world scene lasts, and which must be assessed and analysed only from the very longest-term perspectives).

It is ONLY in the light of the post-1945 imperialist boom's coming COLLAPSE that the titanic achievements of the admittedly BUREAUCRACY-run Soviet workers state can finally be properly assessed, - INCLUDING as much or as little additional value to life that middle-class Trot hysterics wish to add (on account of supposed "Soviet totalitarian bureaucracy" while genuinely fighting imperialist counter-revolutionary sabotage before tamely limping off the scene of history in 1990); - compared to the butchery, lies, warmongering, and exploitational tyranny inflicted on hundreds of millions of people in the Third World by the "free market" since 1945.

Clearly, the totally war-ravaged, crazily Revisionism-disadvantaged, cruelly-sabotaged and isolated Soviet workers state TOTALLY OUTPERFORMED the West's amassment of the mightiest imperialist wealth and power that the world has ever seen; - by managing to MORE THAN hold its own, - AND to offer generous help and friendship to a huge number of Third World and Socialist Camp countries at the same time, winning genuine world sympathy light years ahead of where Western imperialism had forced its rotten domination and exploitation relationships to, with various reactionary stooge regimes, in the same period.

That this huge advantage to a workers state planned economy was thrown away by the scarcely-credible stupidity of the Stalinist Revisionism corrupted Soviet bureaucracy is not strictly relevant to the actual facts of the USSR's state achievements, but only to the catastrophe of Third International leadership-failure due to the strange Cult-of-Stalin historical circumstances of Soviet socialism's triumph against imperialist counter-revolution AGAINST ALL THE ODDS.

The still-staggering phenomenon of the bureaucracy's self-liquidation is also only relevant to the still-relatively naïve philosophical maturity of the international proletariat so far.

China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc, may yet decide to do things differently, showing greater maturity, though without yet showing much greater grasp in public of the full world-dominating significance of the incurable and deepening warmongering imperialist crisis, or of the unbelievable defeatist stupidity of Stalinist Revisionism in cajoling the entire Third International into ignoring it or dismissing its CRUCIAL REVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE for the whole of mankind. Build Leninism. EPSR

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

The scumbag "free press" is part and parcel of the decrepit ruling-class's dying colonial order.

THE naming of 'Stakeknife' exposed the way the media spreads misinformation through un-attributed sources and becomes a willing participant in the so-called 'dirty war'.

Journalists claiming to have anti-imperialist credentials have used the 'Stakeknife' story to launch attacks on Sinn Féin. For some, criticism of the Peace Process and of Sinn Féin has become part of the process of British propaganda.

PEACE PROCESS THREAT

The British Establishment considers the Process to be a threat to its rule in the North, not least because it fragments and disorientates unionism. They have sought to consolidate unionism since the Agreement was signed by continuing the overt and covert campaign against Sinn Féin. British strategy has sought to reincorporate the Dublin Government into this strategy, whose aim is to preserve the political integrity of sectarian unionism and to marginalise Irish republicanism.

Elements of the British establishment are attempting to re-engineer the political isolation and demonisation that republicans experienced prior to the Good Friday Agreement. The unionist paramilitaries have been used as part of this strategy to put continuing violent pressure on republican areas, with the hope of disrupting and destroying the republican cessation.

M15 SPEAKS WITH FORKED TONGUE

However, the plan to 'save Dave' has left Britain dangerously exposed politically. It required the cancellation of an election, a basic denial of the right to vote. This action was accompanied by John Stevens' report on British collusion with unionist paramilitaries. The revelation from Michael Stone that he was directed to Milltown Cemetery in 1988 to kill mourners by the RUC emerged the same day the Stakeknife story appeared.

An attempt at attention diversion was put in place by the 'naming' of Stakeknife. A large sucking sound accompanied the story, which pulled in every gullible journalist and media organisation.

The purpose of the story is to demoralise northern nationalists with the mistaken idea that they are not authors of their own political destiny and to take the focus off nationalist political anger.

DAILY TORYGRAPH

Ed Moloney wrote for the pro-unionist Daily Telegraph on 15 May supporting the Stakeknife revelations, or 'Steak Knife', as he insists on calling it. Moloney wrote an earlier Telegraph piece attempting to partially discredit the BBC's Panorama, which exposed the FRU/Nelson relationship with unionist paramilitaries. Moloney deliberately undermined the exposé. He wrote that Nelson's task was to protect Stakeknife, while the UDA organised the shooting of Pat Finucane, Francisco Notorantonio and other nationalist victims. That piece deflected responsibility away from Britain's dirty war. The Telegraph, as media representative of the right wing of the British establishment, was happy to print it.

Southern anti-republican writers like Eoghan Harris, Fintan O'Toole and Colm Tobin have promoted Moloney's recent work, as has David Trimble's advisor, Paul Bew and Daily Telegraph former Ireland correspondent, Toby Hamden. Now Moloney sees the Peace Process as a British plot and promotes the conspiratorial fantasy that Sinn Féin is controlled by highly placed British spies. The anti-republican commentators named above praise his delusional and patronising findings. It is classic example of persistent misinformation.

Moloney has an inflated sense of his own importance. He told the Sunday Tribune after the publication of his book on Gerry Adams, that "he would be exposing himself and his family to "obvious dangers" if he worked in the north again... "It is not that I think the IRA would order action they are not that stupid - but that some 'Saturday night hero' might try to impress his bosses by taking his own action," he said" (Irish News, 7 Sept 2002).

The only people to attack and kill journalists have been unionist paramilitaries under the control of British Intelligence. Moloney knows this. His comment was both self-serving, egofuelled and a typically casual smear.

Those who ran with the 'revelation' and the blatant lies and falsehoods that accompanied it continue to treat this bag of smoke in a room full of mirrors as a fact. They call on the IRA to address 'serious' questions. Wild-eyed Irish journalists were seen on British television demanding that the IRA conduct a prolonged investigation and enquiry into a story that fell apart within days of its appearance. Curiously, the clear evidence of penetration of dissident republican organisations, and the splits engendered, has not led to similar demands from these same 'anti-imperialist' media pundits.

007 SCHOOL OF POLITICS

Undaunted by setbacks in the 'outing' of Stakeknife, proponents of the 007 school of anti-republican politics have started to claim that we should examine the whole box of cutlery. The anti-republican journalist Jim Cusack in the Sunday Independent tried to salvage the story. The IRA's GHQ was "riddled with informers", he said, in a futile attempt to derive more column inches from this securocrat fantasy.

Securocrat and media circles are more than happy to promote the Stakeknife theory. It has the potential to send republicans into a frenzy of self-recrimination and fruitless speculation about spectres and phantoms - if republicans were foolish enough to fall for it.

MARTIN McGUINNESS ATE MY HAMSTER

Anther curious example of persistent misinformation is from Anthony Maclntyre's dissident anti-Sinn Féin website. This website hosts mutually self-reinforcing praise from Bew and Hamden for the Stakeknife theory, reprinted from the Daily Telegraph, not usually thought of as a source of pro-Irish nationalist, never mind republican, information.

An uncritical response to British propaganda has developed alongside a relationship with Liam Clarke (Ireland Editor of the Sunday Times) and his partner Kathryn Johnston. Clarke openly claims to write for a paper with "a robust anti-nationalist line". He regularly contributes uncheckable 'security' sourced stories, in which facts are not facts at all, just guesswork. Clarke 'revealed' the existence of Stakeknife four years ago in the Sunday Times.

A recent interview with Clarke and Johnston, after their arrest by the PSNI team investigating the publication of the McGuinness-Mowlam tapes, turned into a diatribe against Martin McGuinness.

The website's friendly association with Clarke & Johnston began with the publication of a positive review of Clarke and Johnston's 'biography' of Martin McGuinness. The book claimed that Martin McGuinness started the Bloody Sunday massacre. The review was written by a member of Republican Sinn Féin and said that McGuinness was a "censor" for advising people not to talk to Clarke and Johnston.

IT'S THE PSNI AND BRITISH ARMY, STUPID!

The interview tries to shift responsibility for the PSNI's treatment of the intrepid pair on to Martin McGuinness. This is the way Clarke-Johnston wrote about Bloody Sunday. The Irish Democrat noted that "smears are delivered without fanfare [and] arrive in the company of known facts". This latest smear is published without critical comment. Perhaps, to borrow a phrase from the piece, this is an example of how "chummy" relations have become.

It should be obvious, but Sinn Féin is not responsible for treatment meted out by the PSNI and the British state or, for that matter, for what happened on Bloody Sunday. The Brits are to blame.

PROVOS, PARAS - SPOT THE DIFFERENCE

It remains for us to speculate about the upcoming participation by Clarke and Johnston in the Saville Tribunal, announced by Johnston on a TV programme. In it, Johnston tried to rehabilitate the Widgery Tribunal and consistently attacked the IRA, whose guns were silent during the march.

Clarke and Johnston plan to contradict the evidence of Derry people and will support the British view that 'the Provos' were partly to blame for Bloody Sunday - if it were not so serious this 'evidence' should turn out to be a real laugh (and a half). It has to be asked if the participants in this website are going to continue to collude in a gross historical fabrication.

The attempt to deflect British responsibility for Bloody Sunday on to the IRA is part of Britain's dirty war. The attempt to conceal, or to deflect attention away from, collusion with unionist paramilitaries is also part of that war. Unfortunately, there are some who claim to know better who have been deflected into the political cul-de-sac of an endless spy hunt.

WHERE'S THE BEEF?

Two questions can be asked. Why did British sources release the 'name' of Stakeknife and then do nothing to protect their 'superspy' - did they want a dead body on republican hands? Second, why do so-called purer-than-the-driven-snow dissident 'republicans' promote pro-British propaganda and propagandists? Those who are blind to the relevance of the first question are incapable of self-reflection in relation to the second.

British spies and informers are a fact of British rule in Ireland. So too is misinformation and the tactic of divide and rule. The British still carry out both an open and a clandestine struggle against the advance of Sinn Féin. Open in the demand for sanctions and the denial of the right to vote. Clandestine in the direction of unionist paramilitaries, attacks on nationalist areas and the continuation of the dirty war and the media war.

This is not the action of people who think their opponent has sold out. You don't fight a dirty war against an enemy that has given up.

The securocrats will not succeed. Exposure of their activities will enable more people to open their eyes to the nature of British rule in Ireland.

Commentators like Liam Clarke and Ed Moloney are so fixated on tripping up their biographical subjects, Adams and McGuinness, that they are increasingly blind to political reality.

Luckily most of the rest of us can read between the lines.