Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.   V. I. Lenin 

Economic & Philosophic Science Review 

No 1198  September 02 2003

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NW Seminar on Sat Sept 27, NOT Sept 20
Hutton smokescreen in vain as the sick West colonial-warmongering arrogance comes increasingly to grief in the Middle East anyway. It is the imperialist DEFEAT which matters, - not at whose immediate hands. Once Western monopoly-tyranny mismanagement of the world is halted by defeats and economic-crisis collapse, planned revolutionary socialist re-organisation, of the planet will quickly re-find its voice. The fake-'left'  "rejection” of a spontaneous "terrorist" mass-fightback against Zionist and US colonial occupation will see this petty-bourgeois posturing humiliated along with the whole era of propaganda brainwashing by bourgeois anti-communism.

The trivial dramas of the inquiry details (into the Blair Government's lying) cannot hide the infinitely greater political reality of looming Western imperialist defeat in the Middle East.

With even the fake-'lefts' (Alliance, SWP, SLP, etc) beginning now to grasp the EPSR's long-standing analysis that insoluble economic crisis is driving the west relentlessly towards more and more generalised warmongering, it is the glaring gaps still in their understanding which point out which questions continue to require the greatest emphasis.

The fake-'lefts' sectarianism, - rigid from decades of posturing, self-righteous anti-Stalinism, remains blind to the uncontrollable REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS which forms the absolute core of all Marxism's historical science, and inherently hostile to such an understanding of world development because of their petty-bourgeois complacency, born of too long class-collaboration inside the global bourgeois anti-communist camp.

And because of this, the fake-'lefts' then miss the significance of the spontaneous surge of anti-imperialist struggle, raging worldwide now but in particular in the Middle East, - dismissing it for its "destructive terrorist crudeness" or for its "lack of any reliable democratic-socialist party, structure", etc, etc.

It is perfectly intelligible that there are few signs yet of any re-born Leninist-Bolshevist movement building towards the toppling of Western imperialist world domination in the only way possible (by renewed determination to impose proletarian dictatorship everywhere until all monopoly capitalist bourgeois ambitions are conquered planet-wide).

Western 'left' influence totally destroyed all Marxist understanding and credibility in the long sterile years of the phony "Cold War" in which incipient Moscow class-collaborationism (fed by Stalin's Revisionist theoretical idiocy) was only countered by Trotskyism's disgraceful and degenerate anti-communist opportunism (which ended up cheering on the Pilsudski-fascist Walesa as he implemented the CIA-Vatican "Solidarnosc" stunt to dismantle the Polish workers state, the lynchpin for undermining the whole of East Europe from the feeble grip of Revisionism's world-reformist illusions).

True to form, the local Communist Party in Iraq is still peddling Moscow's disastrous dream of "peaceful coexistence and collaboration with non-aggressive imperialism" (as Stalin called it), - actually accepting a position on the US-stooge "governing Iraqi council", and actually "condemning" the spontaneous guerrilla-war resistance as "pointless terrorist destruction of Iraq's wealth", etc, etc.

But the Trots are no better, with the Weekly Worker "Communist University" giving a welcoming platform to the WPI (Worker-Communist Party of Iraq) to give its ridiculous reformist spiel which starts by rhetorically asking: "Dealing with the war and occupation, could they achieve workers' demands? Is it true that the war was launched to bring to us the freedoms we fought for years to gain? Was the war launched for our welfare, for human rights? Are the workers benefiting from the current situation?", etc, etc; and ends with the fake-'left' declaration: "We have to end the unipolar world. We have to replace the new world order based on this unipolar world with another one, and western government with the workers' council republic", - in practice, however, only demanding a UN takeover, & failing in between to even mention any idea of REVOLUTION, and merely dismissing the nationalists, Baathists, and Islamic factions as just "reactionary forces", and failing to say a single word about their actual devastating blows against the American imperialist occupation.

Ideologically reactionary the nationalists, Baathists, and Islamic sects certainly are, but the all-important question is that they are DEFEATING the imperialist occupation.

To not only not understand the colossal historical significance of this, but to actually be opposed to its "destructive terrorist effects", as these anti-Marxist petty-bourgeois posturing 'lefts' clearly are, - is so far up the reactionary creek itself that one wonders who these jerks are, and who put them up to it? (See story below of how the fake-'left' in Britain admits, in its own words, how it was ALL conned for years by some bogus Ukrainian 'lefts'. It is told as simply a money fraud by the self-exculpatory Weekly Worker tellers (dressing up their own political backwardness as best they can, despite its laughable shallowness). But what else might be behind these Ukrainian 'left' con groups??)

The potentially imminent DEFEAT of Western imperialist warmongering intrigues in the Middle East, - for all its maddening absence of conscious Leninist leadership on the scene for the moment, and for all its reactionary ideological birthmarks (Baathism, nationalism, Islamicism, etc), would be a spontaneous reflection of such a major shift in the balance of class and national forces in the world as to merit a "historical turning point" label, - without which the undoubtedly vitally necessary Leninist-party conscious leadership of REVOLUTION would face frustration anyway.

It is the fake-'left' absolute ignorance of Marxism which is playing the disastrous role here.

What is emerging in the Middle East are signs of the classic convergence (identified by historical materialism)of a ruling-class system (now a global system) which cannot rule on in the old way any more, and a ruled mass which can no longer tolerate suffering the old exploitation and humiliation conditions any more.

This means the making of a possible REVOLUTIONARY explosion, and, in the circumstances, one which could have WORLDWIDE repercussions and significance.

What the posturing of the fake-'left' refuses to see is that behind the obviously ideologically-reactionary current superficiality of growing anti-imperialist resistance in the Middle East (Islamic fundamentalism, nationalism, Baathism, anti-semitism, etc) looms a seething mass of resentment possibly representing a historical turning-point at which EVERYONE is expressing the impossibility of the Third World living-on any longer under Western imperialist domination.

And if this IS what is happening, then it almost certainly means that the proletariat throughout the rest of the world is ALSO coming to the end of its tether as far as any further tolerance is concerned of monopoly capitalism's never-ending cycles of economic uncertainty and shallowness (brittle consumerism followed by slump disasters) followed by catastrophic warmongering disasters for literally billions of people (as World War III would now affect, following the escalating pattern already set by World Wars I and II which accompanied the imperialist economic system's two previous great slump crises of "overproduction" such as is now again threatening global economic collapse, the fear of which is precisely what is driving the Western leadership back into nonstop warmongering mode).

All the classic signs are already there. 

* An economic crash of "surplus" capital and unrepayable debt-mountains (state and personal) which has been artificially prolonging the post-1945 boom into capitalism's greatest ever flourishing, stumbles closer to catastrophe every day;

*The age-old diversion of a foreign war "in the national interest" to take everyone's mind off the impending national economic disaster, is no longer working as it used to in the gung-ho colonial era, - the "pagan fuzzy-wuzzies" just refuse to be "subdued" so easily any more;

*And the post-globalisation world is already rapidly growing up, already showing signs of being heartily sick of the tawdry glitz, the shallow philistinism, and the crippling uncertainties of the hire-and-fire capitalist rat-race, and its sordid, violent, nihilistic "culture".

If the "prosperity" system is entering yet another falling-apart phase; if the monopoly-imperialist world leadership is simply incapable of colonially dominating any longer; and if the mass of people on Earth are simply fed up with capitalism's inherent injustices, nastiness, and instability; then the third and final great wave of proletarian REVOLUTION is the obvious Marxist programme to work towards.

Even the bourgeois press can see this:

The world is beginning to look like France, a few years before the Revolution. There are no reliable wealth statistics from that time, but the disparities are unlikely to have been greater than they are today. 

The wealthiest 5% of the world's people now earn 14 times as much as the poorest 5%. The 500 richest people on earth now own $1.54 trillion - more than the entire gross domestic product of Africa, or the combined annual incomes of the poorest half of humanity. Now,  just as then, the desperation of the poor counterpoises the obscene consumption of the rich. 

Now, just as then, the sages employed by the global aristocrats - in the universities, the think-tanks, the newspapers and magazines contrive to prove that we possess the pest of all possible systems in the best of all possible worlds. In the fortress of Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay we lave our Bastille, in which men are imprisoned without charge or trial. 

Like the court at Versailles, the wealth and splendour of the nouveau-ancien-regime will be on display, not far from the stinking slums in which hunger reigns, at next week's world trade summit in Cancun in Mexico. Between banquets and champagne receptions, men like the European trade commissioner Pascal Lamy and the US trade representative Robert Zoellick will dismiss with their customary arrogance the needs of the hungry majority. There we will witness the same corruption, of both purpose and execution, the same conflation of the private good with the public good: le monde, c'est nous. As Charles Dickens wrote of the ruling class of that earlier time: "the leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance." 

The unreality begins in Mexico with the World Trade Organisation's statement of intent. It will, its director general says, ensure that "development issues lie at the heart" of the negotiations. The new talks, in other words, are designed to help the people of the poor nations to escape from poverty. 

In almost every respect they are destined to do the opposite. Every promise the rich world has made the poor world is being broken. Every demand for the further expropriation of the wealth of the poor is being pursued with ruthless persistence.

Take, for example, the issue of "tariffs"; or taxes on trade. A new report by Oxfam, published today, shows that the poorer a nation is, the higher the rates of tax it must pay in order to export its goods. The United States imposes tariffs of between 0-1% on major imports from Britain, France, Japan and Germany, but taxes of 14 or 15% on produce from Bangladesh, Cambodia and Nepal. The British government does the same: Sri Lanka and Uruguay must pay eight times as much to sell their goods over here as the United States.

This happens for two reasons. The first is that the poorer nations can't fight back. The second is that, without taxes, the poor would outcompete the rich. The stiffest tariffs are imposed on goods such as textiles and faun products, in which the weak nations , possess a commercial advantage.

Nor has any progress been made on farm subsidies. In 1994, the rich countries agreed that they would phase them out, if the poor countries promised to open their markets to western corporations. The poor nations kept their promise, the rich countries broke theirs. The new round of talks is supposed to lead to the "phasing out [of] all forms of export subsidies"; and a negotiating text to this effect was meant to have been produced by March 31. Again, the promise has been broken, and again the poor have been told that only if they grant the rich world's corporations even greater access to their economies, farm subsidies will come to an end.

But the powerful nations, while refusing to address the demands of the poor, press their own claims with brutal diplomacy. They now insist that the "development round" be used to force nations to grant foreign corporations the same rights as domestic ones; to open their public services to the private sector and to invite foreign companies to bid to run them. What this means, as nearly all the big multinational corporations are based in the rich world, is a rich world takeover of the poor world's economy. 

Lamy and Zoellick and the governments (such as ours) they represent must know that these demands are impossible for the weaker countries to meet. They must know that the combination of their broken promises and their outrageous terms could force the weaker governments to walk out of the trade talks in Cancun, just as they did in Seattle in 1999. They must know that this will mean the end of the World Trade Organisation. 

And this now appears to be their aim. Subverted and corrupted as the WTO is, it remains a multilateral body in which the poor nations can engage in collective bargaining and, in theory, outvote the rich. This never happens, because the rich nations have bypassed its decision-making structures. But the danger remains, so the EU and the US appear to wish to destroy it and to replace world trade agreements with even more coercive single-country deals. 

But eventually, as in France, there must be a revolution. It is likely to happen only when there is a globalised crisis of. survival: a worldwide shortage of grain, for example (like the deficit which followed the bad harvest of 1788) or - and this is currently more likely and more imminent - a shortage of fossil fuel. In previous columns I have suggested some of the means (such as a threatened collective default on the debt) by which this revolution can take place. Until the nouveau-ancien regime has been overthrown, and Lamy and Zoellick and their kind are (metaphorically) swinging from the lampposts, the rich, like the aristocrats of France, will devise ever more inventive means of dispossessing the poor.

Fake-'lefts' are now accepting that warmongering itself (faced with the unfathomable, imperialism-threatening terrors of insoluble global economic collapse) is the "reason" for the US Empire going to war, not just the simplistic "grab for oil', that the anti-revolutionary Lalkar Revisionists & SLP, etc. have been misleading the working class with.

But why the Middle East?? Obviously, because of the crucial oil resources there.

But NOT just to "grab some more". The USA virtually already controls it all anyway. And it could always bribe its way to any increased supplies it wanted, - as it has always done in the past.

No, the issue is POLITICAL CONTROL of the Middle East.

And that warmongering, neo-colonial aggressiveness has become regarded as necessary BECAUSE OF THE POTENTIAL WORLD BREAKUP in slump-haunted all-out economic trade-war conflict between all the major monopoly capitalist forces on Earth FOR SURVIVAL after the collapse of the "surplus"-capital credit boom, -  in which all kinds of hostile new alliances could be formed in the "every man for himself" atmosphere that is being created between the nations.

But the fake-'left' acceptance of economic crisis warmongering will only go so far and no further.

Still totally resisted is all grasp that THERE CAN BE NO SOLUTION to this imperialist monetary pollution of the world market.

It can only collapse into warmongering conflict.

And also TOTALLY resisted is the Marxist scientific fundamentals that in the imperialist epoch, such a crash can ONLY lead to war and the attempt to recarve-up the world's resources and technological-production preeminences for any ruling class's SURVIVAL stake, - the crisis will be that bad.

Equally TOTALLY resisted is any attempt to understand how the Third World prpletariat's vast masses might be showing the whole world how to fight a way forward through the terrible economic crisis and political tyranny to come by their magnificent spontaneous sacrificial struggles against imperialism, - such as the Palestinian nation has been steadily developing-in-strength for years, and such as now may be emerging in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course these struggles are a massive distance yet from being remotely close to proletarian revolutionary struggles for socialism, but they are nevertheless demonstrating something absolutely priceless for world working-class education in its current condition, - namely that imperialist warmongering tyranny is not only completely useless and full of shit, but even more importantly that it can also be DEFEATED.

Let the capitalist press itself tell the story:

'This is a disaster,' says Ahmed Jabal, 30, an English teacher who lost three relatives in the blast. 'There are so many sides now in Iraq you don't know who is your friend.' Jabal is certain of only one thing. 'I don't believe any Shia could have done this to one of his holy places.'

The logic believed to be behind the attacks, which have been happening at a rate of around 13 a day, is to sow maximum chaos in Iraq and undermine post-war reconstruction. If true, it is succeeding in this case: many of the grief-stricken, angry Shias crowding Najaf believe the bombing was either a sinister US conspiracy or the work of ex-Baath Party militants loyal to Saddam Hussein.

THE GROUPS behind those attacks go by a multiplicity of names - and increasingly, it appears, by a multiplicity of agendas that verge on anarchy. There are the Muslim Fighters of the Victorious Sects, the Iraqi Resistance Brigade and the General Command of the Iraqi Armed Resistance and Liberation Forces. There is the Army of Mohammed, Islamic Armed Group of al-Qaeda, Fallujah branch. There are the White Flags and Muslim Youth and Wakefulness and Holy War. All have claimed that thev are behind the bloodshed directed largely at US troops

The significance of this catastrophe, for all Iraqis, was written on the faces of the staff at Baghdad's Sheraton Hotel as the news broke and they gathered around the vast television in the foyer, Sunnis and Shias alike transfixed with fear and horror.

What we all are asking now is whether this audacious and destabilising attack will plunge the country into chaos.

The picture of that network of terrorists and guerrillas, between 5,000 and 7,000 strong,  which has been emerging in the past few weeks is of groups that are organising but not yet organised, with local command structures, money, weapons and expertise. Its fighters, by and large, are former members of Saddam's former security forces and Baath Party, bolstered with manpower and expertise by Arab fighters joining the new jihad against America - unlikely bedfellows with the secular Baathist cause.

That campaign of attacks that reached a crucial watershed last week as the number of US soldiers to die in Iraq in the post-invasion period overtook the number killed in action in the 'war proper'. Now even that has been overshadowed by Friday's events.

'What they are looking for is chaos,' says Charles Heatly, the British spokesman for Paul Bremer, Iraq's US administrator. That is what made the UN headquarters [which was bombed the previous week] a good target for them.'

The people behind the attacks, according to Heatly and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), are those who can never hope to thrive in the 'New Iraq'  - crooked businessmen and thugs from the state security organisations and towns like Ramadi and Fallujah, once the recruiting grounds for Saddam's Republican Guard.

According to Heath, their actions have no resonance with the wider population. 'These people have no future and are going to go down.' he says.

What Heatly does not say is that the groups have rapidly adapted. moving from crude ambushes on US troops to setting up factories turning out explosive devices.

His optimism is undermined by the physical reality that is growing up around the headquarters of the international organisations in Baghdad. Confronted with the fact of the shattered UN HQ at the Canal Hotel, and amid a wave of threats to organisations from CNN to the Red Cross, the internationals are burrowing into the fortresses.

Most striking of which is 'The Bubble', the headquarters of Paul Bremer and those charged with reconstructing Iraq. Surrounded by a wall of reinforced, blast-proof concrete, and guarded by tanks and helicopters, this is the Green Zone, the hub of Bremer's vision for the New Iraq.

It is almost self-sufficient. Those working their 16-hour shifts there can be treated in the compound's own hospital, run safely in its grounds, even take in a film. When they go outside. it is by armoured car with military escort. 

Those who once sneered at Bremer's isolation are now being forced into their own fortresses. At the complex of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels, a wall of concrete and wire is guarded by armed Iraqi security guards overseen by US troops in tanks.

At the headquarters of the International Committee for the Red Cross last week, which evacuated many of its staff following the UN bombing, workers were building tall walls of sandbags.

And while Bremer's office insists that the security situation is slowly improving, it is not the view of the security officers employed to advise and protect the major international organisations.

'The situation is getting worse,' said a senior official to a major aid organisation who asked not to be identified. 'We have been warned that we may be a target. I fear this is a society in the process of distintegration.

'What we are seeing is different groups emerging with different agendas. There are those who do not like foreigners, there are those fighting against what they see as an occupation, and those who believe all the international organisations are Christian.'

IT IS THIS last point that is becoming increasingly crucial in the development of those resisting the US 'occupation'. Evidence has emerged in recent weeks that Iraq has become the magnet for jihad fighters, who, according to some sources, have brought the expertise in terror operations and bomb-making that culminated in the UN attack.

'What we are seeing,' said one security source, 'is a developing marriage of convenience between the ex-Baathists, who have the money, the contacts and the ground knowledge, and jihadist volunteers who have the specialist skills and are coming to Iraq to fight Americans on Arab soil.

'As regards these people, the US has dangerously underestimated how important Iraq has become to them. They are drawn not only by the fact that US and British troops are in a country with two of the most important Islamic shrines after Mecca, at Karbala and Najaf, but because Iraq represents an ancient and powerful idea of Arab culture and history.'

Perhaps Wahabi jihadists puritanical Islamic group from Saudi Arabia - who regard the Shia rituals as idolatrous - helped carry out Friday's bombing.

Saudi nationals, Yemenis, Sudanese and Syrians, have already been captured in Iraq, according to the US Deputy Secretary of State.

But it is the Iraqis themselves who pose the greatest headache for the coalition forces, confronted in recent weeks with the realisation that those behind the attacks are far better organised than they had at first appreciated. 

The coalition's intelligence experts have discovered that the former Iraqi intelligence services are playing a much greater role than appreciated, with senior officials orchestrating attacks. And in many cases they are hiring poorer Iraqis to carry out the raids.

It is an analysis shared by the Iraqi National Congress (INC).

Most important of all, they have the people.

More important, it seems, the new terrorists blossoming in Bremer's new Iraq - the conquest of which was supposed to mark an end to terrorism - have the will and the capability to act.

FIRST, it was Afghanistan, then Bosnia and Chechnya, then, briefly, Afghanistan again. Now it is Iraq.

Islamic militants talk of  'theatres of jihad'. The phrase, with its dual military and dramatic senses, connotations of combat and of audience, is significant. Iraq is the latest stage on which militants can demonstrate their faith to fellow Muslims and unbelievers. It is the latest zone of battle where, in the militants' twisted world view, the aggressive West, supposedly set on subordinating and humiliating the lands of Islam, can be resisted.

Yesterday Iraqi police sources said they had seized four men whom they believed were behind the bombing of the Najaf shrine which killed 75 people on Friday. They said they were linked to 'al-Qaeda'.

Police always say this, and any claims of direct links to Osama bin Laden or those of his aides still at large should be treated with some scepticism. Al-Qaeda is a useful scapegoat. Any one with any knowledge of the practicalities of modern Islamic militancy knows that the chances of bin Laden ordering last week's attack are slim.  But, whatever the actual identity of the bombers or their commanders, the growing resistance networks in Iraq include a component made up of Islamic militants. If al-Qaeda is conceived of as the phenomenon of contemporary Sunni Muslim jihadi militancy, then al-Qaeda is indeed in Iraq. The bomb against the Jordanian embassy this month is likely to have been the work of a militant group which, though actually rivals of bin Laden, sham much of his broad agenda. 

Though those who organised the devastating attack on the UN in Baghdad may well have been diehard Saddam Hussein loyalists, it seems probable that it was an Islamic militant who drove the bomb into the building.

There is a dark irony in the growing co-operation between the Baathists, with their secular, Arabist, quasi-socialist traditions, and the militants, to whom Saddam was an apostate to be hated more than an unbeliever until very recently. Before the war in Iraq, most experts agree that such an alliance was impossible. Claims of a Saddam-bin Laden link were never substantiated.

However, during the war a series of religious opinions were issued by militant clerics which said that it was a Muslim duty to help any Muslim, even a bad one, in the face of any attack by an unbeliever.

That assistance is now being made available and is being accepted. The hawks' prophecy of potential, if not extant, links between Baghdad and al-Qaeda, conceived in the widest sense, has become self-fulfilling.

If everything goes according to plan, the new system should be up and running in time to impress voters in the American presidential elections of November 2004.

In practice, however, this plan is not working. The US and UN agendas clash. The mood in Kabul is getting gloomier by the day as the ambitious transition, timetable comes to seem more and more of a bad joke.

The first need of anyone working on reconstruction is basic security. Before building teams, aid workers or educators can improve regional hospitals, schools, water networks or phone systems (or even collecting data for the census that must be completed before next June's election), they need to be able to move around the country without fear of attack.

But as a murderous assault on an International Red Cross convoy proved this spring, no one can guarantee safety outside Kabul. Afghanistan's dusty hinterland bas again split into fiefdoms, each run by a warlord holding absolute power. No one dares to challenge the warlords, however much they ignore the hapless Kauai's demands for taxes, or flout human rights, or encourage the illegal cultivation of poppies for opium Why? Because the warlords are not only tolerated by US forces, but are also seen as vital allies in the War on Terror.

From Ismail Khan in the west to Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta Muhammad in the north, Gul Agha Shirzai in the south and Haji Din Mohammad and Hazrat Ali in the east, these mutually distrustful American-armed allies against the Taleban were hastily welcomed into today's leadership and given formal titles once the Taleban fell - a pragmatic reflection of their regional power. Many ex-Mujahidin have ties to America dating from the 1980s fight against Soviet occupation.

Not unnaturally, US forces find it convenient to continue to work with these bosses, arming them and using their territory to eradicate the still-dangerous Taleban resistance. Equally naturally, that US preference worries the Afghan Government and the aid community. Last month Human Rights Watch accused Washington and its allies of putting "too little pressure on military leaders" to knuckle under to civilian powers and said "funding joint operations and fraternising with warlords has sent, at best, mixed messages".

One solution could be to send the Nato-led international force, Isaf, which at present keeps order only in the capital, into the provinces.

But Isaf is going nowhere fast The US has ignored UN and Afghan pleading, and said no. And feuding between these two sets of foreigners is doubling Afghanistan's troubles.

In the left corner, behind the well-meaning but virtually powerless Government of interim President Karzai, is the United Nations with its multiple agencies and white Land Cruisers, the channel for the $5 billion of aid due in the next four years. The aid is supposed to help Karzai to extend his authority across Afghanistan, to rebuild infrastructure, and get on with the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (catchily known as DDR) of former fighters.

In the opposite corner is the United States and its Western allies. Washington's main aim in Afghanistan, on which it is spending $10 billion a year (ten times more than its contribution to reconstruction), is a separate military mission to hunt down the Taleban and al-Qaeda forces still lurking in the remote southeast, near the Pakistan border.

So there is stalemate. Aid seldom gets out of Kabul. Big ticket restoration jobs - notably the rebuilding of the Kabul to Kandahar highway - go nowhere. The training of an Afghan national army and police force is making little headway. Handwringing over insecurity makes a convenient excuse for frittering away the first $2 billion of aid money with hardly any visible result (except a surge in corruption).

The fake-'left' failure to grasp the colossal DEFEAT (for imperialism that is building up), because of the ideological barminess of those in the Middle East who do command some mass support (entirely due to the now widely understood long Revisionist retreat into opportunism by both Stalinism and Trotskyism), - is essentially the inability to spot the wood because of all the trees in line of vision.

Suicidal Jihadism is not any kind of longwinded Socialist Manifesto at all, - but it is currently helping to destroy Western imperialist domination over the Earth 100%, compared to the 0% of the equally-ideologically-barmy "Socialist Programme" windbags of the fake-'left'.

And this hatred of the disgusting mess of world society that decrepit Western imperialism is now making is spreading like wildfire all over the planet, and also to some of the unlikeliest places, as, once again, the bourgeois propaganda machinery is itself admitting:

Cuban exiles in Miami yesterday condemned a dissident politician for his surprise decision to move to Havana. Eloy Gutierrez-Menoyo, 68, announced his decision to live in Cuba at Havana airport where he had been expected to board a plane back to Miami with his wife and three sons after a short visit to the island.

Instead the dissident - who spent 22 years in a Cuban jail after trying to lead an armed rising against Mr Castro in 1964 - told journalists: "I'm publicly declaring my right to stay in Cuban territory."

The declaration came as a shock to Mrs Gutierrez-Menoyo, who said she had been given no warning that her husband would be staying behind until he began addressing the press. She boarded the plane with their sons, and later expressed her support from Miami.

But news of the decision caused uproar in the rest of the Cuban exile community in Miami.

"I'm very disappointed with Menoyo," Huber Matos, another fellow rebel leader told the Miami Herald.

Mr Gutierrez-Menoyo is a former revolutionary who fought by Mr Castro's side in the 1950s but broke with him and tried to rally support against him in 1964 at the head of an armed faction called Alpha 66.

He was captured in 1965 and jailed for 30 years, but released in 1986 after the intervention of the Spanish prime minister at the time, Felipe Gonzalez.

The rebel, who is Spanish-born, returned to Spain, but a few years later moved to Miami, where he set up a moderate opposition movement called Cambio Cubano (Cuban Change).

It advocates dialogue with the Havana government

At Havana airport on Thursday, Mr Gutierrez-Menoyo distributed a four-page manifesto, entitled "Message to all Cubans for a New Revolution"; to explain his actions.

"My decision to not go back to exile and instead settle in Cuba definitely comes as direct result of a careful and profound analysis of the country's situation and from an understanding that I can be more useful here than abroad," the document said. He denied that he was being manipulated, and implied that the exiles in Miami were doing Washington's bidding.

"I reject any kind of destabilising movements or those that act for the interests of foreign powers or governments," Mr Gutierrez-Menoyo said.

The main exile movement, the Cuban American National Foundation, denounced Mr Gutierrez-Menoyo, arguing that he would not be able to remain in Cuba without reaching an understanding with the Havana government, which this year launched a ferocious crackdown on dissidents.

State tribunals have sentenced 75 of them to prison terms of between six and 28 years.

"I imagine he is doing this because he is speaking the language the Castro dictatorship wants to hear," said Mariela Ferretti, a foundation activist.

Some Cuban moderates were more supportive. Alfredo Duranz, the secretary of the Cuban Committee for Democracy, which opposes US sanctions on Cuba, said: "He is a Cuban patriot, as he always has been.

"You have to take your hat off to his courage. He is there non-violently and simply wants to exercise his civil rights and to live in his country."

For the young the country's hammer-and-sickle ensign is a popular adornment on fashionable clothes while an older generation, whose lives are blighted by near-record unemployment, yearn for an era when employees could not be fired and pensions were guaranteed.

Goodbye Lenin, in which a bedbound mother woken from a coma is convinced by her son that the regime is still alive and well, has been Germany's biggest box office earner; in its wake companies are churning out retro versions of communist-era brands of everything from hand creams to schnapps.

Witt's programme The GDR Show, which starts on Wednesday is the most high profile of a rash of Ostalgie shows; in another, Andrea Kiewel, a former East German celebrity, whips the audience into a frenzy with the old mantra: "Are you ready, to fight for peace and socialism?" to which the cheering crowd replies "We are always ready!"

While the fake-'left' continues its blanket blame of the workers states for the catastrophic triumph of anti-communist ideology ("The fact is that the Soviet Union was awful; the standard of living was low and the Stalinist system was not something that anybody would actually want" current Weekly Worker (28/8/03) ), the most embarrassing re-think in history continues to gather pace.

The 86 years so far (1917 to 2003) of varied workers-state experiences have indeed thrown up many mistakes and developments that were (and still are) laughably "awful", but this is entirely to miss the point on the biggest scale in history as well.

The reality is that the anti-imperialist USSR was far too much of an astonishing TRIUMPH for imperialism's comfort, inspiring and partially protecting the remarkable post1945 worldwide national-liberation struggle to topple all the West's physical colonial empires, as well as the even more significant and influential revolutions in China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc, etc.

And this colossal historic anti-imperialist influence is still powerfully working today, albeit on a smaller scale for the moment, - as can be read in the anti-communist press itself:

Echoing President Bush's dismissal of Cuban-style socialism as a "relic", the Miami Herald pronounced the revolution "dead in the water" at the weekend. The Telegraph called the island "the lost cause that is Cuba", while the Independent on Sunday thought the Cuban dream "as old and fatigued as Fidel himself" and a BBC reporter claimed that, by embracing tourism, "the revolution has simply replaced one elite with another". 

Bush is, of course, only the latest of 10 successive US presidents who have openly sought to overthrow the Cuban government and Batista's heirs in Florida have long plotted a triumphant return to reclaim their farms, factories and bordellos - closed or expropriated by Castro, Che Guevara and their supporters after they came to power in 1959. 

But international hostility towards the Cuban regime has increased sharply since April, when it launched its harshest crackdown on the US-backed opposition for decades, handing out long jail sentences to 75 activists for accepting money from a foreign power and executing three ferry hijackers. The repression, which followed 18 months of heightened tension between the US and Cuba, shocked many supporters of Cuba around the world and left the Castro regime more isolated than it has been since the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

Egged on by Britain and the rightwing governments of Italy and Spain, the EU has now used the jailings to reverse its policy of constructive engagement and fall in behind the US neo-conservative line, imposing diplomatic sanctions, increasing support for the opposition and blocking a new trade agreement. But it's not hard to discover the origins of this dangerous standoff, which follows a period in which Amnesty International had noted Cuba's "more open and permissive approach" towards dissent. 

In the aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration - whose election depended on the votes of hardline Cuban exiles in Florida - singled out Cuba for membership of a second-tier axis of evil. The Caribbean island, US under-secretary of state John Bolton insisted menacingly, was a safe haven for terrorists, was researching biological weapons and had dual-use technology it could pass to other "rogue states". He was backed by Bush, who declared that the 40-year-old US trade embargo against Cuba would hot be lifted until there were both multi-party elections and free market reforms, while Cuba was branded a threat to US security, overturning the Clinton administration's assessment. 

Into this growing. confrontation stepped James Cason as the new chief US diplomat in Havana, with a brief to boost support for Cuba's opposition groups. The US's huge quasi-embassy mainly provided equipment and facilities, but millions of dollars of US government aid also appears to have been channelled to the dissidents through Miami-based exile groups. 

The final trigger for Castro's clampdown was a string of US-indulged plane and ferry hijackings in April, against a background of US warnings about the threat to its security and Cuban feats of military intervention in the event of a mass exodus from Cuba - a scenario long favoured by Miami exiles. 

After 44 years of economic siege, mercenary invasion, assassination attempts, terrorist attacks and biological warfare from their northern neighbour, it might be thought the Cuban leadership had some reason to feel paranoid.

And however grim the Cuban crackdown, it beggars belief that the denunciations have been led by the US and its closest European allies in the "war on terror" : Not only has the US sentenced five Cubans to between 15 years and life for trying to track anti-Cuban, Miami-based terrorist groups and carried out over 70 executions of its own in the past year, but (along with Britain) supports other states, in the Middle East and Central Asia for example, which have thousands of political prisoners and carry out routine torture and executions. And, of course, the worst human rights abuses on the island of Cuba are not carried under Castro's aegis at all, but in the Guantanamo base occupied against Cuba's will, where the US has interned 600 prisoners without charge for 18 months, who it now plans to try in secret and possibly execute -  without even the legal rights afforded to Cuba's jailed oppositionists.

Winch only goes to reinforce what has long been obvious: that US hostility to Cuba does not stem from the regime's human rights failings, but its social and political successes and the challenge its unyielding independence offers to other US and western satellite states. Saddled with a siege economy and a wartime political culture for more than 40 years, Cuba has achieved first world health and education standards in a third world country, its infant mortality and literacy rates now rivalling or outstripping those of the US, its class sizes a third smaller than in Britain while next door, in the US-backed "democracy" of Haiti, half the population is unable to read and infant mortality is over 10 times higher. Those, too, are human rights, recognised by the UN declaration and European convention. 

Despite the catastrophic withdrawal of Soviet support more than a decade ago and the social damage wrought by dollarisation and mass tourism, Cuba has developed biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries acknowledged by the US to be the most advanced in Latin America. Meanwhile, it has sent 50,000 doctors to work for free in 93 third world countries (currently there are 1,000 working in Venezuela's slums) and given a free university education to 1,000 third world students a year. 

The historical importance of Cuba's struggle for social justice and sovereignty and its creative social mobilisation will continue to echo beyond its time and place: from the self-sacrificing internationalism of Che to the crucial role played by Cuban troops in bringing an end to apartheid through the defeat of South Africa at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1988. 

But those relying on the death of Castro (the "biological solution") to restore Cuba swiftly to its traditional proprietors may be disappointed, while the Iraq imbroglio may have checked the US neo-conservatives' enthusiasm for military intervention against a far more popular regime in Cuba. That suggests Cuba will have to expect yet more destabilisation, further complicating the defence of the social and political gains of the revolution in the years to come.

Taking advantage of the moronic eventual self-liquidation of the Soviet workers state by Stalinist Revisionism, the best trick of Western propaganda (loyally aided, as always, by the anticommunist fake-'left') is to continue pretending that the USSR "was awful; had never worked successfully; and finally collapsed in disaster", - all of which is the most ridiculous historical nonsense which world society has ever been brainwashed by, - as Cuba is still demonstrating, for example, now the envy of the overwhelming majority of the Latin American masses, whose support for revolutionary war grows steadily, in spite of the vicious reaction imposed by 1)K/ US imperialism on all signs of socialist progress and struggle:

The scale of human distress in Colombia is described by aid agencies as the worst in the western hemisphere: 2.5 million people displaced and political murders at the rate of 20 a day.

Human rights organisations have long accused the Colombian security forces of backing the rightwing militias responsible for murders, massacres and drug smuggling. Many military intelligence files are said to wrongly describe civil activists as subversives or terrorist sympathisers. The police are routinely accused by rights organisations, and the US state department, of taking part in or colluding in massacres.

Critics say the war on drugs - involving aerial spraying with defoliants to kill the coca bushes from which cocaine is made is displacing the trade and the accompanying corruption and political destabilisation to neighbouring countries and more remote parts of the Colombian jungle.

Peace talks with Farc collapsed last year and President Uribe took office last August with a mandate for a strong military offensive.

Mr Uribe's latest policy document promises to defeat the rebels and bring them to the negotiating table within two years. He is creating peasant militias to support the army in the hope of returning civil government to areas from which it has long been absent.

Mr Uribe's election seems to have strengthened relations with Britain. The son of a wealthy Colombian landowner who was killed by Fare in the early 80s, he recently spent a year lecturing in Latin American studies at St Antony's College, Oxford. Concerns have been voiced about his political past and the company he keeps. He dismisses them as smears. "I have been honourable and accountable,' he told Newsweek last year.

As head of the civil aviation authority in the early 80s he was accused of offences in connection with granting air strip and pilots' licences. He was cleared but his deputy was jailed for five years for accepting campaign money from the Cali cocaine cartel. Then, as mayor of Medellin, the drug barons' "sanctuary", he allegedly accepted funds from the notorious trafficker Pablo Escobar for two urban regeneration schemes.

In the late 90s Mr Uribe became governor of Antioquia province and was instrumental in raising militias to help the counter-insurgency drive. The plan badly backfired. Some of the groups committed serious human rights violations and, when banned in 1997, many joined the death squad paramilitaries.

His security advisers General Rito Alejo De Rio, dismissed from the army in 1999, and Pedro Juan Moreno, his former chief of staff in Antioquia. have been accused of connections with the paramilitaries.

In 1997 and 1998 the US customs seized three shipments of potassium permanganate, essential in the manufacture of cocaine, bought by Mr Moreno's company GMP Productos Quimicos. The Colombian police and the US drug enforcement administration believed that many of GMP's sales invoices were fraudulent.

In 2000 the DEA confirmed the seizures and concluded that there was "ample evidence "that the chemical might be diverted for illicit use. Mr Moreno insisted that it was for innocent purposes.

Despite these difficulties Mr Uribe won the election with a 53% landslide. He won the confidence of Mr Blair when he visited London as president-elect last July.

Despite continuing reports of serious abuses by the security forces and the concerns of human rights groups about President Alvaro Uribe's tactics, Tony Blair has encouraged the Foreign Office to hold an international conference on support for Colombia.

Whitehall refuses to disclose the extent of British military involvement on the grounds of national security. "We provide some military aid but we don't talk about the details," a Foreign Office spokeswoman said.

But a Guardian investigation can identify a number of key areas of UK support:

• Military advice to the army's new counter-guerrilla mountain units;

• A surge in the supply of military hardware and intelligence equipment: and

• Assistance insetting up an intelligence centre and a joint intelligence committee.

Britain is now the second biggest donor of military aid to Colombia, a security analyst with close ties to the Colombian defence ministry has suggested. "The British like to keep a low profile here," he said.

The US defence department website openly gives details of the $2bn aid given under Plan Colombia to fight what the administration calls "narco-terrorists". It includes training and equipping three military brigades and providing 60 Black Hawk helicopters and Huey-2 gunships.

Unusually, the Foreign Office confirmed four years ago that Britain had given training and advice on urban warfare techniques counter-guerrilla strategy and "psychiatry".

Since then ministers have admitted training the Colombian narcotics police but declined to elaborate on grounds of "national security". One of the reasons for their reticence is the role of the SAS, whose activities are never formally acknowledged. Sent by Margaret Thatcher in 1989 to fight the drug cartels, they are believed to have extended their role to counter-insurgency training.

The new intelligence assistance builds on work begun in the early 90s when an Ml6 station head was sent to Bogota. After Labour came to power it was considerably expanded and coordinated in London by an M16 officer whose name is known to the Guardian.

The additional military equipment has been substantial. Foreign Office licences for exporting military items rose by 50% between 2001 and 2002. Last year's items included cryptography material, missile technology, components for combat helicopters, explosives, airborne refuelling equipment and submarine technology.

Before this week's conference Amnesty International called on western governments to stop giving military aid, because of the increasing human rights abuses by the security forces. "The Colombian government has not implemented the UN human rights recommendations and military assistance only gives a green light to the army to carry on as before," it said.

But Mr Blair has made the country, blighted by 40 years of civil war, a significant foreign priority, sending ministers, retired generals and security advisers to Bogota.

But the fake-'left', of course, will continue to treacherously turn again any real communist-guerrilla breakthrough in Latin America, just as they backed the fascist Walesa's destruction of the Polish workers state.

Their cretinous posturing for reactionary "internationalist" causes(from the CIA's Solidarnosc to their one-time call for a "revolution to overthrow the dictator Castro"), has just been remarkablv attested-to by their own admissions of recreating their routine former backing for anything which pretended to be "leftwing" in East Europe provided it was resolutely anti-communist and anti-workers-state:

A bizarre collection of organisations on the revolutionary left have been on the receiving end of a petty, but nonetheless politically quite sophisticated, fraud dating back to at least the late 1900s. Five young Ukrainian conspirators - seemingly with a background in the  'official

communist' Komsomol and well able to pick up the vital factional nuances of left politics in the Anglo-Saxon world - managed to pass themselves off as 'sections' of anything up to 12 different organisations. A feat which might be explained by the claim that they met each other in an "amateur acting troupe".

Those stung include Peter Taaffe's Committee for a Workers' International, the Alliance for Worker' Liberty, Sheila Torrance's Workers Revolutionary Party and its 'Fourth International', the US-based League for a Revolutionary Party, the Committees of Correspondence (Publishers of News and Letters), the International Bolshevik Tendency, the Socialist Party of Great Britain and Workers Power, along with its burlesque League for the Fifth International. Plans were also being hatched to establish links with colonel Gaddafi and his regime in Libya - that at least might have proved to be a real money-spinner.

Using a whole String of aliases - Alexander, Ivor, Ivan, Jukuv, Kyril, Marsha, Alyosha, Ihor, Pugachov, Mikhail, Oleksity, Sergey Kozubenkow, Vadym Yevtoshok, Vassily, Viktor, Vitality, Yakov, Boris Pastukh, Oleg Vernik (assistant lecturer at a Kiev law school and mastermind of the fraud), Oleksander Zvorsky (born 1972), Yuri Baronov (born 1984) and Zakhar Popovich (born 1976) recreated in fictional microcosm the factional struggles and rivalries that plague the left in Britain and the US. Negotiations, polemics, splits and all. This doubtlessly pleased their 'masters' in London and New York no end.

In a spirit of internationalism, but presumably with an eye to outdoing their rivals on the left, various groups channelled money and material resources to aid those whom they believed to be their co-thinkers. For example, it seems that at least three organisations were supplying cash for the upkeep of an 'office' in Kiev. Besides that there were trips to Germany, Britain and elsewhere.

Now the whole scam has been exposed. Apparently the executive committee of the SPGB got the feeling that all was not well with their World Socialist Party Ukraine in July. Their minutes put the worries on record. The penny dropped for the IBT and Workers power on August 14. A leading WP comrade was boastfully displaying a photograph of the organisation's recent world congress to an IBT member. Standing on either side of the said WPer were two Ukrainian comrades - they were instantly recognisable. They were the IBT's key comrades in their own Ukrainian section. Photos and information were quickly exchanged between factional centres - everyone had been conned.

With exposure the various Ukrainian 'sections' have simply winked out of existence and the CWI - said to be the original host organism - has suspended its whole Ukrainian membership pending a full investigation.

The fiasco is not without its funny side, of course. The Sting meets Life of Brian. For instance, we also received an approach from these people (see below). A little later, we sot a furious email from a leading AWLer, demanding to know what 'our group' in the Ukraine was doing putting out leaflets attacking their group, the Ukrainian Workers Tendency. They were - of course - the same people. Even better, I have often been teased by a leading member of the minuscule IBT in Britain that at least his group in the Ukraine was bigger than ours. AS it turns out, they were exactly the same size comrade. Whatever else can be said about this mob, you cannot criticise them for not working for the money... 

Perhaps tempted by what they saw as our relatively successful fundraising efforts, these con-artists contacted us in June of last year. Cornplimenting  us on our role in the Socialist Alliance, the self-styled "Communist Struggle Group (Ukraine)" told us that the main thrust of its work was "the call to establish a wide socialist anti-Stalinist alliance like the SA in the UK", with the perspective of this bloc developing in the direction of a "real mass socialist party".

Some discussions were mentioned with the Ukrainian Workers Tendency the "organisation of supporters of the Alliance for Worker' Liberty". While the CSG(U) agreed with "some of their programme documents", the UWT still needed to "overcome a lot of dognmatic authoritarian and sectarian Trotskyist" baggage (Weekly  Worker June 13 2002). A carefully crafted 'teaser' of a letter, in other words, designed to get us reaching for our cheque book.

We agreed that the SA represented a potential route out of the sectarian impasse in which the UK left found itself . At the same time, we noted that "abroad, the sects still seem to behave in the old way ... the various splinters of the British revolutionary left have attempted to build Ukrainian replicas of themselves. This is sad to watch, frankly. 

"Groups that can barely reproduce themselves in this country expend gargantuan amounts of time, resources and energy attempting to construct 'Potemkin village' versions of themselves in other parts of the globe. Entertainingly, members of these sects will castigate our organisation for not being interested in this sterile and pointless work.  'You're not internationalists,' they taunt us. In fact, their undemanding of 'intemationalism' is thoroughly degenerate.

Concretely, we offered our 'comrades' in the Ukraine access to the Weekly Worker to develop their ideas and openly engage with other trends, including our own; technical help with the construction of websites or publishing projects; joint work at the Florence European Social Forum that year; an invite to Communist University and assistance and advice on launching their own Summer Offensive-style fund drive.

Now, we are not claiming to be staggeringly more clever than any of the groups who were stung. It is quite feasible that this Ukrainian mob might have been able to con some cash out of us eventually - if they had not so busy with trends who were an easier touch, perhaps.

Sects which seek to 'internationalise' their own arid impotence via a forlorn, massively time-consuming global quest for co-thinkers are unlikely to have much positive to contribute to any World party.

A "principled" unity based on no agreed world view??? More "Alliance" nonsense. More synchronised anti-communist sectarianism. And no questions about the real politics of
these Ukrainian posturers. The exposure of Walesa's "rank & file socialism" treachery, organised by the CIA, has been in vain for these UK posturers.

Build Leninism. EPSR

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

Washington's colonial swindling won't survive dollar bankruptcy

One of the political battlegrounds in Latin America over recent years has centred on currency. Recently, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez suggested a single currency for the region similar to the euro. This is part of his plan to complete Simon Bolivar's dream of Latin American unity. Washington was quick to dismiss the suggestion. They already have plans for a single currency in the region; it's called the US dollar.

The process of dollarisation is gaining pace, with Panama, Equador and El Salvador already having officially adopted the US currency. Guatemala is next and Argentina and Mexico have held high level talks on the subject. Here in Nicaragua and in neighbouring Costa Rica, the dollar is the unofficial currency. Every where you go you not only see images of United States popular culture but you see the dollar.

Political opposition to this process in Nicaragua is not in a strong position. The Sandanistas lost last year's presidential elections. Many thought it would mark the end of their leader, Daniel Ortega's, political career. However, despite three failed presidential bids and his fair share of personal scandal, he was reelected leader late last year. Many of the people I spoke to had fought with the Frente and still supported the FSLN, although most argued the movement had changed dramatically after 13 years of often uneasy tactical alliances and  political defeats. 

Much to my disappointment, almost all the symbols of the FSLN's time in power are gone. The political murals have been replaced with Coca-Cola adverts and the like. Buildings once named after revolutionary leaders have now been given new names. 

THIS WEEK marks the 24th anniversary of the Sandanistas taking control of Nicaragua. After many years of struggle, sacrifice and death, this week all those years ago the people of Nicaragua rejoiced as the Somoza regime crumbled and fled. The following years were scarred by the Frente's need to fight off the US-backed Contras and economic isolation.

Nicaragua rjected the FSLN at the ballot box and replaced them with a government favoured by the United States. 

One symbol still there, however, is the huge image of Sandino that overlooks the city. The legendary Nicaraguan revolutionary who fought against the US marines early in the last century still stands guard over Managua  -  a reminder of a time of hope, not just for the people of Nicaragua but throughout the world.

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

Imperialist establishment's deliberately narrow inquiry in safe hands 

THE ANNOUNCEMENT by British Prime Minister Tony Blair of a judicial inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly headed up by Lord Hutton of Bresagh has provided the requisite pause or, more accurately, a desperately needed breathing space, for Blair, Alasdair Campbell and the British Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon. However, Hutton's appointment, to those who know of his previous dealings in relation to the Six Counties, is likely to raise further questions over what is already a very murky and puzzling ordeal.

Hoon is the man many 	believe is responsible for organising what one report called a "media strategy" for slipping Dr Kelly's name into the public domain. As Blair has consistently demonstrated during his tour of the Far East, the  inquiry allows him and his Ministers to simply refuse to answer the difficult questions being thrown at them.

On the question of the inquiry itself, the British Government has already tried to limit its scope to the immediate circumstances of Dr Kelly's death, rather than looking into the bigger issue of how the British parliament was duped into agreeing to the invasion of Iraq. Whether it succeeds remains to be seen, but the judge chosen to head the inquiry will be a familiar name to many in the Six Counties as a man with some form, particularly in respect of defending the interests of government.

72-year-old Lord Hutton of Bresagh was, in his former incarnation as Sir Brian Hutton, a high court judge from 1979 until 1988, when he became the Lord Chief Justice of the Six Counties. He was also the legal advisor to the Ministry of Home Affairs under the old Stormont government and, in that role, acted for the British government when it was called before the European Court of Human Rights, accused of the inhuman and degrading treatment of internees. In 1986 he acquitted the RUC police officer who killed Sean Downes with a plastic bullet fired at point blank range.

In 1999 Hutton, now a law lord, became involved in a case brought by two lawyers, Seamus Treacey and Barry MacDonald -  both of whom currently represent the families of the Bloody Sunday victims at the Saville inquiry. Treacey and MacDonald mounted a legal objection to the requirement for all newly appointed QCs to make an oath of loyalty to the British monarch. Hutton wrote to the then British Attorney General, warning that, "if you decide to remove the requirement for a declaration, it will appear that you are being influenced by political pressure to alter the procedure relating to an office which links Northern Ireland with the Crown". Justice Kerr dismissed the case made by Treacey and MacDonald, citing Hutton's comments in his judgement.

Also in 1999, Hutton was one of the law lords who ruled that the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet should receive immunity from arrest and extradition for crimes against humanity. During the case, Hutton criticised one of his fellow judges on the case, Lord Hoffman, for not declaring his links with Amnesty International.

Hutton was also involved, in the case of David Shayler, the former MI5 agent. He and his colleagues ruled against Shayler's argument that he was acting in the public interest when he exposed the illegal activities of British intelligence forces, including collusion. Shayler was later jailed.

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

Colonist split over sectarian stunt shows that 'Unionist' paralysed muddle is near end.

Once again, the Peace Process appears to have been stalled or perhaps even abandoned to save David Trimble from facing down anti-Agreement unionists from within his own party ranks.

Jeffery Donaldson, a former part-time member of the UDR, defied his party leader and called a meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council at which he tried to scupper the Joint Declaration by claiming that a vote in favour is a vote for the destruction of the RIR.

Trimble immediately capitulated and demanded re-assurances from the British Government. If the 'Home Service' were disbanded, he said, "it would be worse than Patten". And the UUP leader then declared that he would not "lift a finger" in support of the Joint Declaration unless the British Government gave assurances on the RIR's three battalions.

Commenting after UUP leader David Trimble's meeting with the British Minister, Sinn Fein's spokesperson on policing and justice, Gerry Ketly described the RIR as "first and foremost a unionist militia".

"Sinn Fein's position has been both clear and consistent. We want the removal of all British forces, including the RIR. This conflict resolution process must involve the removal of the RIR," said Kelly. 

"The RIR/UDR are part of the problem. Many nationalists, victims of the UDR and RIR, regard David Trimble's demand as a cynical disregard of their suffering. It is totally unacceptable to nationalists," he said.

Hoon refuted speculation that the British Army intended to disband RIR units once demilitarisation proposals in the British and Dublin Government's Joint Declaration were implemented.

"That decision will not arise until the security threat has receded to the point when the police no longer routinely need operational support ftom the army," said Hoon.

But Sinn Fein and the SDLP have already indicated that it was their understanding that the RIR battalions would be stood down and have accused the British Government of bowing to unionist rejectionism.

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

AS locally-recruited pro-British rule militias, the RUC, B Specials, UDR and RIR had at least five things in common. They were over 90% Protestant and 100% unionist in terms of personnel. They ensured continuation of the status quo by force of arms, violence and repression.

They were feared, hated and resented by northern nationalism, almost exclusively their target for violence and repression. They often acted as training camps for loyalist death squads with whom they continued to collude. And finally, they enjoyed uncritical British support despite their brutality, sectarianism and the many associated atrocities.

In this, they are not alone. The British state has a long history (India, Africa, the Middle East and the Mediterranean) of recruiting local militias to do their dirty work for them.

In 1970, Churchill's B Specials were disbanded but only to rejoin en masse the newly formed UDR, sometimes entire battalions simply changed their name. In 1992, the UDR was renamed the RIR and amalgamated with another smaller regiment of that name.

Here are just some of the reasons the regiment, in whatever guise, is unacceptable to nationalists:

• James and Gertrude Devlin were driving with their 17year-old daughter from Coalisland to their home in Edendork, County Tyrone. In the laneway leading up to their house a UDR soldier, accompanied by loyalist paramilitaries, waved the Devlins' car down before opening fire. Riddled with bullets, James and Gertrude died at the scene. Their daughter, despite serious injures, escaped and survived.

• The Miami Showband, at the time one of Ireland's best known groups, had just played at a Banbridge dance and were on their way home when the minibus they were travelling in was stopped by a UDR roadblock. The musicians were made to get out of the vehicle and stand in line beside a ditch. When a bomb being planted on the minibus by a member of UDR gang exploded prematurely, the gang opened fire killing three band members and left another for dead. A fifth, who had been blown into a bush by the explosion, managed to hide and escape.

• Colm McCartney and John Farmer were returning from an All-Ireland semi-final GAA match in Croke Park when the vehicle they were travelling in was ordered to stop by a UDR/RIR patrol. The two friends were later found dead with gunshot wounds to the back of their heads.

• Adrian Carroll, the brother of a Sinn Fein councillor, was walking home from work when he was confronted by a gunman in an alleyway near Abbey Street in Armagh City. Adrian was shot three times and died a short time later. Four members of the UDR were later charged and convicted of the murder. Civilian eyewitness placed the UDR patrol at the scene of the killing and the prosecution claimed that one of the UDR soldiers had dressed in civilian clothing to carry out the shooting. After a lengthy political campaign by prominent unionist politicians, the court of appeal released three.

• John Davey, a Sinn Fein councillor, was driving home along Quarry Road after attending Magherafelt District Council when he was shot dead. The car in which the dead man had been travelling was stationary with the engine switched off at the time of the killing. The Davey family believe John, who was aware that his life was under threat from unionist paramilitaries, would have only stopped his car at a UDR checkpoint.

• Loughlin Maginn was at home with his family when two gunmen burst into his County Down house and shot his dead. His wife and four children were in the house at the time of the shooting. Before his death, Magic had received a number of death threats from the UDR/RIR R. After British Intelligence documents were posted on a wall by the UDA identifying Maginn as a target, two UDR/RIR soldiers were convicted with another man of the killing.

But for every killing directly involving the UDR/RIR, there have been dozens more involving UDR/RIR collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. Despite the fact that thousands of documents containing the personal details of republicans and nationalists have been passed by the UDR/RIR to loyalist death squads, there have been few convictions. An exception to the rule was Joanne Garvin, a UDR soldier convicted of passing photographs and information to the UVF.

UDR/RIR involvement in murder has not always been restricted to passing information. On numerous occasions the weapons used by loyalist gunmen have originated with the UDR/RIR. In such cases the official euphemism is to regard the weapon as 'stolen'.

A weapon used in the killing of Belfast defence lawyer Pat Finucane came from the RIR/UDR. A soldier was later convicted in relation to the 'theft' from Palace Barracks but only after the Gardai apprehended him with weaponry across the border.

The RIR/UDR has one of the worse records for criminal behaviour throughout the entire British Army. Hundreds of its soldiers have been forced to resign or have been discharged following criminal behaviour, including assault, sexual assault and rape, the use of illicit drugs and theft.

In the most recent incident, RIR Colonel Tim Collins faced allegations by a US Army officer that he abused civilians while in Iraq. Such allegations came as no surprise to northern nationalists;  members of the RIR/UDR have routinely abused civilians in the North for years.

But even more fundamentally than the sectarian and brutal history of this regiment, as Brian Feeney pointed out in Wednesday's Irish News, is that "the RIR's existence means the British administration endorses the unionist community's definition of itself as the official community; literally an arm of the British state, while the nationalist community is a deviant community with a secondary status in society" •