Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.   V. I. Lenin 
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  0771 263 9934      www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]        
No 1201 September 23 2003                                                                                                                                25p
NW seminar Sat 2pm. Pse bring receipts.

Gold-price leap, dollar slump, market tremors, and Iraq sell-off thumbsdown show that even if US imperialist world domination manages to avoid crawling away from Iraq defeated, its really serious problems are only just beginning. Even pro-"democracy" whistle-blowers are now grasping that it is the West itself which is creating the nuclear terror tyranny threatening civilisation's survival and has even manufactured all its own "causes" for war. Some fake-'lefts' now see inter-imperialist WWIII as inevitable, but still refuse to draw the correct revolutionary-party lessons.

The international capitalist system's descent into globalised warmongering because of insoluble "overproduction" crisis has blundered further into focus via renewed IMF alarm and stalemate; dramatic erosion of government credibility in the USA and UK; and more startling bourgeois press admissions about the cynical depths of firm, longstanding imperialist plans to "succeed" in bringing total war to the planet.

An early dollar collapse and complete global economic chaos is the now open concern of the International Monetary Fund (despite it being dominated by American interests), and it must be the impossibility of quelling these growing fears of a worldwide markets crash (followed by the most dangerously destructive economic slump the history of society has ever known) which is helping the Iraq war's problems turn Bush and Blair from political heroes into figures of hatred.

Revelations that this sick and uncontrollable mayhem with its death and devastation has long been sinisterly planned for in the West are not going to improve the atmosphere, but they also show how "ordinary politics" has so far been incapable of even discovering and laying-bare the rotten roots and the even more catastrophic perspective for this relentlessly deepening capitalist crisis, let alone do anything about it.

But the clear REVOLUTIONARY conclusions to which this all must inevitably lead, sooner or later, are still being mostly ignored by the entire fake-'left'.

The struggle goes on to force a broad realisation that this very real, diabolical, and WAR-INEVITABLE total crisis of the capitalist "democratic" system requires sober, scientific preparations by all rational mankind to build a CONSCIOUS, OPEN, REVOLUTIONARY PARTY without delay.

The increasingly sordid mess that Washington is getting itself and the world into is not much disputed for the moment.

In the USA, Bush has slumped to a negative presidential rating, and doubts are growing rapidly about exactly what all this warmongering in the Middle East is really for; exactly how is "success" supposed to be realised and measured; and most of all how are the crazy Federal economics of colossal state debts supposed to be able in the long run to "pay for" this war but at the same time ensure a full American and international economic "recovery".

While the front-line positions continue to deteriorate in Iraq (a part of the USA's insane, fraudulent, and hypocritical "pacification" ambitions for the Middle East, meaning total physical domination), the endless efforts to impose economic optimism on the world via "free press" brainwashing have again been undermined by events such as Japan and China's refusal to be bullied into the IMF's "exchange-rate strategy" (which was simply another means for trying to get Japan and China to revalue their currencies against the dollar to help ease America's crippling balance-of-payments debts after direct Washington appeals had failed), and by the IMF's failure to agree a further $12bn emergency bailout which Argentine capitalism needs for survival in its devastating minicrisis. And in these mounting difficulties, the IMF, itself could not refrain from mentioning the dollar pollution of the world's economy (caused by America's relentless global counter-revolutionary warmongering conspiracies) ahead of the international "free market's" other failings:

The International Monetary Fund yesterday warned that the colossal United States trade deficit was a noose around the neck of the economy, emphasising that the once mighty dollar could collapse at any moment.

Arguing that the world's big economies were already too dependent on the willingness of American consumers to live beyond their means, the IMF said the US could not continue to run a current account deficit of 5% of GDP.

The IMF's chief economist Kenneth Rogoff said that it was just a matter of time before the gap closed, tipping the dollar into a potentially steep fall.

"If we were looking at a poor developing country, the world gives them just enough rope to hang themselves. A country like the United States, they give them enough rope to tie the noose around their neck several times. But it does happen in the end," he said.

In its twice yearly report on the world economy, the Fund warns that even a controlled slide in the dollar's value is likely to slow US growth and unless other countries picked up the slack, the global economy would suffer.

Mr Rogoff said the collapse of world trade talks last weekend in Cancun could spell disaster for a global economy already too dependent on unbalanced growth in the US. Describing the breakdown as a "tragedy"; he said global poverty would rise if protectionism took root in the world's biggest economies.

The impact of the stalled trade talks in Mexico on the fragile global recovery will dominate this weekend's annual meeting of the IMF and the World Bank in Dubai.

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, said yesterday: "The failure of the talks in Cancun will cast something of a cloud over the meeting.

"That is not a happy background in which to assess the durability of the recovery."

Misalignments between the world's biggest currencies are also likely to feature on the agenda, with the US hoping other countries will support its campaign to get China to strengthen its currency, the yuan.

But grotesque protectionism is precisely what the USA's monstrous international warmongering threats are all about, plus massive global economic arm-twisting, dangling much-needed aid and self-defence weaponry as the eternal blackmailing device, - the determination to preserve the American supremacy on Earth, plus its fabulous living standards (for the better-off), at all costs.

And the unrepayable US debts now financing all this dollar-pollution warmongering and arms-aid to servile reactionary stooge-regimes everywhere, is undoubtedly going to cause "suffering", "breakdown", and "tragedy" on a historical conflict scale far beyond the wildest imagination at present possible or believable.

Meanwhile for the Blair sidekicks of this global disaster, - the wretchedly subservient and smallminded New Labourites, - the Brent electoral debacle and the continuous disbelieving drip of the Hutton Inquiry carry on destroying the myth of "all-powerful propaganda spin-doctoring" supremacy, and thereby putting more nails into the coffin of the idea that the electoral lies of "democracy" can forever keep the capitalist bourgeoisie and trade-union class collaboration ruling the country.

After nearly two centuries of "modern" tweedledum-tweedledee parliamentary political farce hiding the fact that ALL the House of Commons parties loyally serve the capitalist state and system, thereby concealing the de facto dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in this country, - it cannot be said exactly how many more years of this ridiculous "democracy" charade are going to have to be suffered.

But the "winner" at Brent got not much more than 15% support, from even those bothering to register to vote, leaving 85% of registered voters NOT backing the policies of their "new" representative in Parliament, and an even bigger majority of Brent residents in total who have shown no sign at all of agreeing with "their new voice in Parliament", such is the contempt in which this "democracy" farce is now properly held.

All bourgeois parliamentary "leadership" posturing will come to an end, of course, in the USA, Britain, and elsewhere, once the international imperialist economy has collapsed into total slump.

But even before that, the problems of the warmongering itself might well deliver some crippling blows, especially as all brands of US and UK "democracy" more or less eventually agreed to go along with the "anti-terrorist" warmongering once it had begun, all making the assumption, of course, that it was "bound to be victorious" once the onslaught had begun. The fact that this might have been the West's biggest mistake of all is now one of the most astonishing fascinations of this dramatic new phase of international capitalist crisis.

With their unheard-of $87bn fresh spending pledge to totally dominate Iraq, the Bush imperialist gangsters are threatening to risk US and world bankruptcy rather than abandon their attempted "pacification" and pull out, defeated.

And clearly, the firepower is there, and the master-race nastiness, to continue with the "shock and awe" blitzkrieging until every last Iraqi is either killed or cowed.

But all that this notion achieves is to raise even more huge questions, - with even more potentially disastrous consequences for American imperialism and for the whole Western capitalist world system, - about whether Iraq might yet turn into another Vietnam or Palestine where no amount of US or Zionist torture, humiliation, tyranny, and mass terror can brutalise the "terrorist enemy" into submission; about where the neo-colonial rampage might need to turn next in its mad "defeat terrorism" war against effectively the entire Third World; and about how much of the NAZI-type tyranny the "democratic" posturing of British and American society can turn a blind eve to and really stomach; etc, etc, etc, etc.

The most enlightened Guardian correspondent David Hirst in a new book has thrown some fascinating new light onto aspects of these profound historical questions long debated by the EPSR.

Dramatically, he not only confirms the Review's longest-range perspective of nearly 20 years standing that the nonsense of the Zionist colonisation of Palestine could one day bring the USA and Israel to blows and even nuclear war.

Hirst sensationally takes this investigation further and reveals a whole swathe of Zionist opinion which is quite prepared to threaten international nuclear devastation rather than accept the ultimate disaster which their own aggressive greed and the anachronism of Zionist colonisation has now caused to emerge, - namely the impossibility any more of now creating two viable separate states on the old land of Palestine, and therefore the inevitability of just one state, which the Palestinian Arabs are bound to eventually dominate, thus causing the total disappearance of 'Israel' (see last week's EPSR).

A brief edited summary of Hirst's reasoning and revelations has appeared in the capitalist press, taken from The Gun and the Olive Branch:

BY THE SUMMER of 2002, George Bush had firmly set his new course: 'regime change' and reform in the Muslim and Arab worlds, and, where necessary, American military intervention to achieve it.

It was all set forth, in its most comprehensive, well-nigh megalomaniac form, by Norman Podhoretz, the neocons' veteran intellectual luminary, in the September 2002 issue of his magazine, Commentary. Changes in regime, he proclaimed, were 'the sine qua non throughout the region'. They might 'clear a path to the long overdue internal reform and modernisation of Islam'.

Under the guise of forcibly divesting Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, the US now sought to 'reshape' the entire Middle East, with this most richly endowed and pivotal of countries as the lynchpin of a whole new,  pro-American geopolitical order. Witnessing such an overwhelming display of American will and power, other regimes, such as Hizbollah-supporting Syria in particular, would either have to bend to American purposes or suffer the same fate.

With the assault on Iraq, the US was not merely adopting Israel's long-established methods - of initiative, offence and pre-emption - it was also adopting Israel's adversaries as its own. Iraq had always ranked high among those; it was one of its so-called 'faraway' enemies. These had come to be seen as more menacing than the 'near' ones and especially since they had begun developing weapons of mass destruction.

SO EXCITED WAS Israeli premier Ariel Sharon about this whole new Middle East order in the making that he told the Times, 'the day after' Iraq, the US and Britain should turn to that other 'faraway' enemy - Iran. For Israel, the ayatollahs' Iran had always seemed the greater menace of the two, by virtue of its intrinsic weight, its fundamentalist, theologically anti-Zionist leadership, its more serious, diversified and supposedly Russian-assisted nuclear armaments programme, its ideological affinity with, or direct sponsorship of, such Islamist organisations as Hamas or Hizbollah.

Nothing, in fact, better illustrated the ascendancy which Israel and the American 'friends of Israel' have acquired over American policy-making than did Iran. Quite simply, said Iran expert James Bill, the 'US views Iran through spectacles manufactured in Israel'. Impressing on the US the gravity of the Iranian threat has long been a foremost Israeli preoccupation.

The showdown with Iraq has only encouraged this kind of thinking. 'Within two years,' said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, 'either the US or Israelis are going to attack Iran's [nuclear sites] or acquiesce in Iran being a nuclear state.'

To where this Israeli-American, neoconservative blueprint for the Middle East will lead is impossible to forecast. What can be said for sure is that it could easily turn out to be as calamitous in its consequences, for the region, America and Israel, as it is preposterously partisan in motivation, fantastically ambitious in design and terribly risky in practice.

Even if, to begin with, it achieves what, by its authors' estimate, is an outward, short-term measure of success, it will not end the violence in the Middle East. Far more likely is that, in the medium or the long term, it will make it very much worse. For the violence truly to end, its roots must be eradicated, too, and the noxious soil that feeds them cleansed. 

It is late, but perhaps not too late, for that to happen. The historic - and historically generous - compromise offer which Yasser Arafat, back in 1988, first put forward for the sharing of Palestine between its indigenous people and the Zionists who drove most of them out still officially stands. It is completely obvious by now that, without external persuasion, Israel will never accept it; that the persuasion can only come from Israel's last real friend in the world, the US; that, for the persuasion to work, there has to be 'reform' or 'regime change' in Israel quite as far-reaching as any to be wrought on the other side.

Given the partisanship, it is, admittedly, highly unlikely to happen any time soon. But if it doesn't happen in the reasonably foreseeable future, there may come a time when it can no longer happen at all. The Palestinian leadership may withdraw its offer, having concluded, like many of its people already have, that, however conciliatory it becomes, whatever fresh concessions it makes, it will never be enough for an adversary that seems to want all.

The Hamas rejectionists, and/or those, secular as well as religious, who think like them, may take over the leadership. The whole, broader, Arab-Israeli peace process which Anwar Sadat began, and which came to be seen as irreversible, may prove to be reversible after all. In which case, the time may also come when the cost to the US of continuing to support its infinitely importunate protégé in a never-ending conflict against an ever widening circle of adversaries is greater than its will and resources to sustain it.

IRAN CAN never be threatened in its very existence. Israel can. Indeed, such a threat could even grow out of the current intifada. That, at least, is the pessimistic opinion of Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. 'If it went on much longer,' he said, 'the Israeli government [would] lose control of the people. In campaigns like this, the anti-terror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing. I regard a total Israeli defeat as unavoidable. That will mean the collapse of the Israeli state and society. We'll destroy ourselves.'

In this situation, he went on, more and more Israelis were coming to regard the 'transfer' of the Palestinians as the only salvation; resort to it was growing 'more probable' with each passing day. Sharon 'wants to escalate the conflict and knows that nothing else will succeed'.

But would the world permit such ethnic cleansing? 'That depends on who does it and how quickly it happens. We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother." I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.'

As the EPSR has repeatedly argued for years, it is the ultra-reactionariness of imperialism and Zionism which will finally TEACH their victims to build an unquenchable REVOLUTIONARY resistance.

And when the revolutionised victims of imperialist bullying-tyranny reach the Palestinians' levels of desperate, determined bloodymindedness, or reach the size, wealth, ability, pride, and cultural self-awareness on an Iranian level, - then imperialism will have begun running into-a once-and-for-all historical limitation to its ability any longer to boss things on Earth.

Capitalist crisis will have started to bring about its own revolutionary downfall, exactly as Marxist science has always explained must happen eventually. There is no proletarian revolution challenging Western imperialist warmongering rampaging yet. But exactly where the continuing, insoluble economic collapse-crisis of capitalism is finally going to end up, and where this chaotic and calamitous warmongering tyranny is going to end up, is quite impossible to foretell, with mass international working class anger at the whole bourgeois warmongering mess (the USA against all of its former imperialist stooge regimes of one sort or another, from Chirac to Arafat, from Saddam to Sharon, etc, etc) being every bit foreseeable since no clear-cut bourgeois state "victories" out of this insane belligerent maelstrom are at all discernible yet.

The fake-'left' sect Lalkar has, after repeated EPSR batterings, at last stirred itself towards at least a remote re-acquaintance with revolutionary theory (the essence of the Leninism these 'lefts' lay claim to but totally alien to the demagogic, conservative, Revisionist muddleheadedness of Stalin that Lalkar has in fact made a strange fetish of, or of Scargill that a repeat shrine has been made to at an even laughably lower level).

Almost 20 years after an EPSR book examining the path the world would follow towards inter-imperialist World War III and insisting that henceforth only a world party of revolutionary theory could seriously meet international working-class needs any more, Lalkar has come out of its Stalinist-Revisionist museum to declare that imperialism is no longer bound for peaceful coexistence with anybody but is only doomed by crisis to repeat the catastrophes of WWI and WWII, and will need to be confronted by a conscious party of world revolution.

The treacherous, imbecile delusions of Stalin's Third International, making longterm preparations everywhere for "peaceful roads to socialism" in the light of Stalin's idiotic "Marxist" revelation in 1952 (Problems of Socialism) that never again could the countries of the imperialist system enjoy economic expansion because of the size and strength of the Socialist Camp, - are apparently finally laid to rest (although ungraciously without any acknowledgement by Lalkar).

Scargill's stooges declare:

In the light of the foregoing, imperialism is sharpening to an unprecedented extent all the major contradictions - those between the oppressed nations and imperialism, between labour and capital, and between various imperialist powers.

It is facing humanity with the choice: either revolution or war and barbarism. It is our bounden duty to spread among the proletariat "... the grim and inexorable truth that it is impossible to escape imperialist war, and the imperialist world which inevitably engenders imperialist war, it is impossible to escape that inferno except by a Bolshevik struggle and a Bolshevik revolution" (Lenin, 14 October 1921).

So surely now, this will be urged on the SLP as the only perspective worth fighting for?????

But why does Lalkar shirk from this conclusion itself???

Surely a Bolshevik Revolution can only be brought about by a Bolshevik Party???

Or is Stalinist-Scargillite conservative opportunism going to produce yet another museum-fed late rally and allow the SLP to get away with continuing to grotesquely mislead the working class, internally unchallenged on its ludicrous 'left'-reformist parliamentary fantasies and trade-union daydreams and its even worse, unchallenged, leadership collective and membership-collective of every kind of theoretical nonsense from Stalinism to Trotskyism, from Maoism to English nationalist chauvinism, - all welcome as long as no one tries to clarify an agreed understanding of the world?????

Lalkar also blatantly ignores another crucial question unmissably raised by its agreement at last that inter-imperialist WWIII is the world's only future, and that "it is in this context that we must view all the imperialist-led and imperialist-inspired wars and armed conflicts raging all over the globe", followed by a wide list, repeatedly returned-to, but from which the Zionist-Palestinian war, - the longest of all, and potentially the most catastrophic of all (see above), and the one with one of the clearest revolutionary lessons of all (see repeated EPSRs), - is astonishingly continually excluded.

Such a titanic, never-ending, symbolic struggle for the future of the world (will imperialism's armed 'right' prevail, or will Third World anti-imperialist justice prevail?) can hardly have been forgotten about by oversight, so what is it?

It is the wretched cowardice of Stalinist Revisionism which knows full well that it has been trounced by the EPSR for Lalkar's support of the idiotic "two-state solution" nastiness (which means PERMANENT Zionist domination, brutalisation and humiliation on 78% of Palestine with the Arabs restricted to 22% of that, and with no real sovereignty ever) which flows directly out of the brain dead Stalin era of "peaceful coexistence with imperialism" delusions whose essence was Moscow's insane agreement to Zionist armed colonisation of Palestine in the first place in 1947, -  another matter Lalkar has been trounced on and cannot reply to, and would therefore prefer to be completely forgotten.

Hence the omission of the Zionist-Palestinian War from the obvious list of imperialist conflicts which all need re-examining in the light of the Western capitalist system's revealed irremediable descent relentlessly towards all-out inter-imperialist World War III as the final catastrophic reality of the postwar world of "peaceful coexistence" and "negotiated rational solutions to everything."

Another duty which any serious Bolshevik reincarnation will have to attend to but which has frequently been scorned by all the squabbling sectarian varieties of Stalinism/Revisionism, both before and after the tragic self-liquidation by the Soviet workers state in 1990, - namely defence of the dictatorship of the proletariat from petty-bourgeois attacks against it "on principle", accepting its mistakes and crimes as no more or less heinous than the fully comparable, but vastly more numerous, mistakes and crimes committed continuously WORLDWIDE by colonial-imperialist "democracy" in any given period, - has been remarkably drawn attention to by the most enlightened broadcaster in bourgeois television John Pilger.

His sensational Breaking the silence documentary this week on ITV has again raised the question "Whose are the real terrorist crimes in history??"

In particular, as well as exposing the entire new US warmongering programme as of very longstanding for the purposes of inter-imperialist war in the conflict for world economic domination and survival, and nothing whatever to do with any "anti-terrorist" peacekeeping, - Pilger forces a rethink on the Soviet Union's ill-fated Afghan war intervention by revealing that not only did CIA counter-revolutionary intervention against the 1978 Afghan Revolution pre-date the USSR's armed help to the Mojahedin threatened Kabul government (exactly as the EPSR constantly explained at the time) but that this CIA terrorist network (which directly gave birth to the Taleban and al-Qaeda later on) was precisely organised WITH THE SOLE AIM OF EMBROILING THE USSR IN AN UNWINNABLE WAR FOR WHICH THE USA WAS ALREADY TRAINING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF REACTIONARY INTERNATIONAL - ISLAMIC - EXTREMISTS for waging war on the "communist infidels", etc, etc.

Hitherto, Moscow Revisionism has been held to question by the EPSR for not having fought the CIA intervention with enough confidence and conviction (due to the weakmindedness resulting from the lack of any scrap of world revolutionary perspective in Soviet postwar political education).

Now it can be speculated whether Leninism at the head of the Soviet workers state, still keeping strong and bright a detailed and non-stop thirsting for opportunities for completing the world socialist revolution, - would have fallen into the trap of the Afghan War at all.

There is no way that the half-asleep Moscow Revisionists of 1979 were thinking of any total future revolutionary all-out conflict with imperialism for the completion of the world socialist revolution when they ventured into Afghanistan for the immediate defence of the Afghan revolution from the outrageous CIA counter-revolutionary intervention.

But given that weakness, (fatally threatening the longterm survival of the 1979 Soviet Revisionist continuity still managing to maintain a largely remarkably successful workers state), - it would have been better in that case for Moscow to have completed the task of seeing off the CIA counter-revolution rather than have abandoned the task "defeated" in 1988.

From a consistent Leninist-Revolutionary imaginary position, however, it can now be usefully asked whether the USSR should have risen to the bait at all to start the fight for the completion of the world socialist revolution in such unfavourable circumstances as Afghanistan under siege from deliberately mobilised CIA Islamic fanatic armies at that time?

Stalin frequently kept the Soviet powder dry but for all the wrong reasons, and is to be endlessly totally condemned because of that.

His Revisionist protégés intervened in Afghanistan but equally bereft of the correct world-revolutionary perspectives so must be written-off too as any kind of positive contribution to the Marxist-Leninist science of overthrowing imperialism.

From a serious Leninist world-revolution completion point of view, can they now also be condemned for having lightmindedly ventured into Afghanistan at all in open armed forces formations against such a loaded conspiracy?

None of these considerations, of course, yet form part of Pilger's purposes.

But his devastating onslaught on bourgeois imperialist skulduggery nevertheless helps a challenge to ALL of postwar Western prejudices since 1945 including anti-communism.

Here is what was broadcast in part:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, admitted in an interview in 1998, "CIA aid to the mojahedin began during 1980, that is, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan... But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise." At Brzezinski's urging, in July 1979 Carter authorised $500m to help set up what was basically a terrorist organisation. The goal was to lure Moscow, then deeply troubled by the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in the Soviet central Asian republics, into the "trap" of Afghanistan, a source of the contagion.

For 17 years, Washington poured $4bn into the pockets of some of the most brutal men on earth with the overall aim of exhausting and ultimately destroying the Soviet Union in a futile war. One of them, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord particularly favoured by the CIA, received tens of millions of dollars. His speciality was trafficking opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. In 1994, he agreed to stop attacking Kabul on condition that he was made prime minister - which he was.

Eight years earlier, CIA director William Casey had given his backing to a plan put forward by Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6, with the SAS training future al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called Operation Cyclone and continued long after the Soviets had withdrawn in 1989.

For America, it's a Frankenstein story - you make a monster and the monster goes against you.

Afghanistan's tragedy exemplifies the maxim of western power - that third world countries are regarded and dealt with strictly in terms of their usefulness to "us". The ruthlessness and hypocrisy this requires is imprinted on Afghanistan's modern history. One of the most closely guarded secrets of the cold war was America's and Britain's collusion with the warlords, the mojahedin, and the critical part they played in stimulating the jihad that produced the Taliban, al-Qaida and September 11.

"I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard," said Lord Curzon, viceroy of India in 1898, "upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world." Brzezinski, adviser to several presidents and a guru admired by the Bush gang, has written virtually those same words. In his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, he writes that the key to dominating the world is central Asia, with its strategic position between competing powers and immense oil and gas wealth. "To put it in terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires," he writes, one of "the grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy" is "to keep the barbarians from coming together". Surveying the ashes of the Soviet Union he helped destroy, the guru mused more than once, so what if all this had created "a few stirred up Muslims"? On September 11 2001, "a few stirred up Muslims" provided the answer. I recently interviewed Brzezinski in Washington and he vehemently denied that his strategy precipitated the rise of al-Qaida: he blamed terrorism on the Russians.

The latest mutation of the mojahedin, the Taliban, now ruled Afghanistan. In 1997, US state department officials and executives of the Union Oil Company of California (Unocal) discreetly entertained Taliban leaders in Washington and Houston, Texas. They were entertained lavishly, with dinner parties at luxurious homes in Houston. They asked to be taken shopping at a Walmart and flown to tourist attractions, including the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, where they gazed upon the faces of American presidents chiselled in the rockface. The Wall Street Journal, bulletin of US power, effused, "The Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history."

In January 1997, a state department official told journalists in a private briefing that it was hoped Afghanistan would become an oil protectorate, "like Saudi Arabia". It was pointed out to him that Saudi Arabia had no democracy and persecuted women. "We can live with that," he said.

The American goal was now the realisation of a 60 year "dream" of building a pipeline from the former Soviet Caspian across Afghanistan to a deep-water port. The Taliban were offered 15 cents for every 1,000 cubic feet of gas that passed through Afghanistan. Although these were the Clinton years, pushing the deal were the "oil and gas junta" that was soon to dominate George W Bush's regime. They included three former members of George Bush senior's cabinet, such as the present vice-president, Dick Cheney, representing nine oil companies, and Condoleezza Rice, now national security adviser, then a director of Chevron-Texaco with special responsibility for Pakistan and Central Asia. Peel the onion of this and you find Bush senior as a paid consultant of the huge Carlyle Group, whose 164 companies specialise in oil and gas and pipelines and weapons. His clients included a super-wealthy Saudi family, the Bin Ladens. (Within days of the September 11 attacks, the Bin Laden family was allowed to leave the US in high secrecy).

The pipeline "dream" faded when two US embassies in east Africa were bombed and al-Qaida was blamed and the connection with Afghanistan was made. The usefulness of the Taliban was over; they had become an embarrassment and expendable. In October 2001, the Americans bombed back into power their old warlord friends, the "Northern Alliance". Today, with Afghanistan "liberated' the pipeline is finally going ahead, watched over by the US ambassador to Afghanistan, John J Maresca, formerly of Unocal.

Since it overthrew the Taliban, the US has established 13 bases in the nine former Soviet central Asian countries that are Afghanistan's resource-rich neighbours. Across the world, there is now an American military presence at the gateway to every major source of fossil fuel. Lord Curzon would never recognise his great game. It's what the US Space Command calls "full spectrum dominance".

It is from the vast, Soviet-built base at Bagram, near Kabul, that the US controls the land route to the riches of the Caspian Basin. But, as in that other conquest, Iraq, all is not going smoothly. "We get shot at every time we go off base," said Colonel Rod Davis. "For us, that's a combat zone out there.'

I said to him, "But President Bush says you liberated Afghanistan. Why should people shoot at you?"

"Hostile elements are everywhere, my friend."

"Is that surprising, when you support murderous warlords?" I replied.

"We call them regional governors." (As "regional governors", warlords such as Ismail Khan in Herat are deemed part of Karzai's s national government – an uneasy juxtaposition. Karzai has pleaded with Khan to release millions of dollars of customs duty.)

The war that expelled the Taliban never stopped. Ten thousand US troops are stationed there; they go out in their helicopter gunships and Humvees and blow up caves in the mountains or they target a village, usually in the south-east. The Taliban are coming back in the Pashtun heartland and on the border with Pakistan. The level of the war is not independently known; US spokesmen such as Colonel Davis are the sources of news reports that say "50 Taliban fighters were killed by US forces".

Afghanistan is now so dangerous that it is virtually impossible for reporters to find out.

Contours of rubble rather than streets, where people live in collapsed buildings, like earthquake victims waiting for rescue. They have no light and heat; their apocalyptic fires burn through the night. Hardly a wall stands that does not bear the pock-marks of almost every calibre of weapon. Cars lie upended at roundabouts. Power poles built for a modern fleet of trolley buses are twisted like paperclips. The buses are stacked on top of each other, reminiscent of the pyramids of machines erected by the Khmer Rouge to mark Year Zero.

There is a sense of Year Zero in Afghanistan.

A hundred yards away, men in blue move stiffly in single file, mine-clearers. Mines are like litter here, killing and maiming, it is calculated, every hour of every day. Opposite what was Kabul's main cinema and is today an art deco shell, there is as busy roundabout with posters warning that unexploded cluster bombs "yellow and from USA" are in the vicinity. Children play here, chasing each other into the shadows. They are watched by a teenage boy with a stump and part of his face missing. In the countryside, people still confuse the cluster canisters with the yellow relief packages that were dropped by American planes almost two years ago, during the war, after Bush had prevented international relief convoys crossing from Pakistan.

More than $10bn has been spent on Afghanistan since October 7 2001, most of it by the US. More than 80% of this has paid for bombing the country and paying the warlords, the former mojahedin who called themselves the "Northern Alliance". The Americans gave each warlord tens of thousands of dollars in cash and truckloads of weapons. "We were reaching out to every commander that we could," a CIA official told the Wall Street Journal during the war. In other words, they bribed them to stop fighting each other and fight the Taliban.

These were the same warlords who, vying for control of Kabul after the Russians left in 1989, pulverised the city, killing 50,000 civilians, half of them in one year, 1994, according to Human Rights Watch. Thanks to the Americans, effective control of Afghanistan has been ceded to most of the same mafiosi and their private armies, who rule by fear, extortion and monopolising the opium poppy trade that supplies Britain with 90% of its street heroin. The post-Taliban government is a façade; it has no money and its writ barely runs to the gates of Kabul, in spite of democratic pretensions such as the election planned for next year. Omar Zakhilwal, an official in the ministry of rural affairs, told me that the government gets less than 20% of the aid that is delivered to Afghanistan - "We don't even have enough money to pay wages, let alone plan reconstruction," he said. President Harmid Karzai is a placeman of Washington who goes nowhere without his posse of US Special Forces bodyguards.

In a series of extraordinary reports, the latest published in July, Human Rights Watch has documented atrocities "committed by gunmen and warlords who were propelled into power by the United States and its coalition partners after the Taliban fell in 2001" and who have "essentially hijacked the country". The report describes army and police troops controlled by the warlords kidnapping villagers with impunity and holding them for ransom in unofficial prisons; the widespread rape of women, girls and boys; routine extortion, robbery and arbitrary murder. Girls' schools are burned down. "Because the soldiers are targeting women and girls," the report says, "many are staying indoors, making it impossible for them to attend school [or] go to work."

In the western city of Herat, for example, women are arrested if they drive; they are prohibited from travelling with an unrelated man, even an unrelated taxi driver. If they are caught, they are subjected to a "chastity test", squandering precious medical services to which, says Human Rights Watch, "women and girls have almost no access, particularly in Herat, where fewer than one per cent of women give birth with a trained attendant". The death rate of mothers giving birth is the highest in the world, according to Unicef. Herat is ruled by the warlord Ismail Khan, whom US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld endorsed as "an appealing man...thoughtful, measured and self-confident".

"The last time we met in this chamber," said George Bush in his state of the union speech last year, "the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today, women are free, and are part of Afghanistan's new government. And we welcome the new minister of women's affairs, Dr Sima Samar." 

A slight, middle-aged woman in a headscarf stood and received the choreographed ovation. A physician who refused to deny treatment to women during the Taliban years, Samar is a true symbol of resistance, whose appropriation by the unctuous Bush was short-lived. In December 2001, Samar attended the Washington sponsored "peace conference" in Bonn where Karzai was installed as president and three of the most brutal warlords as vice-presidents. (The Uzbek warlord General Rashid Dostum, accused of torturing and slaughtering prisoners, is currently defence minister.) Samar was one of two women in Karzai's cabinet.

No sooner had the applause in Congress died away than Samar was smeared with a false charge of blasphemy and forced out. The warlords, different from the Taliban only in their tribal allegiances and religious pieties, were not tolerating even a gesture of female emancipation.

Today, Samar lives in constant fear for her life. She has two fearsome bodyguards with automatic weapons. One is at her office door, the other at her gate. She travels in a blacked-out van. "For the past 23 years, I was not safe," she told me, "but I was never in hiding or travelling with gunmen, which I must do now...There is no more official law to stop women from going to school and work; there is no law about dress code. But the reality is that even under the Taliban there was not the pressure on women in the rural areas there is now".

The apartheid might have legally ended, but for as many as 90% of the women of Afghanistan, these "reforms" - such as the setting up of a women's ministry in Kabul - are little more than a technicality. The burka is still ubiquitous. As Samar says, the plight of rural women is often more desperate now because the ultra-puritanical Taliban dealt harshly with rape, murder and banditry. Unlike today, it was possible to travel safely across much of the country.

At a bombed-out shoe factory in west Kabul, I found the population of two villages huddled on exposed floors without light and with one trickling tap. They had fled there, they explained, because warlords routinely robbed them and kidnapped their wives and daughters and sons, whom they would rape and ransom back to them.

"During the Taliban we were living in a graveyard, but we were secure," a campaigner, Marina, told me. "Some people even say they were better. That's how desperate the situation is today. The laws may have changed, but women dare not leave their homes without the burka, which we wear as much for our protection." 

Marina is a leading member of Rawa, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a heroic organisation that for years tried to alert the outside world to the suffering of the women of Afghanistan. Rawa women travelled secretly throughout the country with cameras concealed beneath their burkas. They filmed a Taliban execution and other abuses, and smuggled their videotape to the west. 

"We took it to different media groups," said Marina. "Reuters, ABC Australia, for example, and they said, yes, it's very nice, but we can't show it because it's too shocking for people in the west." She says that the current silence in the west over the atrocious nature of the western-backed warlord regime is no different. We met clandestinely and she wore a veil to disguise her identity. Marina is not her real name. "Two girls who went to school without their burkas were killed and their dead bodies were put in front of their houses," she said. "Last month, 35 women jumped into a river along with their children and died, just to save themselves from commanders on a rampage of rape. That is Afghanistan today; the Taliban and the warlords of the Northern Alliance are two faces of the same coin.

The centre of US operations is now the "holding facility" at Bagram, where suspects are taken and interrogated. Two former prisoners, Abdul Jabar and Hakkim Shah, told the New York Times in March how as many as 100 prisoners were "made to stand hooded, their arms raised and chained to the ceiling, their feet shackled, unable to move for hours at a time, day and night". From here, many are shipped to the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. They are denied all rights. The Red Cross has been allowed to inspect only part of the "holding facility"; Amnesty has been refused access altogether. In April last year, a Kabul taxi driver, Wasir Mohammad, whose family I interviewed, "disappeared" into Bagram after he inquired at a roadblock about the whereabouts of a friend who had been arrested. The friend has since been released, but Mohammad is now in a cage in Guantanamo Bay. A former minister of the interior in the Karzai government told me that Mohammad was in the wrong place at the wrong time: "He is innocent." Moreover, he had a record of standing up to the Taliban. It is likely that many of those incarcerated at Bagram and Guantanamo Bay were kidnapped for ransoms the Americans pay for suspects.

Why, I asked Colonel Davis, were the people in the "holding facility" not given the basic rights he would expect as an American taken prisoner by a foreign army. He replied: "The issue of prisoners of war is way off to the far left or the right depending on your perspective." This is the Kafkaesque world that Bush's America has imprinted on the recently acquired additions to its empire, real and virtual, rising on new rubble in places where human life is not given the same value as those who perished at Ground Zero in New York. One such place is a village called Bibi Mahru, which was attacked by an American F16 almost two years ago during the war. The pilot dropped a MK82 "precision" 500lb  bomb on a mud and stone house, where Orifa and her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, lived. The bomb killed all but Orifa and one son - eight members of her family, including six children. Two children in the next house were killed, too.

Her face engraved with grief and anger, Orifa told me how the bodies were laid out in front of the mosque, and the horrific state in which she found them. She spent the afternoon collecting body parts, "then bagging and naming them so they could be buried later on". She said a team of 11 Americans came and surveyed the crater where her home had stood. They noted the numbers on shrapnel and each interviewed her. Their translator gave her an envelope with $15 in dollar bills. Later, she was taken to the US embassy in Kabul by Rita Lasar, a New Yorker who had lost her brother in the Twin Towers and had gone to Afghanistan to protest about the bombing and comfort its victims. When Orifa tried to hand in a letter through the embassy gate, she was told, "Go away, you beggar."

In May last year, the Guardian published the result of an investigation by Jonathan Steele. He concluded that, in addition to up to 8,000 Afghans killed by American bombs, as many as 20,000 more may have died as an indirect consequence of Bush's invasion, including those who fled their homes and were denied emergency relief in the middle of a drought. Of all the great humanitarian crises of recent years, no country has been helped less than Afghanistan. Bosnia, with a quarter of the population, received $356 per person; Afghanistan gets $42 per person. Only 3% of all international aid spent in Afghanistan has, been for reconstruction; the US-led military "coalition" accounts for 84%, the rest is emergency aid. Last March, Karzai flew to Washington to beg for more money. He was promised extra money from private US investors. Of this, $35m will finance a proposed five-star hotel. As Bush said, "The Afghan people will know the generosity of America and its allies."

All of the Revisionists, including the Stalinists, have effectively given up the fight against anti-communism.

It is a wretched mistake, born of no longer having any serious conviction about Marx's scientific understanding that only a world of proletarian dictatorship can possibly replace a world of endless imperialist economic turmoil and warmongering conflict such as is now, increasingly relentlessly, making a mockery of humanity. Build Leninism. EPSR supporters.

EPSR BOX

Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote is Revolution and a strong workers state, - as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE explain.

Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.

The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with a vengeance.

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It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And  from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

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"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

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" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

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

COLLUSION IS STATE MURDER

COLLUSION has been part of the Six-County state since its creation. British forces and unionist paramilitaries have traditionally shared intelligence, weapons and personnel. But in the 1980s, under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, members of the British cabinet and their military intelligence agencies developed a specific collusion mechanism that established state sponsored murder as a formal strategy at the heart of British policy in Ireland.

The British Government would like us to believe that collusion is simply a matter of past grievances outside the new dispensation of the current Peace Process. But until the mechanisms have been dismantled, the strategy denounced and the truth revealed, collusion cannot be consigned to the history books.

The death of Belfast defence lawyer Pat Finucane and the subsequent exposure of British collusion in the killing has shocked the world. Ten years later and in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, the death of Rosemary Nelson, in almost identical circumstances, is more than shocking.

The recent killing of William Stobie, a loyalist who knew too much, just days after he supported the call for a public inquiry into the Finucane murder further suggests collusion is far from a thing of the past.

The British state, through agencies like the FRU and Special Branch, rearmed, reorganised and redirected loyalist death squads. Supplying unionist paramilitaries with modern weaponry had an immediate and deadly impact on the number of killings in the north of Ireland. Within six years of the arrival of weaponry, procured in South Africa and smuggled into the Six Counties by British agents, loyalist murder gangs had increased their capacity to kill by 300%.

Through a network of agents, like Brian Nelson, the British state identified targets, supplied intelligence and provided back up to the killers. The FRU had the authority to ensure loyalist gunmen on a 'hit' a clear run to and from their target while Special Branch ensured any investigation into the killing did not result in prosecutions.

In other words, the British state established an effective murder machine that enabled them to commission the killing of citizens within its own jurisdiction. The British justified collusion to themselves by promoting the notion that they were 'taking the war to the IRA' but in fact once the machinery of murder was up and running, no one was safe.

They killed politicians, civil rights activists, election workers, defence lawyers and Catholic civilians. They killed to cover their agents' tracks.

They killed agents who had outlived their usefulness and loyalists who knew too much. And they sacrificed their own soldiers and members of the RUC to retain their agents' cover.

But by the late 1980s the secret operation of the collusion strategy began to be exposed. In August 1989, the UDA killed Loughlin Maginn and claimed that he was a member of the IRA. To support their claim, the UDA produced classified British Intelligence documents that identified Maginn as an IRA Volunteer. In the months that followed, thousands of British Intelligence documents in the hands of loyalists were shown to the media.

British police chief John Stevens was quickly dispatched to investigate the subsequent allegations of collusion. Stevens' investigation was initially based on the premise that collusion was nothing more than the leaking of documents. But the inadvertent arrest of the British agent at the heart of UDA Intelligence network, Brian Nelson, and his admission that he was working for the FRU further exposed the nature of British collusion.

As a consequence of Nelson's exposure, the British state was no longer able to completely hide its hand. Covert attempts by the FRU, the hiding of Nelson's paperwork at palace Barracks and the mysterious fire at Stevens , offices failed and Nelson's prosecution proceeded.

The British feared that the information that might be exposed during a lengthy court case so much that they had to deploy 'public' mechanism to curtail the trial. The subsequent cover up involved the then British PM John Major, who met the trial judge Basil Kelly and the head of the. British judiciary in the North, Chief Judge Brian Hutton.

It involved the then Attorney General Patrick Mayhew and British Defence Minister and former NIO Secretary of State Tom King, who provided a character reference for Nelson. And it also involved the partial exposure of the FRU and its operation by the trial attendance of Colonel 'J', now Brigadier Gordon Kerr, the then head of the FRU. Kerr remains a key military and political figure under Tony Blair as British military attaché to Beijing.

The most politically dynamic revelation to come out of Stevens' investigation was the exposure of Nelson's involvement in the killing of Pat Finucane. The killing of a defence lawyer attracted worldwide attention and created an international lobby in the campaign to end collusion.

To date, the British Government has initiated three probes by John Stevens, All three have been little more than exercises in damage limitation and a mechanism to stem the growing tide of international opinion which supports the families' call for an independent public inquiry.

As information has increasingly emerged into the public arena, Stevens has presented a rollercoaster of notions about collusion. At first collusion was presented as a matter of unofficial 'leaks' between regular and irregular pro-British forces. In this scenario, there is no guiding hand, no pattern, no strategy, just the collective result of individual acts of collusion. Stevens focused upon indigenous groups like the UDR and unionist paramilitaries.

But the 'leaks' scenario collapsed as soon as Nelson revealed himself as a British agent working for a unit of British Military Intelligence. Then collusion became the consequences of a 'rogue' agent, Nelson, who it was claimed had strayed beyond his sanctioned role with the FRU. But that proved to be equally unsustainable.

Fearing his potential as a whistleblower, the British state felt compelled to rush to Nelson's defence, manipulating the operation of the justice system and providing a British cabinet minister, Tom King and British Army officer, Gordon Kerr, as character witnesses during the trial. Nelson was described as a 'courageous hero' by Kerr and a 'valuable agent' by King.		

Currently, the FRU are being presented as a 'rogue' unit that acted beyond the sanction of their military and political masters but that lie is already being exposed. The range of agencies involved in the Finucane killing and cover up shows the FRU was far from a solo player.

The increasing insight into the operation of the FRU, the unit's close working relationship with Special Branch and MI5 control of both agencies further undermines any notion that the FRU was acting alone.

Former FRU agents have already confirmed the close day-to-day monitoring of their activities by MI5 and the detailed documentation generated by the FRU suggests a level of accountability unlikely to allow operation outside the control of their political and military masters.

Through MI5 to the Joint Intelligence Committee, the collusion chain of command runs directly to Number 10 Downing Street and the heart of the British government. The JIC is directly accountable to the British Prime Minister.

But one key aspect of the collusion controversy hat been successfully sidelined by the British so far. Supplying intelligence, even engaging in a cover up after the event, is one thing but supplying weaponry is quite another. The way in which British Military Intelligence rearmed unionist paramilitaries is an aspect of collusion yet to be 'investigated' by Stevens.

In 1996, relatives of some of those killed as a consequence of collusion presented a submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, urging investigation into an arms shipment, organised by British agents during the former Apartheid regime to loyalists in the north of Ireland.

In 1985, Dick Wright, a loyalist from Portadown and British agent, travelled from South Africa to the North of Ireland. At the time, Wright was working in South Africa as an agent for an armaments company, Armscor. In Belfast, Wright met a leading member of the UDA, now widely believed to have been a British agent, and offered to supply loyalists with weaponry worth at least a quarter of a million pounds.

A second British agent was duly dispatched to South, Africa to secure the deal. In June 1985, Brian Nelson travelled to South Africa. His trip was authorised by the British MoD and by a British minister whose identity is as yet unknown. In South Africa, Nelson was met by another British agent with loyalist connections, Charles Simpson.

Charles Simpson, an MI5 agent and former member of Tara, a loyalist paramilitary group headed by the notorious William McGrath, was then working as a member of the equally notorious South African Defence Forces. In Durban, Simpson took Nelson to inspect the shipment of weaponry that was later smuggled into the North of Ireland.

Final arrangements for the shipment were completed in December 1987. According to Nelson, he kept MI5 informed throughout, passing on all details including the method to be used to smuggle the weapons into the North.

The arms were dispatched in crates marked as containing ceramic tiles at the end of December 1987 by a Lebanese intermediary employed by an American arms dealer working for the South Africans. Dick Wright had previously worked for the same American in London.

The shipment is believed to have consisted of 200 AK47 automatic rifles, 90 Browning pistols, 500 fragmentation grenades, 30,000 rounds of ammunition and 12 RPG7 rocket launchers.

The weapons were landed in the north of Ireland in January 1988. Many of the weapons were Czech made and had been initially captured from the PLO by the Israelis, who sold them to Armscor.

The shipment was shared out between three unionist paramilitary groups, the UDA, UVF and Ulster Resistance. Part of the shipment was lost when a car carrying some of the weapons was stopped by the RUC outside Portadown and a dump raided in North Belfast but the bulk of the shipment still remains in loyalist hands.

British Military Intelligence has subsequently attempted to justify the fact that they allowed the shipment through on the grounds that seizure might have compromised an agent's cover. But such a defence is nonsense. It asks us to place the primacy of an agent's cover above the hundreds of lives subsequently lost as a direct consequence of the South African shipment.

In the 1980s, the British state adopted a strategy and developed a means by which it could commission the murder of citizens within its own jurisdiction. Thirty years later, those mechanisms are yet to be dismantled and the policy of state collusion yet to be disavowed.

BRITISH STATE COLLUSION with loyalist paramilitaries, or indeed direct operations by British forces, also took a heavy toll of lives in the 26 Counties. These include:

• The bombing of Belturbet, County Cavan in December 1972 in which two teenage civilians were killed.

• The Dublin bombings of December 1972 and January 1973 in which three bus workers were killed.

• The Dublin and Monaghan bombings of May 1974 in which 33 people died  - 26 in Dublin and seven in Monaghan.

• The killing of Volunteer John Francis Green in County Monaghan in January 1975.

• The Dundalk bombing of December 1975 in which two civilians were killed.

• The Castleblayney bombing of March 1976 in which one civilian, Patrick Mone, was killed.

• The killing of civilian Seamus Ludlow by the UDR in County Louth in May 1976.

• The killing of Sinn Fein Councillor Eddie Fullerton in Donegal in May 1991. 

• The killing of Volunteer Martin Doherty in May 1994, having foiled an attempted bombing of the Widow Scallan's pub in Dublin.