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 1227 April 6th 2004

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SW seminar 24/4

"Deadly chemical" scare stories are just a routine smokescreen/provocation to hide the latest disasters for imperialism's Middle East warmongering catastrophe. While the quantitatively tiny danger from actual terrorist strikes is real and unpleasant enough, this isolated anarchy is in practice only being used (and exaggerated) to create a "justification" for Middle East warmongering which US imperialism had made its policy even before Sept 11 had even been heard of. The hate-filled "Islamic extremism" which this American NAZI blitzkrieging is provoking is NOT the issue. The mass revolt and rejection of Western domination is the thing, and it will soon shed any barmy temporary leaderships, as all great revolutionary transformations in history have done. Insoluble imperialist economic crisis of "overproduction" is the cause of all the world's difficulties and warmongering, and only a completely new order, ending the grotesque inequalities on Earth, will resolve it.

Western imperialism's warmongering catastrophe in the Middle East is now degenerating so rapidly that savage recriminations are already out-headlining the latest admissions of disasters and setbacks, which are almost becoming taken for granted.

This is still nowhere near a military defeat for this American recreation of NAZI blitzkrieg yet.

Vastly more quantities of "shock and awe" devastation can still strike (and probably will) Iraq and Afghanistan in retaliation for the ongoing US humiliations there ( — plus anyone else who can get branded as "having assisted in the damage to American interests etc, etc).

But this warmongering is fast becoming such a huge POLITICAL and ECONOMIC debacle that everything in the EPSR's perspective of a TOTAL HISTORICAL CRISIS for the WHOLE IMPERIALIST SYSTEM is being strongly invigorated.

First, a flavour of the very latest escalation of bad tidings, as admitted and reported by the British capitalist press itself:

The Bush administration was last night facing a nightmare scenario in Iraq, fighting on two fronts against Sunni arid Shia militants less than three months before it is due to hand over power to an Iraqi government.

American officials in Baghdad announced an arrest warrant for a radical Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, whose black-uniformed Mahdi militia revolted against coalition forces at the weekend, killing seven American soldiers in the Baghdad district known as Sadr City. Up to 30 Iraqis were also killed in the clashes, the worst the capital has seen since its fall to US troops a year ago.

US forces 	used Apache gunships to attack targets in Baghdad for the first time since the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime. The helicopters opened fire over the Shia neighbourhood of Shulla after militants destroyed a US armoured vehicle.

Meanwhile, a force of 1,300 US marines and Iraqi troops began moving into the town of Falluja in an attempt to regain control of the Sunni stronghold, which signalled its defiance last week by the torching, dismemberment and display of the bodies of four American private security guards, ambushed in the town centre by insurgents. The marines imposed a curfew and closed the Baghdad-Amman road that runs past the town.

Faced with a rapidly deteriorating security situation and the prospect of a civil war following the transfer of power to a yet-to-be-determined Iraqi government, the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, cancelled a visit to Washington to deal with the crisis.

The US military commander, General John Abizaid, was considering the reinforcement of his 105,000-strong army of occupation. According to Pentagon officials, Gen Abizaid gave his aides 48 hours to come up with ideas on where fresh troops, American or allied, could be found.

Mention of reinforcements has been taboo in the Bush administration as it faces re-election in November, but the revolt in Shia majority areas on Sunday, a few days after the Falluja killings, triggered profound anxiety in Washington.

"I'm accused by one of the leaders of evil, Bremer, of being an outlaw," Mr Sadr said in a defiant statement. "If that means breaking the law of the American tyranny and its filthy constitution, I'm proud of that and that is why I'm in revolt."

He ordered his followers into the streets after the arrest of one of his top aides, Mustafa al-Yakoubi, and 13 other followers, for al-Khoei's murder, and the closure a week earlier of his movement's weekly newspaper, al-Hawza.

At the same time as Sunday's clashes in Baghdad's Sadr City, 24 Iraqis died in gunfire between Mahdi militiamen and Spanish-led forces in Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad, where a Salvadorean coalition soldier was reported killed. Mr Sadr's forces also demonstrated in the British-run cities of Basra, Amara and Nassiriya.

Yesterday, US officials played down the significance of Mr Sadr's movement. The Pentagon said he commanded only 600 militiamen and a few thousand supporters. However, the Iraqi Shias' most senior religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a relative moderate, was reportedly ambivalent in his response to the Mahdi revolt.

"The good news here is Sadr is just one extreme cleric we already knew was an extremist and by resisting firmly we will send a message," said Michael O'Hanlon, a strategic analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "The more nerve racking news is that Sistani seems to be divided in his instincts."

But even since that report of this past weekend's insurgency, things have just got worse.

Bremer's analysis and authority is crumbling fast. He sounds a loser.

His "tough" action against Moqtada al-Sadr in closing down the Shiite leader's A1-Hawza newspaper, and arresting a deputy, had maybe the appearance of the "smack of firm government" but looks more like stupidity-desperation of deludedly kidding himself that the uncontrollable Sunni Triangle revolt might end if a Shiite firebrand's anti-imperialist incitement was shut down.

But it is looking much more likely at the moment that this brutal, arrogant, and hypocritical clampdown on the "democratic freedoms" that American recolonisation was supposed to bring, was just an idiotic act of incompetent despair by Bremer who knows that his military occupation is now out of its depth, and sinking fast.

The recriminations over this hamfisted bullying stupidity were already bitter and universal in pro-American circles, even, — even before this catastrophic extension of violent hatred on the streets of Iraq, — as these capitalist publications themselves record:

Floyd Abrams Newsday, New York, March 30

"Of all the messages the US could send to the people of Iraq, the sorriest is this: if you say things we disapprove of, we'll shut you up ... Shutting down a newspaper that publishes material — even false material — that is critical of us sends precisely the wrong message. It is a message of fear that the truthful recitation of facts in other newspapers and on radio and television will fail to persuade the Iraqi public of what really happened. It is a message of weakness that we do not believe our ideas will prevail. Even more important, it is a message of inconsistency that, for all our talk of freedom, we really don't mean it when we are the ones criticised."

Hartford Courant Editorial, US, March 30

"In carrying out this highly symbolic act, the US comes across as a coloniser, not a teacher of democracy. It sends an ominous message to other publishers in Iraq to muzzle themselves or face being shut down. We forget the lessons of our own history — for example, British troops arresting anti-crown pamphleteers in vain — at our peril. "Silencing a newspaper that speaks to the discontent of some (or possibly many) Iraqis will only make matters worse. Is that how we want the independent Iraqi government to act after we leave?

Baltimore Sun  Editorial, March 31

"Sending in soldiers to padlock the front gates of the newspaper Al-Hawza, as the chief US administrator, Paul Bremer, did on Sunday, suggests that the American occupiers have little faith in their own powers of persuasion, and aren't bothering to be subtle about it ...

"The American goal is a better Iraq and a more obedient Iraq, but they're not the same and it's clear obedience comes first. The thing about Al-Hawza is that it printed fantastic and provocative lies about US responsibility for lethal bombings. Any occupying force would have felt justified putting a stop to those lies. A democracy building force would not have. The Americans, in this, showed their true colours."

Gulf Times Editorial, Qatar, March 30

"Shutting down a small circulation newspaper shows little regard for freedom. Al-Hawza may indeed have printed some inaccurate stories and undoubtedly cast the coalition's efforts in a bad light. But nothing does more to convince people that there is an official cover-up than the suppression of a publication. When the media are prevented from reporting properly, the rumour mill fills the gap.

"Banning Al-Hawza will make the rumours about what is happening more virulent. On the whole, the public is able to distinguish between exaggeration and accurate reporting and gives less credence to sensational media. When people know that negative stories are banned, they will assume something terrible is being kept secret ... Unfortunately the coalition authority seems to believe that freedom must be kept in chains for its own good."

New York Times  Editorial, March 30

"Newspapers like AI-Hawza do not create the hostility Americans face in Iraq they reflect it. Shutting them down, however satisfying it may feel to the Bush administration, is not a promising way to dissolve that hostility. The occupation authorities have plenty of means, including their own television station, to get out a more favourable message ...

"There are times when the demands of security and the demands of democracy tug in opposite directions. This was not one of them. By driving Al-Hawza's rumours and anti-American sentiments underground, Mr Bremer made both of those central goals that much harder to achieve."

But while this nitpicking blaming game is an encouraging early sign of defeat in the air, (— the only longterm hope for mankind of getting out of this chaos of arrogant imperialist warmongering's making), — the truly inspirational development in this fouled-up mess is the huge boost to Iraqi defiance (and to anti-imperialism further afield) that Bremer's mindless bumbling(and the explosive response to it) will have produced. The "unsavoury" character of past and emerging "anti-imperialist" leadership in Iraq (or Afghanistan) is nothing whatever to do with the importance for the world of this revolt against American bullying.

It is the lessons learned from standing up to super-monied and super-armed tyranny that count.  

By all means let cretinous Saddamism be painted in the worst colours imaginable (although the propaganda exaggeration of his "monstrousness" was a deliberate and damaging fraud on the West by the US warmongers, with ulterior motives, who were once Saddam's patrons, — as the EPSR has frequently reported, and as more revelations in the Western press reveal below).

And likewise let "Islamic fundamentalism" be cursed by the Christians beyond all repair.

What matters to mankind is the revolt itself.

Once literally BILLIONS of people, — the poor of the world, start to stand up and say that they are prepared to fight against being intimidated and pushed around, regardless of the terrifying dangers as is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, — then the writing is on the wall for ALL rubbish, conmen, and exploitation eventually, — mullahs too.

The small-minded racist envy of the powerful and competent White West is not a problem.

It is natural and predictable that this long-awaited further revolutionary development in the human spirit should be being finally brutalised into life by this Anglo-US sick re-run of 19th and 20th century Western colonial warmongering tyranny and LIES at their very worst.

The Third World billions whose willing and rapidly-educating cooperation can alone turn the whole world into a harmonious success story at last, got halfway off their knees (and their backwardness) with the post-1945 movement for colonial freedom which FORCED the physical Western empires out of existence.

And until still-unresolved (and still largely unanalysed) internal unexpected weaknesses and mistakes laid them low, some parts of the world went three-quarters of the way towards real self-emancipation and enlightenment,plus fierce and competent independence, — in Cuba, China, USSR, Vietnam, etc, and other workers states. 

This time round, the horrors of imperialist economic crisis and imperialist warmongering will eventually DRIVE mankind into as-yet-unborn mass movements which will take global human culture and construction into unheard-of realms of achievement and cooperation. But only via imperialist DEFEAT. As all history proves, it is the only pattern of development possible (see EPSR Box).

For as long as people let it happen, it is the propaganda LIES and the exploitational TYRANNY of the monopoly capitalist haves versus the universal have-nots that will flourish, — backed of course by brutal blitzkrieg warmongering whenever the natives get a bit stroppy or restless. 

This fightback in the Middle East shows encouraging signs of being the possible first steps of the beginning of a major turning point in human history. 

But paradoxically, its start can only be in something like the negative and destructive violence which seems to be all that is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the suicide bombings in Palestine and the terrorist atrocities elsewhere.

But as the capitalist press itself is beginning to notice with some interest, what all this anarchy also reveals is a potentially life inspiring and imagination-firing HATRED of what is happening to these Third World billions at the moment:

AS THE gunfire died down and the bodies in the vehicles burnt, the people of Fallujah ventured out, armed with shovels, stones and a deadly hatred for the foreign occupation.

Then the people fell on the charred corpses of the American contractors, hacking and kicking and dragging them through the streets.

Dancing and cheering, the people of this fiercely tribal town west of Baghdad beat the smouldering bodies with metal pipes, stamped on their heads and cut off limbs, before taking a yellow plastic cord and dragging the bodies to an iron girder bridge, where they strung two of them by the feet, cheering in a celebration of their hatred of the occupier.

These were scenes reminiscent of Somalia in 1993, when the body of a US soldier was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by a chanting mob. The scenes prompted a hasty US withdrawal from Somalia and tamed its foreign policy for the rest of the decade.

Scott McClellan, President Bush's spokesman, rejected suggestions that the horror in Fallujah represented a "Mogadishu moment", or turning point, for the occupation.

The four Fallujah victims were believed to be American civilian contractors working for the US Department of Defence. In a year of relentless violence, their deaths plumbed a new low, shocking Iraqis in the capital and sending a shiver of terror through the multitude of foreign workers toiling to rebuild the country. American television reported the killings but chose not to show footage of the corpses telling viewers that the scenes were too vivid.

With no sign of US troops or Iraqi police in the streets, a cheering crowd jogged beside the macabre, slow-moving procession, a trail of blood streaming from the corpses, to the old bridge spanning the Euphrates about a mile away, where they hung two of the bodies from overhead supports. Witnesses said the bodies hung there for more than an hour before being cut down.

"The people of Fallujah hanged some of the bodies on the old bridge like slaughtered sheep," Abdul Aziz Mohammed, a resident, said. An Iraqi police car near the bridge was spotted leaving the area and witnesses said it was several hours before any Iraqi security presence appeared.

"We are ready to kill them all. We are waiting for them to return to take these bodies and cars, and we will then cut them all to pieces. Let them come back, — if they are real men," shouted one man, his face hidden by a headscarf. Television footage captured the faces of the men who took part in the violence.

Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, spokesman for the US Army, said he did not know how the mob had been allowed to vent its hatred on the men's bodies for so long without intervention from Iraqi or coalition security forces. The US Marines have a base on the edge of Fallujah and Iraqi police and the paramilitary Iraqi Civil Defence Corps have bases in the town, where violence has proved endemic since US troops killed 20 demonstrators in the closing days of the war last year.

The attack came three days after Marines fought a big gun battle with guerrillas armed with mortars and assault rifles in Fallujah, in which one marine and nine Iraqis were killed.

The battle has fed into the longstanding hatred that residents harbour for the occupation forces, with men yesterday chanting: "Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans."

One Iraqi man held up dog tags ripped from the body of one of the victims, saying the men had been carrying weapons and flak jackets. Others displayed a US passport and a Department of Defence security card identifying the victim as a major.

In a separate incident close to Fallujah, a roadside bomb killed five American soldiers, leaving a hole 15ft wide and 10ft deep beside the road. The attack was the worst single loss to the coalition since a helicopter was shot down near Fallujah in January.

Such colossal energy and indignation cannot possibly remain purely destructive, resentful, and disorganised for ever. 

A sturdy new RED ARMY movement must emerge soon, emulating and surpassing even the mighty feats of China and the Soviet Union. 

And it is the West's own disgust with itself which is a good indicator that the imperialist propaganda trick (of just highlighting the destructive negative anarchy of Middle East anti-imperialism so far) is not going to be the world's final verdict on what is going on. 

Every week, new voices are being raised all round the West insisting that it is solely and wholly imperialism which is in the wrong, and that one way or another, it is this rotten warmongering tyranny which must end first before any further positive developments are even contemplatable.

One "democratic" US view reported in the American magazine "Nation" declared: 

Do you have any rooms?" we ask the hotelier. She looks us over, dwelling on my travel partner's bald, white head.

"No," she replies.

We try not to notice that there are 60 room keys in pigeonholes behind her desk - the place is empty.

"Will you have a room soon? Maybe next week?"

She hesitates. "Ahh ... No:"

We return to our current hotel — the one we want to leave because there are bets on when it is going to get hit — and flick on the TV: the BBC is showing footage of Richard Clarke's testimony before the September 11 commission, ,and a couple of pundits are arguing about whether invading Iraq has made America safer. 

They should try finding a hotel room in this city, where the US occupation has unleashed a wave of anti-American rage so intense that it now extends not only to US troops, occupation officials and their contractors but also to foreign journalists, aid workers, their translators and pretty much anyone else associated with the Americans. 

Which is why we couldn't begrudge the hotelier her decision: if you want to survive in Iraq, it's wise to stay the hell away from people who look like us. (We thought about explaining that we were Canadians, but all the American reporters are sporting the maple leaf — that is, when they aren't trying to disappear behind their newly purchased headscarves.)

The US occupation chief, Paul Bremer, hasn't started wearing a hijab yet, and is instead tackling the rise of anti-Americanism with his usual foresight. Baghdad is blanketed with inept psy-ops organs like Baghdad Now, filled with fawning articles about how Americans are teaching Iraqis about press freedom. "I never thought before that the coalition could do a great thing for the Iraqi people," one trainee is quoted as saying. "Now I can see it on my eyes that they are doing good things for my country and the accomplishment they made. I wish my people can see that, the way I see it"

Unfortunately, the Iraqi people recently saw another version of press freedom when Bremer ordered US troops to shut down a newspaper run by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr. The militant Shia cleric has been preaching that Americans are behind the attacks on Iraqi civilians and condemning the interim constitution as a "terrorist law." So far, al-Sadr has refrained from calling on his supporters to join the armed resistance, but many here are predicting that closing down the newspaper — a non-violent means of resisting the occupation — was just the push he needed. But then, recruiting for the resistance has always been a specialty of the presidential envoy to Iraq: Bremer's first act after being tapped by Bush was to fire 400,000 Iraqi soldiers, refuse to give them their rightful pensions, but allow them to hold on to their weapons - in case they needed them later.

While US soldiers were padlocking the door of the newspaper's office, I found myself at what I thought would be an oasis of pro-Americanism, the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company. On May 1 this bottling plant will start producing one of the most powerful icons of American culture: Pepsi-Cola. I figured that if there was anyone left in Baghdad willing to defend the Americans, it would be Hamid Jassim Khamis, the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company's managing director. I was wrong.

"All the trouble in Iraq is because of Bremen" Khamis told me, flanked by a line-up of 30 Pepsi and 7-Up bottles. "He didn't listen to Iraqis. He doesn't know anything about Iraq. He destroyed the country and tried to rebuild it again, and now we are in chaos."

These are words you would expect to hear from religious extremists or Saddam loyalists, but hardly from the likes of Khamis. It's not just that his Pepsi deal is the highest-profile investment by a US multinational in Iraq's new "free market" : It's also that few Iraqis supported the war more staunchly than Khamis. And no wonder: Saddam executed both his brothers and Khamis was forced to resign as managing director of the bottling plant in 1999 after Saddam's son Uday threatened his life. When the Americans overthrew Saddam, "you can't imagine how much relief we felt", he says. 

After the Ba'athist plant manager was forced out, Khamis returned to his old job. "There is a risk doing business with the Americans," he says. Several months ago, two detonators were discovered in front of the factory gates. And Khamis is still shaken from an attempted assassination three weeks ago. He was on his way to work when he was carjacked and shot at, and there was no doubt that this was a targeted attack; one of the assailants was heard asking another, "Did you kill the manager?" Khamis used to be happy to defend his pro-US position, even if it meant arguing with friends. But one year after the invasion, many of his neighbours in the industrial park have gone out of business. "I don't know what to say to my friends anymore," he says.

"It's chaos."

His list of grievances against the occupation is long: corruption in the awarding of reconstruction contracts, the failure to stop the looting; the failure to secure Iraq's borders — both from foreign terrorists and from unregulated foreign imports. Iraqi companies, still suffering from the sanctions and the looting, have been unable to compete. 

Most of all, Khamis is worried about how these policies have fed the country's unemployment crisis, creating far too many desperate people. He also notes that Iraqi police officers are paid less than half what he pays his assembly line workers, — which is not enough to survive.

The normally soft-spoken Khamis becomes enraged when talking about the man in charge of "rebuilding" Iraq. "Paul Bremer has caused more damage than the war, because the bombs can damage a building but if you damage people there is no hope." 

I have gone to the mosques and street demonstrations and listened to Muqtada al-Sadr's supporters shout "Death to America, Death to the Jews", and it is indeed chilling. But it is the profound sense of disappointment and betrayal expressed by a pro-US businessman running a Pepsi plant that attests to the depths of the US-created disaster here.

When we leave the bottling plant in late afternoon, the streets of US-occupied Baghdad are filled with al-Sadr supporters vowing bloody revenge for the attack on their newspaper. A spokesperson for Bremer is defending the decision on the grounds that the paper "was making people think we were out to get them".

A growing number of Iraqis are certainly under that impression, but it has far less to do with an inflammatory newspaper than with the inflammatory actions of the US occupation authority. As the June 30 "handover" approaches, Bremer has unveiled a slew of new tricks to hold on to power long after "sovereignty" has been declared.

Some recent highlights. At the end of March, building on his Order 39 of last September, Bremer passed yet another law further opening up Iraq's economy to foreign ownership, a law that Iraq's next government is prohibited from changing under the terms of the interim constitution. Bremer also announced the establishment of several independent regulators, which will drastically reduce the power of Iraqi government ministries. For instance, the Financial Times reports that "officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority said the regulator would prevent communications minister Haider al-Abadi, a thorn in the side of the coalition, from carrying out his threat to cancel licences the coalition awarded to foreign-managed consortia to operate three mobile networks and the national broadcaster." 

The CPA has also confirmed that after June 30, the $18.4bn that the US government is spending on reconstruction will be administered by its embassy in Iraq. The money will be spent over five years and will fundamentally redesign Iraq's most basic infrastructure, including its electricity, water, oil and communications sectors, as well as its courts and police. Iraq's future governments will have no say in the construction of these core sectors of Iraqi society. Retired rear admiral David Nash, who heads the Project Management Office, which administers the funds, describes the $18.4bn as "a gift from the American people to the people of Iraq".

He appears to have forgotten the part about gifts being something you actually give up. And in the same eventful week, US engineers began construction on 14 "enduring bases" in Iraq, capable of housing the 110,000 soldiers who will be posted here for at least two more years. Even though the bases are being built with no mandate from an Iraqi government, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy chief of operations in Iraq, called them "a blueprint for how we could operate in the Middle East".

The US occupation authority has also found a sneaky way to maintain control over Iraq's armed forces. Bremer has issued an executive order stating that even after the interim Iraqi government has been established, the Iraqi army will answer to US commander, Lt General Ricardo Sanchez. In order to pull this off, Washington is relying on a legalistic reading of a clause in UN security council resolution 1511, which puts US forces in charge of Iraq's security until "the completion of the political process" in Iraq. Since the "political process" in Iraq is never ending, so it seems is US military control. 

In the same flurry of activity, the CPA announced that it would put further constraints on the Iraqi military by appointing a national security adviser for Iraq. This US appointee would have powers equivalent to those held by Condoleezza Rice and will stay in office for a five-year term, long after Iraqis scheduled to have made the transition to a democratically elected government. Taken together, these latest measures paint a telling picture of what a "free Iraq" will look like: the United States will maintain its military and corporate presence through 14 enduring military bases and the largest US embassy in the world. It will hold on to authority over Iraq's armed forces, its security and economic policy and the design of its core infrastructure — but the Iraqis can deal with their decrepit hospitals all by themselves, complete with their chronic drug shortages and lack of the most basic sanitation capacity. 

On nights when there are no nearby explosions, we hang out at the hotel; jumping at the sound of car doors slamming. Sometimes we flick on the news and eavesdrop on a faraway debate about whether invading Iraq has made Americans safer. Few seem interested in the question of whether the invasion has made Iraqis feel safer, which is too bad because the questions are intimately related. As Khamis says: "It's not the war that caused the hatred. It's what they did after. What they are doing now?"

Despite these telltale admissions within the Western imperialist system's own media, the crap is still being poured out that it is the "new Iraqi democratic regime" and its "law and order" which is demanding that Moqtada al-Sadr now be arrested as "an outlaw", and that "full power and sovereignty" will be handed over to this American puppet regime in July, — when clearly, for all to see, Iraq will remain economically and militarily TOTALLY DOMINATED BY AMERICAN IMPERIALISM for the forseeable future.

What do these endless LIES represent???

They exactly illustrate how much trouble the imperialist system is in because HISTORICALLY INSOLUBLE CONTRADICTIONS have finally caught up with it.

As the EPSR Box briefly reports Marx, it is the very globalisation success of capitalism which has ultimately created a mass consciousness of mobile, informed, and competent billions who are, no longer willing to remain mere wage-slaves suffering grotesque chasms between their living standards and opportunities and those in the West where the financial ownership and control of the world's monopolies is based and maintains its power domination.

At the start of the colonial-imperialist centuries of Western world domination, the gross plunder of the Third World's wealth and population could remain openly blatant, with the natives dismissed as "happy with a few glass beads", and "lucky to have at least some order brought into their barbaric existence", etc, etc.

The same monstrous exploitation of the Third World, and the same monstrous inequality between Western and Third World living standards, is still the ENTIRE basis for the fabulous lifestyles now available in the West, — but ON NO ACCOUNT can this outrageous economic tyranny,fully dependent on continuing Western military tyranny, — ever be FREELY ADMITTED.

Increasingly, the imperialist global profiteering racket can ONLY be maintained via NON-STOP LIES and FRAUDS as to why Western military domineering should control the whole planet, and as to what "good things", what "fairness", and what "democratic opportunity" would ensue for the dominated regions of the world as a result of Western blitzkrieg invasions, and other forms of gross interference, bribery, and control via stooge dictator-regimes (such as Saddam was for nearly 25 years as a "safe" American puppet before he miscalculated Washington's signals by rewarding himself with reclaiming Iraq's Kuwait province when the USA wanted no such development).

While these living standards continue in the West, — and while "flying the flag of national interest" in military aggression abroad continues to avoid too many humiliating defeats, — the mass opposition to imperialism in the West will remain containable.

It will take the ever-deepening economic crisis of global imperialist "overproduction" (see EPSR Box) and the subsequent vicious trade-war and slump, plus the onset of imperialist military DEFEATS, — to create mass unrest problems for Western governments.

But prior to that, the posturing "liberal" sensitivities of many middle-class sections will build up a crescendo of usefully damaging hostility to Western NAZI thuggery, which is where this spate of recriminatory exposures of imperialist lies and skulduggery comes in.

The West's entire world control perspective is now up for derision, — as the excellent Bremner, Bird, and Fortune political satire series has been dramatically demonstrating.

Print media voices are just as outspoken:

Within hours of the testimony of Richard Clarke, the former counter-terrorism chief, before the 9/11 commission, where Clarke discussed how resources spent on the Iraq war undermined the war on terrorism, President Bush acknowledged that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction — the rationale for the war —  remained absent. Bush's admission took the form of a comic monologue before about 1,000 black-tied members of the Radio and TV Correspondents' Association gathered for its annual dinner. The lights dimmed and Bush presented a slide show of himself peering out of windows and looking under furniture in the Oval Office. "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere ... nope, no weapons over there ... maybe under here?"

With each gag the press corps roared. Bush was acting as the college fraternity house president he once was and the journalists as pledges eager for acceptance by the Big Man on Campus. "I'm the commander — see, I don't need to explain — I do not need to explain why I say things," Bush told Bob Woodward in Bush at War. "That's the interesting thing about being president." Through its laughter the press corps didn't grasp that the joke was on them.

The new rules of the game are that there are no rules of the game. In the preface of his book Against All Enemies, Clarke wrote that he expected an assault on his reputation from the "Bush White House leadership" that was "adept at revenge": Clarke had observed the politics of intimidation become standard operating procedure. The former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who, at the administration's behest, looked into the claim that Saddam was seeking uranium in Niger and concluded it was bogus, was subjected to a sustained attack that included outing the identity of his wife, a covert CIA operative. Paul O'Neill, a former secretary of the treasury, had revealed that an invasion of Iraq was being pushed from the earliest days of the administration, and he instantly became the target for personal vituperation. Richard Foster, the chief actuary for the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was threatened that if he told Congress the actual cost of Bush's Medicare bill while it was being considered, he would be fired. So Clarke knew the new rules.

Throughout the long day that ended with the president's WMD joke, the White House directed strikes on Clarke's integrity. It declassified an off-the-record background briefing given by Clarke in 2002, when he had been ordered to put a "positive spin"; as he put it, on Bush's pre-September 11 terrorism record in response to a critical report in Time magazine. The White House press secretary read out portions of the briefing out of context. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser whose neglect of terrorism was among Clarke's revelations, summoned reporters to her office to point to the background briefing and call his story "scurrilous"

While she was putting a stiletto into Clarke, the background briefing paper was shuffled by her press office to Fox News to broadcast as Clarke testified. Republican members of the 9/11 commission waved the paper at him, and much time was taken up by his explanation of how, as a staffer, he had been acting properly, like a lawyer representing a client, and why his briefing was not at odds with his information now.

This selective declassification signalled to professionals in government that anything they said to reporters could be held against them if they ever in the future contradicted the Bush line. The Clarke episode is symptomatic of a systematic abuse of power. Reality is raw and dangerous to report better to laugh along.

If no weapons of mass destruction have been found-in Iraq, is it also possible that there are no al-Qaida terrorists in Guantanamo?

The US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, argues that the inhumane incarceration, the secrecy and the abuse of any principles of justice are all justified by the fact that these prisoners are the hardest of hard cases. But given what we know of those who have been released, the refusal of the US to open the evidence to challenge, and the secrecy that surrounds the prison and all who languish there, the proposition is worth considering. Lt Commander Charles Smith of the US navy is one of the five serving officers assigned to the defence of Guantanamo prisoners

When the military defenders were first assigned, they seemed like another implausible piece of the rigged and unfair process. The defenders, after all, are subject to military discipline and signed up to the military worldview. Their ultimate boss is the same Donald Rumsfeld who has already announced that even should a prisoner be found not guilty, he would not necessarily release him,

The military defenders may never get their day in court with their clients, but they have already done invaluable service by denouncing Rumsfeld's system as impossibly unfair and challenging it in the US supreme court. But their concerns go deeper.

Smith, a military defence attorney for more than seven years, went to Guantanamo expecting his client to be a hardened terrorist. Instead, he met a Yemeni migrant who had got a job driving agricultural workers on Osama bin Laden's farm near Kandahar and had ended up as one of several drivers who chauffeured the man himself. Appalled by September 11 and by Bin Laden's reaction to it, he left his job as soon as he safely could, then as war was imminent, took his wife to safety in Pakistan. He had returned to Afghanistan to try to sell his car and pack up when he was detained and handed over to US forces.

It makes sense to Smith that his client should have been detained as a potentially valuable intelligence source and a useful witness. But, he says: "Would you charge Al Capone's chauffeur with Al Capone's crimes? I had to ask myself, after I'd met him, is this really the best they've got? Are there no real terrorists in Guantanamo Bay?" Out of more than 600 people, only six have been designated for trial. Nearly 100 detainees have been released with no more explanation than had been given for their detention. One Afghan detainee was handed  $100 by a US military officer as he arrived at Kabul airport, as though he were a taxi driver being tipped for carrying his bags. The Tipton Three have given accounts of dreadful ill-treatment during their incarceration. Despite months of often violent interrogation — carried out, they say, with the participation of British officials — they too were accused of nothing. Now among those who have been deemed appropriate for trial — the inner circle of the hard core of the hardest of the hard — we find men like Smith's client, men who look strangely like innocent bystanders. It is, as Smith puts it, profoundly troubling.

But Guantanamo is not only a manifest affront to justice; it is the thin end of the wedge. In addition to those held at Guantanamo there are 13,000 prisoners in Iraq, detained without trial, and an estimated 6,000 in Afghanistan of whose fate almost nothing is known. "Evidence" obtained in secret interrogations — that we now know are so abusive that they amount to torture — is beginning to appear in other cases in other countries. If Guantanamo is allowed to stand, it could undermine justice across the world without enhancing our security one iota.

If the fiasco of the phantom weapons of mass destruction has taught us anything, it is that those who hide behind intelligence may have bad motives, bad intelligence — or both. Judicial safeguards are not only civilised and ethical instruments, they are also a means of ensuring, as far as possible, that the court arrives at the truth. Without those safeguards, the wrong people get locked up — and, equally to the point — the wrong people stay free.

It is the duty of the legal defence to challenge the prosecution's facts and the interpretation of the facts. If the facts do not withstand the challenge, the accused goes free and, in a perfect world, the police redouble their efforts to catch the real perpetrator. But imagine if there is no defence — or if the defence is deliberately crippled. Translate that to terrorism and it is clear that Guantanamo is a huge obstacle to anyone who is serious about defeating terrorism. It may not be pretty, the US administration argues, but this is war: the interrogation may lack the usual safeguards, but it has provided a rich harvest of invaluable information. Perhaps. But that is not the view of several experienced FBI officers who have taken part in interrogations and who, concluding swiftly that Guantanamo was a waste of time, left to pursue the fight against terrorists in the real world. After two years of appalling conditions, uncertainty and manifest injustice, any prisoner — especially an innocent one — will despair. In those conditions, he may talk, but, as any psychiatrist will testify, the information is unreliable. What an interrogator may perceive as a breakthrough may simply be a prisoner in despair of the truth, offering false confession, false accusation, invented testimony. "Why should an American care about a Yemeni?" asked Charles Smith. "Because the only way you can know you have the right man is with a fair, independent hearing. If my client seeks his rights, he may be denied a hearing at all: the president can detain him indefinitely." 

And why is he so determined to fight Guantanamo? "I agree with the president," he said. "Al-Qaida can't alter America. Only we can alter America. I have met the enemy, and he is us."

The Lockerbie bombing was carried out not by Libyans at all but by terrorists based in Syria and hired by Iran to avenge the shooting down in the summer of 1988 of an Iranian civil airliner by a US warship. This was the line followed by both British and US police and intelligence investigators after Lockerbie. Through favoured newspapers like the Sunday Times, the investigators named the suspects — some of whom had been found with homemade bombs similar to the one used at Lockerbie.

This line of inquiry persisted until April 1989, when a phone call from President Bush senior to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned her not to proceed with it. A year later, British and US armed forces ' prepared for an attack on Saddam Hussein's occupying forces in Kuwait. Their coalition desperately needed troops from an Arab country. These were supplied by Syria, which promptly dropped out of the frame of Lockerbie suspects. Libya, not Syria or Iran, mysteriously became the suspect country, and in 1991 the US drew up an indictment against two Libyan suspects. The indictment was based on the "evidence" of a Libyan "defector"; handsomely paid by the CIA. His story was such a fantastic farrago of lies and fantasies that it was thrown out by the Scottish judges.

In Britain, meanwhile, Thatcher, John Major and Blair obstinately turned down the bereaved families' requests for a full public inquiry into the worst mass murder in British history.

Basset al-Megrahi, a Libyan official, apparently working in intelligence, was convicted in January 2001 of bombing the airliner. How he accomplished this feat is still a mystery. The details of the crime did not emerge at the trial, which was held by Scottish judges sitting without a jury in Holland. It lasted 18 months and cost an estimated £50m. Megrahi's co-accused was acquitted, so the prosecution's suggestion that the two men conspired to bomb the plane cannot be right. Indeed, the crucial evidence that the bomb was put on a feeder flight at Malta and was transferred twice, at Frankfurt and at Heathrow, was so thin it was derisory. No one knows whether anyone else took part in this sophisticated crime of terror. More people died at Lockerbie than in Madrid, and you would have thought that the government, if only as proof of its horror at terrorism, would be keen to question its new friends in Tripoli about the bombing. Not so, apparently.

It follows from this explanation that Megrahi is innocent of the Lockerbie bombing and his conviction is the last in the long line of British judges' miscarriages of criminal justice. This explanation is also a terrible indictment of the cynicism, hypocrisy and deceit of the British and US governments and their intelligence services.

NEW evidence has emerged in the United States which might help explain how British newspapers got it so wrong propagating the Saddam doomsday scenario in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The US government paid millions of dollars to the Iraqi National Congress (INC) for work that apparently included placing stories about non-existent weapons of mass destruction in the Sunday Times, Times, Observer Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard, Express, Independent, Birmingham Post and Western Mail.

According to documents obtained by the American newspaper firm Knight Bidder, the INC still receives $4m a year for its "information collection programme" — the scheme which Ahmed Chalabi's organisation used to pass inaccurate stories, gleaned from exiled Iraqis about Saddam's WMD to the US department of defence. But the INC also claims responsibility for getting similar stories into newspapers.

Indeed, to justify its continued funding, in June 2002 it wrote to the US senate appropriations committee boasting of its success. It referred to 108 pieces in British and American newspapers under the heading "summary of ICP product cited in major English language news outlets worldwide (October 2001-May 2002)".

A major source for British hacks was the Iraqi civil engineer Adrian Al-Haideri, who claimed to have built underground bio-warfare labs and worked on an Iraqi nuclear programme. The INC list points to an article by Marie Colvin in the Sunday Times (17 March 2002 headlined "Saddam's arsenal revealed" and publicising Al-Haideri's claims. Colvin said a second defector had revealed the existence of seven mobile germ labs "disguised as milk trucks" and quoted an unnamed official as saying the information was "high grade". Not that high grade, it turns out.

The INC also claims credit for two articles by Damian Whitworth in the Times in December 2001 which uncritically reported AI-Haideri's claims "about the acceleration of President Saddam Hussein's work on chemical. biological and nuclear weapons".

In December 2000' Andrew Gumbel of the Independent and Toby Moore in the Express also reported Al-Haideri's claims without scepticism. The INC cites Ben Fenton in the Telegraph on the same subject, under the banner "Defector tells of Saddam's nuclear arms". At least the Telegraph noted that "Mr al-Haideri's claims have not been confirmed by intelligence sources in Washington".

Christopher Hitchens is another British hack on the INC list. In his March 2000 comment piece in the Evening Standard he wrote that Saddam was "within a measurable distance of acquiring doomsday materials". He went on to praise the "heroic" Chalabi as "the symbolic and actual head of the Iraqi opposition" and his "information concerning the whereabouts of the Ba'ath party's weapons of mass destruction". The INC also claims credit for Hitchens' piece in that month's Guardian, which said Saddam "certainty has nerve gas and chemical weapons".

Hitchens cited the discredited exile Khidir Hamza to show that Iraq would soon have nuclear weapons, and used an INC source to show how Saddam was linked to the September I 1 attacks.

This latter claim, the INC says, also appeared in a March 2002 piece by Toby Hamden in the Daily Telegraph which said Saddam "armed Bin Laden and funded AI Qaeda allies". Relying on INC information, Hamden reported that "Iraq sent conventional and perhaps biological or chemical weapons to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan".

And so on. While US journals have taken publication of the INC list seriously and re-examined their INC-linked material, in Britain the response so far has been... silence.

And yet all of this bourgeois indignation erupts despite the fact that such semi-"critical" mentalities still all wish to "condemn terrorism", — thus still playing into the hands of the insane US imperialist fraud of a so-called "war on terrorism" which can never be anything other than just a cover for the latest blitzkrieg-targeting that American monopoly-capitalist world controllers wish to inflict on any and every source of "trouble to US interests",the clear background to the running saga of how Iraq recolonisation was the main US aim even BEFORE Sept 11 had taken place, — with Blair's agreement guaranteed in advance, leaving only the pretend "Commons debate" and the "UN deliberations" to be theatrically negotiated (and ignored) to give bogus "democratic legitimacy" to what the world's imperialist rulers had already decided to do anyway.

How much more far-reaching will this criticism in the West become as the penny drops that a) a "war on terrorism" is impossible nonsense; b) it has never even been the real aim of the USA's blitzkrieg mobilisation campaign; and c) it has only ever been a cover for quite vicious and sinister US world-control aims.

It will begin to be realised that, as the EPSR has always explained, isolated acts of terrorist anarchy by disorganised fanatical volunteers can never amount to a "serious threat" to the Western way of life (while always remaining an ever-present and incurable scary danger to isolated individuals for as long as the Third World holds such massive legitimate grievances against the West, with little but despairing self-sacrifice as any comfort.)

Totally different would be a serious international guerrilla war mounted by a sizeable state power, which is exactly the fraudulent cover which Washington and UK propaganda tried to manufacture by abusing the Iraq problem as "the source of international state-terrorism".

It was nonsense, — as are 95% of the endless scare stories (deliberate) about "deadly chemical plots", etc.

All anti-imperialism needs to get its head around the philosophical reality of the present world crisis.

The "fundamentalist extremism " of the Third World is in fact typical of new-found self-assertiveness of emerging class forces and national forces in every period of major world upheaval.

But this adopted puritanism is never destined to prevail longterm. It is always a temporary vehicle of identification.

Puritanism in Britain was a powerful signal of the eventual Cromwellian Revolution that brought down the corrupt decadence of feudalism and destroyed the absolutist power of the monarchy, — but the serious historical movement which emerged into power was capitalism. Puritanism dwindled to a harmless cult.

The Third World masses can only be on their way to one workable worthwhile goal ozone, - which is worldwide economic cooperation, or planned socialism.

In this scientific age, fundamentalist extremism will dwindle to nothing even more rapidly than puritanism did.

The reactionary primitiveness of some aspects of fundamentalism and extremism in the Third World are obviously good for an imperialist propaganda laugh about how we will all end up being forced to pray to Mecca five times a day, and how "neo-NAZI military hordes" wall be conquering the planet unless Iran is blitzkrieged, following Iraq, etc, etc, and unless HAMAS leaders are put to the sword like Sheikh Yassin, etc, etc, etc.

It is all TOTAL codswallop.

The most advanced "threat" to the West from Iraq; was largely secular. The most successful national liberation movements throughout the Arab nations post-1945 were largely secular (Nasser in Egypt, Kassem in Iraq, Mossadeq in Iran, the FIN in Algeria, the PLO in Palestine, etc, etc. etc.).

It was the temporary Revisionist collapse of the communist movement's serious revolutionary anti-imperialism which has momentarily given Islamic fundamentalism. the brief chance to play a rabble-rousing "leadership" role (while the total fraud of Stalin's "peaceful coexistence" continues to sink-in worldwide, now having totally undermined the Soviet workers state and having left the Third World virtually defenceless against any imperialist military tyranny that American monopoly-capitalist domineering chooses to inflict).

HAMAS	and Islamic Jihad have played important armed resistance roles in challenging Zionism's genocidal colonising tyranny to steal the country of Palestine away from its rightful owners in the monstrous post-1945 Western imperialist diktats — ONLY because Arafat's "coexistence" capitulatory nonsense has taken as long as Stalin's Revisionism to die.

But it is secular Palestinian revolution which will finally drive the Jewish imperialists back to the west from where they came.

And in Iran now, the bogus "anti-imperialism" of the Ayatollahocracy will slowly but surely give way to the communist anti-imperialist revolutionism which has also only been temporarily disoriented by, once again, the disastrous aftermath of Stalin's "peaceful road" Revisionist nonsense, (plus the crafty initial insertion by the West of the Ayatollah Islamic Fundamentalism in 1979 when proletarian mass revolt in South Tehran is what had really brought down the West's favourite imperialist stooge, the Shah.)

For the REAL fundamentalist NAZI lunacy, look to the societies of imperialist culture which really are trying to recreate the colonial-supremacist past, or just grab a belated share of the modern imperialist spoils (as Germany tried to do under Hitler), or simply just postpone an uncertain future by any means possible.

That the blitzkrieg coalition is mainly the USA, Britain, Spain, Japan, Italy, Poland, etc, tells its own pathetic wishful-thinking tale. Any call for international volunteers would see White South Africans, White Rhodesians, and Orange-fascist Ulster-colonists flocking to the imperialist standard.

But philosophically, this kick-arse warmongering coalition is even more interestingly despairing.

The fundamentalist extremist lunacy sweeping the USA does not even have the faint excuse of Hitler's NAZI barminess which at least pretended to look forward to a new Golden Age for the world under German efficiency following the planet's grim Depression years of the 1930s under Anglo-Saxon/French domination.

In America, the battle-cry inspiring the Onward Christian Soldiers to enthusiastically support the USA's blitzkrieg warmongering on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine (with dozens more to follow) is the one screaming that "the end of the world is nigh" anyway.

Piecing together some crap Trot-Guardian reports which almost miss the point altogether, the following telltale admissions emerge:

The first 11 Left Behind books have sold more than 40m copies, making the authors, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, bigger sellers than John Grisham.

Coming in the wake of the success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, which details Jesus's last 12 hours before crucifixion, the Left Behind series is the latest example of the huge impact religious themes are having on popular culture in the US, as well as the vast amounts of money that can be made from them.

Scan the Christian Supply store in Spartanburg and you will see everything from The Bible's Way to Weight Loss to Bible Bingo, along with T-shirts, keyrings, CDs and toys bearing scripture and car registration plates asking: "Got Jesus?"

"Americans don't just have to rely on the Bible anymore," says Sarah Golightly, one of the few African-Americans who came to the launch. "God is showing himself in many ways through movies, books and audio."

As prophesied in the book of Revelation, she explains, the end of the world is nigh.

"A lot of what is written down is literal and a lot of it is happening today. I definitely believe that," she says. "The seasons are meshing together. One day in January it was 75F and the next day it snowed. The world has gone down so quickly."

Ms Golightly, who has read only the first three of the Left Behind series, found Gibson's film hard going but rewarding: "It was two hours of rough beating. But it was good."

The Left Behind series is not all easy reading either, with long passages both vivid and violent. It starts with what evangelists call the rapture — the moment when, they believe, those who have been born again will disappear and ascend to heaven. The first book opens with a 747 heading to Heathrow from Chicago. The flight attendant finds half the seats empty as the faithful are whisked away into the firmament, leaving behind only their clothes, fillings and wedding rings. Several thousand feet below husbands and wives are waking up next to piles of pyjamas, and cars, suddenly deprived of drivers, crash as the righteous rise.

The next 10 books — with titles including Assassins, Armageddon and Desecration — detail the seven-year period of upheaval in which those left behind have their final chance to find Jesus. The authors committed themselves to portraying at least one "believable conversion" in each book. As the series progresses, the antichrist becomes the head of the UN and triggers the second coming after he signs a peace treaty with Israel, while 144,000 Jews convert to Christianity.

Robin Bales has seen the signs — war, terrorism, microchips in animals and corporate logos tattooed on the foreheads of the young.

Impending doom notwithstanding, Ms Bales is delighted. She got to the South Carolina Christian Supply store early on Tuesday to buy her copy of Glorious Appearing, the 12th book in the bestselling Left Behind series, based on a fictionalised account of the apocalypse, on the day it came out.

Orders for the Glorious Appearing (The End of Days) were so strong that the publishers started a second printing two weeks before the first copies had reached the shelves. According to the publishers, a survey last year showed that one in eight US adults has read some of at least one book from the series.

So Ms Bales, who has read all 11, booked her place in line early, thus avoiding the queue of 800 people snaking around the shop and out into the rain, waiting to meet the authors on Tuesday night. And now she is clutching a signed copy of one of the most startling literary sensations of our time. "I'm going to read the 11th one again before I start this," she says.

Glorious Appearing should be the final episode, in which Jesus returns — although the publishers plan a postscript (with the final judgement of Satan after Jesus' 1,000year reign on earth) and a prequel (which will introduce the characters sent to the rapture before the first book began).

It was all LaHaye's idea. The 77-year-old creationist and religious-right stalwart had been preaching and writing self-help books for decades when he got the idea for a fictional series about the end of time.

When he realised he couldn't write it himself he drafted Jenkins, 54, a former journalist and prolific religious novelist.

LaHaye provides the scripture; Jenkins moulds it into drama.

"Dr LaHaye believes we should treat the Bible literally where we can," Jenkins says. "For people who disagree with us, we say, 'Write your own books.' We're just glad we can live in a country where we can compete in a marketplace of ideas."

And with that they start their 12-city six-day tour through the south — home to almost half of their readers — from Spartanburg through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. The book's core reader is a white, southern, female homemaker in her mid-40s, who is a college-educated, born-again Christian.

When LaHaye first pitched the idea, publishers did not think it had much of a future outside of the Christian market. It was a hard sell, according to Ron Beers, the senior vice-president and publisher of Tyndale fiction, which published the series. The production team asked why anybody would "want to buy a book when they know what the ending's going to be?"

But with each edition word of mouth grew. More than 20,000 volunteers formed a Left Behind "street team", to introduce the books to family, friends and neighbours. When the fifth book, Apollyon, was released in 1999 it hit No 2 on the New York Times fiction hardcover list and the novels have remained in the mainstream ever since.

If the series' success illustrates the high degree of religious feeling in the US, it also offers a glimpse of how evangelism and fundamentalism are shaping the national mood after 9/11.

A Time/CNN poll 18 months ago found that 59% of Americans believe the events in the book of Revelation are going to come true, while nearly 25% think the Bible predicted the September 11 attacks. Little wonder then that sales jumped 60% after 9/11 and Desecration — the 9th book, released in October 2001 — was the bestselling novel of the year. "The tragedy of 9/11 made everything so much more real and believable," Jenkins says.

Referring to Mel Gibson's film, LaHaye said: "I think the world is waking up to the fact that there are a great many people who support wholesome movies and maybe we'll have a whole new field of faith-based movies.

"People complain that The Passion is violent and wonder if children should see it ... But they're used to violence. Good grief, television and the internet abound with it. But that's senseless violence. This is purposeful violence. Children end up, asking why Jesus was committed to go through that."

Some Catholics and conservative Protestants have charged that the Left Behind novels are anti-Catholic because they depict a future pope establishing a false religion linked to the antichrist.

This is a bourgeois society, — history's most powerful empire,— which is going stark, staring, raving mad.

This is the background which is creating the NAZISM of American warmongering and world-police tyranny which is WORSE than what desperate German imperialism under Hitler even managed.

One predictive proof which the EPSR has always stuck to is the regular explanation that imperialist reaction will nearly always move on to worse and worse tyranny just when louder criticism creates expectation of some pulling-in of horns.

It seldom happens, precisely because of the INSOLUBLE contradictions in which reaction is inevitably embroiled.

The Zionist tyranny is the classic, where the WHOLE of the tiny land of Palestine (including the 80% carved off at bayonet-point by imperialism to create the colonial concentration-camp called "Israel" for permanently cowing or imprisoning the entire Palestinian nation) can alone be seriously considered as the proper homeland for the Palestinian nation, but which must in fact become the Palestinians genocidal graveyard if "Israel" is to survive as such.

So every time here, — just when the world might be concluding that ruthless Zionist tyranny DARE NOT go any further for fear of totally alienating world opinion, — the Zionist colonial-fascist mentality, aware of this insoluble contradiction, invariably does just that.

Thus, just when the world guesses that Zionist state-terror has gone just about as far as it dare go in the rocket-strike butchery of Palestinian opponents from gunship helicopters (supplied and paid-for by the West for "defence" purposes) the NAZI mass-murderer Sharon, author of the Sabra and Shatila massacres and much much more, orders the butchery in his wheelchair (of known and well-publicised whereabouts) of the religious leader Yassin.

Enough now don't believe it. Far, far worse brutality is on its way.

But, now, who is emulating this classical reactionary trick of feeling forced to behave more and more nastily, brutally, hypocritically, and stupidly????

The USA's Bremer regime in Iraq.

Just when the provocative viciousness of the censorship clampdown on the al-Sadr Shi'ites was being universally derided as obviously ASKING FOR the explosion of insurrectionary trouble which it got, what does the beleaguered American occupation do, lumbered with insoluble colonial contradictions, but make things even more stupid, — and worse, — by demanding al-Sadr's arrest and "murder trial" to get him judicially killed!!

The logic???

Recolonisation is proving impossible, but defeat at such a delicate time of worldwide imperialist crisis (when only ruthless warmongering can now save the USA's ludicrously over-exalted privileged position on Earth) is even more unthinkable.

Therefore????

The US occupation is going to have to kill even more Iraqis, even more brutally, to FORCE Iraq to accept its recolonisation. QED.

The best way to test the worth of a political philosophy is to find out how good it is at saying what is going to happen next.

The EPSR has comfortable survived 25 years of such testing, despite the huge shock of the bitter lessons it somewhat belatedly learned (during the Gorbachev final disaster from 1985 onwards) that even the incredible achievements of the Soviet workers state since 1917 could nevertheless be TOTALLY RUINED by Revisionist stupidity, — against the EPSR's original expectations.

But that bitter lesson has immeasurably deepened the EPSR's grasp of the whole extended, uneven, and complicated role that workers statehood-experience is destined nevertheless to play in finally ending this stupid, out-of-date, imperialist warmongering tyranny that the world is currently suffering.

The perspective remains for imperialist global economic "overproduction" crisis and trade-war slump to be the next decisive turning point in world history, taking Western warmongering setbacks to the point of catastrophic DEFEATS and devastation in inter-imperialist conflicts, leading to a whole new REVOLUTIONARY era on the planet.

The corrupt and crooked privatisation interlude,, based on yet more and more inflationary credit-creation by warmongering imperialist governments (debt-creation) will end in tears. Build Leninism. ESPR

E P S R

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.)

*******

" 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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