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 1233 May 18th 2004
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Whether forced out or humiliated out of any particular bloody mess, the American Empire will not give up its domineering international rule, and so the catastrophic crisis of the imperialist system will just go on taking the world towards worse and worse disaster. Never-ending setbacks in Iraq are driving pro-Western ideologists to the end of their tether, worried that a World War III orientation for the US ruling class blitzkriegers might only be taking the "free world" fantasy ride towards total DEFEAT. Insoluble historical contradictions almost acknowledged, and warmongering American arrogance slated, along with its 'left' UK stooges. Western monopoly capitalism's neocolonial domination is no longer acceptable, and brutal NAZI "shock & awe" tyranny is only swelling anti-imperialist resistance to revolutionary proportions. Deepening economic chaos will drive imperialism to its doom. Inevitable national liberation for the WHOLE of Palestine will play a key role. Zionist apologising for the West approaches insanity. Non-stop brutal massacre of Gaza prison-reservation for 1.2m ethnically cleansed Palestinians for daring to fight back for their stolen country only deepens imperialism's grave.

So great is the chaos now being caused by the imperialist-system crisis and its associated catastrophic blitzkrieging in the Middle East that the West's astonishment and gloom at how badly its aggressive arrogance is faring is turning towards intriguing philosophical probing.

The struggle for Marxist understanding should be in its element.

The fake-'left' shallowness that this is "a war about oil" (Lalkar and the SLP, and most other of the 57 varieties of opportunist philistinism) is, not surprisingly, now leaving these bastions of Scargillism at each others throats with a vengeance (Brar threatened with expulsion, etc) but superficially seemingly clueless as to why, — (daft excuses about "constitutional differences", etc).

No less than five alternative bourgeois analyses have appeared in the past week either trying to explain why the obvious trauma for the West over this debacle has gone so deep; or nervously calculating the catastrophic consequences which could ensue because of this huge setback to traditional and fundamental Western imperialist assumptions.

In a word, the "free world" epoch is utterly gobsmacked, and is being shaken to its roots.

The cockiest of rightwing gurus at Murdoch's Times empire, Kaletsky, leads the parade of deep-searching headscratching.

Nowhere in all five bourgeois approaches, of course, is a systemic crisis of imperialism identified, as Marxist science obviously requires.

But what is interesting is how close these analyses come to admitting that this is a big historic disaster for the American Empire era, yet still misidentifying the exact scientific cause.

Kaletsky picks out a confidence crisis of US power but crudely puts the blame on badly-calculating individuals for the terrifying mess that the gung-ho aggression has now resulted in:

How stupid we all look today. The security arguments for regime change in Iraq were quickly exposed as bogus. The legal grounds were destroyed before the war even started. What about the humanitarian reasoning? I wrote on this page last year that the justification for the Iraq conflict would not lie in the discovery of a few rusting drums of chemical poisons or bacterial cultures but in the improving lives of millions of people who had been oppressed by Saddam — and maybe in the example this would set for other brutal regimes around the world. How naive that now sounds. For who can seriously doubt now that America will cut and run from Iraq, abandoning the country to bloody chaos as it has in Afghanistan, long before the job of creating a stable democracy is anywhere near done?

But have all those who backed the war turned out to be wrong? Not quite. In one unexpected sense, the neo-conservative ideologues who pushed hardest for the war have been proved absolutely right — and therein lies the only remaining hope and the greatest danger of the Iraq disaster.

The Washington neocons, led by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, were dreaming of a war against Iraq long before the hanging chads in Florida were even counted, when most people would have imagined that al-Qaeda was the name of a Lebanese restaurant. The neocons' desire for war had a psychological wellspring deeper than geopolitical calculations about oil or their love for Israel. They believed that invading Iraq would open a new chapter in America's military history. By overthrowing Saddam Hussein, the US would prove that it had both the means and the determination to enforce its will whenever and wherever required. This would expunge once and for all the debilitating memories of defeat in Vietnam.

 Well, the neocons have been proved right, though not in the way they expected. Vietnam will indeed be forgotten. Thanks to Rumsfeld, Cheney and their henchmen in the Pentagon's civilian leadership, Iraq will indeed now replace Vietnam as the byword for America's military humiliation, its strategic incompetence, its wayward moral compass and its lack of political resolution. 

Iraq may have shown off US military supremacy, but it has also proved that military supremacy can be worse than useless in achieving US objectives — not only such nebulous ideals as the "triumph of democracy" and the "defence of freedom", but also the hard-nosed, cynical calculations favoured by conservative thinkers: uprooting terrorism;, gaining control of the world oil market, and strengthening Israel.

	The war which the neocons promoted to restore America's military self-confidence and put an end to the feeble-minded consensus-seeking has so far had the opposite effect It has proved that the US military is even more of a "paper tiger" today than it was in Vietnam.

	America can now be thwarted in a matter of months, not the decade which it took the Viet Cong — and by a ragtag band of poorly-armed 	medieval zealots, whose military prowess cannot begin to compare with that of the Vietnamese.

Kaletsky quickly goes on to plead that an even greater disaster will take place if the USA cannot extricate itself from this chaos soonest, and rapidly re-establish its "rightful" role as the only possible global military policemen, able to resume as "effective guarantor of a peaceful, prosperous, and broadly democratic world order"!!!

Despite Kaletsky's small dose of vindictive personal candour, the grotesque grand imperialist illusions still continue, apparently unruffled. 

In the USA, William Pfaff delivers a far more confident liberal broadside against a much greater chunk of American imperialist self-aggrandisement, far more deeply exposing the longer-term and broader-picture aspects of the crisis for monopoly-capitalist supreme power, while still ignoring Marxism's far clearer and more materialist basics explanation for the ideological and political turmoil that the American Empire era has now been plunged into:

THE UNITED STATES and Britain have an Iraq crisis on their hands, but the US has something worse, a crisis of thought and assumption in the mainstream intellectual community over foreign policy.

The second crisis involves much more than the derailment of US policy in Iraq. It concerns what has been done and said to redefine America's place in global society and, by implication, in contemporary history, since 11 September after which, as Americans said, nothing could ever be the same.

A 'new America' was said to have emerged, but it would be better to say an old one found new empowerment. It was recently described by former US ambassador to France Felix Rohatyn as 'more radical and more committed than ever to the need for unchallenged military dominance'.

This is undoubtedly true, but this 'new' America amazingly resembles the isolationist and xenophobic America between 1920 and 1941. What is new is that it has become the most heavily-armed nation on Earth and believes it is, and should remain, number one.

Like pre-1941 America, it includes a strong streak of populist anti-European sentiment. What's new is that many political intellectuals and political leaders are anti-European too, annoyed by Europe's pretension to offer a valid alternative to what America considers its manifest destiny, and preoccupied by the threat that the EU might become a serious international rival.

The persistent note [is of] of denigration and condescension in talk about Europe (most recently, as a waning 'Venus' to an American 'Mars')

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans produced several theories about their new position as sole superpower. The most popular one said that history had come to an end in the American political and economic system, all other possibilities exhausted or discredited. The US was history's culmination, the system the rest of the world had to adopt. The rest was detail.

The 'realistic' version of this progressive dialectic, the one favoured by Republicans, said that the US should use power as well as persuasion to hustle the others along for their own good. This was held essential in the case of those who found the idea of an Americanised destiny less alluring than it seems to Americans. The Iraqis currently benefit from such attention.

In 2001, the main reason the New York and Washington attacks produced so traumatic an effect in the US was that they defied the notion of America as the morally righteous fulfilment of history. Americans were abruptly made to see themselves as victims of what they interpreted as the hate and envy of people who obstinately refused to acknowledge (as George Bush angrily complained) 'how good we are'.

Americans were under attack by enemies who not only were multiple and elusive, malevolent and inventive, but who asserted their own outrageous claim to moral superiority over Americans, as well as a divine mandate of their own. The war on terror, with its adjunct war in Iraq, was meant to reconfirm this pre-eminence. Both, of course, have done the opposite. They have demonstrated the inability of badly over-extended military power even to impose stability on the two countries in the developing world which the US has invaded.

The prospect of stabilising and reforming what Washington now calls the 'Greater Middle East' seems slight, to put it politely. Terror has multiplied, rather than been disarmed. Now an American moral disaster has been revealed, composed of torture, secret prisons and international illegality.

The mainstream commentators and foreign policy experts never imagined defeat in Iraq. The latest American election-year books on foreign policy are entirely concerned with managing the challenges of success and hegemony.

Nearly all express a calm confidence that America has entered a new stage in its relations with the rest of the world, produced by the singularity of American power and the superiority of its conceptions of how the world  should be ordered (not to speak of the mandate confided to America, and particularly to the present administration, by the English speaking deity).

A year ago, when these books were drafted, few in the policy community and the corps of commentators, and no one in the Bush government, expressed any doubt that American military power was invincible; that it rested on moral foundations that are beyond serious reproach; that pacification, control and reform of Iraq and the Greater Middle East by the US and its allies was both feasible and desirable; and that 'the war on terror' was finite, intellectually and morally coherent —  and winnable.

Most warned about where the world would find itself if America failed to lead all the rest. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, argued that the US has a right to 'more security than other countries', since without America's worldwide military deployment, there would be chaos in the Middle East, war in Asia, 'pell-mell' rearmament in Europe, a rush by Europeans to make 'special arrangements' with Russia, and rekindled 'fears of German power and historically rooted national animosities'.

Now the assumed decadence of Venus Europe, and its inevitable submission to the American Mars, has lost plausibility.

The war on terror was founded on an edifice of illusions that virtually no one in the US policy community questioned. That has collapsed. Since they really were illusions about the US itself, the collapse has internal implications. The country suffered a disruptive and doubt-filled domestic aftermath of the defeat in Vietnam for more than a decade. The war in Iraq was supposed to give the US the triumph it was denied in Vietnam. Instead, it has doubled the defeat. The consequences of this, abroad as well as at home, are unforeseeable.

Unlike Kaletsky, Pfaff offers no shallow "reform" solutions (!), & is quite clearly implying that the crisis's causes are not just ongoing but deepening, if anything, though without even remotely suspecting their systemic economic base, apparently.

Another American, Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to the previous warmonger-president Clinton (who began World War III with the blitzkrieg destruction of Serbia), expands interestingly on the possibly dire consequences of all this incredible chaos that Pfaff worries about. 

For obvious reasons, Blumenthal pours even more shallow partisan bile on Rumsfeld and Cheney, and inevitably dwells contentedly on what a TOTAL humiliation for the Bush regime this military and political disaster is now becoming. 

His suggestion that an anti-war US-army coup d'etat might be necessary to extricate the USA from this debacle, is sinisterly indefinite about exactly how big a historical disaster that might represent:

For decades, Rumsfeld has had a reputation as a great white shark of the bureaucratic seas: sleek, fastmoving and voracious. As counsellor to Richard Nixon during the impeachment crisis, his deputy was the young hick Cheney, and together they helped to right the ship of state under Gerald Ford.

Cheney became the most hardline of congressmen, and Rumsfeld informed acquaintances that he was always more conservative than they imagined. One lesson they seem to have learned from the Nixon debacle was ruthlessness. His collapse confirmed in them a belief in the imperial presidency based on executive secrecy. One gets the impression that, unlike Nixon, they would have burned the White House tapes.

Under Bush, the team of Cheney and Rumsfeld spread across the top rungs of government, drawing staff from the neo-conservative cabal and infusing their rightwing temperaments with ideological imperatives. The unvarnished will to power took on a veneer of ideas and idealism. Iraq was not a case of vengeance or power, but the cause of 'democracy' and 'human rights'.

In his Senate testimony last week, Rumsfeld explained that the government asking the press not to report Abu Ghraib "is not against our principles. It is not suppression of the news." War is peace.

In an extraordinary editorial, the Army Times, which had not previously ventured into such controversy, declared that "the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons... This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential - even if that means relieving leaders from duty in a time of war."

William Odom, a retired general and former member of the National Security Council who is now at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, reflects a wide swath of opinion in the upper ranks of the military. "It was never in our interest to go into Iraq," he told me.

["]Wisdom in military affairs dictates withdrawal in this situation. We can't afford to fail, that's mindless. The issue is how we stop failing more. I am arguing a strategic decision."

One high-level military strategist told me that Rumsfeld is "detested"; and that "if there's a sentiment in the army it is: Support Our Troops, Impeach Rumsfeld". The Council on Foreign Relations has been showing old movies with renewed relevance to its members. The Battle of Algiers, depicting the nature and costs of a struggle with terrorism, is the latest feature. 

The seething in the military against Bush and Rumsfeld might prompt a showing of Seven Days in May, about a coup staged by a rightwing general against a weak liberal president, an artefact of the conservative hatred directed at President Kennedy in the early 60s. In 1992, General Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs, awarded the prize for his strategy essay competition at the National Defence University to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Dunlap for The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012. His cautionary tale imagined an incapable civilian government creating a vacuum that drew a competent military into a coup disastrous for democracy.

Dunlap wrote: "The catastrophe that occurred on our watch took place because we failed to speak out against policies we knew were wrong. It's too late for me to do any more. But it's not for you."

The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012 is today circulating among top US military strategists.

No such-idealistic confusion clouds Simon Jenkins' clearer view in the Times that in this monstrous blitzkrieging tyranny desecrating Iraq, it is the wretched British Labour campguards for the Washington NAZI warmongering who deserve the greatest contempt, — precisely for bringing such incurable shame on the mythological "reformist democratic alternative's" to Bush's imperialist bullying that all "liberals" like Jenkins and Blumenthal love to pretend to believe in.

This is a much less profound piece on the extreme philosophical disorientation that the entire "free world" stance has been plunged into by this shocking war and historical comeuppance, but its posh relish on the disgustingness of Labour fake—'lefts' has an agreeable flavour:

Never in modern history has Britain been so humiliatingly in thrall to an overseas power as London now is to Washington. Ministers live in daily terror of news from the front. They squirm, prevaricate, lie and pray for release. The Cabinet could as well be hooded and piled in a naked heap while a jeering GI looks on.

Mr Blair's colleagues seem decent enough. They pop into parties, nurse a glass of chardonnay, chat about Arsenal and ask after other people's children. They are shocked by a Camden burglary or an Upper Street mugging.

Yet Amnesty and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) indicate that, since last year, ministers have been collectively responsible for outrages reminiscent of the days of the Indian Mutiny. These include the bombing and shelling of civilian targets, revenge attacks on towns, beatings and the "routine" use of torture, and holding some 15,000 mostly innocent civilians in what amount to concentration camps. Are these the same right-thinking, liberal people we see nightly on our TV screens?

As I watched Mr Hoon and the whey-faced Labour front bench on Monday, a ghostly image flashed across my mind. It was black-and-white newsreels of men in dark suits intoning: "I was only obeying orders". That is the lethal seduction of foreign policy. Distance offers a moral firewall. Coalition supplies a comfort blanket. As for the British excuse, much peddled to visitors in Basra, that "it's the Americans who are cocking things up in the north", that will no longer wash.

As the ICRC rightly insists, Iraq is a joint command under a joint authority. Mr Blair boasts his closeness to President Bush as the price of supporting every twist and turn of coalition policy. Intelligence is shared. When the Americans abjured the Geneva Convention after 9/11, they told London. Indeed they broadcast the fact from Guantanamo Bay. Mr Blair and his Cabinet knew and consented. February's Red Cross report listed the consequences. It is simply unbelievable that British ministers did not know what was widely rumoured and, we now learn, authoritatively reported at the time.

Mr Blair welcomed the US Marines' assault on Fallujah. This act of retaliation for the deaths of four American contractors cost unknown hundreds of civilian lives. It was a massacre that secured no strategic gain. What can have induced Mr Blair to associate his Government with this outrage is a mystery.

Iraq has been the most inept Western intervention of modern times. Nothing I can recall in Vietnam, in Central America, in Lebanon, in  Somalia, in Bosnia approaches the shambles established by the Pentagon, with British assistance, in Baghdad.

The nature of the mission has changed each month, a confusion reflected in coalition indecision and indiscipline.

As the bevy of American "postwar histories" are already showing, Iraq was essentially the product of ideological battles within the Bush Administration. Mr Blair claims to have been a restraining hand, at least stopping America going berserk or isolationist if left unloved. This is bunkum. The truth is that Mr Blair was intoxicated with closeness to Washington power. He had "presidency" on intravenous drip.

David Blunkett ludicrously boasted that stories of torture showed British democratic "transparency". He ignored the fact that the Red Cross and Amnesty evidence was suppressed by the Government in London, under some vague excuse. It was revealed in America, by CBS, The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal, and ruthlessly exposed by Congress. British MPs meanwhile were ridiculing the Daily Mirror for its cackhanded hoax and praising "our boys" to the skies.

Nothing has demonstrated Mr Blair's emasculation of British political institutions so completely as Iraq. The Tories were already out of commission. They have supported every palaeo-imperial dispatch of British troops for half a century. What is astonishing is the silence of the Labour lambs.

The collapse of collective government under Mr Blair has enabled presumably worried ministers such as Gordon Brown, Patricia Hewitt, Paul Boateng, Alistair Darling, Tessa Jowell and others to sit on their consciences over Iraq. They can say, "it is not my department". Yet they cannot dodge collective responsibility. They cannot pick the pie of moral cherries and spit out the ones that taste American.

And what of backbench Labour? Clive Soley, former chairman of the parliamentary party, has become a Pentagon spokesman. Donald Anderson, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, is being taught lessons in parliamentary accountability by conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. He is hopeless. The Commons is in collective subservience to America.

MPs are like Chesterton's dockers, whose "heart is in their boots./They go to hell like lambs, they do, because the hooter hoots." 

Old Labour spoke its mind. New Labour speaks its text message. It was always in Mr Blair's pocket. Now it is in Mr Bush's. What a comedown.

This accurate picture of the Blairites as the modern equivalents of NAZI camp-guards for the Washington blitzkriegers has just had revealed some fascinating historical parallels from the time when the West was actually more in sympathy with Hitler Germany's fascist-colonial threats to East Europe than against them.

While 99% of such incriminating archives still remain censored or suppressed (and will stay that way), such tiny glimpses of the truth about the PERMANENT and TOTAL warmongering conspiracy which the ENTIRE imperialist system has never ceased engaging in, help complete the historical patterns of monopoly capitalist crisis which are deliberately kept deeply hidden, even by the most "outspoken" bourgeois and anti-war "criticisms" so far dealt with above.

The really key paragraph in these imperialist-media admissions about the fascist rottenness at the heart of the whole "free world" fraud, — the bit about the West's financing of Hitler's blitzkrieging, — was in fact tucked away at the very bottom of the original version:

THE British and US governments used known Nazi war criminals after the Second World War as spies, going to elaborate lengths to protect their identities.

The newly released CIA, FBI and Army records show that at least five associates of the notorious Gestapo leader, Adolf Eichmann, worked for the CIA. In addition. the records show that 23 war criminals or Nazis were approached by the CIA for recruitment.

The records also shed new light on how the Nazi Government raised more than $20million in foreign exchange between 1936 and 1941 with the help of US banks, particularly Chase National Bank (now JP Morgan Chase). US banks made more than $1.2 million in commissions.

The documents provide an insight into the Cold War obsession with communism and the willingness to take at face value information provided by war criminals. The one thing that stood between them and a war crimes prosecution was their perceived usefulness.

Although the use of Nazis by the US was far more widespread than the British, one UK case revealed yesterday concerned a Gestapo official named Horst Kopkow. He was captured and interrogated by the British, and supplied information about Heinrich Himmler's movements in the final days of the war.

According to CIA records, he played up the value of his knowledge of Soviet and communist espionage. The records suggest that British intelligence faked Kopkow's death from illness, in order to use him as a spy. He died in Germany in 1996.

Another Gestapo official, Otto von Bolschwing, was hired by the CIA in late 1949. He had worked with Eichmann before the war planning the expropriation of Jewish property in Austria and later served as the SS consultant to the forces that staged the bloody pogrom of Bucharest in 1941.

In early 1950, the Austrian police began asking questions about von Bolschwing. His personnel file had been among those captured at the end of the war by the US. To protect this agent from a war crimes trial, the CIA decided that any prosecutors who asked for it should be told, according to a secret CIA memo, "no files available".

In 1953, in recognition of von Bolschwing's work for US intelligence, the CIA pressured the US immigration service to let him enter the country. He later became a US citizen. In the 1970s he was exposed and stripped of his citizenship, but he was never arrested.

Theodor Saevecke was hired by the CIA in Berlin as agent "Cabanjo" in the late 1940s. A senior SS officer in Milan in 1943, he had participated in the forced deportation of Jews in North Africa.

In Italy he rounded up and killed members of the Italian resistance. By the early 1950s, he was an agent for the US in the West German criminal police service. When some Italian partisans sought his arrest in 1954 for his war crimes, the CIA sought to protect him. 

A CIA document dated July 12,1954, lists his offences: "Attended and managed hostage execution in Italian village; doubtless role in North Africa supervising deportation Jews to Germany." The memo then shows the CIA's intention to set Saevecke up as a private detective if the West German Government decided to drop him. He worked for West German police throughout the 1960s, retired on a full pension and died in 1988.

The hundreds of thousands of papers were released by the US National Archives. They have been pored over recently by historians of the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Record Inter-agency Working Group, and assimilated into a book: US Intelligence and the Nazis.

Another case involved Viorel Trifa, an alleged student leader in Romania's fascist Iron Guard movement. He became bishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church in the US and once led prayers in Congress. The FBI knew of his background, according to the US government historian Norman Goda. But, Dr Goda said, the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover considered him a "very desirable part of the landscape during the Cold War. Men like him kept émigré communities from being sympathetic to communist governments back home".

Mykola Lebed, a Ukrainian accused of aiding German stormtroopers in the suppression of wartime resistance, was also protected by the CIA. He was hired by the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps and later by the CIA. In 1953, the US immigration service wanted to investigate Lebed but called off the investigation after the CIA intervention.

Dr Goda said the documents show that US Immigration was not, as long thought, "asleep at the switch" during the years when many Nazi sympathisers entered America. They were often thwarted by the CIA, he added.

The NAZI warmongering received international public appeasement from the West at the Munich Agreement in 1938 for German militarism, representing the most powerful industrial country in the world, to bludgeon a way out of the appalling worldwide capitalist economic crisis of the 1930s by blitzkrieg destruction and enslavement of the more backward lands to the East, chief among the targets being the planned-socialist Soviet workers state which was winning huge international admiration by this time, in spite of its own bad mistakes and tragic gaps in cultural development, and in spite of the infinitely more monstrous filthy propaganda and subversion offensives to which the USSR was subjected nonstop.

It was only Hitler's failure to turn the West's vicious economic blockade of the Soviet workers state into instant blitzkrieg annihilation after Munich (thanks to the remarkable Soviet development already, plus Stalin's smarter diplomacy in giving Germany better war options than the West had done at Munich) that the "Allies" imperialist bloc finally came to blows with the "Axis" imperialist bloc. 

This archive revelation only puts blame on one American bank for building up the NAZI war machine which was eventually to devastate the whole of Europe and far, far beyond.

The truth is that the whole of Western imperialist policy turned a blind eye to German warmongering rearmament, — from even before Hitler becoming the elected Chancellor by the German parliament in 1933.

And vast areas of Western capitalist life supported the NAZI 'new world order' plans, from the start, including much of the "free press".

Now it is the next insoluble international economic "overproduction" crisis of the imperialist anarchic "free-trade" racket which is bringing the capitalist system down, just as in the 1930s.

Only this time, the sole "new world order" saviour in prospect is the American superpower itself.

So ruthlessly has monopoly capitalist domination now transformed the world that only the American Empire, the greatest in history, is now available to domineer effectively, and tyrannically punish the Third World into place, annihilating their troublemaking upstart pleas for greater equality on Earth in the process, and simultaneously wreaking enough devastation worldwide to "shock and awe" the planet out of any further rational consideration of who or what has caused the great "free trade" economic debacle.

That is what the "World War" system has been all about in its first two outings (1914 and 1939); but what Pfaff,and others above, are effectively analysing are the disastrous difficulties that imperialism is having in credibly or successfully imposing World War III on civilisation.

The power is there in abundance, plus the ruthlessness to use it savagely, as the incredible stories of deliberate atrocity torture programmes to "force prisoners to talk" are now revealing.

But, again as the whole world including the bourgeois "critics" cannot help but notice, the problem is that the Third World just will not lie down any more to receive its death, destruction, and re-colonisation-subjugation.

The uneven development, creating the great superpower's warmongering arrogance, has also seen to that.

One further rightwing ideological guru, Irwin Stelzer from Murdoch's empire, dwells on this aspect from a remarkable angle.

The usual aggressive cockiness about perpetual imperialist economic triumph, invariably leading to political and military triumph as well, strikes a strangely defensive alarmist note on this occasion:

The greater problem, and a potential catastrophe for the world economy, would be an American defeat and withdrawal from Iraq. This would send a signal to Osama Bin Laden and his crew that they are free to pursue their goals without fear of an America that is sulking in its tent, as it did after Vietnam.

This brings us back to Saudi Arabia. The recent killings in the kingdom's Yanbu oil hub show that the royal family's tight control is slipping. With millions of young Saudi men unemployed, disenfranchised and trained in their mosques to hate America, there is mounting danger that the royals will be overthrown, regardless of whether they introduce modest reforms or crack down on dissent. Worse still, a new regime may prefer caves to palaces, as Bin Laden clearly does.

If the nation's new, radical leaders believe they can bring down western economies, even at the cost of their own prosperity, they would willingly cut back oil production to drive prices to levels that would, indeed, induce a worldwide recession. The West would then have to borrow Spain's white flag, or beg a weakened America to return to the fray after licking the wounds incurred in Iraq.

Bizarre speculation, but as usual trying to put all the blame for possible catastrophes ahead, anywhere but on the head of the imperialist anarchic colonial-trade system where it belongs. A routine, more "progressive" tack is pursued by the "reformism" deluded Guardian to concentrate on the imperialist system's homemade disaster, only muddling the picture up with the smuggest hints of "reformist" solutions "somewhere", if not immediately available and obvious; — the usual "liberal critique" line:

What then is Greenspan up to? There are really only three possible explanations. The first is that he believes that 1% interest rates are appropriate at a time when fiscal prudence has been thrown to the winds by George Bush's tax cuts and the extra spending needed for Iraq, when commodity prices are hardening across the globe and when the US consumer is taking advantage of cheap money to load up on debt. If that is the case, he really has lost it.

The second explanation is that Greenspan believes the US economic recovery is much less robust than the public has been led to believe, and that withdrawing monetary stimulus could bring the house of cards down. This is not a message much heard in the US (where the predominant voice is that of Wall Street economists who have a vested interest is talking up the stock market) but it is true that Greenspan solved the problems caused by the collapse of the bubble in the stock market by creating two new bubbles — in the housing and bond markets. Economist Kurt Richebacher puts it this way: "The stock market bubble of the 1920s ended with an unprecedented consumption boom, and just that has been happening again since 1997, and in particular since 2001. Since then, consumer spending . has accounted for 92% of GDP growth. Yet, to keep it rising in the face of grossly lacking income growth, the Fed has invented a policy stance that has no precedent in history: boosting home prices with artificially low interest rates in order to provide rapidly growing collateral for consumer borrowing." 

Richebacher's view is that Greenspan has papered over the "existing maladjustments from the boom through even bigger, new bubbles and macroeconomic maladjustments, heralding much worse to come in the future".

 What next?  The key question is what happens once policymakers try to wean the US off its growth drugs. Unless Bush is prepared to push through new tax cuts — the ultimate dud cheque, given the size of the budget deficit — the boost to consumers from higher take-home pay will fade. Raising interest rates would pull the rug from under the housing market, while if the Fed's negligent approach allows inflation to pick up over the coming months watch out for a crash in the bond market. Even the tiniest threat of higher short-term rates spooked wall Street last week: it's not hard to imagine what some aggressive tightening would do, particularly if it looked as though the Fed was struggling to catch up.

If this is the case, it doesn't say much for the independence of the Fed, and it will add to the economic problems of whoever wins in November. It's a good bet that. there will be a large dollop of both monetary and fiscal belt-tightening in 2006, and Greenspan might be well advised to bow out gracefully before the brown stuff attaches itself to the fan. As Gordon Brown always says, there are only two types of finance minister: those who fail and those who get out in time: The same applies to central bankers.

But very bleak it remains for imperialism's all-round perspectives:

IN an office lit by bright neon strips, Mutar al-Edani, the chief of electricity distribution, studied a leaflet posted through the door last week and signed anonymously by "the people of Basra". It warned of trouble "like you have never seen before" unless power was restored to the city. 

"We are threatened every day by different people. They don't understand what's happening," said Ali Faleh, another colleague with the unenviable task of pushing substation switches that plunge streets into darkness. He is now protected by armed guards.

Three months ago the British Army proudly announced the restoration of 24-hour power to Basra in southern Iraq. But with temperatures rising to more than 40oC and air-conditioners on full blast, there is only enough now to supply homes for half of each day.

After the coalition forces had toppled Saddam Hussein last year, they concentrated their multi-billion-dollar reconstruction efforts on restoring basic services such as water, sewerage and electricity.

But delays have left many Iraqis complaining of broken promises. British Army commanders fear their anger could lead to violence, as it did during power cuts last summer.
 
The most obvious sign of reconstruction work last week was a series of metal pipes deposited around the city for a new sewerage system. The British have also been plugging leaks that were letting most of the water supply escape.

But as Iraqis prepare to take over sovereignty — and with it the blame for poor services local officials are heaping criticism on the coalition authorities and foreign contractors.

Abdul Satar Akeef, the Iraqi water director for the Basra region, says the supply is getting worse, with up to one third of the city's homes deprived of running water. He blames pump failures and the actions of a US contractor.

But the biggest  money for reconstruction is controlled by American officials in Baghdad  and by the US contractors they have appointed.

Colin McBride, a Northern Ireland engineer who is head of utilities for the Coalition Provisional Authority in the south, said not a single extra megawatt of electricity had been added to the Basra region since last year.

A turbine failure at a power station had resulted in the half-day electricity supply, and there were bound to be further breakdowns. "We have got a system that is now more robust and reliable, but our estimate is that we could still go as low as 12 hours a day of electricity throughout the summer," he said.

However, Iraqis have learnt to judge their occupiers not by promises, but by what they can see — with a flick of the lightswitch or a turn of the tap.

The US blitzkrieging is still a long way from serious DEFEAT, the crucial turning point in history's future, but neither is Western might effortlessly in charge of the world any longer. 

And as the EPSR will keep repeating, it is the incredible heroism of the Palestinians' struggle against the genocidal colonial armed theft of their country (to create the imperialist-stooge state of "Israel") which is the benchmark for civilisation's progress against Western warmongering tyranny.

Utterly and overwhelmingly dominated by the Zionist (US-supplied) military might (the 4th most powerful armed forces in the world), the Palestinians from their refugee-camp imprisonment can only fight by dying.

But fight they will, — and more and more phenomenally successfully and heroically with every year of their national genocidal imprisonment that passes.

By majority opinion, the colonising Jews who butchered their way to the ethnic cleansing which created "Israel", are now feeling forced out of Gaza to stem their losses and to desperately try to gain some "peace" through a blatant ruse which will only leave the Palestinians worse off than ever.

But even the mildest of anti-revolutionary Arab opinion will no longer be bought off.

This carefully-worded statement in the Guardian does not yet challenge outright the Zionist colonisers "right to exist as Israel", the only possible way forward,  —  but neither does it, capitulate to Arafat's muddleheaded political opportunism in treacherously and ostentatiously "accepting" the "right" of Western invading armed Jewish colonisation to be there, building an apartheid "state" on the Palestinians' land:

On the day Israel celebrates its declaration of independence, we mark the mass expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948, known to us as the Catastrophe — the Nakba. 

But Palestinians aren't weepers, wallowing in despair and cursing their bad luck. We commemorate the tragedy of our dispossession, but nostalgia has been progressively transformed into the political action that can secure our future. 

When the United Nations voted in 1947 to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, it did so against the wishes of the indigenous Palestinian Arab people, who then made up more than two-thirds of the population. That led to the first Arab-Israeli war and the eviction of up to 800,000 Arabs from Palestine. Over 500 Palestinian villages were razed to the ground by the Israelis, who vowed the refugees could never return.

Palestine in 1948 had all the elements of civil society in place and an economic system that was a model in the region. This was all utterly destroyed in 1948. 

Palestinians were transformed into a fragmented, dependent collection of exile groups. Palestinians are now struggling to re-establish their unity and political and cultural identity within the occupied territories and in exile.

Today, the 56th anniversary of the Nakba, will see a greater unity than ever. Commemoration activities will take place all week in occupied Palestine, with special TV programmes and newspaper editions, debates, and dozens of marches planned in spite of the checkpoints and the closures. There will be ceremonies and demonstrations across the world, and the Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat, will address Palestinians and the Arab nation.

This national mobilisation is focused on democratic representation and participation under occupation and in exile. If the people have not been included in a democratic process, there will be no solution to the refugee issue, which is the key to peace.

Crucially, young people in Palestine have not internalised the 1948 defeat. Of course, they are angry about the apartheid wall that has destroyed communities and economic life; the arrests; the destruction in Gaza; the land confiscations; the assassinations; the relentless ethnic cleansing. 

Yet when they look to the future, they are full of hope. They understand that their future and that of Israelis belong together. They still base their thinking on common, universal values.

On this 56th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, we hope that the people who share this land with us will also try to look at the future on the basis of the greater values that unite us, rather than narrow ones that separate us. In future, Palestine-Israel should be a land for all of its people, regardless of ethnicity or religion. We must not be afraid to meet face to face in our own land.

Muhammad Jaradat is the campaign coordinator of Badil, a Bethlehem-based refugee rights organisation

And even more impressive than the magnificent results which Arab and Muslim resistance is having against the American blitzkriegers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Zionist dream/ nightmare continues to physically and philosophically crumble before this epoch-making Palestinian Intifada:

When the Soviet Union became fragmented in the 1990s Mr Kariv was finally free to move to Jerusalem where he made it big as a television star, hosting shows on the Russian language Channel Nine.

Two weeks ago he left Israel for good. The 41-year-old bachelor is back in Moscow seeking job interviews. He is following thousands of others who are leaving the Jewish homeland, exhausted by an economic slump and endless violence, in favour of their birthplace or fresh pastures with better opportunities.

"Suddenly Israel just became too small," Mr Kariv said. "In the circles I moved in, more and more people are thinking like me. They've lived in Israel for ten years and find they're not moving forward. They don't see a better future there or the possibility of realising their goals." 

For a land built on immigration, the exodus of talent is a devastating trend, exacerbated by a dramatic drop in newcomers. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, has promoted the goal that the nation of 6.6 million should attract a million more people in the next decade. But immigration slumped to just 23,200 last year, the lowest since 1990.

The influx of Jews after the relaxation of Soviet emigration restrictions and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union boosted Israel's population. It hit a peak in 1990 and 1991 when 376,000 poured in from the Soviet republics. From 1989 until December 2003, 973,000 Soviet Jews settled in Israel. Now they are leaving.

According to official figures, about 72,000 of the Soviet Jews who came to Israel have left, most destined for Canada, the US or Europe.

Israel's Immigration Ministry estimates that about 13,200 Soviet Jews left the country in 2002. Precise numbers are hard to gauge. Few Soviet Jews holding Israeli citizenship say that they have left for good. And if they make a return visit within one year they do not appear in the count even if they live overseas.

Unofficial estimates suggest that there are now between 50,000 and 90,000 Israeli Soviet Jews in Moscow alone. An opinion survey conducted by the Tel Aviv Mutagim Institute last year found that 26 per cent of Russian immigrants in Israel were considering leaving, compared with 6 per cent who admitted contemplating such a move before the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada in September 2000.

Avraham Berkowitz, a rabbi and executive director of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia and the former Soviet republics, says that many of those returning keep their Jewish traditions and intend to go back to Israel.

But for the Israeli Government the departures are another tick of the demographic time bomb that threatens the Jewish state.

As opportunist Jews scuttle away from a vicious colonisation turned sour, the Zionist stooge Aaronovitch churns out more and more poisonous hysteria in his vast role as an imperialist media guru.

His latest degenerate imbecility is to weave a complex web of anti-Islamic sneers to try to do some "moral" point-scoring for the West to stem the avalanche of anti-torture and anti-prison-atrocity commentary which is drowning the imperialist warmongering in shame.

His sick line is that all over the Muslim world, countless women frequently get treated disgustingly.

Onto this insolent rigmarole, citing dozens of brutality cases, Aaronovitch tacks some hypocritical anti-Soviet muck-raking (nauseating from an opportunist ex-student leader of the Stalinist CPGB) plus some cheap spinecurdling about the beheading of Nick Berg.

This slimeball wordplay rants on the "morality" level of asking: "What would have been happening in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere had the invasion not taken place?"

This is the colonial tyranny mentality throughout the ages. "If we weren't here, they'd only be butchering each other as usual, etc.."

To which the only "democratic" answer is "Why not let them get on with it in that case, rather than cover the world with Western colonial empires to do the butchery for them"?

Which is precisely the only rational answer to these provocative questions about how some women sometimes get treated in some Islamic cultural circumstances.

Firstly, there are horribly backward cultural traditions in every society.

Secondly, what worthwhile route to progress is there other than stepping up WORLD cultural interchange, experience, and information, and let the growing improved standards steadily permeate voluntarily throughout the whole of international society???

To which we know the Zionist-US imperialist answer, of course:- "No. Bomb the bastards, and steal their country".

Aaronovitch's  final flourish is so monstrously biased and sickening that his Observer platform needs to start being decorated with swastikas.

In the crassest false comparison yet between what was done to Nick Berg in a Baghdad back alley by crazed and frustrated primitive resistance to US imperialism's bullying, domineering, and humiliating invasion and occupation...and the conscious, planned, systematic "shock and awe" devastation of Iraq by the most powerful and richest Empire that has ever RULED the Earth, — — Aaronovitch degenerately inquires with false naivety: "Do we really believe that it is the same thing accidentally to kill a civilian with a bomb as it is to cut off his head on camera???"

No, for any remotely sane and civilised mind, it is obviously NAZISM of the most depraved and murderous cynicism to pretend that the "shock and awe" blitzkrieg paralysing Iraq and massacring 15,000 of its citizens at one first go, was "accidental- ".

To play Aaronovitch's silly word games and to help this disgusting freak out, let us assume for argument's sake that the savage beheading of "a civilian" had taken place first; and that the blitzkrieg massacre of 15,000 Iraqis had only occurred as "retaliation for this barbarism, to teach them civilised and democratic ways", etc, etc.

In which case why has the loathsome Saudi feudal dynasty not been blitzkrieged into paralysis, massacring 15,000 of its citizens, where ritual PUBLIC beheadings by sword routinely take place, — frequently of totally innocent women victims of Islamic brutality which Aaronovitch pretends to care so much about???????

Because, like Aaronovitch, the Saudis have always supported the "right" of US imperialism to maintain its arbitrary world military tyranny. It suits their feudal despotism down to the holy Islamic ground.

His final justification for the brutalisation of Afghanistan and Iraq, by "shock and awe" massacres and devastation, touches on insanity.

This heavyweight apologist for the "white man's burden" school of "civilising" the natives (as "justification" for the non-stop terror inflicted by overwhelming US and Zionist superior force) demands to know "then what the hell is it all for?" to a challenge that different international cultures should stop blitzkrieging each other.

"Why tell the Mississippi folk how to treat their 'nigras'? Ain't that cultural? And wouldn't it have been less imperialistic of Robinson Crusoe to tell Man Friday that he ought to go back to the cannibals because, on the whole, it would be better for him to be eaten?"

In the insulting simplistic crudeness of these two "moral" examples for letting pro-imperialist Western creeps feel less uncomfortable about the lying mercenary barbarism of the recolonising onslaught on Iraq, (complete with torture and massacre atrocities,	in the "good old imperialistic style" presumably, from Aaronovitch's point of view), — this currently large and unsavoury presence in the pro-imperialist media (TV, radio, and newspapers) moronically shoots down his own childish "moral examples" in the most breathtaking idiotic self-contradiction.

Proposition: The West colonised the entire planet in order to save the Third World from cannibalism (the Man Friday "example" of the West's role in history)!!!!!

So how come there were 'Nigras' on the Mississippi in the first place (to kick his other "Moral example" up the backside which is all it deserves)????????

Even the cheap "point" Aaronovitch tries to make (that "of course all civilised outsiders would properly want to intervene in Mississippi folks' affairs to stop the vicious murderous Redneck tyranny over the 'Nigras' ") to "justify" this blitzkrieg on Iraq, — only emphasises the schoolboy silliness of Aaronovitch's "moralising" by ridiculously abstract "logic".

The main issue in the South was not 'nosey neighbour' interference but the huge White Nation, the most powerful and advanced civilisation in history and the de facto world leader, still allowing 300 years of slavery barbarism to rule-on in Southern attitudes, — a phenomenon properly disgusting the whole civilised world.

And it is that same White Nation (i.e. monopoly-imperialist interests of all colours and faiths, sheltering behind the Washington blitzkrieging juggernaut), barbarically kicking the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and, by proxy, Palestine, around now, which is appalling all civilised people today. 

Aaronovitch represents the most blatant crude Zionist self-justification of genocidal colonial barbarism, nothing more.

And Saddam/Stalin??? The truly civilised never supported either. It was only the nastiest opportunist cynicism, ignorance, and naivety, such as now festers poisonously in the coalition of US brutal imperialism with British fake-'left' apologists, which could turn a blind eye when it suited these "moralisers" in the past, for their different reasons.

Real civilisation needs to get things right, — such as 99% of what the Soviet workers state brilliantly achieved in its 70 years of development.

It takes stupidity and viciousness of an extremely unpleasant kind to still insist that this monstrous catastrophic mess which Western imperialist recolonisation is making in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq is "getting things right".

It is screaming out to the whole world that it is "wrong, wrong, wrong", - and it cannot succeed,or last much longer.

Can the USA "pull out" from so deep in the mess now???, — as is being predicted??

Of course any specific imperialist power-juggling can always be realigned on country-by-country details.

But the American Empire giving up its blitzkrieging total domination of the world?????

Think again. Complete DEFEAT and humiliation for the Western imperialist system's 800-year world-rule main economic and political structures is the only possible way forward for civilisation. Build Leninism. EPSR

E P S R 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

*********

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

BUILDING A WALL THAT IS DIVIDING A COMMUNITY IN HALF AND BREAKING EVERY SET-DOWN LAW FOR HUMAN RIGHTS ON THE PLANET

The Israeli wall, when completed, will run for 150 kilometres along the West Bank and will consist of concrete for the most part, joined by fences, wire and trenches. It will stand 10 metres high and has already swallowed 8,900 acres of Palestinian land. When finished, the project will have cost $1.4 billion.

The wall will separate Palestinians from their families, their land, water supplies, medical care, schools and most other things necessary for everyday life. In building it, the Israeli government is violating articles 53 and 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

UN special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, John Dugard, believes that the aim of the Israeli government is to incorporate 200,000 of the 400,000 Israeli settlers to Palestine, on their side of the wall.

In a report commissioned by the UN, Dugard concluded: "The evidence strongly suggests that Israel is determined to create facts on the ground amounting to de facto annexation. Annexation of this kind, known as conquest in international law, is prohibited by the Charter of the United Nations and the Fourth Geneva Convention.

He adds: "The construction of the wall within the West Bank and the continued expansion of settlements, raise serious doubts about the good faith of Israel's justifications in the name of security."

The report, based on a visit by the South African expert to the region last June, is due to be formally presented to the 2004 session of the UN Commission on Human Rights in March. The Israeli Government does not recognize the UN expert's mandate and has refused to cooperate with Dugard.

OPPOSITION NOISE

Condemnation of the wall has gotten louder in the last few months. South African President Thabo Mbeki said in a message read to an audience marking the international day of solidarity with the Palestinian people: "It has nothing to do with security or protection. It should be identified for what it is, an apartheid wall and it should be dismantled like apartheid had to be."

Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei has called it a racist structure meant to prevent a future Palestinian state. He also said that Palestine is still committed to a two-state solution, but that if Israel chooses to impose a unilateral territorial settlement, the Palestinians could demand a 'one-state' solution — an Arab majority state on both Israel and the Palestinian territories.

This wall will not bring peace or security for the Israelis," he said recently in the shadow of the concrete barrier, complete with watchtowers.

Palestinian President Yasser Arafat has warned that the wall will mean the end of the US backed 'Road Map', which calls for the establishment of a Palestinian State next to Israel by 2005. 

"Time is running out for a twostate solution," Arafat is quoted as saying from his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah, where Israeli forces have penned him in over the past two years.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan reported on 28 November that building the barrier is causing serious harm to Palestinians.

Even the US has voiced opposition to the barrier, although it has refused to support any of the UN's resolutions on the matter, calling them 'one-sided'.

The Dublin Government has cosponsored a UN resolution and said that it opposes the wall.

It seems that the only people who think that the wall is a good idea are the Israelis and those who run CRH. 

IT IS the business of a cement company to build walls. That we know. But what company would want to be involved in the building of a wall which has been dubbed the 'Apartheid Wall', by not only human rights organisations, but leaders of virtually every country in the world?

The answer is Irish company Cement Roadstone Holdings.

CRH hadn't been making the news too much lately, until now that is. Because CRH, is now directly involved in the construction of the Israeli Wall around the West Bank, a violation of human rights that has caused outrage across the world.

The company is connected to the wall through its 50% ownership of Israeli company Mashav, which is the owner of Nesher cement — the business providing most of the cement for the wall.

Does CRH realise that it is putting profit over the human rights of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians?

CRH either doesn't want to, or perhaps can't, defend its investment in the Israeli wall. By being associated with it, it is bringing shame on the people of Ireland, who for the most part, have no idea of the company's international interests.

Its actions have managed to create a complete cross-party consensus in the Seanad, which debated the issue last week and jointly called for CRH to rethink its investment.

The call however, will probably fall on deaf ears. It seems that CRH is happy to put profit above people.