Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class straggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I.Lenin      
Economic and Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£25 p.a.) and circulation P&P Bulletin Publications. PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL (Post Office Registered.) Phone 0771 2639934 www.epsr-marx-lenin.co. uk   or www.epsr.org   (alternative site)
No 1259 Nov 30 2004                                                                                                                                                25p Weekly

Now for the REAL POST-WAR western imperialist conspiracy — the story of how against the whole direction of postwar ANTI-colonialism in the world, the Palestinian NEAR-EAST was DELIBERATELY given to Western Jewish monopoly-imperialist interests for permanent COLONISATION and for subsequent TOTAL and PERMANENT NAZI-CONCENTRATION-CAMP DOMINATION, which will never end until the fascist-Jews and their US NAZI-imperialist  mentors are DEFEATED by PALESTINIAN REVOLUTION —— soon (historically speaking).

The whole  country  (and most of  the   rest  of  the world  too) was   sickened by the  weekend's BBC documentary on TV showing how the   100,000 British "United Nations"  Mandate Army, occupying  Palestine postwar, — supposedly protecting it for the rightful owners (the Palestinian nation, who have owned, occupied, and husbanded this land for three times longer than "ENGLAND" has been "ENGLAND"   (roughly 1500  years — just  walked away from  its obligations, and simply abandoned the whole  country (and all state power and authority for ever) to about 7,000 viciously-determined Jewish fascist-imperialist FANATICS who only ever had one aim in  life, — to make "ISRAEL" by far the most powerful military and state  power in the NEAR EAST, and simultaneously completely dedicated to TOTAL, AMERICAN-EMPIRE WARMONGERING  DOMINATION of all Arab nationalist-independence (to maintain total Western-imperialist monopoly control over the world oil trade, — and hence over ALL WORLD affairs.

And it has worked briefly. The world is currently loosely in the diktat of the insane American Empire warmongers.

BUT IT IS NOT WORKING. 

And it will be another historic FAILURE, — to go with the historic imperialist-warmongering system FAILURES of 1871 (when the Franco-Prussia war pointless  bloodshed and destructive shame caused the world's first proletarian revolution (the  Paris Commune) of 1917 when the greatest proletarian revolution ever (the  BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION)forced an end to the lunatic universal slaughter for imperialist-purely-destructive purposes (to pointlessly try to control monopoly "overproduction" (uncontrollable — see Marxist science — EPSR Box)) — ("TOO MUCH IMPERIALISM BECAUSE  OF PHILISTINE  ARROGANCE").

Another Western imperialist FAILURE looms in Ukraine where the American Empire's chosen NAZI coup leader to steal the election result for NATO anti-communism and monopoly-capitalist total control is a fascist drug-addict who is an integral part of Western Ukraine's long and unbroken pro-NAZI history going back to the world's first anti-semitic CONCENTRATION CAMP which was set up by fervent Hitler-admirer Josef  Pilsudski in the early 1930s to house (and massacre, or hand  over to the Gestapo-SS murder squads) the anti-communist and anti-Soviet Polish dictator's own hated Jewish minority population.

Conflict in Kiev
James Meek may be right that western intelligence services have tapes of outgoing Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma being anti-semitic "in private" (Bold but bloodless, November 25). But what about the anti-semitic utterances of Viktor Yushchenko's supporters in public? One of their key targets is Kuchma's Jewish son-in-law, television boss Viktor Pinchuk. But pro-Nazi revisionism goes deep in the orange-uniformed ranks of Yushchenko's Our Ukraine.

When one of the party's main newspaper backers, Silski Visti, was prosecuted under race hate laws for declaring in 2003 that 400,000 Jews had invaded Ukraine along with the Nazi forces, Viktor Yushchenko and his key allies started a campaign "Hands off Silski Visti". Other pro-Yushchenko media in western Ukraine have blamed the Babi Yar massacre in 1941 on the Jews. Maybe the new European order which Tim Garton Ash sees Yushchenko's supporters striving to join isn't quite so new after all.

Mark Almond (Election observer), 
Oriel College, Oxford

Oranges can often be bitter, and the mass street protests now going on in Ukraine may not be quite as sweet as their supporters claim.

For one thing the demonstrators do not reflect nationwide sentiments. Ukraine is riven by deep historical, religious and linguistic divisions.

Their traditions are not always pleasant. Some protesters have been chanting nationalistic and secessionist songs from the anti-semitic years of the second world war. Yushchenko, who claims to have won Sunday's election, served as prime minister under the outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma, and some of his backers are also linked to the brutal industrial clans who manipulated Ukraine's post-Soviet privatisation. Countless elections in the post-Soviet space have been manipulated to a degree which probably reversed the result, usually by unfair use of state television, and sometimes by direct ballot rigging. Boris Yeltsin's constitutional referendum in Russia in 1993 and his re-election in 1996 were early cases. Azerbaijan's presidential vote last year was also highly suspicious.

Yet after none of those polls did the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the main international observer body, or the US and other western governments, make the furious noise they are producing today. The decision to protest appears to depend mainly on realpolitik and whether the challengers or the incumbent are considered more "pro-western" or "pro-market".

In Ukraine, Yushchenko got the western nod, and floods of money poured in to groups which support him, ranging from the youth organisation, Pora, to various opposition websites. More provocatively, the US and other western embassies paid for exit polls.

The US's own election this month showed how wrong exit polls can be. But they provide a powerful mobilising effect, making it easier to persuade people to mount civil disobedience or seize public buildings on the grounds the election must nave been stolen if the official results diverge.

Intervening in foreign elections, under the guise of an impartial interest in helping civil society, has become the run-up to the post-modern coup d'etat, the CIA-sponsored third world uprising of cold war days adapted to post-Soviet conditions. Instruments of democracy are used selectively to topple unpopular — once a successor candidate or regime has been groomed. In Ukraine's case this is playing with fire. Not only is the country geographically and culturally divided — a recipe for partition or even civil war — it is also an important neighbour to Russia. Putin has been clumsy, but to accuse Russia of imperialism because it shows Close interest in adjoining states and the Russian-speaking minorities who live there is a wild exaggeration.

Ukraine has been turned into a geostrategic matter not by Moscow but by the US, which refuses to abandon its cold war policy of encircling Russia. What concerns Putin is the threat of an anti-Russian regime on his borders and American mischief.

Yuschenko never went there to study. Instead, he headed all the way here, to the west, to Ternopil, because his mother knew someone at the university.'

Boldiryev insists Yuschenko has always had a strong woman pushing him forward: his mother; his wife, Chicago-born ex-State Department official Katya, who introduced him to Washington; his deputy, Yulia Timoshenko. How, then, is this man with the ravaged face now threatening to overturn the Ukraine's corrupt political order? And, crucially, what does he promise?

A YEAR AGO, Victor Yuschenko was, an uninspiring opposition politician in a largely ignored eastern European country best known for being one of the world's most venal. His movie-star looks made him the presentable frontman for the opposition, while his ritual patter was that of a prosaic fan of the free market.

The effect was staggering. He stood before parliament after his release from the clinic, his suntan now jaundice, his wrinkles transformed into the deep pock marks of chloracne that some experts say is consistent with ingestion of dioxins.

VIKTOR YUSCHENKO was not born into the Soviet elite that retained control of the country after its independence in 1992. A teacher's son, he grew up in the tiny town of Khoruzhivka. After an education in Ternopil in western Ukraine, he returned home to take up a job his mother found him in the bank in their hometown.

Yuschenko's account of his decision to head to Ternopil university rather than to Moscow is more colourful than that of detractors such as Boldiryev.

But these were, perhaps, a later rationalisation. In his early career, Yuschenko would show little sign of being adventurous, moving into government under the tutelage of the then head of the USSR's central bank, Vadym Hetman, a powerful figure who went on to head Ukraine's first national bank and become Yuschenko's mentor as he rose to take his boss's old job.

Surviving a corruption scandal at the central bank, he impressed president Leonid Kuchma enough to be appointed his prime minister in 1999.

Two turbulent years would follow in which Yuschenko's free market ideas — his decision to pay off Ukraine's debts to Russia and try and regain the country's economic independence — would begin to rile the corrupt business oligarchs around Kuchma. A basket-case economy improved, but by 2001 he had upset too many interests and he was sacked.

It is this period that has led some at least to suspect Yuschenko's motives — most notably for his public statements of support for Kuchma in a series of controversies, including Kuchma's alleged involvement in the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze, that saw thousands of Ukrainians take to the streets in 2001. But with his sacking, Yuschenko was suddenly on the outside and angry — his wife Katya becoming the catalyst for what would happen next.

Fervently anti-communist in her youth, Kateryna Chumachenko, had worked in the human rights bureau at the State Department, in the White House and the US Treasury — a devotee of free market economics described by one associate as 'one of the most dedicated conservatives I have ever known'. Katya took him to Washington, introducing him to senators as 'their man'. 

For all the allegations of attempts by the government to steal the election, it is also true that many — perhaps almost half of Ukrainians — did not vote for Yuschenko and policies that looked to a future with Europe and the West. Millions of Ukrainians in the east — who identify themselves as Russians — voted for a future allied with Moscow and the past.

Added to that, there are serious questions about what an 'orange revolution' ― elements of whose Ukrainian nationalist coalition encompasses both anti-Semitic and anti-Russian sentiments - signify for the country's future.

With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory — whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.

Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilised by the young democracy activists and will never be the same again.

But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used.

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.

Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

That one failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade. But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev.

The operation — engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience — is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections.

In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.

They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time. Otpor also had a potent, simple slogan that appeared everywhere in Serbia in 2000 — the two words "gotov je", meaning "he's finished", a reference to Milosevic. A logo of a black-and-white clenched fist completed the masterful marketing.

In Ukraine, the equivalent is a ticking clock, also signalling that the Kuchma regime's days are numbered. Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.

Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-Educated Mr Saakashvili travelled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs travelling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organised the overthrow from neighbouring Hungary — Budapest and Szeged.

In recent weeks, several Serbs travelled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Marie, was turned away at the border.

The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute. US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organise focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy.

The usually fractious oppositions have to be united behind a single candidate if there is to be any chance of unseating the regime.

Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organising and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around $14m.

Apart from the student movement and the united opposition, the other key element in the "democracy" template is what is known as the "parallel vote tabulation".

There are professional outside election monitors from bodies such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but the Ukrainian poll, like its predecessors, also featured thousands of local election monitors trained and paid by western groups.

Freedom House and the Democratic party's NDI helped fund and organise the "largest civil regional election monitoring effort" in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organised exit polls.

The exit polls are seen as critical because they seize the initiative in the propaganda battle with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving wide media coverage. 

In Belgrade, Tbilisi, and now Kiev, where the authorities initially tried to cling to power, the advice was to stay cool but determined and to organise mass displays of civil disobedience.

If the events in Kiev vindicate the US in its strategies for helping other people win elections and take power- it is certain to try to repeat the exercise elsewhere in the post-Soviet world. The places to watch are Moldova and Central Asia.

Viktor Yushchenko
Aged 50. Born north-west Ukraine. Divorced his first wife to marry an American, Katrin. Has two sons, three daughters.
Who's behind him? At his side is Yulia Timoshenko, Ukraine's "iron lady", who made a fortune from re-sale of gas under the protection of prime minister Pavel Lazarenko in 1996-97.
Viktor Yanukovich
Aged 54, born in Donetsk region. Married to Liudmila, two sons. Claims to be a "professor". Has tried to hide his criminal record — for theft in 1967 and GBH three years later.
Background Rose from car factory welder to top manager in vehicle manufacture. From 1997 to 2002 was head of the Donetsk regional government.
What does he stand for?
Says he'll tax the rich. Has raised pensions. Says he'll be tough on corruption. Favours Russia. Putin supports him.
Who voted for him? His base is in the Russian-speaking industrial workers of the east and south of the country.

MARKO MARKOVIC does not look as if he could pose much of a threat to Ukraine's powerful ruling elite. But the sight of the 25-year-old. Serb, on the eve of the second round of Ukraine's presidential elections tomorrow, should alarm the country's leaders and others in the former communist world.

Mr Markovic began his revolutionary career handing out leaflets and spray-painting graffiti as an activist for the Serbian youth movement Otpor (Resistance), which helped to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic. Last year, Otpor activists headed to Georgia to train the leaders of the "rose revolution" that ousted Eduard Shevardnadze.

The poll has split the country, with the Ukrainian-speaking, Catholic west behind Mr Yushchenko and the Russian-speaking, Orthodox east backing the Prime Minister.

It has also sparked a proxy contest reminiscent of the Cold War. The United States and other Western nations have funded pro-democracy groups, among them Mr Markovic's organisation, called Znayu.

The work by Otpor activists has not gone unnoticed by the authorities. Last month, one of Mr Markovic's Serb colleagues was arrested anddeported. Mr Markovic fears the same. If Mr Yushchenko wins, he will apply for Ukrainian citizenship. Or he will hit the road again.

And who should turn up for the American Empire's would-be fascist election-stealing stunt than the CIA-Vatican stooge of the defeat of the Polish workers state ― Lech Walesa. Himself.

The EPSR is reluctant to count its chickens, but after a 25 year wait, it is beginning to look as if the Orange-fascist-bastardised acceptance that British-imperialist FAILURE and DEFEAT from the sick colonising enterprise of for 800 years trying to subdue Ireland ― ― is at last being acknowledged and accepted even in the dyest-hard [die-hardest] fanatical corners of the Paisleyite imperialist mind.

This confirms what the EPSR has ALONE IN THE WORLD, ― with its unique MARXIST understanding, ― been explaining since the 1970s, ― ― namely that British imperialism took a big decision THEN that it was pointless to try to continue maintaining the British-imperialist Industrial Empire via the back door of OCCUPIED IRELAND any longer.

The heavy armaments industry was now hugely loss-making; this role was no longer being played by Britain in the world (of being the major FASCIST "free world warmongering hitman on Earth) ― but MOSTLY because the "TERRORISTS" (i.e. armed resistance, prepared to fight for their country, ― and in particular to die for it) WOULD NOT BE BEATEN, despite every fascist "shoot-to-kill", death squad barbarism that the British Empire had perfected (including concentration camps; hostage-taking for judicial slaughter; amateur Orange-NAZI murder squads;) and systematic domestic terrorisation of Republican families.

The EPSR even was able to tell the petty-bourgeois nationalists of Sinn Féin that they had DEFEATED British Imperialism when everyone else was still only talking "continued British-Imperialist intransigence" and "continued permanent domination of Ireland".

The EPSR even explained in detail to the Republican Movement that the hunger strikes to death in the early 1970s, ― exactly the opposite of being a "FAILURE" and a "TRIUMPH" for Thatcher's and Orange intransigence, ―  had in fact become the symbol for the whole world of British-Imperialism's final DEFEAT and TOTAL POLITICAL FAILURE in Ireland.

Sadly, this all had to be confirmed again to Scargill's incurably anti-communist trade-unionism in 1998 when the EPSR insisted that only the truth of Marxism could now save the world from warmongering destruction.

The Socialist Labour Party was systematically told repeatedly that it was talking petty-bourgeois, Trotskyite, anti-communist gibberish (Scargill included)to keep insisting that "the IRA has surrendered; that Sinn Féin had capitulated; and that Adams had "sold out" for high state office".

Scargill's reply was to order the expulsion of his popularly-newly-elected communist vice-president Royston Bull, and the immediate closure of the EPSR.

Dear Royston Bull:

You have refused or failed to comply with a National Executive Committee Instruction, 12 December, 1998: "that the publishers and contributors of the EPSR (Economic and Philosophic Science Review) cease, publication of that Journal.

Yours
 
Arthur Scargill 
General Secretary
Dec 12 1998

Sadly, some longstanding personal, spiteful, petty-bourgeois, Trotskyite and incurable anti-communist gossip entered  the situation at this point in order to pretend that the expulsion was only "for non-payment of party dues".

Total nonsense.

Scargill is an INCURABLE anti-communist. Possibly with state help and advice, Scargill knew exactly what he was doing in expelling the popularly-elected communist  Royston Bull from the vice-presidency of the Socialist Labour Party (which aimed to restore a belief in socialism in Britain, ostensibly) from the very first day that he was elected.

Let us hope that this slight (but vaguely understandable, on a personal level,  unpleasantness)for ever now stays buried.

The biggest, most MONSTROUS, philistine scandal currently inflicted by the American Empire on the world concerns the "benign neglect" of the value of the world's  major trading currency, ― the US dollar.

Such unscientific insanity will eventually totally destroy the entire "free world" monopoly-capitalist economy under American Empire warmongering dictatorship, as it is already half-admitting itself:

Jeremy Warner Independent, November 25

"Since George Bush was sworn in as president in January 2001, the dollar has slumped by a stomach-churning 30% against the euro. Its performance against the pound has scarcely been much better... "The Bush administration's stance so far has been one of benign neglect... By making imports more expensive and exports more competitive, a weak dollar helps to ease America's burgeoning current account deficit and support US employment... There are bound to be some possibly quite serious short-term financial crises.

Wall Street Journal Editorial November 23

"The Bush treasury, and perhaps Mr Bush himself, seem to have fallen for the notion that a country can devalue its way to prosperity. This is the patent medicine of the manufacturers' lobby, as well as the kind of economist who has done so much for Argentina, Mexico and other nations over the years...

"Nothing will more quickly sap Mr Bush's hard-won 'political capital' to borrow his phrase, than a sharp weakening of global demand for American economic capital."

US government is spending beyond its means ..."Mr Bush talks of halving the deficit ― $412bn (£218bn) this year — in the next five years, but he and Congress have caused spending to soar

William Rees-Mogg Times, November 22

 "Without confidence in the dollar, the world has no valid reserve currency. The euro lacks political strength, if nothing else, and itself seems overvalued; the Chinese renminbi is tied to the dollar. If confidence is not restored, there will be pressure for the familiar false remedies, for competitive devaluation or protectionism. Already the exports of the eurozone are being undermined by dollar competition. Yet the world exchange crisis is being treated as everybody's problem and therefore nobody's."

HEDGE funds and nervous dollar investors have ploughed $1.3 billion (£695 million) over three days into a new gold tracker fund in New York.

Analysts have described the success of StreetTRACKS Gold Fund, which gives investors a direct exposure to the gold price without buying and selling the precious metal, as unprecedented in US exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Analysts believe that most of the money is from hedge funds looking for a commodity to replicate oil's strong run, and investors selling dollars.

The fund listed on the New York Stock Exchange only last Thursday and is the first pure commodity-backed investment to list.

In its first three days, the fund attracted $830 million, $241 million and $419 million, according to TrimTabs Investment Research,

Its success eclipses the strong demand from investors in Gold Bullion Securities (GBS), which is traded on the London Stock Exchange. GBS has attracted more than $770 million since it listed almost a year ago.

Two UK companies with heavy dollar exposure, Tomkins and Icap, both blamed the weakening currency for cutting their returns. Profits made by US offshoots of British companies are shrinking after being translated into sterling, with pharmaceutical firms, manufacturers, banks and media groups looking most vulnerable.

Another huge imperialist scandal still brewing concerns the British Zionist Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, lifelong supporter of the military domination of the Near East by "Israeli" total fascist-military control, ― never to be abandoned, ― and never to give the the ancient Palestinians a state of their own.

BRITAIN was given a full outline of an illegal coup plot in a vital oil-rich African state, including the planned date of the putsch, several months before it was launched, according to confidential documents obtained by The Observer. 

But, despite Britain's clear obligations under international law, Jack Straw, who was personally told of the plans at the end of January, failed to warn the government of Equatorial Guinea.

The revelations about the coup, led by former SAS officer Simon Mann and allegedly funded in part by Sir Mark Thatcher, son of the former Prime Minister, will put increasing pressure on the Foreign Secretary

Officials said that Straw and Minister for Africa Chris Mullin were personally told of the plot on 30 January.

In December 2003 and January 2004, according to the documents seen by The Observer, two detailed reports of the plan were sent to two senior officers in British intelligence and to a senior colleague of Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary. They were written by Johann Smith, a former commander in South African Special Forces. He has now given a full statement outlining the contents of these documents to lawyers investigating the coup. 

The new claim by Smith, that Britain was given clear and specific warnings in advance of the coup, raises questions about Straw's recent parliamentary answers in the Commons. In August officials flatly denied any prior knowledge of the plot, but earlier this month Straw was forced to admit that the government was informed in late January. On 17 November he admitted his department had received 'confidential information'  on  the plan

However, the documents seen by The Observer gave names of many of the South African mercenaries involved in the plan who have now been sentenced for their roles. Most significantly, the January report warned: 'These actions are planned to take place in mid-March 2004.' The alleged plotters were arrested in 7 March en route to Equatorial Guinea.

The reports, which Smith asserts he passed to UK intelligence, and marked strictly confidential concluded: 'Knowing the individuals as well as I do, this timeline is very realistic and will provide for ample time to plan, mobile, equip and deploy the force.' 

The fresh claims of Britain and America's prior knowledge of the plan raises questions about whether they ignored UN conventions designed to protect heads of state against violent overthrow. There have also been claims that western governments ' were keen to see regime change in the state because it suited their strategic and commercial interests.

Smith gave a statement last week to lawyers acting for the government of Equatorial Guinea. He says he had been tipped off about the coup by two former military colleagues who were recruited to overthrow Obiang by Nick du Toit, a mercenary who was given a 34-year jail sentence last week for his role in the coup,

In his statement, seen by The Observer, Smith said: 'I considered it my duty to warn the authorities in the US and England' I submitted a report in December 2003 of what I had discovered to Michael Westphal of the Pentagon [in Rumsfeld's department]. I expected the US government to take steps to warn Equatorial Guinea or to stop the coup. This was also my expectation as regards the British government which I warned through two SIS [Secret Intelligence Service, i.e. MI6] people I knew, and to whom I sent the report by email, also in December 2003 to their personal email addresses.'  Westphal is the Pentagon's deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence in charge of special operations and combating terrorism.

In January, Smith received more detailed information about the plot from former colleagues. He said: 'After preparing and sending my December report I received further information... and put this in a second report which I sent by email to the same people as the first one: Michael Westphal of the US and British SIS contacts.'

Smith, who claims he has received death threats since the plot was thwarted, said there was no response from British or US authorities to his warnings: 'The only thing that happened was that; the US authorities froze the Equatorial Guinea money with the Riggs Bank in the USA.'

One very obscure story of unresolved Western imperialist intrigue concerns Margaret Hassan, the dead international "care worker". Imperialism reports:

I met Margaret Hassan in 1987 during the Iran-Iraq war, when I was an aid worker running an educational programme for young Iranian prisoners-of-war in Ramadi, then a quiet town where the only gunfire heard was during weddings. Margaret hadn't yet become an aid worker for Care Iraq. She was assistant director of studies at the British Council in Baghdad. 

I'd gone to see her to ask if the council might let me have any leftover English books to stock the meagre prison library. I wasn't hopeful, given the sensitivity of the demand. Margaret could not have been more generous. 

What I remember most of that meeting was the concern she showed towards the young Iranians. Were they getting enough to eat? Were they mistreated in any way? Did they have warm clothes to protect against the harsh Iraqi winter? And as I was leaving, she said I had to come to her home one day for a slice of her renowned lemon meringue pie.

I was expelled from Iraq in 1989 for criticising the government's treatment of PoWs. I went on to be a country director for various aid organisations, doing a similar job to Margaret in Africa and south-east Asia for another 10 years. Like her, I worked in countries at war where the security of the personnel was a constant preoccupation.

"Who killed Margaret Hassan?" many are asking,

I have a question too, which is just as relevant: why hadn't Care International, which oversees Care's activities worldwide, suspended operations in Iraq, as other aid organisations such as Oxfam had done months before?

The answer lies in a trend that has been developing among international aid organisations, or non-governmental organisations, since the mid-1980s. This was the time of the Ethiopian famine and Bob Geldof's Band Aid appeal, which raised millions of pounds for the victims. Most of the money was channelled through the NGOs, which almost overnight were transformed from small-scale charities into multi-million-pound institutions. Growth continued, indeed became a strategic aim for most. Care International spent £250m this year. Oxfam and Save the Children's budgets both exceed £100m.

Donations by the public, however, have not kept pace with the growth of the NGOs. Increasingly, they depend on government funding. And, whereas in the past, NGOs set strict limits to government funding in order to maintain operational independence,those limits have quietly been removed: Care UK received 64% of this year's funds from the Department for International Development. Care USA, which is by far the wealthiest member of the Care International. family, received 75% of its annual expenditure of £320m from the US government.

Care can no longer claim to be an independent NGO. All its operations, including those in Iraq, will depend to a degree on US government funds and, to coin a phrase, you don't bite the hand that feeds you. In many countries, close links to the US government go unnoticed. Not so in Iraq. And there are clear indications that Care's operations in Iraq were compromised by links to the US and UK administrations. While Margaret is on record as condemning the invasion of Iraq, Care headquarters profess only to being "deeply concerned about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Iraq".

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

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

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

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

The suicide hijack demolition of the New York World Trade Centre and the suicide hijack attack on the US armed forces HQ, the Pentagon, are the greatest defeat for the United States since Vietnam and the only defeat for the USA on its own mainland since Custer's Last Stand against the Sioux native Americans at Little Big Horn in 1876.

Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world have seen the twin towers collapse. Hundreds of millions of children have demanded instant explanations from their parents. Hundreds of millions of people, not just TV watchers, or parents, made their own individual assessments of the situation before the facts could be adjusted or they could be told what to think.  Things will never be the same again.

7000 people were killed, many of then innocent victims. When the United States, without prior declaration of war, invaded little Panama with 26,000 troops on December 20th, 1989 to get rid of President Manuel Noriega, 10,000 people were killed, nearly allby indiscriminate bombing in poor, heavily-populated, working class areas. No publicity for them, though, on British television and radio or in the press. No condemnation anywhere, either.

A lot of people in Panama will not be mourning the carnage in New York and Washington. Perhaps that is rather narrow-minded of them. Just like we in Britain were rather narrow-minded every time we heard of a 1000-bomber raid on Nazi Germany or the exploits of the Dambusters.

A lot of other people have nothing to thank the United States for. The US is the most powerful country in the world and the backbone of all the imperialist powers. The US exploits and oppresses the whole world. Everybody in the USA benefits from this exploitation. Poor countries which do not toe the US line can expect to be victimised politically and economically, attacked militarily or attacked under cover by the CIA. US sex tourists spread HIV/AIDS far and wide. The US maintains oppressive countries, such as Israel, as living garrisons to do its bidding.

If the USA does not like some international agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol on reducing global warming, the Durban conference on racism, or the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, it simply says that it will not abide by them as they are not in America's interests.

The United States is cunning with it. In 1990 the US Ambassador to Iraq told Saddam Hussein that the US would remain neutral if Iraq grabbed Kuwait. In August 1990, Iraq grabbed Kuwait and is still suffering the consequences in the shape of a blockade and regular bombings from America and Britain.

However, there are quite a lot of people who pretend to stand up to the US of A. They have been well described by leading Russian communist Victor Anpilov as "windbags and political tourists". The windbags make good speeches and write good articles and books. The political tourists dash around all over the world declaring their solidarity with the victims of the US. There are not a few windbags and political tourists based in the United States itself, criticising the system from which they benefit.

Windbags and political tourists are usually called progressives. They say that their aim is to rally the working class and people of the imperialist countries against imperialism.

Progressives have been rallying the working classes of the imperialist countries for at least 50 years. And still the working class remain unrallied.

Now some new players have entered the unequal contest between the US and the people it exploits and oppresses. Nobody knows who they are. They may have used other people's identities. They did not seek personal publicity. Perhaps none of them ever made a speech or wrote an article in his life. However, they were intelligent, knowledgeable well-trained, co-ordinated and prepared to die.

What the United States is afraid to face up to is that these new players must have been based in the United States for some time, planning things out for themselves, without even a word with Osama bin Laden.

The United States creams off the best brains from all over the world by offering high salaries to people who have been educated at other countries' expense. The result is that educated people have little difficulty in entering the USA.

It is rumoured that the suicide attackers were Islamist. This may well be the case. It is the religious duty of Islamists to help one another. Islamists in Palestine and Iraq are being given a hard time by Israel, Britain and America.

Communist Party of Britain International Secretary Kenny Coyle and CPB General Secretary Rob Griffiths have been blasting away at the Taliban in successive articles in the CPB controlled Morning Star.

It is no good writing up to the Morning Star either. It knows how to protect its columnists from criticism.

When papers such as the Morning Star, New Worker, Workers' Weekly or Weekly Worker tell lies or suppress or distort facts, they mislead their readers who, on the whole, are communists and socialists. These readers, despite their wish to do good, cannot help but go wrong when their statements and actions are not based upon the facts. These people's whole lives and characters will be distorted. Tragedy turns to farce when they are the only ones coming out with lies when everybody around them knows the truth.

 "Running around like headless chickens, the CIA and the intelligence forces of Capitalism are completely at a loss, it clearly being a case of after the horse has bolted. The weakness of the CIA — even compared with French and British intelligence — in penetrating terrorist groups is being increasingly noted in Washington. In the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly, Ruel Mark Gerecht, a former senior Near East Division operative, writes. "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background."

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

Oil and water: Soviet Communism and the Irish Revolution salutary for republicans to gain an historical perspective on one of the many Marxist groups that have attempted to influence republican policy

BOOK REVIEW Reds and the Green: Ireland,Russia and the Communist Internationals 1919-1943 By Emmet O'Connor

O'Connor traces the efforts of the Comintern to establish a viable Communist Party in Ireland. All along, this was dogged by sectarianism and the fact that communists rarely attracted popular support.

For a time, most of their energies were directed at capitalising on the popularity of Big Jim Larkin but Larkin proved to be a frustrating ally, whose political history was probably best summed up by Charlotte Despard, who in 1925 said: "The great Jim will tolerate nothing of which he is not the boss" (p109).

Special Branch was happy enough to allow Larkin remain as a figurehead. When in 1928 it was suggested that there was enough evidence to prosecute Larkin over the misappropriation of funds, the Gardai decided that such was Larkin's negative role within the Irish revolutionary movement that it was better to leave matters rest (p 134/5).

The most interesting aspect of the book from a republican viewpoint is evidence of the Comintern's relationship with the IRA. The Dail loaned the Bolsheviks $20,000 in 1919 and attempted to negotiate a Treaty but the Soviets decided that possible trade and recognition from London were more important.

The Comintern did realise that working class and small farmer support for republicanism was the key to any left-wing movement but this was pursued in an inconsistent, not to say cynical manner by both the Irish communists themselves and by their mentors in the British party, through whom Moscow kept a watching brief.

While some historians regard the IRA's radicalism of the 1920s and '30s as an aberration or else as something introduced into the movement by Marxist 'theoreticians', it is in fact clear that the IRA was reflecting a broader societal radicalisation, whereas the communists were attempting to manipulate that for their own short term and ever changing motives.

Thus, in 1931, communists took part in the founding of Saor Eire but with the avowed objective of undermining it, as it was regarded as a threat to the prospects for a Communist Party. During the Comintern's Third Period', when all non-communists, whether of left, right or centre, were regarded as no different from fascists, the Irish party attacked the republican leadership as 'petit-bourgeois' in the hope that leftwing Volunteers would desert the IRA.

That was also the motive for the CPI's intervention in the Republican Congress, where they supported the united front motion because they did not want the Congress to be established as a political party that might prove to be a rival. The IRA responded to communist machinations in 1934, when it made membership of the Communist Party incompatible with membership of the Army.

Again, this is sometimes seen as evidence of the IRA shifting to the right, whereas in fact the IRA was at its most leftwing between 1933 and 1935, when it was suppressed by the Fianna Fail Government, which the CP called on people to vote for in the 1937 general election! Having initially opposed the war because of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, by 1941 the CP in the 26 Counties had disbanded and infiltrated Labour in support of a Fianna Fail-led coalition that would take the southern state into the war on the side of the allies.

O'Connor's book is certainly worth a read, especially given its use of the Moscow archives. It is also salutary for republicans to gain an historical perspective on one of the many Marxist groups that have attempted to influence republican policy.