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 
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[P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.] 
No 1174 March 4th 2003                                                                                                                                     25p

Belligerent warmonger invective against 'anti-war weasels' reveals inter-imperialist economic conflict and fear of SLUMP as the real terror splitting the West: The symbolic blitzkrieg on Iraq is just a step towards NATO monopoly-capitalists warring on each other. The anti-Marxist refusal to see CRISIS the key to this dramatic degeneration in the "free world" means failure to understand the bitterness of Third World anti-Western revolt, and failure to grasp the only solution to imperialist warmongering in REVOLUTIONARY struggle everywhere. The sole "morality" is to take advantage of every effect going from ALL anti-imperialist conflict. The warmongers' fascist reaction will teach Marxist revolutionary science to the world.

While 'democratic' public opinion (to the very limited extent it is allowed to be heard in the media which remain under the total control of the monopoly-capitalist bourgeoisie) continues to run heavily AGAINST the US imperialist warmongering rampage, - the Establishment voices dominating the press have started to threaten World War III to intimidate all who oppose Bush's blitzkrieg.

The Times top editorial mouthpiece, Anatole Kaletsky, has just detonated two astonishing bombshells.

Firstly, this usually irrepressible optimist on behalf of eternal economic prosperity for the "free-world" private-monopoly system has at last admitted that capitalism is heading for a CRASH and not 'recovery';

and secondly, with scarcely credible aggressive vindictiveness, he hostilely declares this coming collapse to be all the fault of France, Germany, and Japan, effectively speaking.

This is more than just a continuation of the "let's-impose-trade-war-on-all-who-won't-back-our-Iraq-invasion" belligerence which all US Government mouthpieces have been spouting for several weeks (see recent EPSRs).

The tone of this diatribe is envisaging inter-imperialist conflict as the MAIN EVENT, and not just as a "temporary, unfortunate, small by-product" of the tactical split over how best to impose imperialism's interests on Saddam's resistance to US/NATO domineering.

In their own imperialist-press admissions, this confirms key points of the EPSR's entire analysis anticipating inter-imperialist World War III and USA/Western DEFEATS, ushering in communist REVOLUTIONS as the only final answer to imperialist warmongering, which the American ruling class is driven towards by ECONOMIC NECESSITY for its own top-dog survival. 

Iraq, and "rogue states", and "axis-of-evil" terrorism are all being SCAPEGOATED. 

The real target for imperialist warmongering fear, anger, and tyranny is the ECONOMIC DISASTER of their own rotten system.

The imperialists' REAL ARGUMENT is with each other over who is to blame for the coming "free market" collapse into unbelievable bankruptcies, slump, and mass unemployment; - and, even more importantly, WHO IS TO BEAR THE WORST BURDENS OF THIS ECONOMIC DISASTER.

This growing crisis started out with a routine escalation of Western warmongering to boost the industrial-military complex; get "emergency" deficit spending through parliaments; splatter the Third World (Serbia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Iraq next, etc) to let it know who still rules; and reaffirm the imperialist military-power pecking order.

But the "recovery" this was all supposed to help on its way has not materialised.

Exactly the opposite. Trade war between the Great Powers is now getting ferociously sharp, and a terrifyingly serious currency crisis (for everyone) now threatens the dollar because of American imperialism's degenerate military overspending and corrupt political-influence buying through bribery and handouts (which the rest of the world pays for, - see last week's EPSR) at the heart of all this rottenness.

And suddenly the casual brutal NATO tyranny that was to be increased again (it has never ceased) on Iraq, stopped being a routine useful flexing of imperialist warmongering muscles, and became instead yet another issue on which to disagree about, and bicker over, between the now-frightened and hostile imperialist powers, already shaping up into TWO OPPOSED CAMPS.

This main Times editorial opinion piece, concentrating on the WHO-IS-TO-BLAME crucial first aspect of emerging INTER-IMPERIALIST warmongering, is a blatant British Establishment bid (from the pro-American wing) to catch up with the fire-breathing xenophobic rhetoric, seeking REAL CONFLICT with rival imperialists, that the White House political insiders and US media trade-war extremists have already been hammering for weeks (see recent EPSRs):

The world economy is approaching a moment of truth, to judge by Tuesday's sudden collapse in American consumer confidence, which was only the latest and most spectacular of the many declining economic indicators reported from around the world in the past few weeks.

Could this sudden economic downturn - which has been evident not only in Britain and America but even more clearly in Japan and continental Europe - portend the long-dreaded recession which has dominated media and financial comment since the late 1990s, but has so far been conspicuous by its absence from Britain's everyday life?

Reluctantly, I must concede that this could be true. When the facts change, you have to change your mind. In the three years since the bursting of the dot-com bubble and especially in the 18 months since September 11 - my views about the economic outlook have been much more optimistic than the conventional wisdom among economists, businessmen and politicians.

While I recognised that the computer and telecom collapse was bound to cause some weakening of industrial activity and employment, I did not think it would produce a recession or any other dramatic economic problem.

My confidence was based partly on the belief that damage from the stock market bust would be mainly confined to the absurdly overvalued computer and telecom businesses. But my main reason for optimism was faith in the power of active government policies to manage demand and thereby mitigate economic cycles.

Because inflation was not a problem at the start of the recent slowdown, central banks and governments would be able to act very forcefully to keep their economies growing. The classic Keynesian policies of cutting interest rates and increasing public borrowing seemed likely to succeed, mainly by boosting the housing market and consumer spending.

These expectations turned out to be more or less valid, at least in Britain and America, where policymakers were prepared to cast their traditional caution to the winds and "go for growth". Despite all the waiting and gnashing of teeth in the media about record breaking falls in investment, trade, profits, share prices, wealth and consumer confidence, the fact is that Britain and America have both passed through this period of turbulence more or less unscathed.

There is, in fact, only one economic imbalance which does justify worries in America and Britain. This is the balance of payments deficit, currently running at almost $500 billion or 5 per cent of gross domestic product in America and £19 billion or 2 per cent of GDP in the UK.

What these large figures suggest is that neither Britain nor the US can afford to continue increasing its imports much faster than the goods it sells abroad. In order to avoid severe financial imbalances and permanent structural damage to their internationally competitive industries, both economies must gradually shift from a pattern of consumer led to export-led growth. But in order to achieve that, they must find growing export markets.

This is where we must move in our tour of the world economy away from the Anglo-Saxon countries and come to the real worries about the state of the global economy today. It is in Europe and Japan, not in America and Britain, that economic conditions are again deteriorating - and at an alarming rate. In Japan, all hope that the Koizumi Government was serious about economic reform must probably be abandoned, after this week's appointment of an ultra-conservative candidate to run the Bank of Japan. But a decade of stagnation in Japan is something the world has learnt to live with.

The real worry, especially for Britain, is the rapidly deteriorating economic outlook in Europe. Germany is now clearly following the Japanese roadmap towards a banking crisis and long-term economic paralysis, severely aggravated by an overvalued currency, economic policy blunders and a total unwillingness among politicians or voters to grasp the nettle of economic reform.

Far worse, the German disease seems to be spreading to the rest of Europe. The eurozone's stability pact is forcing other countries to raise their taxes or defer tax cuts in response to the economic weakness engendered by Germany's decline. Even more seriously, Germany's refusal to deregulate labour markets and reduce state pensions makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for other European countries to attempt bold economic reforms.

The upshot is that economic forecasts for continental Europe are now being downgraded almost daily. The implication is that global trade imbalances are bound to get even worse. These imbalances, in turn, are weakening the dollar and the pound. The resulting strengthening of the euro is in turn making the economic prospects even worse for continental Europe, just as the malignant hardness of the yen shattered the Japanese economy in 1995.

If Europe continues to follow the Japanese road to long-term economic stagnation, this really could spell disaster for the rest of the world and especially for Britain, which relies on Europe for roughly half of its trade. So if you are worried about a global economic crisis, you should look for its causes in Brussels or Frankfurt, not in Baghdad.

The bile-fed irrationality of this chauvinistic vomiting defies belief.

The entire moronic Western world has chosen for decades, against the only scientific evidence that exists (Marxism), to pretend that "economic cycles can be mitigated", - meaning never a return to the shameful and near-fatal COLLAPSE of the 1930s.

It is, of course, complete nonsense, - the most primitive, voodoo anti-communism.

And now that it IS happening again, and the entire world "free-market" is heading for the greatest CRASH and the most terrifying anarchic/revolutionary aftermath in the whole of world history, - all that this British bourgeois Establishment voice can come up with is to still insist that "active government policies COULD change things", - but the "malignant" behaviour of France, Germany, and Japan is now going to ensure "disaster for the rest of the world".

From its ownership closeness to the rightwing of the American Establishment, this authoritative British bourgeois media voice is surely nothing but deliberate, advance, conditioning propaganda to prepare capitalist-brainwashed-ideology for inter-imperialist World War III.

The current spat in the Western camp is supposed to be "just about tactical differences in how best to disarm Iraq, on which we are all agreed", etc, etc.

But Iraq does not even get an abusive sideswiping mention here as the issue between the Big Powers.

As the EPSR has explained from the start, finding scapegoats in Iraq, etc., & arguing how to deal with them, have always been mere diversions from the real crisis dividing the imperialists, - namely how to cope with a world of economic collapse, yet stay on top.

Different styles for bullying Iraq (and as many other "rogue states" or "evil axes" as can be identified or agreed upon), have never been more than SYMPTOMS of the alarming and insoluble economic CONTRADICTIONS which are relentlessly splitting the imperialists apart into WARRING CAMPS.

It is ONLY by understanding this reassertion of classic inter-imperialist "overproduction" crisis which made the 20th century of two world wars what it was (see box p 3) that the need to apply Marxist-Leninist science seriously to the current world situation becomes clear.

And without that proper reading of Marxism which alone can give a sensible explanation for ALL of modern history, including the supposed "failures" of communist revolutions so far to produce workers states consistently building planned socialism, successfully and to everyone's satisfaction, - then the chances of resuming the march of proletarian dictatorship to transform the world (see box) remain difficult.

The DEFEAT of imperialist warmongering remains the only way forward for civilisation.

And while defeating imperialism by reason and peace protests BEFORE the warmongering starts is an obviously worthwhile struggle for political education and a marvellous dream, - it is defeat by more determined anti-imperialist revolutionary forces, on as global scale as possible, which is how the given class strengths, numbers, and dispositions on the planet are likely to resolve matters.

It needs to be understood that the right wing of the American ruling class has already been fighting this "war to end all wars" for some considerable time.

Let the imperialist press's own admissions reveal the story:

Lurking in the background behind Bush, his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are the people propelling US policy. And behind them, the masterminds of the Bush presidency as it arrived at the White House from Texas, are Karl Rove and Paul Wolfowitz.

It is too simple to explain the upcoming war as 'blood for oil', as did millions of placards last weekend, for Rove and Wolfowitz are ideologists beyond the imperatives of profit. They represent an unlikely and formidable alliance forged between the gritty Texan Republicans who took over America, fuelled by fierce conservative Christianity, and a faction of the East Coast intelligentsia with roots in Ronald Reagan's time, devoted to achieving raw, unilateral power.

'Rove and Bush came to an important strategic conclusion,' writes Lou Dubose, Rove's biographer. 'To govern on behalf of the corporate Right, they would have to appease the Christian Right.'

Bush's six years as Texas governor were a dry run for national domestic policy - steered by Rove - as President: lavish favours to the energy industry, tax breaks for the upper income brackets and social policy driven by evangelical zeal.

By the time George W. became President, Rove was the hub of a Texan wheel connecting the family, the party, the Christian Right and the energy industry. A single episode serves as metaphor: during the Enron scandal last year, a shadow was cast over Rove when it was revealed that he had sold $100,000 of Enron stock just before the firm went bankrupt.

More intriguing, however, was the fact that Rove had personally arranged for the former leader of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, to take up a consultancy at Enron - Bush's biggest single financial backer -- worth between $10,000 and $20.000 a month.

Rove in theory has no role in foreign policy, but Washington insiders agree he is now as preoccupied with global affairs as he is with those at home. In a recent book, conservative staff speech writer David Frum recalls the approach of the presidency towards Islam after the attacks and criticises Bush as being 'soft on Islam' for his emphasis on a 'religion of peace'.

Rove, writes Frum, was 'drawn to a very different answer'. Islam, Rove argued, 'was one of the world's great empires' which had 'never reconciled... to the loss of power and dominion'. In response, he said, 'the United States should recognise that, although it cannot expect to be loved, it can enforce respect'.

Rove's position dovetailed with the beliefs of Paul Wolfowitz, and the axis between conservative Southern Protestantism and fervent, highly intellectual, East Coast Zionism was forged - each as zealous about their religion as the other..

Wolfowitz wrote a blueprint to 'set the nation's direction for the next century', which is now the foreign policy of George W. Bush. Entitled Defence Planning Guidance, it put an onus on the Pentagon to 'establish and protect a new order' under unchallenged American authority.

The US, it said, must be sure of 'deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role' - including Germany and Japan. It contemplated the use of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry pre-emptively, 'even in conflicts that do not directly engage US interests'.

Wolfowitz's group formalised itself into a group called Project for the New American Century, which included Cheney and another old friend, former Pentagon Under-Secretary for Policy under Reagan, Richard Perle.

In a document two years ago, the Project pondered that what was needed to assure US global power was 'some catastrophic and catalysing event, like a new Pearl Harbor'. The document had noted that 'while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides immediate justification' for intervention, 'the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein'.

At a graduation speech to the Military Academy at West Point, Bush last June affirmed the Wolfowitz doctrine as official policy. 'America has, and intends to keep,' he said, 'military strengths beyond challenge.'

At the Pentagon, Wolfowitz and his boss Rumsfeld set up an intelligence group under Abram Schulsky and the Under-Secretary for Defence, Douglas Feith, both old friends of Wolfowitz. The group's public face is the semi-official Defence Policy Board, headed by Perle. Perle and Feith wrote a paper in 1996 called A Clean Break for the then leader of Israel's Likud bloc, Binyamin Netanyahu: the clean break was from the Oslo peace process. Israel's 'claim to the land (including the West Bank) is legitimate and noble,' said the paper. 'Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights is a solid basis for the future.' At the State Department, the 'Arabist' faction of regional experts favouring the diplomacy of alliances in the area was drowned out by the hawks, markedly by another new unit with favoured access to the White House.

And in Rove's White House, with his backing, the circle was closed and the last piece of the jigsaw was put in place, with the appointment of Elliot Abrams to handle policy for the Middle East, for the National Security Council.

Abrams is another veteran of Reagan days and the 'dirty wars' in Central America, convicted by Congress for lying alongside Colonel Oliver North over the Iran-Contra scandal, but pardoned by President Bush's father.

He has since written a book warning that American Jewry faces extinction through intermarriage and has counselled against the peace process and for the righteousness of Ariel Sharon's Israel. He is Wolfowitz's man, talking every day to his office neighbour, Rove.

The dominant US narrative simplifies and misconstrues the transatlantic relationship. There is wilful misrepresentation. It worries a lot of old cold warriors - men such Laurence Eagleburger, who was briefly secretary of state to George Bush Sr. He is no dove but he doesn't like this new mood. "I want the United States to be amenable to the wisdom of, say, the foreign minister of the Czech Republic," he told me a couple of weeks ago. "But it's just not going to happen any more."

The mood is a reflection of what is happening militarily. Donald Rumsfeld came to the department of defence promising not reform, not expansion, but something much more radical than all of these: "transformation". In defence circles the buzz word is "integration". The four traditional wings of the US armed forces - army, navy, air force and Marines - will stop the infighting to which they have been so attached. Their equipment will be integrated. Their command and control structures will be integrated. They will be hi-tech. Their planes will be unmanned - aircraft bombing targets in the Gulf will be piloted by a man sitting in the Pentagon, working shifts and going home to his wife and kids at the end of his day. 

Everyone talks about US "power projection"- and it will be awesome. "The only thing I regret about this coming war" one defence adviser to the Pentagon told me this month, "is that we're fighting it two or three years too early. By 2006/2007 we could really show them".

Be under no illusion. This brave new world is already in the making. And no matter how desirable allies may be politically, there is no role for them militarily. The rest of us cannot keep pace with this transformation. We will not commit the money. We lack the vision. Our armed forces, no matter how willing to engage, will simply not be up to it. We will not be "integrated". One former aide to Rumsfeld put it  like this: "There will come a time soon when the allies presence on the battlefield will not just be useless, but positively dangerous. They'll be in the way." 

And then he added "There is of course one exception to this. Israel." 	 

"Don't misread the language our leaders use," Eagleburger  implored me. "We are not good at nuance. Maybe we are not a nuanced people."

I don't hear much nuance in Europe either. For just as George Bush's wild-west allusions offend European ears, the tone of effortless superiority, dripping as it is with self-righteous disdain, that crosses the Atlantic in the opposite direction, bewilders and alienates America.

The transatlantic dialogue - a dialogue of mutual disdain and despair - is going to change our world. These are the dog days of the Atlantic partnership. Get ready, in the desserts of Iraq, for its last huzzah. 

Whatever the explanation, the gulf between us is real. The op-ed pages of the American papers have the odd thumbsuck on the rights and wrongs of prising Saddam out by force, but their more pressing interest (besides pouring bile on the surrender monkeys of France and Germany) is in the task that will face the great US Army of liberation once its initial work is done.

There is, for example, an argument about personnel. Should the American governor-general ruling newly free Iraq be a civilian - perhaps the former nuclear weapons inspector, David Kay, or Bush-friendly lawyer Michael Mobbs - or a soldier? Surely a man in a suit would smack less of military occupation, and therefore be the more tactful choice?

If, however, the American victors insist on a much more robust level of US control - restructuring Iraq entirely, studding it with countless military bases then we could start drawing rather different conclusions as to the true motive of this campaign. We might agree with those who detect in the Iraq adventure the opening move of a much grander American design: the establishing of US hegemony for the next 100 years.

This is not just twitchy, anti-war conspiracy talk. An outfit exists on 17th Street in Washington, DC, called the Project for the New American Century, explicitly committed to US mastery of the globe for the coming age. Its acolytes speak of "full spectrum dominance", meaning American invincibility in every field of warfare - land, sea, air and space - and a world in which no two nations' relationship with each other will be more important than their relationship with the, US. There will be no place on earth, or the heavens for that matter, where Washington's writ does not run supreme. To that end, a ring of US military bases should surround China, with liberation of the People's Republic considered the ultimate prize. As one enthusiast puts it concisely: "After Baghdad, Beijing."

If this sounds like the harmless delusions of an eccentric fringe, think again. The founder members of the project launched in 1997 as a Republican assault on the Clinton presidency, form a rollcall of today's Bush inner circle. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle - they're all there. So too is Zalmay Khalilzad, now the White House's "special envoy and ambassador-at-large for free Iraqis". 

It will not be the war itself which will reveal these ultras' true intent. That would be fought the same way whatever the underlying motive: overwhelming force aimed at a swift decapitation of the Iraqi regime. But the postwar occupation will reveal plenty. Then we will know if the hawkish dreamers of the project have indeed taken over US foreign policy. How they remake free Iraq will tell us whether they plan to remake the world.

In other words, this is one debate we cannot afford to sit out. As US commentator Sandra Mackay wrote this month "Washington's hawks understand that the real risks...are not in war, but in the peace that follows." It's after victory that the most enduring impact will be felt, whether it be a hated US-led occupation, sparking afresh round of global terrorism, or the sudden release of Iraq's lethal, internal tensions which Saddam has kept pent-up for 35 years. Kurds could fight Turks for their own state in the north; Shias might team up with Iran for control of the south; everyone may turn on the hated Saddamite Ba'athists in a frenzy of revenge. Iraq will not be like 1940s Japan or Germany, the occupations fondly remembered by the US commentariat. Those were coherent nations; Iraq is an artificial fusion of antagonistic tribes. Victory may be rapid and easy - but that's when the real trouble could start.

What this leaves out, of course, is a proper materialist account of why and how these subjective-idealist domineering ambitions have ended up running US imperialist policy precisely NOW.

The entire fake-'left' consistently fall for the same trick, swallowing the assumption that such tyrannical villainy can choose to impose itself arbitrarily, at any time it likes, and potentially then DO anything it likes.

Last week's huge, 'left'-celebrity, anti-war outpouring in G2 suffered hopelessly from the same idealist delusion that it was just Bush-clique rottenness, - which it could change its mind about, which was supposedly alone threatening the world with disaster.

This is not merely flawed and misleading crap, but such shallow "mankind is sinful" rot can help totally disarm the working class, seriously jeopardising the chances for revolutionary struggle which alone will actually end imperialist warmongering.

Only a Marxist understanding of CRISIS will explain that the US ruling-class is FORCED to war for survival; that victims of imperialist tyranny will do ANYTHING to fight back; and that crisis COLLAPSE, or war DEFEATS, alone put an end to tyranny by the REVOLUTIONARY OVERTHROW of imperialism.

Confusion STILL reigns over Sept 11, dividing the global anti-imperialist anti-war forces tragically, for example.

And half the 'left'-celebrity anti-war outpourings ran along the lines of "Iraq is not a real threat to the West, at least not at the moment", etc.

But why shouldn't anti-imperialist hostility in the Middle East (or anywhere else) become a VERY REAL "threat" to "the West"??

What is more, there is EVERY likelihood that Third World revolt against Western monopoly-capitalist economic domination and exploitation WILL very soon produce new Vietnams, Chinas, Cubas, Algerias, Koreas, Adens, etc, etc, with the revolutionary ability to DEFEAT colonial-imperialist domination or intervention.

And SOME of the tactics adopted against monopoly capitalist domination in, say, Colombia, or Nepal, or Zimbabwe, etc, etc, might well become the relentless brainwashing target of imperialist "anti-terrorist" propaganda, just as Sept 11 has been used by the US warmongers.

The fake-'left' confusion over these matters predictably emerges inseparably alongside the idealist reading that Western warmongering villainy is purely the result of a badhat minority of monopoly capitalist dealings with the Third World which can be changed by sufficient protest and Amnesty International exposure.

The modern world is basically deemed OK, and endless reformist agitation can properly "put right" all the most glaring "injustices" and inconsistencies, etc, etc.

But this is total class collaborating, christian codswallop, which inevitably puts the entire fake-'left' firmly in the IMPERIALIST camp over Sept 11, playing right into the warmongers hands. 

And all arguments that Iraq is no real threat to the West, or doesn't even have any weapons of mass destruction, etc, etc, do the same thing, in the long run.

Suicidal terroristic jihad is hardly rational materialism, and therefore no guarantee at all of a bright socialist future for the world, obviously.

And the chance of being an innocent victim of terrorism's arbitrariness and unpredictability is truly terrifying.

But NO anti-imperialist struggle, however "terroristic", has EVER been undertaken because of the wilful wickedness or suicidal stupidity of the anti-imperialists. In their lights, their tragic behaviour has only ever been FORCED UPON THEM by imperialism's invariably relentless tyranny.

The METHODS of any anti-imperialist action certainly don't need to be copied or praised; which is criticism enough, which doesn't have to be kept secret.

But as Marxist revolutionary science made absolutely clear in pre-revolutionary Russia where terrorist acts were the favoured methods of many sincere and civilised anti-Tsarist movements, the onus on the ideology of BETTER ways to fight imperialism was to WORK HARDER to give 'proper' leadership to all those determined anti-imperialists, sucked in to terrorist methods of struggle.

What was UNTHINKABLE was to take the side of official imperialist society by joining in the CONDEMNATION of terrorism. It is imperialist society alone which is to be condemned, - for FORCING people to become anti-imperialist fighters by its own rottenness.

And it is precisely the reformist-idealist illusion that Western society's world-role evils are "curable" that exactly leads on to the naff, reactionary nonsense that it is the movements that are DRIVEN to fight imperialism in the most terrible suicidal ways that deserve condemnation, rather than the relentless Western imperialist-society exploitation of the world economy whose grotesque inequalities and injustices routinely kept in place by Western warmongering interventions to preserve pro-Western tyrannies or to put in pro-West stooges (Pinochet, the Contras, Saddam Hussein originally)) eventually DRIVE people into all kinds of revolts or resistance, for all kinds of motives.

The only morality for all anti-imperialists everywhere is to take advantage wherever possible of all useful EFFECTS of others' anti-imperialist struggles.

The only immorality (born of reformist illusions) is to side or sympathise with the imperialist system for the foul mess its decaying rottenness is getting it into.

Not by chance, Sept 11 coincided with incurably deepening economic crisis, and PANICKED the current US imperialist ruling clique to come out openly in its true colours possibly earlier than it might have wished, - having possibly preferred a little longer to continue putting on the act of "law-respecting, democracy-respecting, rational, reasonable, Western-Alliance-friendly stalwart of all-embracing world improvements and peaceful negotiated solutions to all problems wherever possible", etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

But now we are learning the real score about the CRISIS-RIDDEN imperialist system where periodic economic catastrophe and inter-imperialist warmongering and anti-Third World tyranny are the only true historical pattern of the last 100 years.

Sept 11 remains a useless method for ultimately effective anti-imperialist struggle, but it has had an inspirational uplifting effect on BILLIONS throughout the Third World, encouraging greater anti-imperialist struggle everywhere.

Where they occur, the effect of ALL anti-imperialist struggle should be treated as grist to the mill. 

And as the Kaletsky piece, and the non-stop anti-German trade-war hatred pouring out of Washington, clearly demonstrated, the supposed Sept 11 "excuse" for imperialist warmongering hysteria has already been well overtaken. The terror and hatred of insoluble "over-production" CRISIS rules alone, nothing else.

All the same arguments apply to fake-'left' confusion, similarly splitting the anti-imperialist movement for years over the existing completed anti-imperialist "rogue states", most notably embracing the "Stalinist dictatorships", of course, - Cuba included. (The fake-'left' Alliance, Trots, and right-Revisionists, keep quiet about Cuba now, of course, but they all at one time demanded the "overthrow of the Castro regime" in unison with US fascist-imperialism, - only for their "own" reasons of some more subjective idealist fantasy, the building of "real socialism", etc.)

It is the anti-imperialist effects that need making use of, not imitating or even approving of any particular methods of statecraft or local socialist culture. Third-World leader cults (and all the arbitrary and unbalanced dangers that can flow from them, especially under the corruption of Revisionist theoretical confusion) will never cease to appall rational Western socialists.

But the EFFECT of Cuba's Castro-led resistance (to us imperialist warmongering, bullying, and sabotage in helping to encourage ever-stronger anti-imperialist REVOLT throughout Central and South America (and far beyond)) is a crucial gain to the ACTUAL class and national struggle worldwide to halt and eventually overthrow Western domination.

Despite its appalling arbitrary flaws both domestically and internationally, the EFFECT of Soviet anti-imperialism internationally in defending, aiding, financing, or arming anti-imperialist struggles, again and again all round the world, was so massive that it created an entire mini-epoch of history when Western imperialism only dare go so far in its vicious repression of the Third World within monopoly capitalist exploitation's bounds.

The aggressive, warmongering, fascist difference in US imperialist behaviour since Revisionist theoretical muddleheadedness caused the Soviet workers state to self-liquidate, is obvious to any but the blindest anti-communist fools; - yet throughout Soviet existence, the entire fake-'left' never ceased to join imperialism and go along with one anti-Soviet propaganda stunt after another, fearfully weakening international anti-imperialism, and helping cement Moscow's own Revisionist stupidity.

North Korea has a leadership-cult culture beyond belief, but it is a passing phase of national-state growing-up (China had Maoism but at least no longer suffers from such personality worship, even if other dangerous Revisionist confusion still holds sway); and NK's repeated, determined, anti-imperialist defiance throughout its brief history is still an inspiration to many Third World anti-imperialist struggles far and wide, directly aiding many of them.

Nothing is certain about North Korea's plans or intentions because of massive residual traditions of sectarian arbitrariness and Revisionist confusion, but its determined anti-imperialist defiance seems 100% sound at the moment, and only the most moronic fake-'left' reactionariness, (doomed to rejection in hatred by the working class), could double up on solidarity with imperialism's current Nazi blitzkrieg mentality by "condemnation" of Sept 11 followed by denunciation of North Korea's stated intention (commendable, 100%) to resist a "rogue state" clobbering (from US warmongering hysteria) by nuclear-weapon self-defence if necessary. Such anti-imperialist determination is already an inspiration throughout much of Asia and beyond.

It is the idealist philosophical method, seeing US warmongering mania as residing in a small group of bad-hat wilfulness "which can therefore be reformed", which also lends itself to assuming that Western imperialism can crush ANY resistance if it really wants to. And this anti-historical impressionism, with its un-Marxist ignorance of the class transformations which are the greatest turning points in civilisation's progress, - helps the fake-'left' to its slightly racist snobbery, recoiling in revulsion from, say, Kim cultism in Korea or from al-Qaeda jihadism, automatically assuming that "the West will quickly teach these backward people a lesson if it really makes up its mind to it", etc, etc, - from which it is the easiest short step to slip into some kind of 'Western' solidarity and actually condemn terrorism or nuclear resistance which "has no hope of succeeding", etc, etc.

Such wishful thinking also just erects more and more barriers to grasping the CRISIS nature of open imperialist warmongering degeneration. 

Since types like Wolfowitz and Rove have ALWAYS HAD these plans for total open US military domination one day, even over its closest Western "allies" like Germany and Japan, "therefore", reasons the fake-'left', they have taken power NOW simply because they always INTENDED TO, at some stage. "Crisis has nothing to do with it. There IS no crisis," goes this straight-line subjective-idealist "logic".

But by leaving out the crisis, of course, the fake-'left' reformist petty bourgeoisie creates its own deluded fantasy-world of "moral" and "virtuous" certainty where the most fluent and gifted reformists (themselves, of course) will, by the beauty and force of their arguments, HAVE to be listened to, and gratefully be given the country's leadership, etc, etc, etc,

The "catastrophism" of crisis-science disturbs all this. Paul Foot's "revolution" (see last week's EPSR) precisely came out as this "logical and inevitable smooth progress towards an ever finer grasp, presentation, and implementation of ever richer democratic logic" (his own, of course).

But real revolutions are so utterly different from this idealist delusion as to be unrecognisable from such fond wishful thinking, - and in history invariably UNRECOGNISED by such 'left' posturers.

The SWP centrist mentality spent the whole 20th century insisting that the Soviet workers state was class-dominated exploitation just like the rest of the world (only worse because dictatorial), but state capitalist rather than mostly private capitalist.

The catastrophic collapse of Soviet state power in 1990 from its previous ability to protect, aid, and defend anti-imperialist struggles everywhere from any number of might-have-been imperialist clobberings, and from several degrees of imperialist warmongering where the West did get away with neocolonial intervention, - a collapse bitterly regretted and mourned from Korea to Cuba, a collapse surely impossible if the USSR merely shifted in 1990 from "state-capitalism" to a slightly greater private-capitalist mix, - has never been satisfactorily addressed by these SWP fake-'left' mountebanks.

Equally, the catastrophic collapse of Soviet economic strength and living standards TO LESS THAN HALF by 1996 (six years), - the most astonishing economic state collapse in all recorded history, and one which would have been utterly impossible if merely state-capitalism had been added-to with more private-capitalist initiatives, - has gone similarly unexplained by these treacherous SWP frauds, misleading the working class towards idealist 'left'-reformist cul-de-sacs and away from any real grasp of REVOLUTION.

And by all this relentless subjective idealism which cannot understand crisis or its role in acting as catalyst for all these dramatic changes now rapidly altering the face and perspective of world politics, - the fake-'left' can also easily reject the role for revolutionary theory polemics, which WILL eventually be the training-ground for the British Bolshevik Party to come, regardless of the complacent fake-'left' hostility.

Once again, it is imperialism's crisis events themselves which will SHAKE and JOLT the working people into a revolutionary education. As ever, it is imperialist REACTION which will make revolutionaries of everybody (aided and abetted by Marxist-Leninist science to which deceived, harassed, and intimidated workers will be FORCED to turn by intolerable counter-revolutionary nonsense in EVERY country of the "free world" in due course).

The neo-Nazi warmongering hysteria of the Christian and Zionist US ultra-right provided a classic example of this at the weekend, courtesy of the following capitalist press revelation:

THE UNITED STATES is conducting a secret 'dirty tricks' campaign against United Nations Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of a war against Iraq.

Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the e-mails of the delegates, are revealed in a document which has been leaked to the Observer.

The disclosures were made in a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency - the US body which intercepts communications around the world. It was circulated both to senior agents in his organisation and a friendly foreign intelligence agency.

The memo describes orders to staff at the agency, whose work is clouded in secrecy, to step up its surveillance operations 'particularly directed at...UN Security Council Members (minus US and GBR, of course)' to provide up-to-the-minute intelligence for Bush officials on the voting intentions of UN members regarding the issue of Iraq.

The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan at UN headquarters in New York - the delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the US and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for UN inspections, led by France, China and Russia.

The memo advises that the agency is 'mounting a surge' aimed at gleaning information not only on how delegations on the Security Council will vote on any second resolution on Iraq, but also 'policies', 'negotiating positions', 'alliances' and 'dependencies' - the 'whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises'.

Dated 31 January 2003, the memo was circulated four days after the UN's chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, produced his interim report on Iraqi compliance with UN resolution 1441. Bulgaria came on board with the United States shortly afterwards. The memo urges an 'extra focus on Pakistan UN matters'.

It was sent by Frank Koza, chief of staff in the 'Regional Targets' section of the NSA, which spies on countries that are viewed as strategically important for United States interests.

Koza specifies that the information will be used for the US's 'QRC' - Quick Response Capability 'against' the key delegations.

Suggesting the levels of surveillance of both the office and home phones of UN delegation members, Koza also asks recipients of the e-mail to make sure that their staff also 'pay attention to existing non-UN Security Council Member UN-related and domestic comms [office and home telephones] for anything useful related to Security Council deliberations'.

Koza addresses the foreign agency directly, saying:'We'd appreciate your support in getting the word to your analysts who might have similar more indirect access to valuable information from accesses in your product lines [ie, intelligence sources].'

Koza makes clear it that this is an informal request at this juncture, but adds: 'I suspect that you'll be hearing more along these lines in formal channels.' Disclosure of the US operation comes in the week that Blix will make what many expect to be his final report to the Security Council.

It also comes amid increasingly threatening noises from the US towards undecided countries on the Security Council who have been warned of the unpleasant economic consequences of standing up to the US.

Sources in Washington familiar with the operation said last week that there had been a division among Bush administration officials over whether to pursue such a high-intensity surveillance campaign with some warning of the serious consequences of discovery.

It is the first time the American spies have been caught bugging diplomats at the UN since the end of the Second World War. Its predecessor, the Signals Security Agency, caused a scandal after the San Francisco conference that established the UN in 1945, by bugging overseas delegations.

The NSA has been the worldwide eyes and ears of the US ever since. It is based at a vast complex nicknamed 'Crypt-City' off the Baltimore-Washington parkway road.

If the NSA were a corporation, in terms of dollars spent, personnel and floor space, it would rank among the first 50 of the 'Fortune 500' companies.

Although it appears on no map, the NSA, with its 38,000 specially cleared employees, constitutes the second biggest metropolis in the state of Maryland after Baltimore, consuming as much electricity as the state capital, Annapolis.

Inflicting warmongering destruction on the planet is necessary, according to Bush and Blair, "in the true spirit of democracy and genuine constructive cooperation in the well-meaning community of nations", etc, etc, etc.

This sinister, treacherous lying and bullying at the UN home of "world democracy" is the Big Brother nightmare made real at last, not by the Soviet KGB, - which benignly self-liquidated when the Soviet state (it had been trying to protect from relentless Western spying, subversion, and sabotage) quit; but by the one real "evil empire" which truly Marxist science has always explained would eventually be forced to expose itself to all for what it is, namely, Western imperialism, the sole source of reactionary warmongering and all tyranny holding civilisation back.

Alongside, FORCING people to communist revolutionary conclusions, struts Zionist colonialism, relentlessly seeking the genocidal elimination of the Palestinian nation, having been implanted with imperialist force on the Palestinians lands in 1947 in the most criminal "ethnic cleansing" of a nation from its homeland in all modern history, - an inhuman eviction which Western civilisation was supposed to view as "a crime against humanity".

Sharon, the fascist butcher ordering the massacre of hundreds of defenceless Palestinian families at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon in the 1980s, has just publicly torn up the pretended "road map" towards at least some sort of Palestinian state home at last (albeit a complete joke of tiny patchwork pieces on less than 20% of Palestine, and still dominated by the Zionist Nazi tyranny), --- a "road map" which Blair loved to posture was "the complete answer to charges of anti-Arab bias in the Middle East by the West", etc, etc. But no more, it seems.

How imperialist tyranny educates revolutionary understanding was reflected in a bizarre human-interest story which the capitalist press tried "so reasonably" to slip in without too much fuss), identifying "terrorism" with Zionism, not with the Arab Intifada:

Anne Gwynne is conducting her own war on terrorism. A retired bank manager from Wales, she originally planned to join the thousands of other foreign volunteers who spend a few weeks each year picking olives, monitoring Israeli roadblocks and acting as human shields in solidarity with the Palestinians.

But after nine weeks in the West Bank city of Nablus, with bullet shrapnel in her leg and horrors she never imagined etched on her mind, she says she has come to understand - perhaps support - the more extreme and tragic tactics of a brutal conflict. She has found friends in the men with guns and the proud relatives of suicide bombers, the "martyrs" whose pictures paper the streets.

"I had never seen a tank before. I'd never seen a soldier. I've seen dead people, but I've never seen someone killed by these huge 25mm bullets. The injuries are horrific. The cannon from the tank takes the whole chest off," she said. "This is terrorism gone completely and utterly crazy. There is no other word for this because it's not one incident, it's thousands of incidents across the whole city.

"I really, really understand the martyrs [suicide bombers]. I am very good friends with the family of the two who went on the mission to Tel Aviv. One saw the other explode, and then he walked away and blew himself up. They are such lovely families and very proud of their sons."

Twenty-three people died in those bombings in Tel Aviv in January, including many poor foreign workers. Was it wrong?

"I agree that it is a strategic mistake but I understand why they do it," she said. "Let's not blame the victims. It's clear who the real terrorists are here. I'`m going to fight it."

It is not what she imagined for herself just a few weeks ago.

Ms Gwynne, 65, retired in 1998 after 15 years as a manager for Barclays in Aberystwyth. Since then she has split her time between her two daughters, one in Germany the other, at university in California, who took her to a Palestinian solidarity meeting at which she was so outraged by accounts of children shot by the Israeli army that she decided to see for herself.

She arrived in Tel Aviv proudly announcing her intention to help the Palestinians. Immigration officers held her for three hours and tried to persuade her it was too dangerous to go to Ramallah and to ask why she wasn't there to help Israeli victims.

"I had three people telling me how dangerous it was to come to Ramallah, which I find ironic seeing as the Israelis are the ones causing the danger," she said.

Through an encounter at a New Year's Eve party, she found herself in Nablus, which has suffered even more than most West Bank cities under virtually perpetual curfew for more than six months. She is working as a volunteer "nurse" - although she has no training - with a Palestinian ambulance driver, Feras al-Bakri, taking the wounded through Israeli army checkpoints to Raffidia hospital.

It is dangerous. Last week Mr Bakri was shot in the hand and another man had a testicle shot off by a soldier who opened fire for no apparent reason.

Nine weeks later she is something of a veteran.

"It hasn't surprised me but it has shocked me to see a baby die because its mother has been dumped next to the roadside in the cold because the Israelis won't let the ambulance through; to see a child in a hospital with its nose shot off; to hear an Israeli soldier threaten to kill us all. He said: 'I can kill you all in 10 seconds: This is a crime of unimaginable proportions unless you live here.'

Ten day's ago the Israeli army surged into Nablus's old city, the Casaba, destroying homes, searching for Palestinian fighters. The killing went on for a week. At the end 11 people lay dead, including three children, one a 14-year-old boy shot by the army alongside his grandfather.

Hundreds were wounded. Among them was a boy who took a bullet through his palate.

"It would be better if they'd killed him. He's in hospital in a terrible state," Ms Gwynne said. "I found it very difficult to handle at night. For the first week I wept, but after that I became so angry I couldn't shed any more tears."

During the fighting she caught a piece of shrapnel in the leg while trying to reach a woman who had gone into labour. She says an Israeli soldier deliberately shot between her leg, even though it was evident that she was unarmed.

"The Palestinian fighters say I am one of them now, wounded on the battlefield".

Ms Gwynne is small and, at first glance, might be mistaken for fragile. But in any discussion about the injustices perpetrated in Nablus, she offers by far the most energetic denunciations, loudly berating the Israelis while Palestinians who have lived with the misery for years almost mournfully recount the suffering.

Threat of rape 

"I've been arrested too. One of the Israeli commanders threatened me with rape. He was very graphic," she said. "I've told Israeli soldiers that when you say you're just obeying orders, please remember that it was what every German soldier said.

"The soldiers say we must defend our land; God gave us this land; if I don't kill them, they will kill us.

"I used to think it was all excuses, but they actually believe this shit. We have nothing to kill them with, just a few AK-47s. 

We? "I feel I am one of them. I want is to live here now. I have a pension. It's not a lot but it's $1,000 a month and it's more than a doctor here gets," she said.

Ms Gwynne plans to remortgage her house in Wales and use the money to buy a computer and digital camera to document events in Nablus for what she calls her own struggle against terrorism.

"I'm ashamed I didn't come before but I was working. I was a single parent. I had children at university. Now I'm here as a witness."

Heroic revolutionary sacrifices don't come any greater, but even more remarkable is this clearly understood, spontaneous eruption of Marxist-Leninist science, - taught by imperialist tyranny.

This is happening by the millions and billions, worldwide, right now.

The fake-'left' racist snobs will sniff, but even semi-feudal Nepal's masses are withstanding ferocious tyrannical repression in order to sacrifice for the revolutionary cause, - as even capitalist press reports are obliged to admit, reading between the lines of routine cynicism, ignorant disinformation, and complacent apathy about the worldwide revolutionary mess that imperialist degeneracy is getting itself into:

'People's War' was launched by the Maoist wing of the Communist Party of Nepal. It didn't seem serious then, not compared to all the other problems Nepal's fledgling democracy, hatched in 1991, needed to address. The Maoist leader was Comrade Prachanda, literally the 'fierce one', a 41-year-old former horticulture teacher. His rhetoric and aims seemed almost quaint in 1996, a kind of nostalgic glance backwards to extreme left-wing peasant movements, from Peru's Shining Path to Cambodia's Khmer Rouge. Nobody was laughing for long.

With astonishing swiftness, the Maoists gained control of Nepal's remote western districts as the country's elected leaders squandered their chance. A dozen governments came and went, all of them characterised by factionalism and greed.

In contrast, the Maoists were well organised. Without foreign support, they fashioned home-made weapons and overran remote police posts to acquire guns and ammunition, rolling back the state's presence. By the time of the royal massacre, as much as 40 per cent of Nepal was under Maoist control.

Prachanda and his Maoist cohorts have at least attempted to address the problems of Nepal's rural poor, such as bonded slavery and the dismal position of women.

In covering Nepal's agonies, Western journalists have focused heavily on the Maoists themselves; shadowy, exotic figures who make good copy. In a rare interview, Prachanda's deputy, Baburam Bhattarai, was asked by the Nepal-born academic Dr Chitra Tiwari in the Washington Times whether the Maoists could ever mount a campaign like that experienced in Cambodia under Pol Pot. 

'There is no independent and authentic account of events in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge available so far,' he told Tiwari. 'Whatever is emanating from the Western media appears to be highly exaggerated.' When Tiwari asked for a little personal background to put a human face on the Maoist machine, Bhattarai's response was just as hardline: 'We believe people are mere products of historical necessity and occur as a matter of chance... you can take me as a typical representative of a Third World educated youth of peasant background.'

There's a Nepalese saying that everyone in a village knows who the Maoists are except the soldiers searching for them. In Jagatiyaa, the army accused Lakshmi's family of giving food to the Maoists,  the reason they searched the house and killed.

While I talked to Lakshmi, I knew that Maoist sympathisers were watching for any sign of dissension from the cause. 'I cannot say,' one villager hissed when I asked him about the Maoists. 'All I can say is that we want to live in peace.' Negotiations between the government and the Maoists have started again, although there are few guarantees that the current ceasefire won't end as quickly as the last one in November 2001. Then the government declared a state of emergency and asked the king to deploy the army which, despite democracy, has remained under his personal control.

Many Western diplomats in Kathmandu quietly welcomed the move, imagining a short, successful campaign that would contain Prachanda and allow the development of this chronically poor country to resume. Instead the true causes of Nepal's chaos became clearer.

The state's institutions, including the army, were exposed as being rotten with incompetence and corruption, incapable and unwilling to meet the people's needs. The Maoists were not the problem at all, just a symptom. By going to war the government had accelerated Nepal's slow decline.

Last autumn, after the government announced that elections would be delayed by the security crisis, Gyanendra sacked prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuha and appointed his own man. It looked very much like a coup.

Friendly Western governments - and beautiful, exotic Nepal has many friends - are now trapped in a quandary. The country has a puny economy, underpinned by remittances from migrant workers and foreign donations. No one wants to turn their backs on Nepal, but human rights abuses by the government seem out of control.

In a special report published last December, Amnesty International detailed cases of murder, rape, extortion, censorship, kidnapping and disappearances perpetrated on ordinary people.

By January, official figures were putting the death toll for the six-year war at over 7,000. Over 5,300 had been killed by the security forces, with more than 4.000 of these deaths occurring in 2002 - after the deployment of the army. These deaths often occur in 'encounters' with Maoists that turn out to be extra-judicial executions. One human rights activist I spoke with in Nepalgunj told me that he had investigated more than 90 incidents in his district where the army had claimed the victims were killed by crossfire. None were true.

Sushil Pyakurel is the human rights representative on Nepal's National Human Rights Commission. He believes the official death toll is at least double that admitted by the army. The west of Nepal is on the move, with hundreds of refugees escaping the conflict by fleeing to India.

Now, the 55,000 strong Royal Nepal Army is recruiting more troops and equipping itself with 5,000 M16s bought with export credits from the United States. American State Department officials see the struggle in Nepal as part of the global campaign against terrorism. They have also provided army helicopters with night-vision equipment.

It's an open secret that there have been British and US military advisers helping the army. Most agree that such ill-disciplined troops could use the help. The British have also bought the army two Miry helicopters from Kazakhstan which the Foreign Office says will be used for humanitarian purposes alone. But there is plenty of evidence troops have fired randomly from helicopters at innocent people working in the terraced fields below.

'When this started,' Pyakurel says, 'the Maoists had pipe bombs and 303s. Now it's more lethal. But the root of the problem is political.' For Pyakurel, the 'antibiotic for the Maoist problem is land reform'. Ordinary Nepalese deserve more than their masters allow, but land ownership goes to something even deeper in this often feudal society - deference.

Amnesty International claims that the key word at the heart of Nepal's problems was 'impunity'. The state's apparatus isn't interested in serving the people, just itself. The people drinking coffee on the king's lawn couldn't care less about the people outside the palace gates, while at the same time greasing up to those in power. Nepal, in essence, is a nation of passive-aggressive forelock-tuggers.

At the wedding, I catch sight of disgraced prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba. It seems strange he is there after Gyanendra had so publicly humiliated him. Every day, Deuba and his colleagues had raged in the newspapers against what had amounted to a coup d'état. But here he is, smiling unctuously and shaking hands with the Maharajah of Jaipur.

All Lal wanted was to get his secondary school certificate and train as a teacher So he came to Nepalgunj and enrolled as a student.

Being 18 and coming from an area controlled by the Maoists, Lal fitted the police profile for a revolutionary. Armed police picked him up one evening in December 2001 with three friends. Handcuffed and blindfolded, they were tortured every day for eight months, their feet beaten with rubber hoses, their wounds smeared with chilli powder.

Lal's health collapsed. He was released from the armed police station at Bageshwori and treated in hospital before being returned to a different prison. Officers there, fearful he would perish in jail, took him to the missionary hospital where he was diagnosed as suffering from cerebral tuberculosis. His paralysis is permanent.

I am told that police guarding him in hospital would beat him at night and then, when the time limit for filing a complaint against his treatment in jail passed, they left him alone.

Still more remarkably, the Western world leadership's reactionary warmongering hysteria picking on Third World scapegoats, but now threatening Europe and the whole world with American military blitzkrieg vengeance if the US ruling class's will is defied, - has even had the effect of getting sincere sympathy and solidarity for North Korea from that most biliously anti-communist cesspit of all, - the Guardian fake-'left' sophisticates:

As Colin Powell tracked the latest half mile across the shifting sands of the US administration's case against Iraq, North Korea announced that it had reactivated the Yongbyon nuclear plant - reminding us that there was little Powell could say about Iraq that was not more true of North Korea.

The North Korean crisis illustrates the inconsistency of US foreign policy. If there is little in the way of policy towards North Korea coming out of Washington, it is because, as the US administration knows, the North Korean case responds even less persuasively to the threat of force than does Iraq. 

It is largely the threat from the US right that has got us into this position. North Korea is a test of the efficacy of the dominator mode that now rules in Washington. It is a test that it is likely to fail.

As a gesture to the Korean crisis, the US announced last week that it would be sending more warplanes to South Korea. US troops stationed there were warned that their tours may be extended. In South Korea, they don't know whether to laugh or cry. They know that if it comes to military action, South Korea will be the first to suffer followed, conceivably, by Japan. We are not talking about a few thousand Iraqis but potentially millions in east Asia.

The huge potential cost of a conflict with North Korea is one sound reason for the existence of the North Korean nuclear programme. No doubt the North Korean regime is deeply unpleasant, but it is not entirely illogical. Since the Korean war, it has understood that the disappearance of the Kim regime, and even of North Korea itself, is a long-term goal of US foreign policy. Deterring the US, therefore, has been its fundamental long-term objective.

Does this make North Korea dangerous? Potentially yes, but it does not make it irrational. It has had a nuclear weapons programme and an advanced missile programme - the best deterrent, the country reasons, to any future US assault. But at the same time it signalled that a secondary purpose was for use as a bargaining chip.

When the cold war ended, North Korea lost Soviet sponsorship. It wanted to come in from the cold and when in 1994 Clinton was prepared to negotiate, the result was the signing of the "agreed framework". This laid out a programme of verification and inspection, and secured a North Korean promise to stop developing weapons in return for fuel oil, and a US commitment to decommission North Korea's old nuclear reactors in favour of two safer US-built replacements. 

It was the most important example of Pyongyang's interest in engagement, and it is worth remembering what the agreement achieved. North Korea agreed to close its reprocessing plant at Yongbyon and did so. Talks on other sites continued, but US negotiators were  encouraged by the fact that, in the two years leading up to the signing of the treaty, North Korea had not extracted fuel rods from its reactors and did not extract any plutonium, a gesture that supported the contention the weapons programme was not its primary goal.

So what happened to the promises of 1994? In the US, Newt Gingrich happened. Clinton faced a Republican Congress led by a rightwing ideologue convinced that the North Korean regime was in a terminal state. (The same argument has been used for decades to nix negotiations with Cuba.) The US fell into technical default on the agreement and the nuclear power stations were never completed. Despite this, North Korea pursued diplomacy with South Korea Japan and Israel. (The Israeli negotiations, in which Israel had agreed to buy a North Korean gold mine in return for a promise to stop exporting missiles to Iran, were halted by the US.)

When George W got to the White House and announced that he loathed North Korea, Pyongyang read it, not unreasonably, as a sign that diplomacy had entered a bear market. Given that the US proposes to spend more on missile defence this year than on the entire State Department, it is hard to argue with Pyongyang.

The present reactivation of the North Korean nuclear programme could be seen as an impulse to mass suicide, or, more likely, given its history, an attempt to bring the US back to the negotiating table. Failing negotiations, hardliners in North Korea might well argue, at least they need a nuclear shield against a trigger-happy Washington.

China, Russia, Japan and South Korea all want a nuclear-free North Korea. But they know that such an agreement would require a guarantee that the US will not stage a pre-emptive strike. On September 20 last year, the US proclaimed its right to stage pre-emptive strikes. Dominators rule in Washington. As North Korea demonstrates, ruling the world is a more nuanced challenge.

This does not yet amount to US warmongering degeneracy teaching this particular part of the world to become revolutionary over this particular issue; but it does show how this CRISIS transformation of the planet is going to reverse the whole trend of history, away from capitalism's empty "triumph" over dying Revisionism, and back towards serious, genuine REVOLUTIONARY struggle via class war for a better civilisation in the only way possible. Build Leninism.	EPSR