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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No 1229 April 20th 2004                                                                                                                                         25p
Southwest seminar 2 pm Sat.Rcpts.

American slaughter in Falluja and murder of Palestinian leaders are aspects of Western DEFEAT desperation, not "almighty" strength. The Bush-Blair "no compromise" posturing, killing or gaoling more and more Arabs and Muslims while backing Zionland's extinction of all Palestinian rights, is being done to hide the splits and the fear of LOSING in the colonial-monopolist camp. Bush's thug-like but stumbling act draws only Hitler-level ridicule. The Jew-colonist savagery masks a RETREAT, not triumphalism. Anti-imperialist struggle is learning how to BEAT Western imperialism, leaving fake-'left' Quisling-collaborators with US "anti-terrorism" tyranny shamed by Bush's war's neo-NAZI echoes. The "two-state solution" fraud marks out the political cowardice. Marxism's "certainties" are what make it such a priceless revolutionary science. The "Islamic" problem" is Western counter-revolutionary nonsense. Only scientific anti-imperialism will eventually 
triumph in the Third World.

The NAZI-assassination butchery continuing against Iraq and the Gaza Strip, is the best proof yet of the colossal WEAKNESS of the imperialist re-colonisation cause.

And the Middle East disasters from Palestine to Afghanistan come at only the first step of crisis-hit US imperialism's world-domination needs (see EPSR box).

Bush's approval of Zionism's genocidal land-grab trick of turning Gaza into a settlement-free giant concentration camp for the Palestinians while virtually annexing the West Bank for permanent Jewish monopoly-capitalist possession, has egged on Sharon's death-squads (did they need it?) but was only an indicator of Washington's now desperate need to "prove that the USA is still resolute and competently tough".

But Iraq daily is still heaping up evermore colossal doubts about either aspect.

And Bush's cheap and brainless gesture towards Sharon's barbarism has only rendered the US position doubly useless, and doubly contemptible.

The Zionist NAZI massacres continue BECAUSE THEY HAVE T0, out of the entire, sick, doomed "logic" of the Western imperialist system, post-1945, stealing the land of the Palestinian nation away from them to give it to the Jewish monopoly-capitalists (as compensation and a silencer for the filthy treachery to the Jews of the 1930s when the build-up of NAZI Germany was deliberately encouraged by the West (Munich appeasement, etc) as a barrier to growing Soviet socialist influence during the Depression's devastating and incurable capitalist trade slump and mass unemployment.)

The WHOLE land of Palestine (now "Israel") was ENTIRELY populated by the Palestinian people, — WHO ARE STILL ALIVE, but festering in refugee camps or in the Zionist-controlled barbed-wire reservations called Gaza and the West Bank.

The notion of "a Palestinian state, side by side with the Jewish state of Israel" has ALWAYS been a complete joke, even when first pronounced by the "United Nations" stooges for US imperialism.

The very nature of the ethnic-cleansing expulsions of the Palestinians by UN decree to clear 60% of the land for Jewish occupation and colonisation, initially, made it absolutely certain that there could NEVER be "peace" thereafter.

Enforced local tactics notwithstanding, only Western minds of the utmost political cowardice and political ignorance, and of considerable petty bourgeois nastiness and treachery, could ever have peddled the disgusting hypocrisy about "a two-state solution" for long.

It is absolutely tell-tale and typical of the ENTIRE fake-'left' in Britain, all the way from the counter-revolutionary Alliance/Respect Trots and Greenies, all the way to the Stalinist-addled Lalkar and SLP, that this is still their position.

This neatly maintains the same "Western" solidarity with Bush and Blair's "road map" fraud as the fake-'left' keeps intact by refusing to denounce its own past "condemn terrorism" stupidity, playing right into the hands of the imperialist "war on terrorism" brainwashing hoax (more on this later).

The only logic of this genocidal wiping out of the land of Palestine, effectively, is that the brutal Zionist colonising repression will have to go on UNTIL EVERY LAST PALESTINIAN HAS BEEN KILLED.

And as the weekly EPSR has never ceased to regularly fully explain for the past 25 years, the phenomenon will be observed of rightwing Zionist terror going on, and on, and on to ever-more-unbelievable NAZI tyranny of assassinations, torture, collective punishments, mass killings, total humiliation of Palestinians, etc, etc, etc, — in a word to the GENOCIDE which is the only "logic" of the original infamous imperialist-"UN" atrocity of giving armed Zionist colonisation the go-ahead in the first place.

But such historical "inevitabilities", (predicted by scientific Marxist philosophy of the vast epochal movements of class and national forces in the monopoly-imperialist era which govern the outcome of all civilisation's developments and struggle), are precisely what are so uncomfortable for every brand of bogus "Marxism" around.

Born of the congenital opportunism of living in the West, scepticism and cynicism always offer a far more convenient way of surviving on the 'left'.

But however hard to fathom, it is only the "certainties" of Marxism which have made it the potentially all-powerful tool of REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS for the proletarian masses once imperialist world-domination has confused, terrorised, and shattered the world towards total paralysis and the brink of total disaster.

The sick treacheries of Bush and Blair in no longer even bothering to pretend "evenhandedness" between the Palestinians and the Jewish colonisation (an utterly fraudulent posture anyway since the Palestinians are 100% the VICTIMS (of genocidal expulsion from their homeland) and the Zionists 100% the VIOLENT PERPETRATORS (of this entire rotten land-theft saga since 1945)) are thus irrelevant anyway as far as the continued terrorist-tyranny by the Jews is concerned, since it is bound to continue unavoidably whatever else happens.

Every "peace initiative" there has ever been, or ever could be, along the lines of "reform, restraint, and compromise", etc, etc, is nothing but a total sham.

Bush's gunslinger smirk towards these latest cold-blooded Zionist butcherings, — endorsing the West Bank annexation intentions as they skulk behind the "let's just turn Gaza into one giant concentration camp" stunt, — was in fact fixed on and cemented by entirely different concerns, — the hopeless and divisive mess that the entire Western "war on terrorism" project (for a non-stop warmongering posture against the entire rest of the world until the nightmare economic crisis of imperialism is resolved (see EPSR box)) has now sunk into.

The NAZI blitzkrieg on Iraq is now DEEP IN TROUBLE instead of forcing the whole world to cower at the awesome power, ruthlessness, and effectiveness of the "shock and awe" punishment programme for the whole "axis of evil", for all "rogue states", or indeed for all who are "against us" (against the USA) by not being "with us" (i.e. virtually the whole planet bar a few scabby stooges like Blair, Berlusconi, and the fascist imbecile who runs Uzbekistan).

Bush smirks a) because his brain, frankly, doesn't run to much more imaginative limits, — which is fun but politically irrelevant; and b) because his regime is in total confusion about the nature of the whole crisis-problem they are dealing with, and about what is going wrong with their "solution" and why, and about what to do next, — but the last thing that he dare do is to let on about this total pandemonium and chaos.

Blair grimaces like an imbecile for the same reasons.

The EPSR, once again, has never ceased explaining for the last 25 years that the whole of postwar world history can only be properly understood if the relentlessly approaching greatest-ever crisis of warmongering, arising out of imperialist economic "overproduction" collapse, is grasped as the dominant driving force governing every longterm development.

ONLY when the unprecedented post-1945 imperialist world-trade boom is considered in its eventual CRASH and war destruction perspective can any real sense, for example, be made of the wretched Stalinist-Revisionist latter history of the Soviet workers state culminating in Gorbachev's infamous self-liquidation of it.

On another level, no sense can be made, e.g., of the "Islamic fundamentalist" colouring of these first stages of global anti-imperialist revolution unless the whole picture of eventual TOTAL imperialist warmongering debacle is borne in mind.

Individual events make up history, and are random, and in one sense are not completely predictable, i.e. in one sense remain unpredictable.

But those individual events are also simultaneously being corralled towards broadly predictable historical patterns, governed in accordance with Marx's philosophical science of civilisation's development.

For a while, any particular set of events might turn out any way.

Iraq, for example, and the "war on terrorism" might yet produce some more spectacular "shock and awe US triumphs" such as the fake-'left' have long been acclimatising to, seeing nothing but "imperialist-imposed peace settlements" (i.e. defeats) on a long list of anti-imperialist struggles such as Anti-Apartheid; Sinn Féin/IRA; Palestine; Cuba; China; East Europe; and latterly on "terrorism" and Iraq, etc, etc.

But it makes infinitely more sense to examine all these various outcomes ONLY in the light of the ultimate disaster into which all these temporary imperialist bullying dealings are eventually heading, and AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PICTURE thereby emerges.

The Palestinians are only being taught one thing, — how to fight better.

The Irish national-liberation struggle ended with the admission that the bastard statelet of "Northern Ireland", nothing but a police-military dictatorship for Orange fascist tyranny, was FINISHED, — a massive blow to British imperialism which had fought to save it, but lost.

The Soviet workers state's self-liquidation will one day be seen as a necessary step in the dismantling of the monstrous Revisionist "peaceful coexistence" and "peaceful roads to socialism" world psychoses which understandably brainwashed the whole planet at a certain period of history; and the eventual restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat there and elsewhere in East Europe will become regarded as the only obvious way in which the unprecedented international brainwashing phenomenon of anti-communism could have been overcome.

Currently on Iraq, the fake-'left' are wobbling like mad, now edging away from the rigid "formally correct" disparagement of "reactionary Islam" towards an opportunist grasp that "staying in the political swim" might require these "Marxist" frauds to "talk nicely" to any successful Islamic anti-imperialist struggle.

"Potential allies??" is the new note being struck about the previously denounced al-Qaeda for its "pointless and immoral terrorist killings and waste of innocent human life....a war crime" (current Weekly Worker).

Attempts are made at some more formally correct "Marxist" tactics of a "united-front" fight alongside the "legitimate Islamic grievances against the US-led world order" while simultaneously developing "the workers movement's own self-defence against these terrorist bombing operations like Bali and Madrid".

This scarcely believable posturing-nonsense reveals the depths of the confusion that the Western petty bourgeoisie has now been plunged into by imperialist defeat, which is taking shape ever-more-distinctly out of the incredible mess that the monopoly capitalist warmongering insanity has inflicted on the Middle East, and on world politics generally.

The total revolutionary disruption that a completely paralysed imperialist warmongering disaster would bring is as alarming a prospect for these fraud-'socialist' pedlars of the "left-reformist pressure" delusions, as it is for the rest of the infinitely varied bourgeois mentality.

They don't like the dictatorship of the proletariat which would have to take over from the collapse of the epoch of bourgeois imperialist dictatorship, and so they don't have any perspective for monopoly-capitalist warmongering DEFEAT.

But the Marxist inevitability of eventual imperialist disgrace, paralysis, and defeat is the ONLY sensible framework in which to try to unravel the chaos steadily gripping the world, and to most purposefully intervene in it.

For example, this particular new Gaza assassination phase of Sharon's "murderous toughness" is sensibly grasped in even bourgeois circles (in Palestine and elsewhere) as just monstrously sick bluster by the Jew-colonists to blur the image of the RETREAT from Gaza which Zionist turmoil has reluctantly decided upon as a result of Intifada terror-bombing ferocity and in the hope of appeasing it.

Even more demented warmonger-Zionists than Sharon would have defeated his retreat proposal in Cabinet but for this lunatic desperation "cover" which pretends that if the Zionist gaolers murder a Gaza concentration-camp inmate or two, then Hamas will not be able to jeer triumphantly at the whole Zionist colonisation project when the Jewish settlements in Gaza get scuttled later this year to try to abate the terrifying and demoralising effects on Zionland of the Islamic suicide terror bombing and other guerrilla war activities.

But it is DEFEAT for Jewish monopoly-capitalism's longterm colonisation-of-Palestine project which is alone the real issue here.

Building "Israel" was always nothing but a sick, fascist-warmongering catastrophe-in-the-making from the start.

It will stagger on only to TOTAL world-threatening warmongering disaster; and complete utter DEFEAT for this poisonous colonial-genocide project alone will provide a cure.

And it remains among the more speculative EPSR projections that it might still be Big Power imperialist warmongering itself which is forced to impose the first curbing military restraint upon the barking-mad Zionists as the warmongering chaos slips more-and-more completely out of Washington's control further on in the crisis.

The frightened Bush regime's mindless cynicism (in giving the nod to Sharon's illegal outrage of denying Palestinian refugees their Geneva War-based "right of return") has thus only deepened Washington's mire. 

More hatred and fighting-anger than ever arises from the entire Third World at this atrocious anti-Palestinian tyranny, and yet at the same time the Zionist mad-dogs are more dangerously out-of-control than ever. Washington's confusion was well captured by Bush's press-conference idiocy, contrasting startlingly with Osama's calm clarity and ever-sharpening political perspicacity:

Edited text of statement said to be by Osama bin Laden

This is a message to our neighbours north of the Mediterranean, with a proposal for a truce in response to positive reactions which emerged there.

What happened on September 11 and March 11 are your goods returned to you so that you know security is a necessity for all and we do not accept that you monopolise it for yourselves, and knowledgeable nations will not accept that their leaders risk security.

Be aware that if you describe us and our actions as terrorism, you should describe yourselves and actions that way as well. Our actions come in response to your actions of destroying and killing our people in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. It is enough to witness the event that shocked the world, the killing of the elderly, wheelchair-bound Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, God have mercy on him, and we pledge to God to take revenge on America, God willing. Under what grace are your victims innocent and ours dust, and under which doctrine is your blood blood, and our blood water?

Reciprocation is just and he who starts is more unjust. As for your leaders, and those who adopt their strategy, who insist on ignoring the real problem of the occupation of all of Palestine and who exaggerate in lying and denying our right to defend ourselves and to resist, they have no self-respect and belittle the faith and minds of people.

Their fallacy increases the shedding of your blood instead of stemming it. A review of the deaths in our land and your land reveal an important truth, which is that there is injustice done to both us and you by your leaders, who send your sons, despite your objections, to our land to kill and be killed. 

It is in the interest of both not to give a chance to those who shed the blood of nations for their limited personal interest and obedience to the gang of the White House.

This war earns millions of dollars for big companies, whether those who manufacture weapons or those involved in reconstruction, such as Halliburton and its sisters and daughters. And it becomes very clear who benefits from igniting the fires of this war and bloodshed: it is the traders of war, the bloodsuckers who run the policy of the world from behind a curtain. 

President Bush and leaders in his sphere, big media institutions, and the United Nations, which entrenches the relationship between the veto masters and the General Assembly slaves, are all instruments in deceiving and abusing people. All of them are a fatal danger to the world, and the Zionist lobby is their most dangerous and difficult member, and we insist, God willing, on continuing to fight them. 

Based on this, and to deprive war traders of opportunities, and in response to the positive reactions reflected in recent events and public polls showing that most European people want a truce, I urge the faithful, especially scholars, clerics and traders to establish a permanent committee to build awareness among Europeans of the justice of our causes, foremost Palestine, and make use of the vast media resources. I offer a truce to them [Europe] with a commitment to stop operations against any state which vows to stop attacking Muslims or interfere in their affairs, including [participating] in the American conspiracy.

Whoever rejects this truce and wants war, we are its sons; and whoever wants this truce, here we bring it. Stop shedding our blood to save your own and the solution to this simple but complex equation is in your hand. You know matters will escalate the more you delay: then do not blame us but blame yourselves. Rational people do not risk their security, money and sons to appease the White House liar.

GEORGE Bush was laid bare to the world as a bumbling embarrassment yesterday when he could not think of an answer to a simple question.

His keynote address to the American nation, watched by tens of millions, saw the president at his cringe-making worst.

Apart from referring to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of State for 17 minutes all went well as he gave a prepared statement about Iraq in only his third prime-time solo appearance before reporters at the White House.

Then came the bombshell question which floored him.

Q: Mr. President. You've looked back before 9/ll for what mistakes might have been made. After 9/ll, what would your biggest mistake be and what lessons have you learned from it?

A: I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it (Laughter from Press, long pause). Err John, I'm sure historians will look back and say, 'Gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way'.

You know, I just, err (long pause). I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, (holds his hands up with palms facing) but it hadn't yet. 

(Long pause) I would have gone into Afghanistan the way we went into Afghanistan. Even knowing what I know today about the stockpiles of weapons, I still would (pause) have called upon the world to deal with Saddam Hussein.

See, I happen to believe that we'll find out the truth on the weapons. That's why we've sent (sic) up the independent commission. I look forward to hearing the truth, exactly where they are. They could still be there (swivels head for emphasis). They could be hidden, like the 50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm.

Even journalists familiar with the President's 'Bush-isms', a mix of misspoken words and grammatical errors, were taken aback by his latest ramblings and cast knowing glances.

Next came his most jaw-dropping reply: "I don't want to sound like I have made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't. You just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."

It later emerged Mr Bush exaggerated Libya's WMD stocks during his address, and the White House issued an apology saying the 50 tons of mustard gas mentioned were in fact 23.6 tons.

During one Forrest Gump moment Mr Bush admitted Iraqi dissatisfaction, stating: "They're not happy they're occupied. I wouldn't be happy if I were occupied either."

Later, wrapping up the press conference, he said: "It's a pretty sombre assessment today. One thing is for certain; though, about me (pause) and the world has learned this (pause), when I say something, I mean it. And the credibility of the United States is incredibly important for keeping world peace and freedom."

Politics professor Robert T Starks, called Bush "an abomination. to a great nation", after watching his performance on TV.

The 60-year-old political science professor at Northeastern Illinois University, branded Bush's answers "vapid, confusing and evasive".

AN editorial in the highly-respected New York Times said: "Mr Bush was grave and impressive reading his opening remarks, which focused on the horrors of terrorism and the great good that could come from establishing a free, democratic Iraq.

"No one in the country could disagree with either thought. But his responses to questions were distressingly rambling and unfocused."

The Chicago Tribune commented: "..the President, who spoke repeatedly about being on a war footing, hardly seemed sure-footed, even on questions that could scarcely be seen as overly aggressive."

The Daily News said: "Bush rambled at times and repeated himself frequently."

And political science lecturer Bruce Caswell, writing in the The South Jersey News, said: "All in all I thought it was a pretty sub-par performance."

Bush's brainlessness was well matched by the mindless thuggery of the USA's demented revenge seeking in Falluja:

The AC-130 gunships spray their 40mm cannon fire, the guns roaring like a chainsaw chewing through metal. The Sunni militiamen fire back, lighting up the American positions with mortars, rockets and bullets.

A marine smiles at the cacophony and the flashes of light as dawn breaks, the strains of Shoot to Thrill by AC/DC, screeching out from the loudspeakers of a Humvee, reverberate across the ghostly neighbourhood.

"You're not men. You hide behind women's skirts. Come out and fight," shouts a psychological operations officer over a loud-hailer.

Two Iraqis immediately do so — and a marine mows them down with his machine-gun.

This is a ceasefire, Falluja-style.

On the edge of the front line, a man in a white robe sweeps his driveway and tends his garden, yards away from another Arab, clad in black and white, shot dead by marine snipers hours earlier.

As the gardener removes some fallen branches from hedges around his home, the marines lose patience and fire a warning shot. The man bolts inside.

The marine snipers perch in a dilapidated breezeblock attic, wallpapered with pictures of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and mourn their fallen friend, Corporal Blake Wofford.

Each wants a chance of revenge. "I think, Blake, this is for you. I hope this is the f***** who got you," says the sniper, who earlier shot the Arab clad in black and white.

Winning hearts and minds is on the back burner for the moment. 

Ned Parker is an AFP correspondent embedded with US forces.

Locals in the deeply religious city of 200,000 people have told of countless incidents of civilians — including women, children and the elderly — killed by US snipers, cluster bombs and attacks from helicopter gunships and fighter planes. Their claims appear to belie American assertions that 95% of those killed in the city have been insurgents.

As early as the first day of the operation, before the siege of the city had begun, an airstrike close to the al-Julan area killed nine civilians.

With tears in his eyes, Nasur Hamdani, the father of Ali Nasur, 4, described how his son lost a hand and a leg and was castrated by flying shrapnel from the missile while he was playing in his grandfather's garden. "Most people did not support the resistance before," he said. "Now the resistance are seen as true heroes. I have only one question for the Americans: what did my child do to deserve this?"

The same thoughts echoed across the neighbourhood as the besieged inhabitants did what they could to save one another. Shortly after Ali was wounded, Hazwan Raawi, a former army officer and a father of two, saw the Americans strike two houses in his street. The three Hussein brothers who had been sipping tea outside one of the buildings stood no chance.

Ammar Ali Hussein was a taxi driver and had three children: Raawi found pieces of his head splattered against a wall. His younger brother Taraq, a barber, lost a leg and bled to death, while the youngest brother Kaldun, who had only just got engaged to marry, lost half his face.

A pivotal moment in the battle came the following day, when another airstrike killed at least 40 Iraqis at the Abdul Aziz al-Samarrai mosque. The dazed citizens gave up all hope of burying their dead at the cemeteries that lie outside the city centre. Instead they either dug makeshift graves in their back gardens or carried their loved ones to hasty funerals in the football stadium.

Other victims of the fighting lay in no man's land towards the American lines; their bodies bloated by the sun and ravaged by packs of dogs.

If the object of Vigilant Resolve was to break the resolve of Falluja, then it has backfired. For every man who falls, several more take up arms. "I know of many people who have joined the fighters because they are so angered by what the Americans have done," said Mustapha Akhmed, 27, who escaped Falluja last week.

"The Americans have no mercy," said another. "A doctor who came from Basra to help the wounded, was shot dead by a sniper as he got out of an ambulance. Is this what they call liberating the Iraqi people?"

And now Spain's bourgeois capitalist state, with as vicious an imperialist-tyranny record as any in Europe, is pulling out of this murderous madhouse.

And so desperate now is the USA for ANY support it can get to hide its naked infamy, from the UN or anywhere, — that sneers about "paella-eating surrender monkeys" were far less prominent than when France's opt-out was the hot imperialist gossip.

This warmongering catastrophe the world is being dragged towards has started drawing unprecedented ridicule from all quarters, including much scathing bourgeois criticism, very pointedly aimed at other bourgeois:

What does it take to get a New Labour politician to speak out on Iraq? I'm not talking about the likes of Blair, Hoon and Straw — key players so deeply implicated in the cruel tragedy of conquest and occupation that they have no option but to stay the course, even as it spirals into slaughter and chaos. But there are ministers and backbenchers with a history of commitment to human rights. What does it take to shock them out of their baffling silence?

Not the 600 or 700 Iraqis killed over the last fortnight in Falluja, it seems.

Maybe they accept the reassurance of the commander of the US marines besieging the city that his men are "trained to be precise in their firepower", and that "95% of those killed were legitimate targets".

Let's accept for the moment that the commander is right and accept that the AC-130 gunships and F16 fighter bombers unleashed against the people of Falluja are precise, that the 500lb bombs falling on the city come under the definition of judicious. Let's look at just a handful of the 5% of civilian casualties the Americans concede they have inflicted. These include the mother of six-year-old Haider Abdel-Wahab, shot and killed while hanging out laundry; his father, shot in the head; Haider himself, and his brothers, crushed but dug out alive after a US missile struck their house. 

They include children who died of head wounds. They include an old woman with a bullet wound — still clutching a white flag when aid workers found her. They include an elderly man lying face down at the gate to his house — while inside terrified girls screamed "Baba! Baba!" They include ambulance crews fired on by US troops — and four-year-old Ali Nasser Fadil, wounded during an air strike. 

The New York Times reporter who found the infant in a Baghdad hospital described him lying in bed, "his eyes wide and fixed on a spot in the ceiling". His left leg had been crudely amputated. The same reporter found 10-year-old Waed Jvda by the bedside of his gravely wounded father. "American snipers shot at us as we were trying to flee Falluja," said Waed. 

Every one of these incidents has been documented by journalists, aid workers or medical staff. And there are plenty more. Even allowing for casualties caused by the Iraqi resistance, the dread catalogue of American-inflicted suffering and death is long and undeniable. At this point it's worth reminding ourselves that 5% of 600 is 30. But the evidence of the bodies alone gives the lie to the American account: at least 350 of the dead in Falluja have been women and children. 

The Americans say they are engaged in a mission to bring to justice the perpetrators of the four security contractors — or mercenaries — killed and mutilated in the city on March 31. Locals see it differently. They describe their occupation, initially by troops of the US 82nd Airborne, as oppressive from the start. Almost as soon as they arrived, in April 2003, US soldiers killed 18 protesters during a demonstration. After six months of occupation, the 82nd Airborne had killed at least 40 civilians and police in the city.

In March, the 82nd Airborne were replaced by a Marine Expeditionary Force and, shortly afterwards, an American soldier was killed. On March 27, marines undertook a "sweep" through the city, described as "revenge" by Mohammed Albalwa, president of the city council. At least six Iraqi civilians, including an 11-year-old boy, were killed. It was in this heightened atmosphere that the mercenaries met their grisly deaths. No one can pretend that the assault on Falluja is anything other than retribution for the mercenaries — even members of the hand-picked Iraqi governing council accept it as such.

On all of this — a shameful and deafening silence. Politicians are not usually so tongue-tied. Remember Peter Hain, leader of the House, after bands of landless black poor invaded white-owned farms in Zimbabwe? The number of white farmers killed was a fraction of the toll of civilians who die every week in Iraq at the hands of coalition forces. Hain was swift to denounce Zimbabwe's government as "uncivilised". He spoke of his "horror" at the killings. Tyranny, he said, was "running riot in Zimbabwe" and "disfiguring the whole of the southern African sub-continent". So far, Hain has been silent about the horror wreaked by US firepower in FaIluja and the disfigurement of Iraq by what has by any reckoning been a massacre.

And what about Chris Mullin, a former Tribune editor and now junior minister at the Foreign Office? Best remembered for his campaign to free the Birmingham Six, Mullin is frequently described as a friend of the underdog, with a commitment to human rights.

Sadly, these qualities have not been much in evidence recently. Last summer Mullin defended to me the kangaroo courts held in Belmarsh prison, at which anonymous witnesses testify against men imprisoned by the home secretary without charge ("Better than sending them back to their countries of origin where they would be killed" he said). And though he was outraged by the denial of justice to the Birmingham Six, Guantánamo does not disturb him ("September 11 changed everything"). The underdogs of Falluja have yet to move Mullin.

Then there's Hilary Benn, international development secretary, who has spoken of Britain's responsibility to get Iraqi schools and hospitals up and running, to ensure a future for Iraqi children. But it isn't easy to square the rhetoric of international development with that of military occupation: the promise of a good education doesn't mean much to parents dodging US snipers to dig a hole in a sports field in order to bury their child.

The list of the shameful silent could go on: Angela Eagle, a longstanding leftwinger? Silent. Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, former stalwarts of the old National Council for Civil Liberties? Silent. Oona King, who in her maiden speech cited the 1880 Match Girls' strike, has spoken passionately about the 35,000 children who die every day from preventable diseases and denounced the "slaughter and oppression" of the Palestinians in Jenin. Silent. Joan Ruddock, former chair of CND. Silent. Ann Clwyd, defender of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs, who wrote: "Some will continue to argue that internal repression is not a matter of legitimate concern for other countries. I disagree. There are basic human rights that must be defended." 

Are we to take it, then, that external repression is acceptable? That the human rights of the inhabitants of Falluja are not worth defending? What has happened to these people? Many of them don't even have ministerial jobs to protect. I have yet to hear any of them acknowledge that what is going on in Falluja is wrong. That killing children is wrong, blasting their houses is wrong, blowing up mosques is wrong, burying a family under a ton of rubble is wrong.

Today the siege of Falluja continues. US troops are massing outside the holy city of Najaf. In the south, the situation has been further inflamed by the British Army shooting 15 people dead in Amara on April 6 (silence there, too). In Baghdad's Sadr City, camouflaged Humvees tour the streets with loudspeakers warning people not to leave their homes. No one seriously believes things are improving in Iraq under occupation. How long before our MPs speak out?

Ronan Bennett is a novelist and screen writer. His novel Havoc in its Third Year is published by Bloomsbury in September 

The mote and beam comparison keeps making imbeciles of the dwindling band of ministers and functionaries who seek to defend the military invasion and grisly occupation of Iraq. Paul Bremer is the blinkered reactionary in charge of the administration of that country. Bremer was described in a special Financial Times profile last week as "an imposing figure with a devastating intellect".

Last week, in the middle of the growing chaos in Iraqi cities, Bremer savagely denounced groups "who think power in Iraq should come out of the barrel of a gun". He was not apparently referring to the US and British armed forces who seized power in Iraq (and put him into his powerful post) entirely and exclusively by sustained use of the barrels of thousands of guns, not to mention helicopter gunships, guided missiles, cluster bombs and weapons of people destruction of every conceivable kind. Bremer, in short, is an "imposing figure" in Iraq only because he was able to rely on the greatest firepower on earth.

Again last week, during the uprising in Falluja, Bremer became very annoyed with the insurgents, led, he alleged, by Sheikh Moqtada al-Sadr. On Tuesday last week I turned on the television to see Bremer angrily protesting that Sadr "basically tried to take control of the country". In an attempt to apply Bremer's "devastating intellect" to that sentence, I would define "the country" as Iraq, Sadr as a man who lives in that country, and Bremer, a career diplomat who lives in the US, as a man who not only tried but succeeded in taking over Iraq by force of arms without recourse to the people there (or even the United Nations).

What advice can we offer Bremer and his fellow imperialists, who keep denouncing Iraqi resistance to the invasion and occupation of their country for the violence and duplicity that they themselves regularly deploy?

A few hours after the terrorist train blasts in Madrid, western media hurried to the scene and mainstream British television networks broadcast the incident live. On the other hand, no one has suggested holding even a minute's silence for the, at least, 10,000 civilians killed in Iraq by those who claim to have gone there to promote democratic values. For the bereaved families, it did not make any difference whether their sons and daughters were killed by Saddam Hussein or their "liberators".

Further evidence of this conceit can be seen in the escalating efforts of the Bush administration and the neo-conservatives to push through their Greater Middle East initiative. The people of our region now associate the term "democracy" with western greed for oil and incessant interventions in our internal affairs. They regard it as self-evident that the west is not after democracy in the Middle East. The history of the region tells them, that grassroots movements for democracy have all been suppressed by the west.

History shows that the west stood against democracy in Iran, but behind the dictatorial regime of Saddam. The reason was a fear of democratic governments coming to power in a domino effect throughout the region.

In 1953, the United States helped orchestrate the overthrow of Iran's popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. It later encouraged Iraq to go to war against Iran. It provided Iraq with sophisticated conventional and non-conventional weapons (except nuclear ones, which were the exclusive domain of Israel).

In its support of "Saddam's democracy", it attacked Iranian oil platforms and naval ships. Finally, the US shot down an Iranian passenger airliner, killing more than 290 innocent passengers, and covered up this atrocity by offering a medal — for his "heroic achievement"—to the captain of the ship responsible.

The same US sent Henry Kissinger to Iran to support the so-called democratic reforms of the shah and offered the Iranian government access to American nuclear power technology. As secretary of state, Kissinger advised Iran to build at least 10 nuclear power plants. It is the height of insincerity for the US to now use bullying tactics against the International Atomic Energy Authority over Iran. Despite all the pressure, the IAEA has declared that Iran is not moving in the direction of manufacturing nuclear weapons.

The US has not learned its lesson and is still paying for past mistakes. It arrested Saddam in a humiliating way and keeps him hanging like a sword of Damocles over the heads of Iraqis. America is now hunting Osama bin Laden. It used his group, al-Qaida, to coerce Iran and, in collusion with the Taliban,  Iranian diplomats were murdered in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan.

Keeping the people of the Middle East in the dark and prioritising short-term western interests will not produce the desired results. Support for the former shah and the orchestration of two coups d'etat (in 1921 and 1953) by British and US agents did not prevent the victory of the Islamic revolution. This time the west, especially the US, should look at the region with its eyes open.

When Sheikh Yassin was killed leaving a mosque in his wheelchair by an Israeli helicopter, the democracy and accountability of Israel to the UN was demonstrated to the world. 

Condemnation of Israel's actions rarely goes beyond words. Western governments will not take a stand against the Sharon government's daily atrocities. But it is now taken for granted in the Middle East that if the condemnation concerns Muslims, they will go all the way to sanctions and even war.

Mohammad Ali Eskandari is press attaché at the Iranian embassy in London

A year ago today, with the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad, the pro-war commentators couldn't stop crowing about the ease with which the coalition forces had won a swift and righteous victory. 

In the immediate aftermath, their triumphalist verdict was: the war had been won; the dictator was overthrown; resistance was crumbling; Iraq was assured of a benevolent, democratic future. 

As that peerless prophet William Rees-Mogg told his Times readers: "April 9 2003 was Liberty Day for Iraq, the day on which one of the foulest of the 20th century tyrannies was finally destroyed". It was achieved, he wrote, by "the engine of global liberation", the United States. 

The Times's leader writer also hymned the victory: "Jubilant crowds emerged on the streets. Elated Iraqis threw flowers to greet American, troops ... After 24 years of oppression, three wars and three weeks of relentless bombing, Baghdad has emerged from an age of darkness. Yesterday was an historic day of liberation." 

One of the Times's senior executives, Michael Gove, wrote of the effects that would follow "a massive infusion of western humanitarian aid", proclaiming: "Hopes are high that it will soon become the most democratic state in the Arab world." This transformation would be aided by the fact that British "troops are recognised as the world's most effective in winning battles as well as hearts and minds".

Rupert Murdoch's other cheerleader for war, the Sun, told its readers: "The spontaneous outpouring of joy in towns and cities across Iraq was the message to the world that America and Britain are liberating allies, not oppressing invaders." It spoke of the war as "a political triumph... for Tony Blair and George Bush", because "virtually alone on the world stage, and blocked at all sides by the treachery of the French, Russians and Germans, they had the fortitude to do what they knew was right."

On April 13, Murdoch's Sunday Times saw it as "an easy military victory" and argued that the "remaining support for the regime has crumbled". Everything was just fine: "The Ark Royal is preparing to sail back to Britain. Yesterday's stop-the-war protest in London must rank as one of the silliest rallies in modern times."

The News of the World, Murdoch's fourth warmongering paper, equated the Baghdad looters with the so-called "TV polluters" in Britain, contending that the former would soon be elbowed aside, while reserving its vitriol for the latter: "What do the BBC and its friends want — Saddam back in power?"

The Daily Express believed the allied forces had won "one of the most remarkable military campaigns in recent history", adding: "Tony Blair's utter determination to see this battle through has been thoroughly vindicated." The Express columnists Richard and Judy informed us that the "weapons of mass destruction, or their components, will surely soon surface. "Iraqi scientists ... will reveal details of the research and development of illegal weapons programmes." 

Next day the Sunday Express's star columnist, Robert Kilroy-Silk — who later lost his BBC presenter's role after revealing an anti-Arab bias — was certain the Iraqis "can be in no safer hands than the British and Americans. Both are successful democracies with proud records on human rights. Both can be relied upon to keep their word and act with altruism to a degree that would seem foolish to the French. And the Iraqis can be assured the country will be returned in better shape than before."

Anne McElvoy, delighted at the vindication of her belief that the war was "both morally and practically right", scorned those who had predicted a "mother of all battles": They "are still waiting for their 'next Vietnam'", she wrote sarcastically in the London Evening Standard.

The Daily Telegraph berated the war's opponents too. "While many of those who opposed the war have had the good grace to keep quiet, others are even now trying to insist that the whole enterprise has been a disaster."

Then there was dear Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail, laying into "the anti-war lobby" and "armchair appeasers" for predicting disaster.

Though the Daily Mirror opposed the war, it generously offered space to one of the war's most vociferous supporters, Christopher Hitchens. He taunted the anti-war marchers and "half the newspaper columnists in England" for their forecasts of doom, confidently claiming that all was well in liberated Baghdad.

The Arab streets had not risen, "to spit in the face of Zionism and imperialism".

Anti-war demonstrators who claimed that "there would be heaps and heaps of slaughtered Iraqi civilians, and massive casualties among coalition troops" had been wrong. "Soon it will become evident to the naked eye that targeting was careful and the intentions honourable."

But at that point, the ignorant inability of all bourgeois commentary to have even the faintest idea of what they are talking about when they bandy around notions of "democracy" and the very nature and historical implications of warmongering imperialist crisis, etc, etc, causes interest in this dog-eat-dog handbagging to peter out.

"Democracy", — in the sense in which all bourgeois use it, — is just a joke, and is not even remotely any sort of possible "solution" (longterm or even shorter-term) in Iraq (or Afghanistan, or Palestine, or anywhere else, etc, etc).

The capitalist-imperialist world system, dominating all our lives, is falling ever deeper into an economic crisis of irreconcilable contradictions in which the Third World will no longer tolerate the grotesque and growing chasm between the richest communities on Earth and the poorest, and who will explode in revolution as the inter-imperialist trade war and slump conflict degenerates into ever-wider warmongering, and ever worsening poverty and despair for the world's masses.

This revolt is already beginning with the spread of ferocious resistance across the Middle East from Palestine to Afghanistan.

The early-stage "Islamic" character of this revolution is utterly irrelevant (and temporarily regionally and historically inevitable in the Middle East's case).

As consistently explained here, Hamas religiosity fades from influence, — as the original PLO secular "national democracy" compromise Revisionism faded from influences — AS SOON AS THE POLITICAL DEMANDS NO LONGER MEET THE SITUATION'S NEEDS, OR ANY LONGER CONVINCE ANYONE.

Utterly pointless is all "speaking nicely" by anyone to anyone else.

Harsh materialist philosophy revolutionary truths are what need putting forward, — constantly, — regardless of who might feel offended.

Exactly where and how is not clear, but revolutionary communist know-how will eventually triumphantly emerge right across the middle East and far, far beyond.

In many places on Earth, it will already be being argued-for right now, and those Marxist truths will steadily be confirmed by real events.

A breakdown of sectarianism to further the fight is already noted among Palestinians and Iraqis, — all SOLELY because of the historical pressures for ALL to get closer to the revolutionary truth about this world, now condemned by imperialist warmongering crisis.

It is this historical PROCESS to which all rational struggle should be oriented. Build Leninism. EPSR

E P S R box

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aznar's government's self-serving attempt to place the blame at the door of ETA, even in the face of growing evidence to the contrary, led voters to shift allegiances

The lies of Home Minister Acebes, and the Aznar administration's fear of telling the truth —  that their decision to go to war against Iraq had led to Spain being targeted by Islamic militants — angered voters, who elected José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's Socialist Party against all odds. The PP's blame game also caused the death of two Basque activists and led to attacks against Basque prisoners in Spanish jails.

On Friday 12 March, around 11 million Spaniards gathered in cities, towns and villages to protest the horror of the deaths of 200 citizens after ten bombs went off in four trains travelling towards Madrid the previous morning. Similar numbers had taken to the streets on 15 February 2003 to oppose the war against Iraq. At the time, nearly 90% of the Spanish population rejected the idea of joining forces with the US, Britain and the coalition of the willing in their campaign against Iraq, however, Aznar's government ignored the wishes of those who had elected him to join his good friends Bush and Blair in their Iraq adventure.

Like Blair, Aznar fashioned himself as a god of spin. His colleagues in the government of Madrid sacked the head of the city's independent television station because it broadcast a documentary that included an interview with a spokesperson for Basque pro-independence movement Batasuna. This helped him to keep the media in his pocket. He trusted this control would help his chosen successor, Mariano Rajoy, retain the party's seats in the parliament.

Everything changed on 13 March, however. With the eyes of the international press community on them in the aftermath of the Madrid outrage, it was difficult to control information surrounding the events of Thursday morning.

Soon enough, the international press were commenting on how the right-wing Popular Party was persisting in discounting evidence that al-Qaeda seemed to be responsible for the massacre. In its digital edition, German newspaper Spiegel On Line informed of how Spanish Foreign Affairs minister, Ana Palacio, had sent a letter to all Spanish ambassadors instructing them that when contacted by the media, they should insist that ETA was responsible for the outrage, even though all evidence pointed to al-Queda. The article detailed how the Spanish government was determined to keep its people in the dark until they voted on Sunday 14 March.

Foreign press correspondents working in Spain on the evening of the explosions received a phone call from the Prime Minister's office to assure them that ETA had planted the bombs on the trains.

When some journalists questioned the government about what evidence they had to make such statement, the Prime Minister's spokesperson stated that the main proof was that no one had claimed responsibility for the attack; the explosive used was that usually used by ETA, and that ETA never issued warnings in relation to its actions. Some of the journalists pointed out that they knew that ETA always issued warnings and that it was a little bit too early to have obtained a reliable analysis of the explosives used.

Most of the correspondents were surprised by the call. Many have spent nearly 20 years in Spain and had never got any information from the Prime Minister's office in La Moncloa Palace.

On Monday 15 March, the Association of Foreign Correspondents met in Madrid to officially complain about what they described as manipulation by the government.

The blatant lies and misinformation issued by the Spanish ministers brought to its knees a party that had mastered the fine art of spin and media control. On Saturday, just two days after the explosions in Madrid, spontaneous demonstrations took place outside the headquarters of the Popular Party in Madrid.

It quickly spread to other cities and Barcelona, Bilbao, Seville and many others staged further protests against the PP.

In Madrid, the main concentration took place outside the PP headquarters, where 5,000 citizens met at about 6pm, keeping the protest going until 6am, shouting slogans such as "Your war. Our dead" and "We want the truth before the elections".

In Barcelona, 7,000 people demonstrated; hundreds gathered in Coruña, Vigo, Uvieu, Seville,, Bilbo, Xixón, Santiago de Compostela, Valencia, Alacant, Valladolid, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Cáceres, Palms de Mallorca, Zaragoza, Burgos and Donosti. The PP described the demonstrations as "undemocratic".

Even at this stage, after al-Qaeda had claimed responsibility via a fax to a London newspaper and ETA had rejected any responsibility in the event, PP Home minister Acebes kept insisting ETA had planted the bombs.

The insistence of the PP minister on blaming ETA is easy to understand. The rejection and anger caused by the bombs in Spain would transform into further votes for the Popular Party in the elections if voters believed ETA was to blame. It would also reinforce the support of the population for the repressive policies of the right-wing government against Basque pro-independence activists.

However, if the outrage was linked to Islamic militants before the election, the PP feared a backlash from a population that had always opposed the war against Iraq and now had to pay the price for the decision of a government that had opted to ignore the people's will.

However, the PP's decision to blame ETA had further implications for the Basques. Basque citizens living outside the Basque Country felt intimidated and were afraid to leave their homes as they feared the anger the government's statements were inciting.

For Basque and anti-fascist political prisoners in Spanish jails, the situation was complicated. Many were attacked by prisoners incited to violence by prison officers. Askatasuna, the support organisation for Basque political prisoners, reported that in Alcala Meco high security prison, three female political prisoners — two Basque and one from anti-fascist organisation GRAPO — had been beaten by some prisoners in full view of the screws. After the attack, the three prisoners were placed in isolation cells.

In the same jail, prisoners threw stones and pieces of furniture against the windows of Basque political prisoners. In Burgos, Basque political prisoners had their status upgraded to the highest level, imposing many restrictions on their rights. In Villena, Edier Pérez was attacked in full view of the screws and another Basque prisoner suffered a panic attack and had to be taken to the prison infirmary.

In Ocaña 1 and Aranjuez, the political prisoners have been placed in isolation and cannot receive visits.

But it was the killing of shop-owner Angel Berrueta by a Spanish policeman in Iruñea that brought home the full implications of the government campaign against the Basque pro-independence left.

Angel, a baker and a supporter of Batasuna, was shot and stabbed by a policeman and his son after he refused to place a poster reading ETA No in his shop window, as the policeman's wife had requested. She went home and minutes later, her husband shot Angel three times while the son stabbed him with a machete.

To make things worst, when people tried to protest against the killing, the Spanish police baton-charged mourners.

In a separate incident, Conchi Sanchiz was taking part in protest against Angel's killing when the Basque police charged the demonstrators. As a consequence, she suffered a heart attack and died soon after.

The question is whether the Socialist Party, back in power after their defeat in 1996, will choose the policies of negotiation or those of the dirty war of the past.

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

Peace-process cannot indefinitely survive undemocratic assaults by the British system

SINN FÉIN CHAIRPERSON Mitchel McLaughlin has described British policy in Ireland as "a package of undemocratic interference".

"Recently we have witnessed the politics of the old, failed agenda of exclusion and vilification once again become currency in the media," he said. "Electoral interests North and South of the border are bound up with this. North of the border, securocrat elements trying to turn the clock back in an attempt to defeat republicanism have dovetailed their politics with those that fear the verdict of the electorate. But they won't succeed. The status quo is not an option.

"The British and Irish Governments' motivation in all of this is clear.

• They did not get the UUP-SDLP coalition they had hoped for and tried to secure.

• The two governments are not implementing their end of the Agreement and want to divert or distract attention away from that.

• Fianna Fail is election obsessed vis-a-vis the European and local government elections in June.

"And, alongside this, unionists and sections of the British system do not want the breadth and depth of change required by the Agreement."

McLaughlin said that "old habits die hard, especially in the British system in Ireland that has always been above accountability and democratic politics". He highlighted the campaign of collusion between the British system and unionist murder gangs and the ongoing cover-ups.

And, in parallel, he said, since the Agreement the British Government has made a succession of undemocratic interventions in the electoral process and election outcomes in the North.

"At the core of all of this is the denial by the British Government of national and democratic rights, democratic norms and the freely expressed will of the people," said the Derry MLA. "A democratic political process cannot survive indefinitely or flourish under this battery of undemocratic assaults by the British system.

"One self-evident consequence of the Peace Process is a resurgent and confident national and democratic opinion throughout this island. Whatever about party political allegiance, the electorate in Ireland today wants peace and justice and has the power to thwart the inherent undemocratic practices of the British system in Ireland.

"Today that system has arrested the forward momentum of the last decade; the momentum set in motion by the Irish peace initiative. Our common task is to tackle this head on, to demand that elected representatives take on the British system on these democratic issues and on the wider issues of equality, justice and peace in our society.

"We have to shift them off the old agenda of politically defeating Irish republicanism and back onto the conflict resolution agenda."

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

SINN FÉIN spokesperson on 	policing Gerry Kelly has accused the British Government of being obsessed with so-called republican violence while ignoring the fact that unionist paramilitaries have carried out 183 sectarian attacks against the nationalist. in the past year. 

Kelly was commenting on figure, released by NIO Security Minister Jane Kennedy, which attributed to loyalists seven killings, 135 shootings and 41 bombings in the 12 months to January this year.

Kelly used the NIO figures to rubbish PSNI boss Hugh Orde's claims that republican and loyalist violence was a the same level.

Kelly said the figures were reminder of where the 'violent threat' to the peace process came from, despite the continual focus on alleged republican activity.

"All these unionist paramilitary attacks have passed with little comment from either unionist party or indeed the British Government. Indeed we have no had special review meetings to discus these sectarian attacks nor have we had determinations or commentary from Hugh Orde or the Independent Monitoring Commission," said Kelly.

Kelly added that people within the nationalist and republican community are sick of the hypocrisy of unionist politicians and the British Government "They are frustrated at the obvious toleration of what is seen as an acceptable level of unionist violence against the Catholic community while at the same time threatening the process over allegations from securocrats over IRA activity."

LARNE

Kelly's remarks came within hours of the UVF bombing a Catholic family in Lame County Antrim and a sectarian attack on a schoolboy in Derry.

In the Larne attack, the family escaped serious injury or possible death when the loyalist gang lobbed a pipe bomb through the front window of their Bryan Street home.

A 13-year-old Derry boy was treated for cuts and bruises at Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry after he was targeted by a sectarian gang in the Lisnagelvin shopping centre in the, Waterside area of the city.

Since news of the attack was made known, other families have come forward to say that similar attacks have been carried out in the shopping centre in recent weeks.

Sinn Féin Councillor Lynn Fleming urged Catholics to be aware that they could be targeted by loyalist thugs in the shopping centre.

A sectarian gang is also thought to have been responsible for an arson attack on the home of a priest near Ballyclare in County Antrim.

The building suffered severe scorch damage in the blaze and three stained glass windows were also damaged in this attack.

The attack was well planned, as the arsonists shimmied up the wall of the chapel and adjusted the CCTV cameras, installed to monitor the church and grounds as a result of previous attacks.

Said Fr 0'Hagan: "This is a sinister development. We have had stones and bottles thrown at the church in the past, but this is quite obviously more serious, as it appears to have been organised."