Download bombers wiping-out innocent village children on rumours of

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is
the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V. I. Lenin
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
No 1212 December 9th 2003
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History's most sinister concentration-camp torture;
bombers wiping-out innocent village children on rumours
of "a terrorist suspect somewhere"; "free" Afghanistan
handed straight back to drugs warlords; fascist drug
militias hired in Colombia; Gestapo-type death squads let
loose on Iraq; unprecedented arms-race terror from the
mightiest empire with the greatest counter-revolutionary
violence on record; etc; etc; — no wonder US imperialism
and its Zionist hitmen need the same Goebbels "Big Lie"
to try to sweet-talk the world. But blitzkrieg colonial
warmongering and all the SS/police-state trimmings has
never changed in the whole history of monopoly capitalist
world domination, and it is doomed to its worst defeat
humiliation ever.
The sneer that criticism of Zionist aggression is merely anti-semitism in disguise is more
than just a tactic to prevent the genocidal obliteration of the Palestinian nation from being
discussed.
This "racism"-sneer smokescreen is effectively the same propaganda racket that protects the
West's "right" to warmongering as a whole.
The big question is why should the armed might of Western interests be in the Middle East
at all???
And the only answer is "because might is right", no different from when Western imperialism
staged its last great outbreak of self-righteous militaristic domineering in the cause of
a "new world order", namely World War II.
The German, Italian, and Japanese states then were just as "convinced" that their interests
were threatened by "rogue state" misbehaviour, by "terrorism", and by general "amoral"
international cultural influences,
Exactly the same way that the Bush clique's oil-monopoly, armaments-corporation, and "stop
abortion" born-again Christian moralisers claim that "evil" must be vanquished by military
mobilisation now.
And Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 by a far more "democratic" process than Bush did in
2000 to grab the presidency, (if this finance-dominated and establishment dominated
"electoral democracy" fraud has ever deserved any credibility at all).
So what is the difference between big-power self-assertive blitzkrieging then and now????
There is none.
Jews hope their "anti-semitism" self-righteousness will win the day via exactly the same
prejudices by which Western warmongering in general hopes to prevail.
"We are innocent. The terrorists are starting everything. We are guilty of nothing," etc,
etc, etc.
This may continue to carry the argument temporarily in both cases, but history is preparing
a different outcome entirely.
Essentially, the case for Western warmongering now and for the military preservation of
"Israel" are the same historical issue.
Contrary to appearances, the aim of World War II was not to eliminate
Western-imperialist-aggressive-warmongering from the governance of the planet, but to
PRESERVE it, — rehabilitating the dominant monopoly-capitalist international system from
its 1950s Depression-humiliation by switching from encouragement of Hitler Germany to wipe
out the Soviet workers state (whose shining planned socialist revolutionary example was the
one serious threat to capitalism's survival during its ghastly and shameful world slump to
cure its economic "overproduction of capital" crisis)... to a temporary alliance with the
USSR to defeat the "Axis" Western imperialist powers.
Thanks to the naive philosophical-imbecility of Stalinist Revisionism, the trick worked;
and the Soviet Union lulled the world into accepting that the now US-led "new world order"
(of the same old Western imperialist military domination of the planet, disgraced even more
by WWII than it had been by WWI), would henceforth become "safely coexistible-with".
The limitless warmongering insanity now escalating its grip over the planet, — of which
the armed genocidal colonisation of the Palestinian homeland by Western-imperialist Jewish
interests is not just a symbolic and typical instance but also now plays a key role, is the
outcome of that temporary infantile regression in the steady evolution of world materialist
philosophy.
It is precisely in the absurdly deluded shallowness of the stock western view of the post-1945
"new world order" that the Jewish religious-freemasonry interests hope to get away with
muddying the clear picture today (of relentless Zionist-fascist aggression to genocidally
wipe out the Palestinian homeland) — by labelling its depiction as "anti-semitism".
'If the postwar settlement by the "victorious allies" is now an accepted part of history
which can no longer be challenged, — the Marshall Plan to "generously aid European
reconstruction"; the establishment of "international law" by the UN; the Western pretence
of "peaceful and democratic settlements universally"; etc, etc; — then a classic example
of all these supposed benefits for mankind in operation, namely the "generous founding of
a homeland for the Jews in the Holy Land to be called 'Israel' " is to be treated as similarly
unassailable History now.
And every devious approach to this subject now tries to pull this same unstated stunt:—
"Criticise any act you wish of the Israeli Government, just don't challenge the right of
Israel to exist".
And every single slander of "anti-semitism" now works itself up into a lather via unstated
reference to this assumedly "untouchable" question of "Why should Israel exist at all?".
Every argument which strays in that direction immediately gets the "anti-semitism" boot right
in the face, just as all Palestinian and Arab resistance since 1948 to that armed colonisation
of the Palestinian homeland has been getting a boot in the face (and much worse besides).
Notice how, despite all the new flood, now, of unprecedented anti-Zionist criticism in the
Western bourgeois media, there is still never any addressing of the only serious question
worth asking if there is ever to be any resolution to this never-ending horror story of
genocidal warmongering "Israeli" tyranny, — namely, why has this armed colonisation been
planted in the midst of the Palestinian Arab homeland at all??? And why does it go on receiving
Western imperialist protection, the highest per-capita aid-rate of any country on Earth,
and generous licence to have access to any weaponry, including nuclear weapons, uniquely
among all countries which are outside the magic circle of the major Western imperialist
powers??
The question never gets debated in the media because the whole of the Western world knows
that there is not a single shred of historical justification for the armed establishment
of "Israel" in the Palestinian Arabs' very midst, either then or now.
To any materialist rational-thinking historical judgement, the whole notion of planting a
Western armed colony in 1948 right in the heart of the Arab Middle East is simply an utterly
insane idea which will become one thing only in due course, — a festering sore of unendable
warmongering conflict in the region.
And so it is now proving, exactly as the EPSR has always explained was bound to happen.
And the brainwashing nightmare to try to ensure that this questioning of the very existence
of "Israel" should never get debated by a zombiefied world, — was also predictable too.
But like all propaganda stunts which go against the grain of history, this one too will in
time crash in flames.
The postwar world HAD TO include some genuine elements of retreat from empire, otherwise
the mythical nonsense of the "victorious allies" who would "respect peaceful coexistence"
could never have been sold to a naive trusting world by Stalinist Revisionism (to get all-out
war-revolutionary struggle put on the back burner, giving the delusions of "good
imperialists" (as opposed to "bad, fascist imperialists") the chance to fall apart peacefully
under their own "going nowhere" steam, etc, etc)
And this physical empire-dismantling (as opposed to the financial continuation of Western
monopoly capitalist global empires) was what the armed colonial establishment of the "state
of Israel" went right against the grain of.
It was, then, (and can only be, now),
purely a matter of time before this armed colonisation
implantation of Western Jewish monopoly-imperialist — (for that is the reality) — interests
right in the heart of the Arab Middle East, (itself in inevitable all-out conflict with
the West eventually, — out of the natural progression of incurable periodic capitalist-world
"overproduction" crisis and warmongering sort-out), — became nothing but an endless
explosion point in world politics.
To a Marxist historical perspective, the whole of Western history since 1945 (and the whole
of world history, effectively) has been nothing but one long run-up to the moment when the
West's monopoly-imperialist racket finally hits the buffers of Third World revolutionary
resistance. That is the general historical period now being entered into with the reassertion
of inter-imperialist conflict (the incurable crisis of the overproduction of capital — see
EPSR box). And the racket of getting the world and the Arabs to swallow the colonising armed
establishment of a warmongering Zionist imperialist tyranny in their midst, is bound to now
be unravelling too. And all the bleating in the world of "But how can you sensibly compare
this new US warmongering (against 'real' terrorists with Nazi Germany's inhuman WWII plans
for mass subjugation and slaughter?" will cut no ice.
There are two answers.
Firstly, German imperialism was in reality not comparable to its "Nazi horror" historical
characterisation anyway.
Every filthy trick from concentration camp slaughter, police-state torture, master-race
genocide, and brainwashing propaganda; to blitzkrieg bombing annihilation, scorched-earth
starvation, collective punishment-massacre disciplining, and hostage killing control, had
ALL been well-tried and used by every major imperialist power in the field before Germany
and Japan, — namely by the long-established (hundreds of years) continent-sized empires
(frequently slave-powered) of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the United States, to
name but few.
Germany and Japan ended up doing it too, admittedly. But what was new and special about that???
Only that they were rising new powers, and their new found aggressiveness and industrial
commercial might had put the old-established colonial empires noses out of joint; and they
have been paying the propaganda penalty in crap misleading history ever since.
Secondly, who says this new US imperialist warmongering "cannot sensibly be compared to the
fascist aggression of WWII"???
Washington's demented arms-race for ever-more-terrifying weapons of mass destruction and
ever-vaster stockpiling of them, makes Germany's 1930s efforts look ridiculously tame by
comparison.
And the USA's thug-like promise to pre-emptively crush any attempt, even, by any power to
catch up with America's arsenal, makes Hitler Germany's endless whingeing about the unfair
advantages which the unequal Versailles Treaty had left to rival imperialist powers (in
armaments and defensive installations) sound like a bleating chicken.
And a whole Middle East blitzkrieg (with much more threatened to come for an overgrowing
list of "rogue states") just because a handful of "terrorists" with a grievance have staged
a couple of suicide stunts against American subjects or interests????????
This American "logical" joke and military aggression insanity makes EVERY "lebensraum"
grievance and "protect German interests" provocation by Hitler Germany seem almost sane by
comparison.
And if "which is the worst warmongering fascism" should be decided by the actual atrocities
committed, then the USA has already left Nazi Germany far, far behind, — and before World
War III has even properly started.
To begin with, the USA has already compiled a 400-war start on any Hitler imperialist
comparison.
Estimates can vary wildly, but from 10 to 20 million innocents have ALREADY perished since
1945 from US imperialism's "might is right" aggressive master-race world domination, —
before WWIII has even got started.
And now that this unrestrained blitzkrieging has at last got into its stride, the totally
devastating "shock and awe" murderous annihilation has been on a cruel and indiscriminate
scale as to make the Hitlerite bombings look like rank amateurishness.
Tens of thousands of totally innocent and uninvolved Afghani and Iraqi women and children
have been massacred, — and are still being massacred daily, — by this fascist aggressive
monstrousness.
And all for what??? In the disgusting pretence, only, of "dealing with terrorism", a
propaganda stunt which might even have made Goebbels blush, and a blatant idiocy when the
whole world can see that terrorist resentment arises from Third World poverty and injustice
which are growing fast, as will terrorism.
Bizarrely, it is the Zionist-colonists themselves, — now so exposed themselves and obviously
identifying themselves with the USA's reborn NAZI aggressiveness and warmongering propaganda
in a desperate panic for any protective covering or like-minded lair that they can find,
— who could most decisively ridicule this Goebbelsian "Big Lie" that total war 'shock &
awe' is the way to "counter terrorism".
Terrorism has GROWN RELENTLESSLY precisely IN RESPONSE TO the Zionist merciless armed
colonising of the Palestinian homeland.
The Jews blitzkrieging state-terror is designed for another purpose entirely, to help Western
imperialism win World War Three, — starting with the crushing and intimidating of all
state-organised resistance to Zionist aggression.
The Jewish religious freemasonry has its own particular propaganda routines with which to
milk support from the post-1945 brainwashed Western populace, in step with the "good allies"
imperialism feigning astonishment that the current "peacekeeping" and "justice-seeking" and
"democracy-installing" and "terrorism-routing" blitzkrieging should remotely be compared
to another fascist like round of warmongering aggression.
"Making the desert bloom"; "righting the eternal injustice to the Jewish people"; "fulfilling
God's commands"; "collaborating to bring closure to Europe's difficult, painful, and
shameful WWII tragedy"; "cooperating with the introduction of UN 'international law' ";
"becoming a potential huge economic locomotive for the whole Middle East"; etc, etc, etc,
etc, — all are part of the postwar Jewish myth.
Equally well-drilled are various degrees of Jewish "disowning" of the more blatant passages
of state-terror tyranny by "Israeli" gun colonisation.
"How could you accuse us, the victims of the Holocaust and of endless Arab terrorism, of
being anything but the innocent victims of this savage hostility by this hopelessly barbaric
Palestinian Islamic extremism", etc, etc.
"Anyone unmoved by any of this has surely got to have an ingrained anti-Semitic agenda, just
as has always persecuted the Jews throughout history", it goes on. This basic crude jingoistic
shallowness then gets refined increasingly, all the way to the top of "liberal" Jewishness,
where nothing so crude as defending "Israeli" tyranny is even attempted, but where any threat
of too effective anti-Zionism is nevertheless cleverly knifed with the smear of
"anti-semitism", as in this letter to the Guardian by an otherwise accomplished and
progressive author:
Anti-Israel equals/does not equal anti-semitism: there is
something a little Alice-in-Wonderland happening to this debate.
John le Carré on Radio 4 last Monday said it was obscene that he
can't be critical of Israel without being accused of anti-semitism
(The Guardian profile, December 5). This, in turn, means we
can't suggest someone is being anti-Semitic in the manner and
tone with which they are being anti-Israeli, though we know in
our bones that is the case.
Le Carré and Brian Klug (No, anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism,
December 3) are applying reason to the irrational. There
are many Jews, like myself, who are critical of aspects of Israeli
policy; we also know there is, there most definitely, identifiably
is, a molten flow of anti-semitism burning the air of reason and
screened unreachably behind smoky anti-Zionism, complaining
comfortably that to say otherwise is obscene.
Jews in all walks of life, university, the arts, bookselling — have
stories of encounters where the questions posed and the
criticisms levelled are couched in tight-lipped, hostile tones and
phraseology that have nothing to do with the substance of
purported concern. Anti-Semitism, like stupidity, is here to stay
in the bloodstream of humankind; and like stupidity will assume
many guises. In the good old days, anti-semitism used to be
prefaced with a slap on the back and "some of my best friends are
Jews"
Let's bring that one back.
Arnold Wesker
It is Wesker's suspicions that require the explanation. The entire media debate is bending
over backwards, as Le Carré did, to deliberately avoid the really challenging question: Why
should "Israel" exist at all? — and to stress how pro-Jewish is the normal sympathy of the
West.
But still the religious freemasonry is not satisfied; and the potentially devastating charge
of "anti-semitism" is still outrageously and irresponsibly levelled, —- and for the obvious
reason that there is no justification for "Israel", let alone for its state-terror criminal
colonising, — nor can there be any justification, by Jewishness or by anything else.
And the test is not simply that if Wesker had any good arguments justifying "Israel" he would
use them rather than resort to the filthy character assassination smear of "anti-semitism".
The test is that until a sizeable volume of Jewish opinion publicly starts campaigning against
the existence of "Israel" (which in factual political terms is nothing but an anachronistic
armed Western-imperialist colonisation directed at the very heart of the Arab Middle East)
as the only possible way forward from the WWIII warmongering crisis which demented US
imperialist circles are now threatening the planet with, — then it will remain inescapable
that in the late 20th century, the Jewish religious freemasonry, ended its long
self-protection history by becoming just a stooge for renewed Western imperialist
blitzkrieging as a "solution" to insoluble-economic crisis).
Inevitably in these circumstances, anti-semitism will spread like wildfire too, virtually
indistinguishable from anti-Zionism.
But there does still remain a vast difference.
Let a single state of Palestine become one country again, letting EVERY Palestinian return
to their old property, wherever possible.
Then let every Jew in
this probable Arab majority state stay on as a fully participating
citizen if invited, and make as much of the desert bloom as is legal, and be as religiously
at home in "God's promised land" as any "chosen people" could wish to feel.
And as some smarter "Israelis" are already arguing (from a purely defensive point of view),
if this colonising settlement land-grabbing genocide goes on for much longer, it will be
impossible to physically separate the Jewish and Palestinian existences anyway, sooner or
later.
So why not make a virtue of this and declare one state for all right now, whereby the Jews
would at least massively benefit for generations to come from the huge skills, networking,
organisational, political, and financial advantages they have already, — much of which would
be a tad unfair for the Palestinians, but only a comparative disadvantage, easily digested
in the face of the huge transformation in Palestinian lives that the establishment of a single
state of Palestine, with returned lands and citizenship for all ousted inhabitants (since
1948, and even decades earlier under British imperialist tyranny) plus all their offspring,
would achieve.
But nothing like this is going to happen, of course.
As can be seen from Wesker's sad contribution, the Jewish religious freemasonry has the
imperialist-era conquest-chauvinism in its nostrils; and just like any
imperialist-nationalism mentality (the USA's for example, which has been the mainstay in
every way of "Israeli" jingoism), this empire-building can only now tyrannically drive on
UNTIL DEFEATED.
And the best "liberal-Israeli" defensive position is worse than useless too, — granting
the Palestinians a Mickey-Mouse joke "state" on a semi-desert pocket-handkerchief-sized
quilt of reservations on just 20% of Palestine, all dominated by "Israeli" guns and roadworks,
etc.
This would not reduce the apartheid tyranny of the occupied Palestine concentration camp,
but only make it more humiliating and intolerable than ever.
Imperialist warmongering madness is taking the world to a completely different solution to
its problems, the international socialist revolution for mankind's civilisation's only
possible survival.
All "Israel" apologists of any description, however mealy-mouthed, are only offering a
"victorious" World War III "solution" as a way out of the planet's insoluble monopoly
imperialist economic and political contradictions.
To various levels of doubt that the incomparably wealthy and mighty US imperialist "new world
order" might not yet find or impose some half-tolerable "solution" or other to the world's
warmongering crisis, let the capitalist press itself admit how morally, politically, and
economically bankrupt the whole "free world" racket has really become:
Israeli advisers are helping train US special forces in
aggressive counter-insurgency operations in Iraq,
including the use of assassination squads against
guerrilla leaders, US intelligence and military sources
said yesterday.
The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has sent urban warfare
specialists to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the home of
US special forces, and according to two sources, Israeli
military "consultants" have also visited Iraq.
US forces in Iraq's Sunni triangle have already begun to
use tactics that echo Israeli operations in the occupied
territories, sealing off centres of resistance with razor
wire and razing buildings from where attacks have been
launched against US troops.
But the secret war in Iraq is about to get much tougher,
in the hope of suppressing the Ba'athist-led insurgency
ahead of next November's presidential elections.
US special forces teams are already behind the lines
inside Syria attempting to kill foreign jihadists before
they cross the border, and a group focused on the
"neutralisation" of guerrilla leaders is being set up,
according to sources familiar with the operations.
"This is basically an assassination programme. That is
what is being conceptualised here. This is a hunter killer
team," said a former senior US intelligence official, who
added that he feared the new tactics would inflame a
volatile situation in the Middle East.
"It is bonkers, insane ... we're already being compared
to Sharon in the Arab world, and we've just confirmed it
by bringing in the Israelis and setting up assassination
teams:'
Nothing like the horrors of WWII imperialist military aggression??? The pro-imperialist rags
themselves own up differently:
In India Block, as the block of punishment cells is known, "there were no windows. There were
four walls and a roof made of tin, a light bulb and an air conditioner. They put the air
conditioning on and it was extremely cold. They would take away the blanket in the morning and
bring it back in the evening. I was kept in this room for one month. We'd ask them: 'Is this a sort
of a punishment?' And the translator would say, 'No, this is being done on orders from the
general.' "
As treatment for Mohammed's suicidal state of mind, US medics injected him with an unknown
drug, against his will. "I refused and they brought seven or eight people and held me and injected
me," he says. "I couldn't see down, I couldn't see up. I felt paralysed for one month — this
injection, the effect, I couldn't think or do anything. They gave me tranquillising tablets.
They just told me: 'Your brain is not working properly.' They were forcing me to take these
injections and tablets and I didn't want to do that. Some people were being injected every
month."
In trying to learn what life is like at the US prison camp at Guantanamo, the few score of
released detainees — almost all Pakistanis and Afghans — are among the scant sources
available. Journalists are allowed to "visit" the facility; the Guardian has been three times, and I
was offered a slot, but journalists, like family members, lawyers and human rights investigators,
have no access to the detainees themselves.
Yet the testimony of those former detainees, together with rare scraps of information from
censored mail, official statements and the odd comment from guards and others who have been
inside, overlaps into a coherent portrait. In the almost two years since the Guantanamo prison
camp opened to hold people seized by the US in what the Bush administration has designated
"the war on terror", it has settled from a rough and ready, occasionally brutal place of
confinement into a full-grown mongrel of international law, where all the harshness of the
punitive US prison system is visited on foreigners, unmitigated by any of the legal rights US
prisoners enjoy.
To this is added the mentally corrosive threat, alien to the US constitution, of infinite
confinement, without court or appeal, on the whim of a single man the president of the US.
One of the few political statements to slip past the censors by a man still detained there is
contained in a short postcard from a French prisoner, Nizar Sassi, to his family, dated August
2002. "If you want a definition of this place" he wrote, "you don't have the right to have rights."
US set about constructing, behind razor wire on a secure Caribbean island, an incarcerated model
of what its "war on terror" rhetoric implies. It has gathered terrorism suspects from all over the
world, imposed discipline and order on them, encouraged them to hate the US and kept them
together for years. It was as if the Bush administration so wanted the Hollywood fantasy of a
central terrorist campus to be true that they built it themselves.
Because the roughly 660 detainees still on Guantanamo have no voice, and because the US has
never explained case by case why it locked them up, the outside world has only the accounts of
their families and the catch-all US definition of "enemy combatant" to understand who they are
and why they are there.
Most were arrested in Afghanistan but many were handed over to the US by other countries.
"They are an extremely heterogeneous group. There are some 40 different nationalities.
There are some people who are extremely educated and westernised, and some people who, are
not at all. There are some very young people and some very old and wise people. There are
people who speak English well, people who don't speak English at all. There are some who go in
with mental disorders . . .there are some very secular, and some deeply devout."
There is Shafiq Rasul from Tiptop in the West Midlands, who took his wardrobe of designer
clothes with him to Pakistan, was captured with his friends Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed by the
Northern Alliance, and was handed over to the US in Shebergan in northern Afghanistan in
December 2001. Jamil al-Banna and Bisher al-Rawi, two refugees living in Britain, were arrested
in the Gambia in west Africa, and handed over to the US by the Gambians. Moazzam Begg and
Richard Belmar, two other Britons, were arrested in Pakistan and handed over to the US by the
Pakistanis. David Hicks, an Australian, who had previously led a life of shark fishing and
kangaroo skinning; and had fathered two children, ended up in the Shebergan prison after
fighting with the KLA in Albania and the Kashmiri insurgency group Lashkar-eTaiba.
Mehdi-Mohammed Ghezali, who grew up in the Swedish town of Rebro and whose father was
Algerian and mother Finnish, had a promising career as a footballer ahead of him before turning
up with the Taliban in Afghanistan and being captured. Nizar Sassi and Mourad Bechnellali grew
up in Venissieux, a suburb of Lyons. Their lives came to revolve around the mosque on Lenin
Boulevard before they travelled east. Ibrahim Fauzee, a citizen of the Maldives, was arrested in
Karachi while staying in the home of a man with suspected al-Qaida links. Tarek Dergoul, from
east London, thought to have been arrested during the battle for Tora Bora in southern
Afghanistan, is reported to have had an arm amputated as a result of wounds. Sami al-Haj, a
Sudanese assistant cameraman with the al-Jazeera TV station, was picked out and held while
leaving Afghanistan for Pakistan after the fall of Kabul with the rest of his crew. They never saw
him again. Another Briton, Martin Mubanga, from north London, was handed over to the US by
Zambia. Jamal Udeen, from Manchester, born into a devout catholic home, and converted to
Islam in his 20s and was seized in Afghanistan only three weeks after he left England. Airat
Vakhitov, one of eight Russians on Guantanamo, thought he had been liberated when a reporter
from Le Monde discovered him in a Taliban jail, where he had sat in darkness and been beaten
for seven months on suspicion of spying for the KGB. But he only exchanged the Taliban prison
for an American one. And there is Mish al-Hahrbi, a Saudi schoolteacher. After he tried to kill
himself on Guantanamo, he suffered severe and irreversible brain damage.
The road for many detainees, including the small number who have since been released, began
with, they claim, a non-combatant reason for being where they were when they were caught.
Mohammed says he went to work for the Taliban as a baker; Razaq says he was a missionary.
They were held by the Northern Alliance in northern Afghanistan, selected by the Alliance
to receive a cursory interview from US special forces or the CIA, and flown to Kandahar, where
they were held for weeks or months before being flown to Cuba.
Razaq, in his first interview with a journalist, told me he was convinced the only reason he was
sent to Cuba was because he spoke English. He had been held by the Northern Alliance for a
month in Shebergan prison, in crowded conditions with little food, when Alliance soldiers came
and asked the group of Pakistani, Arab and Uzbek captives who among them spoke English.
Razaq stepped forward.
His hands were tied and he was taken to a small room with mud walls where he was made to
kneel on the ground in front of two Americans in uniform, one sitting on a mud bench
projecting from the wall and the other standing. The interview took three or four minutes, and
consisted of two questions: "What is your name, and why have you come to Afghanistan?"
Afterwards he was taken outside. He just had time to see a group of bound men with hoods on
their heads sitting in a row before he, too, was hooded. They were taken to an airfield and flown
to Kandahar. No signal had passed between his interrogators and the soldiers who hooded him.
In other words, on the basis that he knew English, the US had already decided to take him to
Kandahar, whatever the result of this initial interview.
Another released Pakistani, Mohammed Saghir, a grey-bearded sawmill owner who is now 53,
tells me that he had not even had a cursory interview at Shebergan before he was bound hand
and foot, blindfolded and helicoptered to Kandahar.
Shah Mohammed was held at a prison in Mazar-i-Sharif, near Shebergan, before being sent to
Kandahar. He met Hicks, the Australian, while he was there. There were early signs of the
differential treatment, apparently according to national background and skin colour, that was to
be one of the characteristics of the US handling of terror suspects.
"I spoke to the Australian, he knew a bit of Urdu; says Mohammed. "He said he had come for
Jihad. He was asked a lot of questions [by the Americans], more than us. He was taken to a navy
ship and I was taken to Kandahar." Mohammed was to see Hicks again.
The released detainees recount the roughness with which they were treated at Kandahar, from
the moment of their transport there. "One thing I've learned about the Americans is they are
very harsh when they transport people around," says Razaq. "They had tied up my hands so tight
that for two months I couldn't use my right hand. They haul you from your neck and drop you
off the plane in a very disrespectful manner. For a long time we didn't know it was Kandahar.
We thought they were going to kill us there."
"They would just pick us up and throw us out [of the plane]," says Saghir. "Some people were
hurt, some quite badly" Mohammed says. "They kicked us out of the plane and threw us on the
ground.'
The accommodation at Kandahar was uncomfortable. Prisoners slept and sat in small groups
under canvas canopies, on the bare earth, surrounded by razor wire and under constant
surveillance. They were given a single blanket each. It was winter. Razaq says that the bottled
water they were given to drink would be frozen in the mornings. He said that for the first 20
days, a strict no-talking rule was enforced. Saghir describes how no one had been allowed to
sleep for more than an hour. "If someone slept for an hour they would yell at him: Get him up!"
The prisoners were interrogated steadily, with long intervals between sessions. "We used to ask
them: 'Why are we being kept here?"' says Mohammed. "They would reply: 'You will be
interrogated, and whoever is found innocent will be allowed to go. They never told us we would
be taken to Cuba."
Razaq was one of the last to leave Kandahar. He saw the camp emptying around him. From his
testimony, it appears that once a detainee was committed to Kandahar, the vast US military
bureaucracy could only send people to Guantanamo. "I don't know what made them suspect me,
but there were rumours that they arrested me because they thought I was a very senior Taliban
official," he says. "In fact, in the last interrogation at Kandahar, the American interrogator gave
me water to drink and assured me I would be released.
"This assurance was given to me on several occasions. I never knew where they were taking the
people who disappeared. We asked the Red Cross, but they wouldn't give us any information.
But there was this gate through which we could see people in red costumes in the distance. At
the end, it seemed they just wanted to send everyone to Cuba and I was in the last group."
The last thing the US captors did before dispatching the Kandahar detainees to Cuba was shave
off their beards, a process they found humiliating. Razaq was told it was because,
without showers, they had picked up lice. "We resisted, but four or five commandos came and
they had a machine and just shaved off my beard and moustache," says Saghir.
For the flight to Cuba, the prisoners were given the orange jumpsuits familiar from television
footage of their arrival at Guantanamo. They were bound hand and foot, blindfolded, gagged,
and their ears were muffled. Once on board the military transport plane, their feet were chained
to the floor, their hands bound to the handrests, and restraining straps stretched across their
bodies. "The translator told us: 'Don't make any movement, don't worry, you are being taken
home' " says Mohammed. "I don't remember how many hours but we left at night from
Kandahar and arrived in Cuba in the evening. We stopped somewhere and changed planes."
Saghir says that, as with the arrival at Kandahar, the detainees, still bound, gagged and
blindfolded, were thrown off the plane on arrival in Cuba — some had their noses broken, he
says. "I got a bruise under my left eye where my face hit the ground."
The first prisoners were moved from the runway to a truck, from there to a launch across the
bay, and from there to the bare mesh cages which would be their home for the first few months
of 2002, the original detention centre, Camp X-Ray.
Cubans remember, if few others do, that the world's first concentration camps were built on
their island by the Spanish in the 1890s.
In the first few weeks of Camp X-Ray's existence, the regime was even harsher than it looked
from the pictures of tiny cages. The prisoners were not allowed to speak to each other, not even
in a whisper. "I spent the first month in utter silence," says Mohammed.
According to Saghir, in this initial, relatively brutal phase of Guantanamo, there was little
tolerance for the practice of Islam, with its requirement of prayer five times a day.
"I tried to pray and four or five commandos came and they beat me up. If someone would try to
make a call for prayer they would beat him up and gag him. After one-and-a-half months, we
went on hunger strike."
US officials at the camp have admitted hunger strikes did take place there — in some cases,
prisoners were force fed — but in the minds of the detainees, they leave been associated with
protests that have achieved results. According to Saghir, it was only after a mass four-day hunger
strike that the no-talking rule was lifted.
Razaq, who arrived after Camp X-Ray had already shut down, said that the culture of protest was
a feature of life in Guantanamo. "In the beginning there was a mass hunger strike, but later on
there were individual cases of people not eating," he says. In other cases detainees would take off
their plastic tags carrying their US identification codes and throw them at the guards, or would
bang on their metal benches. Sometimes the guards would use a disabling gas in response.
"When we threw off our tags the guards asked us to hand over our blankets, but two of our
colleagues didn't oblige, so they sprayed them to make them unconscious, tied them up and took
them to the punishment block; during that transfer they were quite brutal" says Razaq.
2x3 metres with walls of wire mesh, concrete floors and metal ceilings," wrote Eriksson, outside
their cells they wear hand and feet restraints. The handcuffs are fastened to a belt around their
waist allowing them only restricted movement with their hands and arms. [Ghezali] only just
managed to drink water from a mug with hand restraints on.
"The leg restraints mean that when detainees are moved they have to move forward taking very
small steps. One of the guards keeps a hand on the back of the detainee's neck the whole time,
bending the detainee's head forwards so that he is looking at the ground the whole time he is
being moved.["]
In April 2002, the prisoners were moved to new accommodation, Camp Delta. The cages are
about as long and wide as a tall man lying down, and contain a metal bunk, a tap and a toilet.
There is Delta Block, where prisoners with mental problems are kept under special observation,
and India Block, and possibly one other block, which contain the punishment isolation cells.
The Guardian has also learned that a very small number of prisoners, thought to be between two
and five, are kept permanently isolated in a special, super-secure facility within Camp Delta.
Mohammed, Saghir and Razaq all had experience of the punishment cells. Saghir says that he was
locked up in one of the windowless metal boxes for more than a week when an Arab spat at a
guard and the entire line of 24 cages was punished with solitary.
There has been an enormous amount of interrogation; each prisoner has typically been
questioned between 10 and 20 times, which would, assuming interviews last 90 minutes on
average, have generated some 15,000 hours of transcripts, containing perhaps 200 million words,
the equivalent of around 250 Bibles. Yet without exception, the detainees say they were
questioned by different interrogators each time, and each time the questions were the same.
Prisoners describe the interrogation room as a small, windowless, air-conditioned, plywood
space, lit by fluorescent ceiling tubes. There is a metal ring fixed to the floor; while they are being
interrogated, the prisoners sit in a chair and have their chains fixed to the ring.
"They would ask: Where is Osama? Do you know any of the al-Qaida leaders? Have you met
them?'Things like that," says Saghir. "They would not get angry with my answers. We would ask
them and they would say: 'We don't know when you will be let free. Only our bosses know, we
are here to do our job.' "
Sometimes it seemed that the interrogators wanted the detainees to show sympathy with the
victims of 9/11. Saghir was once told by a translator that he had got closer to being released by
giving a "right" answer. "In my last interrogation I was asked: 'These people who attacked the
twin towers, would you call them Muslims?' I answered: 'I won't call them Muslims, but I'm not a
religious scholar, I couldn't judge these people.' The translator then said: 'You have gone one
stage further, there will be no more interrogations.' " Razaq said detainees who refused to answer
questions were sometimes put in isolation cells as punishment.
The interrogated and the interrogator do attempt mind games with each other. In one
interrogation, the interrogators effectively told Razaq he was free to go. "They said: '0K, your file
is clear. Where do you want us to drop you?' "
Daring to hope, Razaq answered: "Peshawar?" Immediately, the interrogators began questioning
him again as if for the first time, and made him take a lie-detector test. "Maybe this was one of
their tactics," says Razaq. "They first made me happy and accept that I will be free, then they
changed direction."
Guantanamo is a bleak, dull, repressive place for its inmates. Yet there is something about it
which may not be immediately apparent to Europeans dismayed by the level of security, the
chains and the punitive, degrading way the prisoners are caged.
By focusing on physical conditions, there is a risk of missing the unique aspect of Guantanamo
— the arbitrary, unprecedented and unfair way in which President Bush and his
administration have confined hundreds of people without either any idea how long they are to
be locked up, or any way to plead their case. It is this which the legal establishment in the US and
Europe finds most menacing. It is this which causes the greatest mental torment to the prisoners
and their families. And the strange Pentagon creatures that have been set up to try some
detainees, the military commissions, are, the Guardian has learned, troubling even the uniformed
lawyers signed up to make them work.
"It's horrible being a prisoner . . . when I read about your British detainees, and families being
concerned that people are being tortured because they are depressed, I wish I could tell the
families it doesn't need torture to make someone depressed in prison. Just a normal prison
environment produces profound alteration in mental states, suicide and depression.
"But at Guantanamo there's an added level of stress, and I think that is the thing that's somewhat
unique. . . Inmates in a normal prison are focused on how much time they are going to serve, on
contacting their lawyers, on being able to take constructive efforts to get out; these are important
ways prisoners deal with the stress of confinement, and these guys can't do anything."
"You kidnap people who may be totally innocent, you take them all the way around the world in
hoods and shackles, you hold them incommunicado for two years, you don't give them a lawyer
and you don't tell them what they're charged with. It's not a matter of what's wrong with it, it's a
question of what's right with it. And it achieves nothing."
Shah Mohammed was given no apology or compensation when he was released, just a
three-paragraph letter from a unit based at Bagram airport in Afghanistan; called
CFTF180Detainee Ops. It is signed by a soldier with a rank lower than corporal, Joseph P Burke.
It reads: "This memorandum is to certify that Shah Mohammed Alikhel [his tribal name],
ISNUS9PK-00019DP, was detained by the United States Military from January 13 2002 to Mar
22 2003." The letter is dated May 8; in other words, Mohammed was kept prisoner two months
longer than the US wanted him.
Despite interrogating him nine or 10 times, the letter goes on to say that the US has no record of
Mohammed's place of birth. The letter concludes: "This individual has been determined to pose
no threat to the United States military or its interests in Afghanistan or Pakistan. There are no
charges pending from the United States against this individual . . . the United States government
intends that this person be fully rejoined with his family."
"If they kept me for 18 months and sent me a letter to certify I'm innocent, then why did they
keep me there for 18 months?" asks Shah Mohammed. "Don't they have any duty or obligation
to me?"
Even less than a duty — a nameless grudge: despite declaring him harmless, the US military
transported him home to Pakistan as it had brought him to Cuba — in chains.
But merely "first time aggressive-leadership awkwardness by a country more used to helping
the whole world than harming it"????
Since 1945, US imperialism has slaughtered up to 20 million in an unparalleled reign of
imperialist counter-revolutionary terror:
SOUTH DAKOTA, 1890(-?) Troops: 300 Lakota Indiana
massacred at Wounded Knee.
ARGENTINA,1890
protected.
Troops:
Buenos
Aires
interests
CHILE, 1891 Troops: Marines clash with nationalist rebels.
HAITI, 1891 Troops: Black workers' revolt on US-claimed
Navassa Island defeated.
IDAHO, 1892 Troops: Army suppresses silver miners' strike.
HAWAII, 1893(-?) Naval, troops: Independent kingdom
overthrown, annexed.
CHICAGO, 1894 Troops: Breaking of rail strike, 34 killed.
NICARAGUA, 1894 Troops: Month-long occupation of
Bluefields.
CHINA, 1894-5 Naval,
Sino-Japanese War.
troops:
Marines
land
in
KOREA, 1894-8 Troops: Marines kept in Seoul during war.
PANAMA, 1895 Troops, naval: Marines land in Colombian
province.
NICARAGUA, 1898 Troops: Marinas lend In port of Corinto.
CHINA, 1898-1900 Troops: Boxer Rebellion fought by
foreign armies.
PHILIPPINES, 1898-1911)(4) Navel, hoops: Seized from
Spain, killed 600,000 Filipinos.
CUBA, 1898-7902(-?) Naval, troops: Seized from Spain,
still hold Navy base.
PUERTO RICO, 1898(-?) Naval, troops: Seized from Spain,
occupation continue.
GUAM, 1898(-?) Naval, troops: Seized from Spain, still
used as base.
MINNESOTA, 1898(-?) Troops: Army battles Chippewa at
Leech Lake.
NICARAGUA, 1898
Juan dal Sur. .
Troops: Marines land at port of San
SAMOA, 1899(-?) Troops: Battle over succession to throne.
NICARAGUA, 1899 Troops: Marines land at port of
Bluefields.
IDAHO, 1899-1901 Troops: Army occupies Coeur d'Alene
mining region.
OKLAHOMA, 1901 Troops: Army battles Creek Indian
revolt.
PANAMA, 1901-14 Naval, troops: Broke off from Colombia
1903, annexed Canal Zone 1914-99.
HONDURAS, 1903 Troops: Marines Intervene in revolution.
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, 1903-04 Troops: US Interests
protected in Revolution.
KOREA, 1904-05 Troops: Marines land in Russo-Japanese
War.
CUBA, 1906-09 Troops: Marines land in democratic
election.
NICARAGUA, 1907 Troops: 'Dollar Diplomacy' protectorate
set up.
HONDURAS, 1907 Troops: Marines land during war with
Nicaragua.
PANAMA, 1908 Troops: Marines Intervene in election
contest.
NICARAGUA, 1910 Troops: Marines land in Bluefields and
Corinto.
HONDURAS, 1911 Troops: US Interests protected in civil
war.
CHINA, 1911-41 Naval, troops: Continuous occupation with
flare-ups.
CUBA, 1912 Troops: US interests protected in Havana.
PANAMA, 1912 Troops: Marines land during heated
election.
HONDURAS, 1912 Troops: Marines protect U5 economic
interests.
NICARAGUA,
1912-33
Troops,
occupation, fought guerrillas.
MEXICO, 1913
revolution.
Naval:
Americans
bombing:
evacuated
20-year
during
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. 1914 Naval: Fight with rebels over
Santo Domingo.
COLORADO, 1914 Troops: Breaking of miners' strike by
Army.
MEXICO, 1914-18 Naval, troops: Series of interventions
against nationalists.
HAITI, 1914-34 Troops, bombing: 19-year occupation after
revolts.
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, 1916-24 Troops: 8-year Marine
occupation.
CUBA, 1917-33 Troops: Military occupation, economic
protectorate.
WORLD WAR I, 1917-18 Naval, troops: Ships sunk, fought
Germany.
RUSSIA, 1918-22 Naval, troops: Five landings to fight
Bolsheviks.
PANAMA, 1918-20 Troops: 'Police duty' during unrest after
elections.
YUGOSLAVIA, 1919 Troops: Marines intervene for Italy
against Serbs in Dalmatia.
HONDURAS, 1919 Troops: Marines land during election
campaign.
GUATEMALA, 1920 Troops: 2-week intervention against
unionists.
WEST VIRGINIA, 1920-1 Troops, bombing: Army intervenes
against mineworkers.
TURKEY, 1922 Troops: Fought nationalists In Smyrna
(Izmir).
CHINA, 1922-7 Naval,
nationalist revolt.
troops:
Deployment
during
HONDURAS, 1924 Troops: Landed twice during election
strife.
PANAMA, 1925 Troops: Marines suppress general strike.
CHINA, 1927-34 Troops: Marines stationed throughout the
country.
EL SALVADOR, 1932 Naval: Warships sent during Faribundo
Marti revolt.
WASHINGTON DC, 1932 Troops: Army stops WWI vet
bonus protest.
WORLD WAR II, 1941-5 Naval, troops, bombing, nuclear:
Fought Axis for 3 years; first nuclear war.
DETROIT, 1943 Troops: Army puts down Black rebellion.
IRAN, 1946 Nuclear threat: Soviet troops told to leave
north (Iranian Azerbaijan). ,
YUGOSLAVIA, 1946 Navel: Response to shooting-down of
US plane.
URUGUAY, 1947 Nuclear threat: Bombers deployed as
show of strength.
GREECE, 1947-9 Command operation: US directs extreme
right in civil war.
CHINA, 1948-9 Troops: Marines evacuate Americans before
Communist victory.
GERMANY, 1948 Nuclear threat: Atomic-capable bombers
guard Berlin Airlift.
PHILIPPINES, 1948-54 Command operation: CIA directs war
against Huk Rebellion.
PUERTO RICO, 1950 Command operation: Independence
rebellion crushed in Ponce.
KOREA, 1950-3 Troops, naval, bombing, nuclear threats:
US and South Korea fight China and North Korea to
stalemate; A-bomb threat in 1950, and vs China in 1953.
Still have bases.
IRAN, 1953 Command
democracy, installs Shah.
operation:
CIA
overthrows
VIETNAM, 1954 Nuclear threat: Bombs offered to French
to use against siege.
GUATEMALA, 1954 Command operation, bombing, nuclear
threat: CIA directs exile invasion after new government
nationalises US company lands; bombers based in
Nicaragua.
EGYPT, 1956 Nuclear threat, troops: Soviets told to keep
out of Suez crisis; Marines evacuate foreigners.
LEBANON, 1958 Troops, naval: Marine occupation against
rebels.
IRAQ, 1958 Nuclear threat: Iraq warned against invading
Kuwait.
CHINA, 1958 Nuclear threat: China told not to move on
Taiwan Isles.
PANAMA, 1958
confrontation.
Troops:
Flag
protests
erupt
into
VIETNAM, 1960-75 Troops, naval, bombing, nuclear
threats: Fought South Vietnam revolt and North Vietnam;
1-2 million killed in longest US war; atomic bomb threats
in 1968 and 1969.
CUBA, 1961 Command operation: CIA-directed exile
invasion fails.
GERMANY, 1961 Nuclear threat: Alert during Berlin Wall
crisis.
CUBA, 1962 Nuclear threat: Naval blockade during missile
crisis: near-war with USSR.
LAOS, 1962 Command operation: Military build-up during
guerrilla war.
PANAMA, 1964 Troops: Panamanians shot for urging canal's
return.
INDONESIA, 1965 Command operation: Million killed in
CIAassisted army coup.
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, 1965-6 Troops, bombing: Marines
land during election campaign..
GUATEMALA, 1966-7 Command operation: Green Berets
intervene against rebels.
DETROIT, 1967 Troops: Army battles Blacks, 43 killed.
UNITED STATES, 1968 Troops: After King is shot; over
21,000 soldiers in cities.
CAMBODIA, 1969-75 Bombing, troops, naval: Up to 2
million killed in decade of bombing, starvation and
political chaos.
OMAN, 1970 Command operation: US directs Iranian
marine invasion.
LAOS, 1971-3 Command operation, bombing: US directs
South Vietnamese invasion; 'carpet-bombs' countryside.
SOUTH DAKOTA, 1973 Command operation: Army directs
Wounded Knee siege of Lakotas.
MIDDLE EAST, 1973 Nuclear threat: World-wide alert
during Middle East War.
CHILE, 1973 Command operation: CIA-backed coup ousts
elected Marxist president.
CAMBODIA, 1975 Troops, bombing, gas: Captured ship, 28
die in helicopter crash.
ANGOLA, 1976-92 Command operation: CIA assists South
Africanbacked rebels.
IRAN, 1980 Troops, nuclear threat, aborted bombing: Raid
to rescue Embassy hostages. 8 troops die in
helicopter-plane crash. Soviets warned not to get involved
in revolution.
LIBYA, 1981 Naval jets: Two Libyan lots shot down in
manoeuvres.
EL SALVADOR, 1981-92 Command operation, troops:
Advisors, overflights aid anti rebel war, soldiers briefly
Involved in hostage clash.
NICARAGUA, 1981-90 Command operation, naval: CIA
directs exile (Contra) invasions, plants harbour mines
against revolution.
LEBANON, 1982-4 Naval, bombing, troops: Marines expel
PLO and back Phalangists, Navy bombs and shells Muslim
and Syrian positions.
HONDURAS, 1983-9 Troops: Manoeuvres help build bases
near borders.
GRENADA, 1983-4 Troops, bombing: Invasion four years
after revolution.
IRAN, 1984 Jets:Two Iranian jets shot down over Persian
Gulf.
LIBYA, 1986 Bombing, naval: Air strikes to topple
nationalist government.
BOLIVIA, 1986 Troops: Army assists raids on cocaine
region.
IRAN, 1987-8 Naval, bombing: US intervenes on side of
Iraq in war.
LIBYA, 1989 Naval jets:Two Libyan jets shot down.
VIRGIN ISLANDS, 1989 Troops: St Croix Black unrest after
storm.
PHILIPPINES, 1989 Jets:
government against coup.
Air
cover
provided
for
PANAMA,
1989-90
Troops,
bombing:
Nationalist
government ousted by 27,1100 soldiers, leaders arrested,
2000+ killed.
LIBERIA, 1990 Troops: Foreigners evacuated during civil
war.
SAUDI ARABIA, 1990-1 Troops, jets: Iraq countered after
Invading Kuwait; 540,000 troops also stationed in Oman,
Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Israel.
IRAQ, 1990(-?) Bombing, troops, naval: Blockade of Iraqi
and Jordanian ports, air strikes; 200,000+ killed in
invasion of Iraq and Kuwait; no-fly zone over Kurdish
north, Shiite south, large-scale destruction of Iraqi
military.
KUWAIT, 1991 Naval, bombing, troops: Kuwait royal
family returned to throne.
LOS ANGELES, 1992 Troops: Army, Marines deployed
against anti-police uprising.
SOMALIA, 1992-4 Troops, naval, bombing: US-led United
Nations occupation during civil war; raids against one
Mogadishu faction.
YUGOSLAVIA, 1992-1 Naval: Nato blockade of Serbia and
Montenegro.
BOSNIA, 1993-5 Jets, bombing: No-fly zone patrolled in
civil war; downed jets, bombed Serbs.
HAITI.1994-4 Troops, naval: Blockade against military
government; troops restore President Aristide to office
three years after coup.
CROATIA, 1995 Bombing: Krajina Serb airfields attacked
before Croatian offensive.
ZAIRE (CONGO), 1996-7 Troops: Marines at Rwandan Hutu
refugee camps, in area where Congo revolution begins.
LIBERIA, 1997 Troops:
evacuation of foreigners.
Soldiers
ALBANIA, 1997 Troops: Soldiers
evacuation of foreigners.
under
fire
during
under fire during
SUDAN, 1998 , Missiles: Attack on pharmaceutical plant
alleged to be 'terrorist' nerve gas plant.
AFGHANISTAN, 1998 Missiles: Attack on former CIA
training camps used by Islamic fundamentalist groups
alleged to have attacked embassies.
IRAQ, 1998(-?) Bombing, missiles: Four days of intensive
air strikes after weapons inspectors allege Iraqi
obstructions.
YUGOSLAVIA, 1999(-?) Bombing, missiles: Heavy NATO air
strikes after Serbia declines to withdraw from Kosovo.
YEMEN, 2000 Naval: Suicide bomb attack on USS Clyde.
MACEDONIA, 2001 Troops: NATO troops shift and partially
disarm Albanian rebels.
UNITED STATES, 2001 Jets, naval: Response to hijacking
attacks.
AFGHANISTAN, 2001 Massive US mobilisation to attack
Taliban, bin Laden. War could expand to Iraq Sudan, and
beyond.
But surely, it is argued, "this was always a start towards making a better world, however
wrong-headed; and now that rivalling Soviet influence is no longer a complicating factor,
surely the USA will get most things right in future???"
But franker bourgeois voices report that the exact opposite is happening, and is in fact
getting worse, to the whole world's enormous damage:
In early November 2001, as the war in Afghanistan was getting under way,
the United Nations held a press conference in Islamabad to announce the
latest scores in the global drug eradication effort. Those journalists who
bothered to attend were surprised to learn that the previous year the Taliban
had all but eradicated the opium poppy from the areas it controlled.
To discover that the Taliban had eradicated the opium poppy did not fit the
picture of unhallowed evil that the moment demanded. The story made little
impact. Even if it was true — as it undoubtedly was — there was a feeling
that the Taliban did not really mean it: they probably had their fingers
crossed. Praise was politically impossible.
Besides, if the story had been given more play it might have been noticed that
in those parts of Afghanistan controlled by the Northern Alliance — who had
successfully auditioned for the parts of noble heroes in the melodrama of the
war against evil — opium production had risen sharply. Had too much
attention been paid to that, it might have raised the question of what would
happen if our new friends, the warlords, had the whole country in which to
plant their favourite crop.
We know the answer to that now. After the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan
swiftly recovered its position as producer of two-thirds of the world's heroin
and main supplier to Europe, including the UK.
Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, has banned it of course, but the
gesture is futile. If the latest UN estimates are correct, opium brings in twice
as much to Afghanistan as foreign aid does. (That's after the country became
a priority case for assistance — or rather for promises of assistance.)
Opium revenues are equivalent to half of the country's GDP. Its agriculture,
roads, communications arid irrigation systems are in such bad shape that
many farmers see little alternative to the poppy. And whatever Hamid Karzai
says, the warlords are hardly going to suppress a crop that offers them such
quantities of easy money.
The trouble is, what are they doing with the money?
They are doing what warlords do: consolidating their power, buying arms,
making sure that the central government doesn't get above itself.
Belatedly, though, the US seems to be worried that the wrong people might
be getting hold of the revenues. The US Drug Enforcement Administration
has launched an urgent initiative — Operation Containment — which is
supposed to get the traffic under control.
To wage an effective war against drugs, however, the US will have to
confront some of its major allies in the war against terror, and that is unlikely
to happen. It complicates the narrative of good and evil for one thing. As the
administration well knows, the words war and drugs are closely related, but
not always in the way we like to pretend. The pompously titled "war on
drugs" — a meaningless umbrella term that covers a variety of policies —
has been a resounding failure by most rational measurements. But the close
association between drugs and war is as strong as ever.
The drug business can be both a motive for armed conflict and a means of
sustaining it. A cursory glance at the history of Afghanistan — and of
conflicts elsewhere reveals it is not just the guys in the black hats who have
found it useful. Afghanistan's drug trade took off in the 1980s, when the CIA
was sponsoring the mojahedin war against the USSR. The cocaine trade in
Central America flourished when the US administration was backing the
Contras to fight the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Clandestine flights that took
arms to Central America returned with other illegal cargoes: It helped the
wheels of the war go round.
It helps the wheels go round in Colombia too. The writer Robin Kirk
estimates that the New York street price of a kilogram of cocaine pays the
wages of 250 Colombian fighters for a month, or buys 180 AK-47 rifles, or
120 satellite telephones. And given that some 6 million Americans spend at
least $46bn on cocaine and heroin a year most of it from Colombia there's
plenty of life in the war yet.
The US government is pouring money into the civil war in Colombia on the
pretext of fighting drugs. In this rather simple scenario, the rebels the Farc
and the FLN — are "narco-terrorists" and the Colombian army must be
helped to defeat them. But the army is closely allied to paramilitary forces
who are paid, fed, clothed and armed by drug money, and the Colombian
legislature is full of senators and congressmen whose electoral campaign
expenses were funded by drug money. If defeating the Farc and the ELN
resulted in the end of the Colombian drugs business, the age of miracles
would truly be upon us.
But surely the "desert-blooming Jews" will never make such a crass and clumsy mess of things,
but will win round Palestinian cooperation eventually???
Not in these pro-imperialist press admissions by one bourgeois Jew:
At some level, I suspect. feelings like these animate the attitude of
most diaspora Jews, however disillusioned or assimilated to Israel.
You may despair over its idiotic invasion of Lebanon, its complicity
in atrocities such as the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, its countless
human rights abuses, its reckless and frequently disproportionate
use of force, its paranoia, its sheer bloody-mindedness.
But somewhere inside there is always a small, persistent voice
saying: these people are putting their necks on the line, making
sacrifices, doing ugly things so that there will be a sanctuary for you
if ever you need one. Who are you to criticise?
Nothing you have read quite prepares you for the provocativeness of
the settlements, the sheer one-in-the-eye, fuck-you-ness of them.
There are the familiar statistics, of course: some 200,000 settlers
hogging a wildly disproportionate share of the land (20% of Gaza
alone), with 2.9m Palestinians squeezed into the rest. But you don't
quite get it till you see it: the boxy orange-roofed homes plonked on
to hilltops like Monopoly houses, little patches of greenery dotting
the drab brush of the Judaean hills, shiny black roads leading down
to the broad, smooth highway, specially constructed to allow settlers
to travel through the West Bank without having to pass through
Palestinian areas.
As we speed past, our Palestinian guide points out the ones that
have been built since the Oslo agreement in 1993, and you can't
help wondering: why? Why, when peace was so close, did Israel
continue to poke these concrete fingers in the Palestinians' eyes?
Yossi Beilin, the former Israeli minister who was instrumental in the
Oslo negotiations, says settlement expansion was a price Labour felt
it was worth paying for the support of its rightwing coalition
partners. Now he's not so sure: "We believed peace was so close
that talking about settlements that were not going to be there seemed
irrelevant . . . What happened was that we don't have peace but we
do have settlements."
Poorer and more concentrated, Gaza is far more instantly shocking
than the West Bank. The stench hits you first — the area's
only sewage plant has long been out of commission. Then the
claustrophobia. With more than a million people packed into an area
roughly the size of the Isle of Wight (20% of whose land is
occupied by 6,500 Jewish settlers) Gaza would be a claustrophobic
place at the best of times. Sealed off, as all Palestinian territories
have been since September, it feels like nothing more than a
self-governing prison camp. In the West Bank, thousands of
Palestinians defy the Israeli cordon, walking over the hills to get to
work each day in Israel. In Gaza, much of which is surrounded by
an electric fence, closure means closure.
On one day in Gaza, we meet a man whose home has just been
bulldozed by the Israeli army, visit a part of the Khan Yunis camp
where 32 homes were flattened by the Israelis a few weeks earlier,
and witness a rocket attack on a Palestinian Authority building in
Gaza. But somehow these are less shocking than the everyday
degradations and indignities of life under closure. We have seen the
bulldozings and the rocket attacks on TV; the sheer brutality of
closure only emerges from the steady stream of stories you hear as
you travel through Gaza and the West Bank.
Stories such as the one told to me by a Palestinian woman, call her
Sarah, I met over dinner in east Jerusalem. Since the intifada, her
mother, who lived in Ramallah, had been unable to travel to east
Jerusalem to see her or her children. So Sarah and her husband had
moved to Ramallah to keep the family together. There was just one
problem: since Sarah and her husband were technically Israeli
Arabs, they were not supposed to be in Ramallah. Any time they
travelled into Jerusalem, they risked being turned back when they
tried to go home.
As someone who grew up under apartheid, I have always resisted
the glib comparison with South Africa. But hearing stories like this,
it's hard to avoid the parallels. "It's worse than apartheid, actually,"
one Palestinian said when the analogy inevitably came up. "Right
now it's apartheid without the pass system."
Travelling through Gaza, hearing stories like Sarah's, seeing the
settlements, you can't help asking the same question: how can Jews
behave like this? How can a people that has for so long been
oppressed allow itself to become an oppressor? It's a naive response,
of course; at the core of Israel's identity has always been the idea of
the muscular New Jew, determined never to allow a repetition of the
catastrophe that befell European Jewry, even if it meant treading on
others to make sure.
Talk to any Israeli about why Israel behaves the way it does, why it
is a nation that feels it is fighting for its very existence despite its
overwhelming military and economic superiority over its
neighbours, and pretty soon you come back to the Holocaust. Over
dinner, an Israeli novelist described how the Shoah defined every
aspect of Israeli life: "We survived to live and now we live to
survive. We cannot escape it and it's very destructive:"
If the Holocaust is one overwhelming influence on the Israeli
psyche, the other is the deeply held suspicion that the Arab world
will not be satisfied until it has pushed the Jewish interlopers
into the sea. It's a view that frequently slides close to paranoia, as
when one Israeli sympathiser pointed down from a hilltop vantage
point at east Jerusalem and told me: "It's not the Palestinians we're
worried about, but how would you feel if there were Iraqi troops
down there?" But it's not entirely paranoid. When I pressed Hassam
Khader, a senior Fatah figure in Nablus, on whether Palestinians
would ever be completely happy with the return of only the West
Bank and Gaza, his reply would not have reassured Israelis: "Sooner
or later the Palestinian people will liberate their homeland. Now
Israel is supported by the United States and Europe, but that will not
continue for ever and sooner or later there will be a big battle
between the Palestinians and Arabs and Israel."
"It will be two or three years, at least," said Nimrod Novik, a former
aide to Shimon Peres. "Both sides need to shed more blood." A
Palestinian academic, arguing that the Palestinians should pursue a
policy of attrition rather than negotiation, thought it would take
much longer. "We can stand this for a long time. The Israelis are
used to the European life and they will not want to live like this. The
only question is who will break first, and we are already broken. We
have been broken for 50 years."
And this is exactly what will happen. This "Israel" 'historical abortion is doomed. And it
is far closer to "anti-semitism" in practice to deny it, than to admit it. Build Leninism.
EPSR supporters.
E P S R
Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting
in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote
is Revolution and a strong workers state, --- as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE
explain.
Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist
light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.
The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western
glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of
Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship
being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with
a vengeance.
***********
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.
*********
"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as
compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute
power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)
*******
" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of
industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern
conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the
bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return
put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a
great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are
periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have
seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state
of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of
every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too
much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The
productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of
bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they
are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois
society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow
to comprise the wealth created by them."
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