Tag: Israel

Syria: A tactical victory for the US and Israel – but will there be blowback?

Uniting the oppressed and overcoming the limits of the Axis of Resistance

Joint statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org

(Left) US Ukrainian Stooge Zelensky, (right) US Syrian stooge Al-Jolani, still a wanted Al Qaeda/ISIS terrorist (by the US) with a $10 million price on his head. Identikit makeovers.

The fall of the Syrian government is the most important geopolitical event since the Palestinian resistance attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. In the immediate term, it is a tactical victory for imperialism, and above all for Israel, for weakening the routes of weapons and financial resources destined for the guerrillas in Lebanon and Palestine and allowing the destruction of a political force that, after Iran, had the best arsenal to confront the Zionist entity.

Israel has effectively removed a potential entire front in the ongoing war against the resistance.  Iran has already demonstrated its capacity to hit Israel powerfully and directly but it has temporarily lost the ability to threaten Israel on its borders via its allies. Whilst Assad was not actively opening up the Golan Heights front in the last 14 months, the complete destruction of the Syrian Army, navy and air-force removes this potential for the for-seeable future.

It has greatly strengthened the government of Netanyahu and the “Greater Israel” fanatics in his government., who will be currently drunk with power and their hubristic supremacist ambitions will also become more emboldened with the coming to power to power of Trump. This could hasten the long term imperialist plans for war with Iran to “finish” their goals of “reshaping” West Asia.

However a dialectal examination of this immediate victory for imperialism reveals that it could be more fragile and temporary than first appears. The competing interests of regional powers such as Turkey, the forces of chaos unleashed and the unreliable nature of the jihadhist HTS forces might sow the seeds of blowback against imperialism in the long run. Facing mounting contradictions, every victory of imperialism in the current context creates potentially more contradictions and problems in the long term. 

Which side do Erdogan and HTS play on?

But this victory seems likely to be short-lived. One of the players most benefited by the fall of Assad in the region is Turkey. Turkey, ruled by Tayyip Recep Erdogan, is part of NATO, but does not enjoy the confidence of the imperialist federation, which attempted a military coup to overthrow it in 2016. Having survived the coup attempt, Erdogan has sought to carve out an autonomous space since the beginning of this cold war and even more so now in the first conflicts of World War III, to regain the influence he had until World War I, when the country ruled the Ottoman Empire.

Erdogan and Assad

Turkey knows that it can only play this autonomous role through winning mass support in the region by opposing the other players, especially the hated State of Israel. Not by chance, on the same day December 7, when Damascus fell, Iran, Russia and Turkey held a trilateral forum in Doha, when:

“Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday that he and the foreign ministers of Turkey and Iran agreed at a meeting in Doha that there should be an immediate end to “hostilities” in Syria, Reuters reports. Lavrov said Moscow wanted to see a dialogue between the Syrian government and what he called the “legitimate opposition” in Syria.” (https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241207-russias-lavrov-says-moscow-tehran-and-ankara-want-immediate-end-to-fighting-in-syria/)

The legitimate opposition to which the Russian minister refers is the one influenced by Turkey, which already after the fall of Assad clashed with the Syrian Democratic Forces, linked to the Kurds and supported by the US.

It would be a mistake to believe that the process is controlled by the US and Israel. It is the decadence of the imperialist system that feeds antagonistic aspirations in the bourgeoisie and governments of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which find themselves with the status of aspirants of the BRICS plus.

The mercenary group that took over Damascus, for example, the Sunni jihadist and Salafist Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS or Levant Liberation Organization), led by the Saudi national Abu Mohammed al-Jolani (who has returned to using his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa), is in dispute. HTS continues to be designated by the U.N., U.S., U.K., and other countries as a terrorist organization, and the U.S. has retained a $10 million bounty for information on Jolani’s whereabouts.

The British government exhibits tensions about the HTS, and also reveals the hesitation of imperialism:

“Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said no decision had yet been made on whether the UK government could remove Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) from a list of banned terrorist groups after rebels led the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

‘We’ve all seen in other parts of history where we think there was a turning point, but that didn’t necessarily become the better future we hoped for,’ Sir Keir added.

(Too early to remove Syrian rebels from terror list – Starmer, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7qenxy8r2o)

For this reason, Iran and Hamas itself nurture expectations that the process as a whole may favor the Axis of Resistance in the medium term.

By the same expectation, even after the surrender without combat by the Syrian army, the Zionist IDF has bombed almost 500 times against strategic military positions in Syria under the justification of “preventing weapons from falling into the hands of terrorist elements”. Compared to Hezbollah, for example, the military apparatus of the Syrian army is far superior. Therefore, Israel, which has no reason to feel secure about the future of Syria, has been bombing fighter jets, helicopters, surface-to-air missile launchers and weapons manufacturing sites in Syria.

According to the US and Israeli agenda, the fall of the Syrian regime would allow the suppression of the presence of Russia, where it maintains two naval bases (Tartus and Latakia), cut off the arms and financial routes to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, contain the advance of China’s New Silk Road, isolate Iran, abort the growth of the BRICS in the region, while favoring Israel’s “new Middle East” plan and the oil and trade routes controlled by the imperialist system.

This is not the same agenda as Turkey, which took advantage of the disintegration of Syria to project its autonomous power in the midst of the crisis of the imperialist system and the new cold war to reestablish Turkish influence in the region, lost since the first world war. Ankara’s second objective is to suffocate the Kurdish communities, which are strongly opposed to it within Turkey and which have in the north and northeast of Syria a fertile ground to found Kurdistan. For this reason, pro-Turkish mercenaries are driving the Kurds out of the Syrian city of Deir Ezzor. At the same time, Russian military bases have not been attacked so far by what Lavrov called  the Syrian “legitimate opposition.”

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), feared by Israel as “the largest terrorist organization in the world,” has launched an appeal to the future Syrian government:

“There are some fundamental basic points on which any possible Iranian cooperation with the new Syrian government must be based:

– Agree on the prohibition of normalization between Syria and the Israeli enemy.

– Reject the Israeli incursion into Syrian territory and confront it by all means, including military means.

– Protect Syria’s religious minorities, not attack neighboring countries, prohibit terrorist activities, and cancel support for such activities.

Iran and the Axis of Resistance will support any non-sectarian Syrian government that rejects the Zionist regime, stands with the Palestinian people, and puts the issue of Palestine and its people among its priorities.’

Blowback is an expression of the lexicon of international intelligence since the beginning of the first Cold War (1949-1991) that refers to collateral effects that turn against secret operations of imperialism, such as, for example, the Iranian revolution (1979) resulting from a process of maturation of the struggle against the coup d’état promoted by the CIA in Iran, in 1953.

The attack by fundamentalist guerrillas, used by the US against the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980s, against the WTC in 2001 and the emergence of Al Qaeda would be another example of blowback. The current operation to overthrow the Assad regime, although quick and successful, also seems to be rapidly generating its blowback, due to the fact that immediately after the fall of Damascus, the same forces that united in the uprising, already began to fight each other for the booty.

Osama Bin Laden lauded by Western media for his anti-Soviet jihad

The internal contradictions of the collapse of the government favored a broad united front of antagonistic interests and this anti-Assad unity took a leap in quality when it concentrated a great tension against which there was no resistance. With the disappearance of the antagonist Assad, new contradictions are created within the ultra-heterogeneous front, disputing the booty.

The IDF, HTS, Free Syrian Army, Kurds, have already started to clash with each other. The first victors repressed have been the Kurds. Pro-Turkish mercenaries are driving the Kurds out of Deir ez-Zor through the ‘Syrian National Army’, aiming for control of Syrian oil. This process will directly or contradictorily feed the resurgence of the axis of resistance in Syria.

The Turkish and Saudi governments, as well as the militias they support in Syria, do not deserve the slightest trust on the part of the oppressed. But neither are they reliable agents for imperialism itself. The greatest proof of this is Israel’s intention to annihilate all the repressive apparatus that would be inherited from the Assad government by a future government of militias supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia. These contradictions can and should be taken advantage of by the Axis of Resistance as part of the policy of weakening imperialist control over the region. At the same time, the basic points presented by the IRGC to politically dispute the new Syrian government are reasonable.

How can a country that bravely resisted the onslaught of imperialism for 50 years fall like a house of cards in 10 days?

Neither the US, nor Israeli, nor Turkish armies, nor any guerrilla militia defeated the Syrian army; it was the economic war of imperialism that strangled the Arab state of Syria and its backbone, the army.

There was no defence. Damascus surrendered. Assad fled to Russia. Hundreds of military and leaders of the former government who were unable to flee to Iraq have been massacred. Now, the Syrian Arab State is being torn apart.

Syria is a West Asian country whose main natural resource is its own geostrategic location. Compared to its neighbors, Syria has almost no oil.  The country’s location is essential for all geopolitical movements between the three continents of the old world, especially between Europe and the Arabian Peninsula, bordering both Turkey and Iraq. Syria was the main supply route for the Axis of Resistance that connects Iran to Lebanon.

Syria has been an oppressed and rebellious country for more than half a century, when Hafez al-Assad, father of Bashar al-Assad, of the Ba’ath party, representative of Arab nationalism and ally of the USSR, opposed the integration of the country into the imperialist system led by the US, as happened to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

Syria and the Soviet Union established a mutual protection agreement in 1971 that resulted in the installation of a Soviet naval base at Tartus during the Cold War, with the aim of supporting the Soviet Navy‘s 5th Operational Squadron in the Mediterranean, which the Soviets saw as a counterweight to the U.S. Sixth Fleet based in Italy.

Since then, imperialism has been trying to subjugate the country with sanctions. Syria was weakened in the 1990s with the end of the USSR and the imperialist offensive was increased during the “war on terror” (from 2001) of the USA, with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. This pressure has forced the political regime to become increasingly repressive against the insurgency sponsored by the US, Israel and Turkey, which culminated in the constitution of an opposition front, supported by the West, the Syrian National Council and the Syrian National Army (formerly known as the Free Syrian Army), which feeds on disaffection with, and defectors from, the Assad regime itself.

The Pentagon has established a strategic military base since 2016 in the country, the Al Tanf base, which today can count on a thousand soldiers. This insurgent movement will be boosted by bombings and military interventions camouflaged as a “civil war” that lasts from 2011 to 2018.

Unlike other oppressed countries that suffer from imperialism’s economic wars, Syria has suffered, cumulatively, sanctions, military intervention and more sanctions, such as the Caesar Law, imposed in 2020 by the US. Unlike other sanctioned countries, Syria, which was the third most sanctioned country in the world until 2022, does not have energy reserves like Venezuela, Russia or Iran that could remedy the expensive economic, social and human price of the blockade imposed by the imperialist system. Syria has an estimated reserve of approximately 2.4 billion barrels of oil. Saudi Arabia has about 297 billion, Iran 157 billion and Iraq 145 billion. And even with small energy reserves, these were already controlled by the enemy, directly by occupation troops of the US army or mercenary organizations that associated with the US, such as Kurds, the Islamic State, which in 2014 had managed to dominate most of the camps in eastern Syria, including the largest, Al Omar, also in Deir ez Zor. Oil sales have become one of the biggest sources of income for the Islamic State, generating about $40 million a month in 2015, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. In 2017, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, also funded and armed by the U.S., took control of major oil fields in northeastern Syria and along the Euphrates River. In 2019, Donald Trump, then in his first presidential term, said that the United States expects to obtain millions in revenue from Syrian oil, at least $45 million per month. (https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-50514276).

Syria’s GDP fell from $68 billion in 2011 to $8 billion in 2020 (World Bank). 90% of the Syrian population is below the poverty line (UN). The average salary of Syrian soldiers was $7 a month and commanders were no more than $40 a month. And these were the best average salaries in the country. This misery was the result of a devastating economic war of sanctions that imposed the Cesar Law in 2020, against the country and third-party companies that traded with Syria. Until March 2022, Syria was the third most sanctioned country in the world (Statista). All of this has engendered the bankruptcy of the Syrian Arab state:

“According to the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC headquarters ‘Khatam al-Anbiyaa’: ‘Bashar al-Assad did not request Iranian help – in fact, he actively prevented us from going and helping’

“Bashar al-Assad said to one of our (Iranian) officials at a meeting: ‘My soldiers have become real smugglers or thieves, they only defend those who offer them bribes and privileges. They couldn’t defend me, and when I wanted to protect Damascus at least, I realized that they weren’t capable of protecting Damascus either.’

“Bashar al-Assad did not allow us (the IRGC) to go to help the Syrian Arab Army, although he had asked us for help in the past, but this time he not only did not ask, but was worried about our arrival, and said that ‘if you come, Israel will probably attack us’. (Middle East Spectator).

The demoralization and political backlash of the Assad government itself paved the way for the unhindered triumphal march of the pack of hostile forces to seize the Syrian state.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei

Syria’s victory against imperialism in 2018 was a victory for the world working class

The imperialist international and national military offensive has been contained by the military support of Iran and Russia. This containment of imperialism’s expansionist policy in Syria in 2018 was a milestone of the current Cold War, revealing the decline of the imperialist system’s military hegemony over the globe. It was a progressive process for the oppressed peoples and therefore should have been supported by all genuine communists and anti-imperialists. Syria’s victory against the “Arab Spring” and the “civil war” manipulated by imperialism between 2011 and 2018 was a victory for the world working class.

Between 2011 and 2024, Russia and Iran shielded the Assad government. In 2015, Russia made a new deal with Syria and built the Khmeimim airbase in Latakia to serve as “the strategic center of Russian military intervention on behalf of the Syrian government.” Russian military advisors, as well as those of Iran, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah were essential in defeating the NATO forces’ plan to overthrow the “dictator Assad”, as they had done with Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi. 

But, as of 2022, Assad’s two allied countries have been deeply involved in the two arenas where the cold war between NATO and the Eurasian bloc has already become hot and where the first outbreaks of a third world war have already broken out.

In this process, the weakened Assad government itself began to pursue a policy of reconciliation with the US, Israel and Turkey, taking a certain distance from Russia and Iran, reducing cooperation with the latter two.

“It is now widely known that Iran, Hezbollah and other Shi’ite factions asked Assad for permission to open a front in the Golan Heights after October 7 to support resistance in Gaza and Lebanon. However, Assad refused, reportedly saying that he did not want to drag Syria into a possible open confrontation with Israel and that he did not want to risk jeopardizing his normalization progress with the Gulf states. (Middle East Spectator).

In the past two years, Assad has come to believe that he can pacify his relations with the West, to take an increasingly neutral stance as the third world war escalates. This left the country more vulnerable to the action of all anti-Assad forces operating in Syrian territory and led to the demoralization of part of the armed forces themselves. Several commanders were bribed and co-opted by the West. State institutions were dissolving while the pro-imperialist opposition, defeated in 2018, was regaining strength.

Even so, both Russia and Iran have offered to support a Syrian counteroffensive. Assad was in Russia on November 29 to talk to Putin in person. But Assad and his government seemed to no longer want to play a leading role in defending the state against the pack of opponents.

Who is to blame for the fall of Damascus?

There are several disputes about who to blame for the fall of Syria: Russia, Iran or China, why did they not help the Assad government economically and militarily, or Assad, because it was not more democratic with the people or did not accept help from a foreign intervention to save it? We believe that the answer is none of the previous alternatives. Looking for culprits is a symptom of crisis on the losing side.

Many question whether wealthy China could not have prevented Syria’s economic collapse and prevented the situation from reaching this point.

In 2022, Syria joined China’s Belt and Silk Road project. In September 2023, Assad made his first official visit to China. At that time, the two countries announced a policy of strategic cooperation.

Xi Jimping offered economic aid from China to revive Syria’s economy. “China is willing to strengthen cooperation with Syria through the Belt and Road Initiative… to make positive contributions to regional and world peace and development,” Xi said (Xi Jinping offers help to Bashar al-Assad to rebuild Syria and regain regional status – https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/internacional/xi-jinping-oferece-ajuda-a-bashar-al-assad-para-reconstruir-siria-e-recuperar-status-regional/).

In 2024, China donated the equivalent of $10 million in communications equipment to Syria, as well as medical aid and assistance to Damascus. However, the strengthening of these relations seems not to have been enough to save the Syrian economy and state from multiple bankruptcy and the siege that resulted in its destruction.

Now China tends to lose a lot because with the end of the state of Syria as we know it, the US is getting closer to the realization of its strategic objective in the region, gaining a breathing space and delaying its decline by containing its loss of control in the Middle East, the core of the disputes for oil, the main energy matrix on the planet.

For months, Iran had been offering to bolster the Syrian defence forces. According to journalist Pepe Escobar, Iran said: we have two brigades. if you give the okay, it will take two weeks, for them to position themselves in Syrian territory, but they are available.

Another Iranian source presents the following picture of defection:

“Iran expected Assad to ask for military assistance, and we were prepared to respond…But such a request did not come. It became clear after Aleppo fell that Assad had no real intentions of staying in power.”

The fall of Aleppo marked a turning point. Iranian officials claim that Assad’s reluctance to act signalled his willingness to step down, a decision influenced by diplomatic efforts led by Russia and the United Arab Emirates. This development has left Iran with limited options, leading to a strategic pivot. (Iranian officials reveal Assad ignored warnings, https://slguardian.org/iranian-officials-reveal-assad-ignored-warnings/)

Apparently, the exhaustion of the country, its state, its armed forces and its social fabric was already too deep to resist a new military intervention like the one we are seeing now and Assad renounced the defense of the country, clearing the way for an easy conquest of Aleppo, Homes and Damascus for the dissolution of the state.

Faced with this scenario of multiple bankruptcy of the organs of the state and Syrian defenses, Putin must have thought the same as he said in 2015: “From now on, we will not be more Syrian than the Syrians themselves.” Подробнее: https://eadaily.com/en/news/2024/11/30/russians-dont-have-to-be-syrians-any-more-than-the-syrians-themselves-thoughts-about-the-failure-in-aleppo

Demonstrating that if the Syrians were not in a position to defend themselves, nor did they demand external aid, offered until the eve of the fall by the Russians and Iran, he did not want to pass himself off as an “armed missionary”.

Russian bases in Syria

Discussing the occupation of eastern Poland by the Red Army at Stalin’s behest, Trotsky makes the following observation:

“Robespierre once said that the people do not like missionaries with bayonets. By this, I meant that it is impossible to impose revolutionary ideas and institutions on other peoples by means of military violence. Logically, this idea, which is correct, does not mean that military intervention in other countries is inadmissible for the purpose of cooperating with a revolution.

“But such an intervention – as part of a revolutionary international policy – must be understood by the international proletariat, it must correspond to the wishes of the revolutionary masses into whose territory the revolutionary troops will enter. The theory of socialism in one country cannot, of course, create this active international solidarity, which alone is capable of preparing and justifying armed intervention. The Kremlin poses and solves the problem of military intervention, like all other questions of its policy, i.e., absolutely independently of the ideas and sentiments of the international working class. That is why the Kremlin’s recent diplomatic “successes” are monstrously compromising the USSR and introducing great confusion into the ranks of the world proletariat.” (L. Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism, p. 43)

A military intervention in other countries by a workers’ state with the aim of cooperating with a revolution must correspond to the wishes of the revolutionary masses into whose territory the revolutionary troops are to enter. Even more confusion can be created by the intervention of a well-armed capitalist state, as part of a conflict with imperialism, on the territory of another oppressed capitalist country in the process of a pro-imperialist counter-revolution based on the deep erosion of the ruling capitalist dynasty, incapable of defending itself even militarily.

It is a good thing that Putin has no illusions in himself for being an armed missionary. Otherwise, it would favor imperialist war propaganda against Russia and the Axis of Resistance much more. Putin can offer resistance to the advance of imperialism on his borders, as he has been doing in Ukraine. It can, very progressively, help in the struggle against imperialist intervention as it did in Syria or in the new national liberation struggles agaisnt imperialist finance capital, as it did in Central Africa, but, by the bourgeois determinations of its own government, it does not go beyond that.

China seems to be waging an economic struggle with imperialism at the same time as it is arming itself for an eventual attack, defensively, against itself or for a final assault by imperialism on Taiwan. It merely develops its productive capacities as quickly as possible in order not only to meet the needs of its people, but also so that it can compete militarily but defensively with the West. China wants to win as well. It is interested in avoiding open confrontation with the West for as long as possible (perhaps they are under the illusion that they can avoid such confrontation indefinitely). While building up its armed forces, it wants to avoid the fate of the Soviet Union, which was partially exhausted from the incessant arms race with the West.

This means that it conducts its foreign policy in a very conservative way, pursuing its own national interest and trying not to antagonize the US. Of course, it does not want to develop an internationalist communist foreign policy, but through the BRICS and the belt and road, it is promoting an illusion of “multipolar” coexistence.

We can see that this plan has worked to help China achieve huge gains in recent decades, however, as the US and its allies become increasingly desperate in the face of China’s growing economic and military power, contradictions are coming to light. The U.S. will stop at nothing to prevent the emergence of this multipolar world that China is trying to build. We can see the existence of the brutality they are using to “reshape” West Asia to maintain their rule at the expense of China, where they are crushing states and committing genocide. What response does China have to this? Obviously, they stayed away from Syria and Libya to avoid antagonizing the West, but for how long can they continue the policy of avoiding conflict as the U.S. uses all its tools to maintain control of key regions and resources.

Iran is responsible for articulating a powerful international defensive system of resistance, but not of offensive to definitively defeat imperialism in the region and its Zionist puppet.

But the emancipation of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves. This is the limit of the Anti-Imperialist United Front and the most formidable of the Axes of Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Zionist Resistance. The events in Syria are a warning to that Marxists cannot rely on the rise of “multi-polar” world organically to occur.  The imperialists will stop at nothing in their “crash or crash through” approach and their “old” weapons of military violence and sanctions still have the potential to deliver gains even if they are contradictory and fluid. The economic powerhouse of China and BRICS and the Belt and Road initiative and the ongoing military power of Russia are significant boosts to the power of the international working class but the desperate dragon of imperialism is far from slain.

 No capitalist government in the world can meet the need for the construction of a New Communist International with sections in every country of the globe, to orchestrate from the inside out and from the outside the permanent socialist revolution, beyond the limitations established by each oppressed and cowardly bourgeoisie, to convert the defensive anti-imperialist struggle into an offensive socialist struggle that liberates the oppressed peoples and the working population of the planet from tragedies such as the that is taking place in Syria and that will be repeated in less or more tragic ways in the midst of the entry of the geopolitical situation into World War III.

Imperialism’s Barbarism Against Palestine and Russia: Genocide is here, World War 3 Threatens!

We need a new Communist International!  For Russian Victory in Ukraine!

For an armed anti-imperialist united front to stop the Zionist genocide!

International Workers Revolution is the Only Road to Peace!

Joint statement of LCFI and ClassConscious

Capitalist-imperialist barbarism is staring humanity in the face. US imperialism’s internal contradictions and desperation to hang onto its world hegemony has led to an immediate threat of nuclear war, as close as if not closer than anything that happened in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The NATO expansion drive through the proxy war in Ukraine now means Russia is being bombed by the United States and Britain with US and British-controlled medium range Cruise Missiles (Storm Shadow and ATACMS). These missiles are being controlled directly by the imperialists, and their use constitutes direct acts of war by the US and Britain, since Ukraine does not have the personnel or the technological means to operate them autonomously. This has been engineered by the lame-duck Biden administration since they lost the presidential election to Donald Trump. Biden is too mentally feeble to be in control – it is functionaries of the liberal-militarist US establishment and likely the military themselves who are calling the shots here, trying by means of escalation to pre-empt what Trump might be inclined to do about Ukraine from 21st January when he takes office.

In response, on 21st November, Russia battle-tested a new ‘game changing’ weapon against a Ukrainian missile and armaments facility near Dnipro, a mid-range hypersonic, multi-warheaded missile. Its speed, Mach 10 (10 times the speed of sound) means it travels at 3 kilometres per second, considerably faster than the interception capacity of all the missile defence facilities of Europe‘s imperialist nations and the various East European US clients, which are simply defenceless before it. The new missile, Oreshnik (Hazel Tree) can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads, and if the imperialists were rational, ought to be sufficient several times over to make them back off from attacking Russia. Whether they are rational enough to take note of the lesson remains to be seen.

The genocide in Gaza, livestreamed on social media even in the imperialist countries (though suppressed insofar as is possible by the pro-Zionist bourgeois mainstream media), has found a judicial expression with the indictments of Netanyahu and Gallant by the International Criminal Court for “crimes against humanity” and “using starvation as a weapon of war”. Which barely scratches the surface of Zionism’s crimes. The ICC is a phoney court that was originally set up by the imperialists to arraign the leaders of disobedient countries outside the Western imperialist club. One of its first actions was to condemn Serbia in the NATO war against Yugoslavia. Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of the Balkan country, was arbitrarily convicted and imprisoned by the imperialist tribunal, despite Yugoslavia not recognizing the jurisdiction of this tribunal over the country. Transferred to The Hague, without even having his extradition approved, as required by Yugoslav criminal law, Milosevic was unjustly tried and convicted of genocide. He was found dead in his cell under suspicion of a heart attack deliberately induced by the tribunal. Numerous African leaders have been charged by the ICC, but their most prominent targets include Vladmir Putin, as part of the West’s fraudulent casting of resistance to NATO expansion in Ukraine as somehow criminal.

But the exposure of Israel’s depraved extermination of helpless Palestinian civilians, including women and children, medical staff, journalists, aid workers, even hospital patients, produced mass pressure on this stooge body to act and indict Israeli leaders. Even then, the cowards had to indict a Hamas leader for ‘balance’, even though the individual they indicted has almost certainly himself been murdered by Israel. The Zionists objected and delayed the indictment for months. They appear to have been instrumental in injecting sexual allegations against the ICC prosecutor to try to sabotage the indictment. But the pressure from below was too much, and now the indictments are issued. It puts European politicians, whose countries for the most part endorse the court, in legal jeopardy for their arming Israel to carry out these crimes.

The United States does not endorse the court – despite its stooge nature, they understand that US forces routinely commit terrible crimes around the globe and even a formal affiliation can put its forces at risk if the ICC comes under sustained mass pressure over some US atrocity, as has happened to Israel over the Zionist holocaust. The US has a law, known popularly as the ‘Hague Invasion Act’, which mandates that US governments should use military force against the ICC should it arrest any US politicians or operatives.

Trump’s New Rise to Power

Trump’s election on November 5th, the defeat of Harris acting as second string for the incapacitated, senile Biden, has brought to the fore the contradictions within the US as its world imperialist hegemony slips away. Trump is basically a fascist in the US context, but there sometimes appears to be an element of rhetorical US isolationism in his attitude to the Ukrainian war. His wing of the US ruling class sees China, not Russia, as the main challenger to US imperialism because of its greater productive capacity and economic power.

 Their likely objective is to do a deal with Russia and back off from the Ukraine conflict, hoping to drive a wedge between Russia and China. In fact, so single-mindedly are they focussed on China that at least some of them are inclined to dump NATO and Europe as a waste of resources that the US is far too ‘generous’ to. They demand that European capitalism, not the US, pays for NATO. Though going by some of Trump’s picks for his incoming administration, some of this may be more rhetoric than reality. Trump has appointed Sebastian Gorka, a hawk who has attacked ‘isolationism’ over Ukraine, as his chief of ‘Counterterrorism’ and ‘Special Assistant’. Also among his picks for his new administration are the most virulent Zionists imaginable. Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee, who will be US Ambassador to Israel, says there are no such things as Palestinians, no West Bank, and no occupation. 

Trump’s people are even more single-mindedly focussed on support for Israel than the Biden administration was, as Huckabee’s appointment shows. Trump criticised ‘Genocide Joe’ for being insufficiently supportive of Netanyahu’s attempted extermination of Gazans – he said directly that Israel should be supported to “finish the job” of extermination. Republican senators such as Lindsay Graham call for ‘sanctions’ against the ICC, and even against other nations who cooperate with the ICC over Netanyahu and Gallant – this could easily include Britain, France and Germany, who have placed themselves under its jurisdiction years ago.  Though Germany says that it would not arrest Israeli leaders supposedly because of its own history of Nazism, that stance could cause them legal problems.

These tactical differences are sharply expressed now, as the large, putatively ‘liberal’ wing of the US ruling class that still gravitates around Biden and Harris sees Ukraine as just as paramount as support for Israel if not more so. This nuance implicitly is about whether the Israel lobby calls the shots in US politics, or the presumed interests of the US itself, as well as whether China is more important as an enemy than Russia in global geopolitics. With the rise of BRICS, and the consolidation of Russia-China cooperation, they appear much too late with this. The US is far weaker, and Russia/China/BRICS are far stronger, than in Trump’s first presidency.

Trump is a pro-Zionist fascist, who denounces his liberal-imperialist opponents such as Harris and the rest of the Democratic Party as ‘communists’ and ‘Marxists’. He promises massive deportations of undocumented workers, up to 13 million by some counts, as well as to use the US military to ‘deal with’ his political opponents among the bourgeois establishment, Democratic and Republican, and to crush left-wing and pro-Palestine demonstrations and mobilisations more generally.

Trump has been one of the key authors of a years-long, accelerating coup in US bourgeois politics. It had its precursors with the end of all restrictions on corporate funding in politics in 2010 (Citizens United). But having come to power in 2016 with massive funding from Sheldon Adelson of Likud, despite not even winning the popular vote (and in fact losing by 3 million votes), Trump proceeded to replace enough Supreme Court judges during his first term of office (2017-2021) to create a far-right supermajority on the Supreme Court. While he was out of office, during Biden’s presidency, this supermajority declared that a President in office had virtually unlimited power to carry out acts ‘in his/her official capacity’ that for anyone else would mean prosecution and jail. So, the feeble attempts by elements of the US state to hold him criminally responsible for his attempted putsch on January 6, 2021, were ruled out by ‘his’ Supreme Court supermajority.

Trump and his wing of the ruling class now have control over all branches of the US executive. In addition, Trump has been cultivating an extra-parliamentary wing to his fascist movement based like all fascist movements on animating the most reactionary layers of the petty bourgeoisie. We saw the utilisation of these heavily armed layers both to help confront the Black Lives Matter protests and most obviously in the attempted putsch of January the 6th. These layers which are animated by white supremacy and Christian nationalism are an extra resource for advancing fascism in the US if Trump finds the methods of the state insufficient in the face of mass working class resistance.

Ukraine War Crushed Biden/Harris

The loss of US hegemony is accelerating and what politically crushed the Biden-Harris regime was mainly the inflationary wave that the Ukraine war sanctions against Russian oil sent through the West, and the enormous amounts the US and NATO countries vainly spent trying to defeat Russia in Ukraine. They have not succeeded in inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia; but NATO is now close to defeat itself in Ukraine. They are desperate to stave this off and have been resorting to increasingly desperate means as defeat got closer and closer over the last few months. The threat to target Russia with Western guided missiles from Ukraine was one such tactic – Putin warned on September 10th that such actions could produce a Russian nuclear response, which caused Biden to back off from the idea at that time. And the failing attempt to create another Maidan-style ‘colour revolution’ in Georgia, and similar activities in Moldova, represent attempts to open up yet another front to attack Russia, in Moldova particularly through a potential attack on the mainly Russian-speaking region of Transnistria, which is close to mainly Russian-speaking Odessa within Ukraine, another disputed territory that no doubt would join Russia if it got the chance in the context of a Russian victory in Ukraine.

The economic strains on the US population from the US bourgeoisie’s Ukraine war caused the collapse of the Biden administration’s electoral base, with Harris getting seven million less votes than Biden managed in 2020, whereas Trump won the popular vote this time with around two and a half million more votes than he did in 2020. This time, Trump won the popular vote by around that margin, two and a half million votes. The complaints that he was the victim of a fraudulent election system in 2020 stand discredited by this, but he managed to gain power anyway. Mainly because the Ukraine war and its economic consequences caused large amounts of suffering to working-class people in the US, and his promises to end the war resonated with that population. And Harris’s clear endorsement of all the actions of Biden’s administration in funding, arming and politically supporting Israel’s year-long genocide in Gaza and now its bloody rampage against the population of Lebanon also discredited the Democrats among their base among class conscious workers, particularly those from oppressed minorities.

The virtually open shift to the US and NATO powers firing longer-range missiles into Russia and Ukraine makes it very clear that Ukraine has all along been simply a Western puppet – this is not a war for ‘national liberation’ or against ‘Russian imperialism’ as social-imperialists putatively on the left like the majority of the so-called United Secretariat of the Fourth International, or the Revolutionary Communist Internationalist Tendency, like to pretend. This is a Western-initiated proxy war, barely hidden behind clouds of imperialist camouflage rhetoric, aimed at defeating and dismembering Russia, and nothing whatsoever to do with any putative rights of Ukrainians. The Russian Federation does not have any project of oppressing Ukrainians – that is why their war over the past two-and-a-half years had been so painstaking – a war of attrition with high Ukrainian military casualties but kept minimal for civilians. Russia clearly has the armed capacity to wage a blitzkrieg-type war, bomb the hell out of Ukraine and take territory rapidly, if it wanted to. But that kind of war would cause massive civilian casualties, and today’s Russian politicians do not seek such bloodshed. Ukrainians are regarded as a fraternal people, not targets for indiscriminate terror. It is the West that is inflicting civilian casualties in this war by using petal mines, depleted Uranium weapons and now openly supplying anti-personnel landmines to attack civilians in the newly Russian territories.

Zionist barbarism. Hospital patients in Gaza forced onto death march by Israeli troop captors.
 

The Need for a New Communist International

Those on the Trotskyist left who claim to be consistent defencists of struggles against imperialism but have not yet unequivocally taken a side with Russia against imperialism, instead engaging in third-campist rhetoric about how Russian and Ukrainian workers should unite against Putin and NATO, ought to be forced to re-assess their wrong position by recent events involving Storm Shadow and ATACMS. The new Spartacists have been the prime example of supposedly orthodox Communists/Trotskyists who have been promoting these erroneous views recently. But the idea that this is in any way a national war between Ukraine and Russia ought to be completely blown away by these events. Even the most dull-witted should be able to discern that the Ukraine conflict is now, and always was, fundamentally a defensive and progressive war by Russia aimed at defending this non-imperialist, ex-workers’ state against imperialist-planned dismemberment.

World War III is very much on the horizon. Some may even argue that it is already underway. That is a matter of interpretation at this point. Trotsky’s remarks about the leadup to World War II make sobering reading today:

“Under the increasing tension of capitalist disintegration, imperialist antagonisms reach an impasse at the height of which separate clashes and bloody local disturbances (Ethiopia, Spain, the Far East, Central Europe) must inevitably coalesce into a conflagration of world dimensions. The bourgeoisie, of course, is aware of the mortal danger to its domination represented by a new war. But that class is now immeasurably less capable of averting war than on the eve of 1914.” (Transitional Programme, 1938)

Though today we are in a different situation, as we are not facing an inter-imperialist conflict, but the threat of a war by NATO imperialism to maintain US/Western hegemony against a loose alliance of remaining workers states, non-imperialist ex-workers states (retaining significant elements of previous post-capitalist productive and state apparatus as major deformations on a weak restored capitalism), and more classically semi-colonial countries seeking to escape imperialist domination and dictat.  But the West does not tolerate this kind of insubordination, and the threat of a world war to restore US hegemony and imperialist domination is very real. All these insurgent countries must be defended against imperialism as a matter of principle by the workers’ movements of the world.

Communists need to be providing revolutionary leadership in this situation, advocating anti-imperialist united fronts to deal with these barbarities. The problem of Zionism and its genocidal aggression against the Arab peoples needs to be resolved by an anti-imperialist united front. We must demand that Russia and China throw their full economic and military resources into fighting the Zionist genocide and defeating Israel in this life-and-death struggle for the Arab peoples. We advocate the independent mass mobilisation of workers wherever it is feasible. Previously we have advocated a ‘coalition of the willing’ to intervene militarily to stop the Zionist slaughter wherever it is happening – the recent Iranian retaliatory actions against Israel also underline that this is feasible.

But in the end, even an anti-imperialist united front is not completely adequate. Every such united front needs a consciously revolutionary, working-class component to make it effective and viable. The only permanent road to peace, the only solution to all the deadly problems that beset humanity in this situation, from the threat of nuclear annihilation to disaster through the capitalist-induced destruction of the biosphere, is through the creation of a mass Communist Movement internationally.  We need a new world party of socialist revolution to unite all subjective communists, all consistent anti-imperialists, under one banner based on free discussion of differences, but unity in action, in pursuit of international socialism. For workers revolution is the only road to real peace!

US Elections – Vote PSL, No Votes for Harris or Trump. United Front Action to oppose any Far-Right Putsch!

Joint Statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org

As Marxists, we can never give support to outright bourgeois, imperialist parties like the Democrats and Republicans in the United States. This is certainly true in the current US election to take place on November 5th, when the fascist-Republican Donald Trump squares off against the Democratic Party nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. Both parties represent different factions of the bourgeoisie, both pitch for support from different sections of the working class. The purpose being to chain those sections of the masses to thoroughly bourgeois politics, and in Trump’s case, to try to mobilise the most backward elements to try to bludgeon his way back to power irrespective of the popular vote of the US American people.

We seek to find a way to draw a class line in this election against the imperialist parties, who are up to their necks in support to Israel’s genocidal campaign to destroy the Palestinian people, which is now spreading genocidal Zionist terrorism and massacres of civilians throughout the West Asia/Middle East region. The Biden administration is also up to its neck in the US proxy war in Ukraine, as part of a new Cold War against Russia and China, non-imperialist adversaries that have put themselves at the head of a bloc of ex-colonial countries, workers states and former workers states resisting imperialist hegemony.

We call upon all socialists, anti-racists and class-conscious workers to vote for the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and its Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates, Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia. Though there is much in the campaign of the PSL that represents left-liberal sentiment – in particular their material on Ukraine is weak – nevertheless by counterposing a socialist campaign to the two main bourgeois parties, they are drawing a class line in this election in an elemental manner. In quite a few places, the bourgeois parties, particularly the Democrats, are trying hard to marginalise them by keeping them off the ballot.

PSL Candiates Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia, and a guide to how to vote for them for US readers. See https://votesocialist2024.com/ for more information.

Such basic class politics is particularly crucial today, as US bourgeois politics has reached a stage of decay so deep that it seems likely that the outcome of this election could bring about something close to civil war, and the Trump/Republican side openly threatens both bourgeois and left-wing political opponents with imprisonment, violence, and the use of the US military to crush the so-called ‘enemy within’.

Trump can only move forward with this threat of a coup d’état and second American civil war, and this time go beyond his 2021 Beer Hall Putsch if Trumpism manages to divide the national repressive apparatus and the ‘deep state’: Pentagon, National Guard, CIA, FBI, making them bear the cost of war. Without this, Trump does not have the military strength and intelligence to even start a civil war or consistently blackmail the Democrats.

Trump’s rise to office for his first term from 2016 to 2020 was fuelled in large measure by popular disillusionment with neoliberal politics and economics, privatisation, deregulation and attacks on the living standards of the working class. The decline of US manufacturing industry, parallelling what happened in Britain and other places, was part of the neoliberal strategy of engineering the decline of the working class at home through the export of unionised, decent-paying jobs to lower wage countries in the Global Rest, including China. Over time, this undermined support from such unionised workers for the Democrats and produced Trumpism, which mobilised angry sections of increasingly impoverished, under-employed workers behind Trump’s call to ‘Make America Great Again’.

Many of Trump’s working-class supporters in 2016 were under the illusion that he was on their side against such things. His racism and anti-Muslim vitriol and abuses, and rampant support for Zionists (who provided him with many millions of dollars of funding), was used to fuel a nationalist protectionism and the illusion that his anti-immigration brutality and chauvinist hostility to China, his racist contempt for blacks and his hatred of the Black Lives Matter movement went hand-in-hand with a programme to revive US manufacturing, that this was the real concept behind ‘MAGA’ (“Make America Great Again”).

There is also the illusion that Trump was in some way anti-war, even that he was supported by Putin’s Russia, which has fuelled illusions among some anti-imperialist activists. The liberals “Russiagate” delusion was an effort to use the factional split in the US ruling class to further whip up war hysteria against Russia by casting Trump as a tool of the “all powerful Putin”. The Democrats represent the faction of the US ruling class who wanted to crush Russia first before moving onto war with China. It was also an act of projection to divert attention from Trump being fully backed by Zionist forces rather than Russia.

Trump was far from pro-worker: virtually the first thing he did when he took office in January 2017 was to institute a massive tax-cut, mainly for the very rich. His far-right appointments to the Supreme Court did what they were meant to do – they abolished a woman’s right to abortion on a federal level, giving every backward state the right to deny basic rights to women.

And far from being a peacemaker in power, one of his most virulent, warmongering actions was that in 2019 he tore up the Reagan-Gorbachev Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty of 1987, that resulted in the removal of Cruise and Pershing Missiles from Europe, that in the1980s were a potent threat of nuclear first-strike against the USSR. His anti-Russian warmongering was of such intensity that his first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was so outraged and frightened by his intensity, that he notoriously lost his temper and called Trump a ‘fucking moron’. Trump also personally ordered the murder of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, a notorious act of war against Iran. The went together with Trump’s tearing up of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which is what he was paid to do by the Likudnik casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. He did much else for the Zionists – he moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and recognised Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights from Syria. This laid the basis for overt US support to the current genocide – all such capitulations and favours to Israel then put the lobby in a stronger position over the next President to continue them, which Biden duly did.

 And while there may be illusions about Trump supposedly being set to stop US support for Ukraine, it should be recalled that it was under Trump’s presidency that Zelensky was groomed as Jewish camouflage for the Nazi-dominated US puppet regime that has waged a proxy war against the people of the Donbass and Crimea on behalf of the US and NATO. In February 2022 this became a proxy war against Russia itself, as Russia intervened in the East of Ukraine to protect the people of the Donbass from a massive US-funded offensive that began 10 days before Putin finally kicked off the Special Military Operation.

Harris appears like a younger copy of Biden. Her early history as a reactionary District Attorney and then Attorney General in California put her on the same wing of the Democratic Party as Bill Clinton and Biden, with their ‘Effective Death Penalty’ Act that tried to out-Reagan the Republican Party themselves. In California she could not be as virulent as that, but she both professed to oppose, and enforced, the Death Penalty as Attorney General. She was notorious for seeking to keep imprisoned men, many of whom were black, in jail even beyond nominal release dates, to engage in prison work, which caused her to be strongly disliked among many black people, even now as she poses a champion of the rights of minorities against Trump’s overt racism. She has slightly distanced herself from Netanyahu’s most bloodthirsty actions during the current genocidal rampage against Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, calling sporadically for ceasefires etc, but the murder of Hassan Nasrallah, the Israeli attempt to invade Lebanon, the recent Israeli attack on Iran, etc have had her leaping to attention, seeking the approval of the Lobby.

Harris is not a lesser evil in electoral terms. Judging by the opinion polls, she still has the edge in terms of the likely popular vote, but that is not always what decides US presidential elections. Rather, it is the fate of around 7 swing states that often decide, and if those go the opposite way to the popular vote, they can still provide the second placed candidate overall with enough votes in the state-by-state Electoral College to win the presidency, even against the popular vote. Both Trump in 2016, and George W Bush in 2000, won the presidency against the popular vote.

This is what Trump is hoping will happen again. It happened in 2016, and when it failed to happen again in 2020, he launched his ‘Beer Halll Putsch’ – the 6 Jan attack on the Capitol. It is highly likely that something similar will happen if Harris manages to win the popular vote, and some of the swing states become violently contested – there will likely be an attempt by Trump and his supporters to seize the presidency by forcibly seizing control of the Electoral College, hoping no doubt that his appointed Supreme Court judges will back him up. One factor against that is that the same judges have ruled that the President is effectively above the law, immune from prosecution “In his/Her official capacity”, and being as Trump is not the incumbent, the Biden-Harris administration could use that as a license to act ruthlessly in putting down a renewed Trump putsch. But that could in turn trigger the outbreak of civil war.

Though the workers movement has no interest in supporting either bourgeois candidate in this election, but rather an interest in supporting the independent PSL, nevertheless if there is an attempt to negate formal democracy, we do have a class interest in defeating that. So, there would be a principled ground, and class imperative, for a united front with Harris and the Democrats against such a Trump putsch. A defence of the right of the elected president to take office is in the interest of the working class as a matter of elementary self-defence, particularly as Trump has openly stated his intention to use the US military to suppress and take revenge against liberal and left-wing political opponents.

This is not a minor question – it may loom very large after 5th November. But at the same time, our interest is in the maximum class-based vote for the PSL.

For a Nuclear-Armed ‘Coalition of the Willing’ – For International Working Class Action to defeat Zionism!

Iranian misslies over Tel Aviv, Ist October 2024

Avenge Nasrallah and all the victims of Zionist Beirut massacre!  Defend Iran against Imperialist attack!

LCFI and ClassConscious joint statement

Zionism has struck a seemingly devastating blow against the Arab and Muslim peoples with the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah and several other Hizbullah leaders by an all-out attack on a cluster of residential blocks in Beirut, in effect massacring the entire neighbourhood. This crime requires blood-vengeance against the perpetrators, to bring them to the final court of justice in the manner of the Nuremburg Trials after WWII, when many leading Nazis were executed. Now they have invaded Lebanon on the ground, in a supposedly ‘limited’ incursion, but they are pursuing a scorched earth policy, demanding that the population of 30 Lebanese villages flee. They should remember 2006 and their previous devastating defeat!

For all the vetoes by the Biden administration of hostile resolutions in the UN Security Council, for all their continued supply of weapons to Israel while periodically bleating about the need for a ceasefire in the Gaza holocaust, Trump goes one better from Israel’s and its powerful Western lobby’s standpoint in that he threatens to destroy Iran. This Beirut massacre has given birth to a Dutch auction of adulation of Netanyahu’s crimes as Vice President and Democratic Party Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris effectively hailed the murder of Nasrallah and pledged ‘support for Israel’. No doubt fearing that Netanyahu would like to turn the US election into a ‘Khaki election’ and get Trump back in on a wave of pro-Zionist anti-Arab racist hysteria.

The Zionists brazenly continue to slaughter civilians in Gaza even as they fail to defeat Hamas. But it looks like Hamas were more prepared to take on Israel than Hizbullah have proven to be so far. Hamas have had so many of their leaders murdered by Israel/Mossad over the years that they have become very security conscious. Whereas Hizbullah managed to allow themselves to be infiltrated, not least by Mossad technology, by sourcing such products in countries allied to Israel, such as Taiwan and Hungary. Arab militants in future will not be so naïve. It is likely that similar channels to this allowed Israel to track down the leaders of Hizbullah. This is unlikely to be allowed to happen again.

As communists, we seek to mobilise the world working class to defend the Palestinian, Lebanese and other oppressed Arab and Muslim peoples against Zionist imperialism, and its US protectors. But this is not an economic question: our role in the imperialist centres is to do everything we can to take the boot of our own ruling classes of the necks of the oppressed nations. In the oppressed countries, particularly in the Middle East/West Asia, the masses have a crucial role – not just in direct struggle with and through such popular forces as Hezbollah, but the doubly oppressed proletariat of Egypt, Turkey and elsewhere. An uprising in Egypt or Turkey with an anti-imperialist outlook that fights not only against their own comprador ruling class but also the Zionists and imperialists could totally change the equation in the Middle East/West Asia.

it is a question of making the international labour movement fit for political power by taking up the cause of all the oppressed. Today that is about the cause of the Arab victims of Palestine, Lebanon, and potentially the whole of West Asia including Iran. The whole idea of ‘condemnation’ of Israel in the United Nations Security Council is bankrupt and a dead end. There needs to be an alternative to the UN itself – BRICS, which already encompasses the majority of humanity, which it is now being suggested may merge with the Shanghai Cooperation Council, could become a practical alternative to the phoney UN – a repository for a world-wide Anti-Imperialist United Front.

The world is confronted with Israel, a rogue imperialist implant in West Asia, which is running amok and massacring whole populations in a truly demented fashion while trying vainly to consolidate and legitimise its rule on land stolen from the same Arab peoples, all of it! It has not succeeded in defeating Hamas, and once Hizbullah gets its bearings it will no doubt be back in contention also, but it is unrivalled in massacring civilians, including women and children, by the hundreds of thousands. It is likely that the death toll from Israel’s Holocaust in Gaza is around a quarter of a million or more, not the mere 40,000 that the Gaza Health ministry has been able to count.

This cannot be allowed to continue. As partisans of the Anti-Imperialist United Front, we must provide political leadership and advocate strategy and tactics for the forces that are actually fighting imperialism, to defeat this enemy. We call on the leadership of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea to declare a formal military alliance, a nuclear-armed coalition to stop Israel’s bloody rampage, and to use BRICS and the SCC to broaden its authority. Such a body must be prepared to confront force with force. In the countries joining such an anti-imperialist united front, the masses are also crucial. The governments of those bourgeois states and deformed workers states involved would be more likely and more able to fight a true anti-imperialist war if it was a popular war backed by and under pressure from their own working classes.

Fortunately, Nazi Germany was defeated by a military coalition, thanks above all to the heroic action of the USSR that swept Hitler’s army from Moscow to Berlin. Now, in its decline, the imperialist system established after the Second World War itself resorts to the most barbaric terrorism and Nazi methods in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon against the oppressed peoples, demonstrating that empires can be very dangerous in their moment of decline. The resistance coalition of the oppressed countries and peoples needs greater cohesion, centralisation and geostrategy to defeat the main enemy of humanity. And, within this anti-imperialist united front, the workers must be organized to fight permanently to transform the struggle against the imperialist system into the construction of the world socialist revolution.

The ICC, Western Imperialism and hypocritical double standards

By Kalliste Hill

The ICC, in the person of Karim Khan, finally announced after 7 months they will ask for the arrest of 2 Israeli ministers, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defence Minister Galant and 3 Hamas leaders, Sinwar, Al-Masri and Hanayeh, after the conspicuous leaks and hysterical outbursts of the Zionist lobby in the US, UK and Israel at the very thought that they might be treated like “African leaders and thugs like Putin”.

However, underneath the hysteria, the mafia-like threats from US congressmen against the ICC prosecutor to sanction not only him, his family and the members of the entire ICC office, including the Judges, lies yet another unbalanced, disingenuous litany of false allegations against the real targets of this action, the Palestinian leadership, while reserving the spotlight of public opinion and victim-waving for the Israelis.

The long list of “crimes” against the Palestinian targets include the chief negotiator as well as the prime Palestinian target marked out assassination by Netanyahu and the Israeli UN ambassador in public and on the floor of the UN.

It’s almost as if the ICC, far from any real intention to actually drag Netanyahu into the dock, is actually reinforcing the ludicrous and demonstrably false allegations made by Israel against Hamas, which excuses they’ve used to commit genocide against the Palestinian people for the past 76 years. They are reciting yet again the reasons why Israel will continue to pursue its policy of political assassinations and fomenting regime change for those who already support the Zionist cause while creating more panic and fear amongst those who see the existence of the state of Israel, even anapartheid, ethno-fascist state, as it is at the moment, as existential, when the reality is that it should go the way of White South Africa, to be replaced by a secular state based on equality and social justice.

After all, the US has already passed laws that ensure no US citizen, or now any proxy under their protection, will be protected from prosecution by the ICC in perpetuity. What do Netanyahu and Galant really have to fear? Whereas all Palestinians, and especially their political leaders have every reason to know that they, their family members and all who work with them, are under sentence of death at the hands of the Zionists who rule Israel, and control our Empire of Lies.

Communist Fight Series 2, issue 3 is Out Now!

This issue is heavily focussed on the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, which are the two immediately active issues that are threatening to escalate towards WWIII at this juncture.

The lead article is a joint statement of two closely aligned Marxist groups on  the implications of Israel’s attempts to provoke a major regional war with Iran, to somewhat distract from its failure, despite murdering around 40,000 Palestinian civilians, to subdue Hamas in Gaza.

Iran’s reprisal on 14th April was only parried by Israel with the help of its traditional imperialist allies: the US, France and Britain, as enough drone and missiles were fired at Israel to overwhelm its Iron Dome defence system had it been forced to defend itself alone. But Iran still managed to damage several Israeli military facilities, including those where the forces that carried out its initial murderous attack on the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus on 1st April.

Since this statement was written, Israel has made a murky response apparently through Iranian proxies, that appear to have led to some completely failed drone attacks around the Iranian city of Isfahan, home of much of Iran’s civil nuclear infrastructure. Though other material has emerged, that at this point appears speculative, that suggests that Israel may have tried and failed to use a high-altitude nuclear weapon to knock out Iranian electronics. A frightening development if true, however the information at this point is open to question.

Which brings us onto the second major article on Zionism, an abridged and updated study of the roots of the danger that Zionism poses, titled “Political Zionism And its Genocidal Hegemony in the Imperialist World”. In its original form, this was published by our predecessor Socialist Fight in 2016, when perhaps it was ahead of its time. It contains an extensive analysis of how Zionism came to play such an important and powerful role in the world of Western imperialism, and updates the Marxist, materialist analysis of the Belgian Trotskyist Abram Leon of the roots of the oppression of Jews in the early 20th Century, in his work The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation.

Leon, who was murdered by the Nazis during WWII, did not live to see the foundation of the Zionist state. Let alone how Zionism inverted that oppression and created the situation we see today where a state whose official mythology claims it was founded to atone for the Nazi genocide, is carrying out its own genocide of the Palestinian people. However, as the article points out, there are enough pointers in Leon’s own analysis to explain what happened within his orthodox Marxist framework, extended in a manner verifiably faithful to its own Marxist, materialist method.

Regarding the Ukraine proxy war of imperialism, which Russia now seems to be on the verge of defeating, we publish the statement of our closely allied groups, and also of like-minded comrades in India, condemning and analysing the imperialist inspired terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall venue in Moscow, by terrorist mercenaries who it is now pretty much proven were acting as part of the Ukrainian proxy war. Terrorism of this type, purely directed at civilians, is hardly a sign of strength. It is directed at the Russian civilian population who overwhelmingly re-elected Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president recently, and basically expresses imperialist bloodlust against that population, just as has previously been seen in attacks on the population of Crimea and the Donbass republics, who likewise voted to join Russia.

Finally, we have a historical article on the Irish Question, written by a leading Brazilian comrade of the LCFI, which should be of interest to readers in Britain both for the different perspective such a view offers of the Irish question, and also for the historical material on the creditable activity of our predecessors in Socialist Fight on the Irish Question, which we obviously seek to continue when the chance arises to do so, as the Irish Question is still crucial for Marxists in Britain to address.

Is Israel trying to provoke WWIII to stave off Gaza genocide defeat?

Support Iran’s right to self-defence!

Defend the Axis of Resistance, against Zionist/US/NATO bloc!

Joint statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org   

In the early hours of Sunday, 14th April, Iran fired, in three waves, more than 300 drones, missiles and finally more sophisticated, possibly hypersonic ballistic missiles at Israel. Most of them appear to have been intercepted by Israel’s air defences or those of its imperialist allies, the US, France and Britain, except for the third wave, which significantly damaged Nevatim and Ramon airbases in the Negev area, and an intelligence centre in the Golan Heights area, all of which were instrumental in Israel’s earlier act of aggression against Iran’s mission in Syria.

This retaliation was for the Israeli air attack on an Iranian diplomatic building in Damascus, Syria on 1st April, an annex of the Iranian Embassy itself. By the Vienna Convention, embassy buildings are regarded throughout the world as being part of the territory of the state the embassy serves. Israel’s attack on the Damascus building was thus regarded by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran as an attack on Iranian territory itself. It was an overt act of war and bound at some point to provoke some kind of Iranian military attack on Israeli territory.

The building Israel destroyed contained seven members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRCG), including the commander of its Quds force, Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, and his deputy, Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi. All-in-all 16 were killed by Israel. The presence of the senior IRCG figures was part of Iran’s military-political relationship with the Lebanese government, which includes the Shi’a resistance organisation Hizbullah, which has twice defeated near-genocidal Israeli invasions of Lebanon which massacred Palestinians and Lebanese Shia, going back as far as 1978. The Israelis scream that the presence of the highly efficient IRCG meant that the building was “not an embassy”, but every significant power in the world that has allies that it seeks to defend from third party attack uses diplomatic premises to further military collaboration with such allies.

Everyone knows that the CIA and Mossad habitually use US and Israeli Embassy buildings around the world to further their aims in terms of both military objectives and espionage. The criteria Israel tries to use to excuse attacking the Damascus Iranian Embassy could be used equally well to justify attacking every single US and Israeli Embassy on the planet. The Iranian military presence was part of the ‘Axis of Resistance’ to Israeli activities in West Asia, activities in pursuit of its aim of a Greater Israel though conquest and genocide of the Palestinian people and more besides, with some renderings of Greater Israel encompassing the whole of Jordan, most of Syria, Iraq up to the River Euphrates and Egypt up to the Nile.

In the case of Syria, everyone knows that Iran and Hizbullah not only defend Syria against direct US and Israeli aggression, but also have played a major role over more than a decade, along with Russia, in thwarting attempts by pro-imperialist jihadist proxies trying to reproduce the destruction of Libya by such proxies, and actual US, British and French intervention forces, in 2011 and after. It is now quite well known that Al Qaeda and ISIS reactionary jihadists have when wounded been given medical treatment by Israel.  The Israeli Islamophobic propaganda offensive against Hamas, accusing them of being akin to Daesh/IS, that they have waged since Oct 7th at the very least, can be defined according to the traditional Jewish term chutzpah, a classic rendering of which is the story of the man who murdered both his parents and then attempted to plead for mercy because he was now an orphan.

The Israeli attack was part not only of its current genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza, but also of this attempt to destabilise and destroy Syria. Iran is now de-facto an ally of Russia and China, both implicitly through its membership of the BRICS bloc, which it joined in January, but also though its membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Council. In that sense, this in turn carries echoes of not merely an anti-Iran agenda from the Zionist genocidaire regime, but also of an anti-Russian, anti-Chinese agenda that merges with the Zionist regime’s more traditional hatreds and obsessions, of Palestinians – of Muslim, Christian and other creeds — other local Arab peoples, and Arabs and other Muslim peoples more generally. Attacks on both Mosques and Churches during the genocide in Gaza, most notably the Al Aqsa Mosque itself, certainly indicate that. All these reactionary missions merge into one in terms of Israel’s attacks on Iran’s presence in Syria. And these occurrences, though they have some autonomy, fit in with the wider drive towards generalised conflict between the forces loyal to the US, seeking to preserve its worldwide imperialist hegemony, and those forces led by Russia and China seeking to reduce the US to just one part of a ‘multipolar world’.

Zionism Facing Defeat

The real nature of Israel is eminently visible in the genocidal murder of over 40,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since the prison breakout of 7th October, the deliberate creation of a deadly famine through the blocking of food, water and fuel to Gaza, publicly announced in advance by the Israeli regime, by the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, healthcare, education facilities, etc., and the deliberate displacement through mass terrorisation of the overwhelming majority of its 2.3 million people. As well as the creeping extension of the methods Israel is using in Gaza to the West Bank and the massive wave of arrests, detentions, settler and state killings and ethnic cleansing that is escalating there also.

But the problem is that for all the genocidal slaughter it has carried out over the last six months, Israel is not winning in Gaza. It has failed to eliminate and defeat Hamas, instead its cowardly army has contented itself with massacring defenceless civilians, while absurdly claiming that it has no choice because Hamas supposedly hides among them as ‘human shields’. This has been the most reported and documented genocidal slaughter in history, even though Israel has murdered many journalists to try to suppress the news coming out. They have been unable to do so because of the ubiquity of social media and camera/mobile phone technology. Israel itself is not stable: there have been huge protests against Netanyahu’s overt corruption, his handling of the ‘hostage’ crisis, and the far-right nature of his regime over the last few months, even though much of it is on a chauvinist basis and does not touch the oppression of the Palestinian people. But the genocidal outrages in Gaza have given rise to the biggest worldwide protest movement in history, with many millions on the streets in countries worldwide, and billions behind them, in the Muslim world from the Maghreb to Indonesia, wider in East Asia, in Latin America, and in the imperialist countries of Western Europe and North America.

Huge Palestine Solidarity march to Israeli Embassy in London, February 2024

In some places these have led to workers’ solidarity actions, in other places, such as Yemen and now Iran, the mass solidarity of millions has had a military counterpart as armed actions have been taken against Israel by governments driven by solidarity with the Palestinians. The Houthi blockade of the Red Sea has cost Israel, and Western companies and governments who trade with Israel, many billions of dollars in lost revenue.  The prison breakout on October 7th forced Israel to evacuate many of its civilians from a wide area near Gaza. So-far sporadic hostilities with Hizbullah forces in the North have also forced large-scale evacuation of the Northern strip of Israel, near the Lebanese border. Netanyahu gambled on the attack on the Damascus Iranian consulate to escalate the war in order to hide the failures of the IDF forces in Gaza, but the result of this action appears to have forced the withdrawal of most of the IDF forces from the Gaza strip, apart from a smaller contingent that splits the strip in two and prevents those driven into the South of Gaza by the earlier bombardment and mass slaughter returning to the North.

The attack on the Damascus Embassy caused a major problem for both US imperialism, and its Biden administration on the one hand, and Israel and the Netanyahu fragile war coalition on the other. The US ruling class is divided about how to handle Iran, and that division has been evident for several years. Obama’s Iran deal, which placed limitations on Iran’s development of nuclear power technology, supposedly to stop its development of nuclear weapons, in exchange for a lifting of long-standing US sanctions, is one manifestation of this. Netanyahu and the Israel lobby played a major role in agitating in US bourgeois politics against this deal: recall Netanyahu’s address attacking Obama’s deal to a joint session of Congress in 2015 where the conduct of US politicians was described by the eminent anti-Zionist US Jewish commentator Norman Finkelstein as like “demented Jack-in-the-Boxes”.  They gave Netanyahu something like 26 standing ovations!

Trump’s far-right election campaign in 2016 was bankrolled by Likud through the gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, who was Trump’s biggest funder. As Likud wanted, Trump tore up Obama’s Iran deal and implemented the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act. This had been pushed through by the Israel lobby more than 20 years earlier but kicked into the long grass by Clinton, Bush and Obama because it was irrational from the standpoint of US imperialism. He also formally recognised Israel’s annexation of Golan, the Jordan Valley, and East Jerusalem, which again previous US administrations had refrained from because they had no particular interest in doing so. The Trump administration thus gave a major boost to the power of the already-very-powerful Zionist lobby in the US. Though Trump was defeated by Biden’s Democrats in 2020, the cowardly and reactionary nature of the Democrats mean that they hardly dared challenge what Trump had done.

Though there has been a half-hearted attempt to revive Obama’s Iran deal, nothing else has changed in that regard, and Biden is still trying to shaft the Palestinians by completing Trump’s ‘Abraham Accords’ to supposedly ‘normalise’ Israeli relations with conservative Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It is the massive exposure of the Gaza genocide and the mass rage this has generated in the whole Arab world, and wider developments such as the growth of BRICS, which Saudi Arabia and the UAE joined this year, which have made this problematic, not anything Biden has done to break with Trump’s far-right Zionism.

US Imperialism Wavers

However, the Gaza genocide and its massive exposure has caused massive political damage to the US, and the Biden administration is facing elections in the Autumn. As things stand, Biden is massively losing support from liberal and labor-inclined elements who traditionally support the Democrats, even though the way the deeply undemocratic US electoral system is designed makes it extremely difficult, in fact at present impossible, for a new political force to get on ballots to oppose both foul parties. Nevertheless, this makes the Democrats likely to lose to Trump, a mess of their own making, and that of the US ruling class, whose world imperialist hegemony is collapsing.

It is not clear whether the pullout of the bulk of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip is the result of US pressure on Israel, or of Israeli fears of facing Iran with most of its military bogged down in a quagmire. But it is clear that this diversionary escalation tactic in fact is bringing Israeli defeat in Gaza closer because Israel does not have the resources to carry on in Gaza and take on Iran, Hizbullah, etc. Palestinians have been quoted as saying that the night Israel had to deal with Iran’s retaliatory strikes was the first night since October 7th when they have not had to contend with massive Israeli air attacks on them. It has also been reported that the single night of Iranian retaliatory strike not only was the largest drone strike in history (so far), but also cost Israel over $1 billion dollars to deal with.

 In a statement issued on the day, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in welcoming the Iranian action, wrote that:

“…the legitimate Iranian response broke the prestige of the Zionist entity, revealing its fragility and inability to defend itself or restore its deterrence power. At the same time, it confirmed the ability of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the resistance factions to deliver painful strikes to the Zionist entity, deepening its internal crisis due to its inability to achieve any of its goals in eliminating the resistance in the Gaza Strip or stopping the strikes directed at it by the resistance in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq.

“…the rush of the American administration and its partners in Britain, France, Germany, and some of their Arab tails in the region to use all their defensive weapons to try to protect the Zionist entity from the Iranian missiles and drones confirms the involvement of these parties in the Zionist crimes in the region, especially in Gaza. It also reveals that this Zionist entity has suffered a strategic defeat, has become humiliated and weak, and is unable to protect itself, now imploring its allies to take on this role.

“… the unprecedented Iranian strikes, the first of their kind in history against the Zionist entity, represent an important turning point in the battle of the Al-Aqsa Flood and in favour of the resistance factions. The repercussions of this strike will have pressing effects on the Zionist entity to stop its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip after the American administration and its allies realized that any escalation in the region would lead to a regional war where their bases and interests will not be safe, nor will the Zionist entity be able to defend itself after the collapse of its deterrence power and its humiliating defeat in front of the resistance in Gaza and other fronts.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/04/14/pflp-unprecedented-iranian-strikes-on-israel-signal-turning-point-in-al-aqsa-battle/

The Israeli gamble on trying to provoke a regional, or world war, to negate its defeat in Gaza, may well be forlorn. The US is losing its world hegemony, and that is clear in other conflicts apart from those in West Asia. Particularly in Ukraine, where their proxy Ukrainian client is facing imminent collapse, and the strains on NATO resulting from this are such that European imperialist powers, fearing a collapse in US commitment to NATO under a Trump presidency due to isolationism, are fantasising about intervening in Ukraine on a bilateral basis, effectively outside the NATO framework. The Zionist lobby have in the past congratulated themselves in getting the US to fight its wars for it, but at this point the US seems to be somewhat paralysed. It was prepared to use its technological resources to prevent Israel’s own Iron Dome defence system being overwhelmed by a combined assault from the Axis of Resistance, but hesitates to participate in an actual Israeli attack on Iran.

And it certainly does not appear keen on the wilder ambitions for world war and the ‘Masada Complex’ that may well be harboured by Netanyahu and his even more far-right cohorts, like Smotrich or Ben Gvir, to use nuclear weapons against its opponents in West Asia, with Iran a particularly hated potential target.  It is worth noting that Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector who is now a particularly enlightened commentator on geopolitics and the Russia question, has surmised that even though Iran does not possess nuclear weapons (by religious conviction, according to Ayatollah Khamenei), it nevertheless is now able to shelter under the Russian/Chinese nuclear umbrella by virtue of its membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Council, and equally importantly, its provision of drone technology to Russia for use in defending the Donbass.  This may well blunt the temptation for the US to act on Israel’s behalf against Iran even more. It is still possible that Israel’s nuclear arsenal may be used in such a conflict, but if so, they really could not expect impunity either.

There appears to have been a considerable exodus from Israel by parts of the Jewish population who have lost confidence in the stability and ability to prevail of Israel against the native people of the Levant. The October 7th action by Hamas was a huge defeat for Israel, not in strictly military terms, as they regained control of ‘their’ territory within a few days and forced the insurgents to flee back to the Gaza Strip. But it was a political defeat, as the division between Gaza and the adjacent areas of Israel is artificial and purely a product of ethnic cleaning and previous atrocities and massacres of the Arab civilian population. The vaunted stability of the Zionist colonisation was exposed as being built on sand. The only solution that the Zionists could envisage for that political problem was a genocidal one – the extermination of the ‘uppity’ population that had dared to defy the place allocated to it by the colonisers.

But that in turn has exposed the nature of Zionism to the whole world, and irrevocably destroyed its political reputation. The only justification that the Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie and its camp followers were able to propagate for the increasingly visible crimes of their state was that Israel was in some way an atonement for the Nazi genocide of Jews. The element of racist injustice that Arabs, entirely outside the European continent where the genocide took place, should have to supposedly pay for the crimes of Europeans against the mainly Ashkenazi European Jewish population, was passed over in silence by the same Jewish-Zionist bourgeoisie and its European and North American camp followers and cult worshippers, in the last three quarters of a century or so. But the decisive exposure of the genocidal nature of the Zionist project by the Gaza genocide witnessed by the world over the last 6th months is an irrevocable defeat. Never again, as the perpetrator of genocide itself, will it be able to trade on the bastardisastion of the Nazi genocide to excuse its crimes. That ship has sailed. The developing exodus of Jewish colonists from Israel could well, as Ritter has pointed out, point to a coming collapse of the settler entity as to make the democratic demand for a single polity based on full political equality, a democratic demand capable of being implemented in practice.

A major defeat for Zionism and Western imperialism, particularly US imperialism, is taking shape. However, the strategic goals of these forces have not changed, and the working class needs to be on its guard for further reckless and destructive actions from these forces, and above all to struggle for the full liberation of the Palestinian people from Zionist genocidal oppression.

Defeat Zionism. Defend Iran and the Axis of Resistance from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen. Destroy the Zionist State – for full equality and democratic rights for all in a workers Palestine. For permanent revolution across West Asia – for working class power!

US/British/French/EU imperialists – out of West Asia!