One law for them…

The imperialists like to talk about the “international community” and “international law” – but only when it suits them. But they’re only talking about their law and their community when they drivel on about justice and human rights. They have an “international criminal court” in The Hague to deal with war-criminals – but only ones they don’t like.They have an “international community” – but it only consists of the United States; its NATO partners, and a handful of puppet states whose leaders are guaranteed to do its bidding.   
Rishi Sunak tells parliament that "first and most important principle is that Israel has the right to defend itself under law" and Grant Shapps, the defence minister, tells us that asking Israel to agree a cease-fire with Hamas is “untenable” and that Israel has "a right" to "go after" Hamas after the devastating Palestinian guerrilla raid into Israel earlier in the month. But whose laws and whose rights are they talking about?
It’s certainly not the rights laid down at the United Nations – the world forum which has repeatedly called for an end to the Israel occupation and upheld the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Nor is it the international law that the imperialists routinely ignored when they overthrew the governments of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya or fermented civil war with their “colour revolutions”,“Arab Springs” and “Maidan Squares” to bring about “regime change” in Ukraine and Syria and create an American-run “Greater Middle East” for the benefit of the big oil corporations. 
The imperialists claim they stand for freedom. Biden talks about it all the time. But it is the freedom of the straitjacket and the dungeon. They preach this “freedom” with their Stealth bombers, their special forces and their economic blockades against all those who dare to stand up for themselves. We saw what the imperialists mean by freedom in Iraq. Libya  and the hills of Afghanistan. We see it today in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
They call their empire the “free world”. They say we have free speech, and live in a democracy. But it’s democracy and freedom only for them. In fact bourgeois democracy is democracy only for the exploiters.
Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London, once said that if voting changed anything, they'd abolish it. And bourgeois elections, as we well know, are used so that the smallest number of people can manipulate the maximum number of votes.
It’s dictatorship in all but the formal sense for the exploited. It is brutal and oppressive because that is the only way it can ensure that the rich can continue to live the lives of Roman emperors off the backs of the working people. While millions of people scrabble to earn a living just to keep a roof over their heads a tiny elite live lives beyond the reach and often beyond the imagination of most workers.
But wherever there is oppression, there is resistance. We saw it in the Don Basin when the anti-fascist resistance drove out the fascists from eastern Ukraine to set up their own people’s democracies that have now joined the Russian Federation. And now we see it on the streets of Gaza and the towns and villages of the West Bank...

Johnson in Wonderland

Boris Johnson didn’t amount to much when he was Foreign Minister in Theresa May’s government. His seemingly trivial approach to international diplomacy led the Russians to compare him unflatteringly with his famous Victorian counterpart, calling him Britain’s “New Palmerston”. Few took him seriously and it is even said that President Sisi of Egypt walked out of a meeting with Johnson simply because the conversation did not get beyond the usual pleasantries.
    So we shouldn’t be surprise to see BoJo posing as a great statesman in Kiev in a desperate attempt to show his usefulness to the Biden administration and divert domestic attention away from the ‘partygate’ scandal. But Johnson has, not surprisingly, failed to shake off the pack of Tory back-benchers baying for his blood or attract the attention of Vladimir Putin or the man in the White House Johnson is so keen to impress.
    Johnson knows that the real reason that so many Tories are turning on him is because they believe they will never be able to restore the ‘special relationship’ that many of them think is vital for the survival of British imperialism as long as he remains at the helm.
    Johnson may think that posing as US imperialism’s chief henchman à la Blair is the way to get back into Biden’s good books. But BoJo, who is still remembered as “Britain’s Trump” in Biden’s circles, needs to do much more than this to restore Britain’s standing with the current President of the USA. Rather than wasting his time talking to a nonentity like Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, Johnson would be better off working to improve relations with Ireland by ending the impasse with the European Union over northern Ireland’s Irish Sea ‘border’. But that is something Johnson clearly cannot do.

The long and winding road

Sad to see that Ken Livingstone, who was hounded out of the Labour Party by the Blairites and Zionists, has applied to join the Greens instead. Some will argue that there was nowhere else for him to go. Others that the Greens are indeed a genuinely left alternative to Labour.
    Meanwhile, reports that Jeremy Corbyn is planning to form a new party – reports almost entirely coming from the Starmer camp that want him out anyway – have fired calls from the usual suspects for the establishment of yet another left social-democratic alternative to Labour. But, needless to say, this will go nowhere without the support of the trade union movement and the unions are simply not interested.
    Past efforts have dismally failed. Arthur Scargill, the militant miners’ leader, did his best with his Socialist Labour Party (SLP) whilst even the RMT’s money wasn’t enough to get their Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) off the ground.
    There’s no point even in standing communist candidates. It is literally divisive. The old Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) abandoned the revolutionary road when it adopted the {British Road to Socialism}. Other left electoral platforms such as Respect, the SLP and TUSC all essentially express the same theory.
    The parliamentary election system in Britain is essentially a two-party system. At this stage the main working-class demands are for social reforms, and we believe that they are best carried out by reformist parties such as the Labour Party. We see the main struggle being within that party and the trade unions, and as long as Labour retains its organic links with the trade unions our policies are unlikely to change. Lenin himself said, at the time of Ramsay MacDonald in the early 1920s, that the British Labour Party was a very strange party, unlike any other social democratic party in Europe. The ‘strangeness’ is that Labour gets nearly all its members and funding from the trade unions. This is still the case.

A Pagoda for peace in London

By Carole Barclay

Pagodas were once the follies of the landed aristocracy of the 18^th century during the craze for anything from the Far East. Nowadays these towers, also known as stupas, that were originally built to house religious relics are invariably linked with Buddhism. So it’s quite surprising to find one in plain sight in a London park.

The London Peace Pagoda in Battersea Park has been a landmark along the Thames for over 20 years. It was given to the people of London by the Japanese Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist order as part of the old Greater London Council’s Peace Year in 1984, back in Ken Livingstone’s day.

The order’s founder, Nichidatsu Fujii, dedicated his life to peace after meeting Mahatma Gandhi in 1931. After the Second World War he called for the construction of Peace Pagodas as shrines to world peace, it was completed in 1985. Sadly Nichidatsu Fuiji died at the age of 100, just 12 weeks before the Battersea pagoda was opened.

Built in the Japanese style, the tower stands at 33.5 metres high with four large gilded bronze sculptures on each of its four sides that reflect important stages in Buddha’s life. A Buddhist monk, who lives in a storeroom converted into a temple in the park, looks after the pagoda, which is the focus for meditation and peace ceremonies throughout the year – including a prayers for peace ceremony in June and a floating lantern ceremony to mark Nagasaki day in August.

The pagoda is located within the grounds of Battersea Park on the south bank of the Thames. The park has a boating lake, all-year-round sports facilities and a small children’s zoo, as well as a licensed café for drinks and snacks. It’s is open from 8:00am until dusk and the nearest railway station is Battersea Park.

Stop the Zionist witch-hunt !

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KEN Livingstone’s resignation from the Labour Party and the sacking of a Hammersmith council worker for expressing pro-Palestinian views at a Jewish Voice for Labour demonstration in March are part of a vicious Zionist and Blairite campaign to drive supporters of the Palestinian cause out of the Labour Party.

Livingstone may not have been the most articulate advocate of Palestinian rights. Stan Keable, who was sacked after 17 years of unblemished service for stating his opinion of Zionists in his own time, holds cranky socialist views that have never won much support within the Labour Representation Committee or the wider labour movement in London. But none of this can possibly justify their persecution.

Years ago, when Tony Benn called Labour the “broad church” of the labour movement, all sorts of views were tolerated within it. Even now Labour officially upholds the rights of free speech and freedom of expression – which is seen by the anti-communist and anti-Arab drivel that’s spouted by the Zionists and their venal right-wing allies without censure within the Labour Party today. But these days prominent campaigners for justice for Palestine are being branded as “anti-semites” by the Blairite clique that controls Labour’s bureaucracy with the support of the right-wing bloc of Labour MPs in alliance with the Zionist movement and the blessing of the bourgeois media.

The Labour Representation Committee recently said: “those who accuse Labour Party members of antisemitism very often do so because of Corbyn’s and other left wingers’ support for the Palestinian cause. Their target is ultimately Jeremy Corbyn, a decades-long advocate of Palestinian rights. Their aim is to peel off and neutralise as many of his supporters as possible, and ultimately to go after Corbyn. Don’t forget his leadership is still under siege. In 2016 172 Labour MPs passed a vote of no confidence in him. Though his impressive show in the 2017 election made him invulnerable for the time being, they still lay low and plot what harm they can do to Corbyn and Labour”.

In 1975 the UN General Assembly classified Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. In 1991 the General Assembly, under pressure from US imperialism, revoked the resolution – a condition set by Israel in return for participation in the ‘Madrid Peace Conference’ which was supposedly going to resolve the Palestinian problem. Needless to say there is still no justice for the Palestinians and Zionism is still a reactionary and racist ideology.

Zionists maintain that the “Jewish question” is “eternal,” “unique,” and beyond class considerations. Zionists utilise every means to propagandise the false idea of class peace between Jewish workers and the Jewish bourgeoisie. All forms of class struggle among Jews are proclaimed to be national treason. The Zionists have always made use of demagogy and tactical manoeuvres in their efforts to conceal the anti-popular, reactionary essence of Zionism, alleging that Zionism is the “national liberation movement of Jews throughout the world.”

Zionism’s main policy has always been one of struggle, both open and covert, against socialism, the international communist and national liberation movements, and the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries. Immediately after the victory of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, Zionism unleashed an active struggle against the new Soviet state. After the Second World War, amid a further intensification of the overall crisis of capitalism, the anticommunism and anti-Sovietism of international Zionism assumed still broader dimensions

Marxists have always repudiated the theory and practice of Zionism. Lenin exposed the reactionary essence of Zionism, emphasising that its dogmas are reactionary, false, and contrary to the interests of the Jewish proletariat. He criticised the Zionists’ theses concerning the unique nature of the Jewish people, the alleged absence of class differences among the Jews, and the imaginary communality of their interests, explaining that such assertions aimed to distract Jewish workersfrom the proletariat’s common class struggle. Exposing the Zionists and the Blairites is not enough. We must challenge these reactionary forces head-on throughout the labour movement.