Resistance and the unity of the working class is what will progress our movement. - Seumas Milne

The media and politicians in this country and all over the Western world would have you believe that the cause of this suffering and this carnage is the rockets of Hamas that are fired into Israel. That is to turn reality on its head.
The Palestinian people have the right, as any occupied people under law and under all political and legal conventions - the right to resist. Israel, as an illegal occupying power, has one obligation, and that is to withdraw. Even now, despite the horrific casualties, Hamas is not broken and will not be broken, because of the spirit of resistance of the Palestinian people.

No major 20th-century political tradition is without blood on its hands, but battles over history are more about the future than the past. Part of the current enthusiasm in official western circles for dancing on the grave of communism is no doubt about relations with today's Russia and China. But it also reflects a determination to prove there is no alternative to the new global capitalist order - and that any attempt to find one is bound to lead to suffering and bloodshed.

It has become almost received wisdom to bracket Stalin and Hitler as twin monsters of the past century - Mao and Pol Pot are sometimes thrown in as an afterthought - and commonplace to equate communism and fascism as the two greatest evils of an unprecedentedly sanguinary era. In some versions, communism is even held to be the more vile and bloodier wickedness. The impact of this cold war victors' version of the past has been to relativise the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure.