A PERSUASIVE INTERPRETATION?

At Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, there's a Marxist called Heiko who holds forth every week and, if you weren't paying attention, you might take him for just one of the raving lunatics that populate the place. His defiance, however, is of a more thoughtful kind and what he says is very challenging. In fact, the idea of class struggle is a credible interpretation of what is happening in global politics today.

Everyone is rightly outraged at the terrorist bombings in Madrid, especially because they influenced the outcome of the election, yet not enough people have questioned the almost casual use of force on behalf of Western governments time and again to achieve precisely the same results.

Heiko draws a parallel between the Bush people and Al Qa'eda; both will stop at nothing to establish effective political control over what happens in the strategic Middle Eastern states of Iran, Iraq, Saudi.

He jokingly asked whether, if Bin Laden tows the American line for a while at some future date, as Gadaffy is apparently doing now, he will be brought back into the fold and rewarded in future years.

He also repeated the now familiar story that Bush had 24 members of the Bin Laden family flown out of the US to safety in Saudi the day after the 9/11 attacks. What's the truth behind that?

I'm not able to tie all these threads together effectively yet because I haven't done my research. It is clear, however, that the shots in the "war on terror", from both sides, are being called by rich elites whose interests are purely selfish i.e. maintaining and extending their economic power.

And isn't it these same forces that are the "drivers" behind many of the Government's policies? If only people weren't quite so keen to believe the official line, perhaps they would wake up one morning a reality quite different from the one they are used to.

Heiko's talks