Supposedly, when Franco was lying on his deathbed, he heard the noise of people gathered outside the window and asked his subordinates what was going on. "It is the people," he was told, "they have come to say goodbye." "Oh," he said, "where are they going?" This joke adequately reflected Franco's fantasy of his own immortality and the superfluity of the people in fascist ideology. It was, of course, expected that they should honour him, just as the British rulers of India expected natives to honour them, but it was really too much for them to expect him to regard them as anything other than objects for satire, even on his deathbed. The colonisation of Spain is the process by which a colonial military elite crushed the people, civil society and government of Spain by means of methods it had refined in the subjugation of Morocco, or rather that part of Morocco that had been a Protectorate of Spain - the northernmost territory including most of the mountainous Rif. It is by no means unusual for a fascist regime to be seen as essentially colonial in nature. Trotsky's Fourth International considered Fascism "a chemically pure distillation of the culture of imperialism". Aime Cesaire, the Martinican anti-colonial rebel and poet, famously ascribed the origins of European fascism to its earlier application to non-Europeans, as did Fanon. Enzo Traverso traces some of the origins of Nazi violence to the colonial era. Sven Lindquist's Exterminate the Brutes is dedicated to tracing the rise of fascism to the military doctrines and practises of colonialism. It is a connection made explicit by Hitler himself in his table talk. There is a significant and growing body of literature on the connections between the colonial experience and modern fascism, both in general and in specific - Germany's extermination of the Herero people in South-West Africa provided some of the experiential backdrop to the later Nazi programme of conquest and extermination, while Italy's colonial successes radicalised the fascist regime.

The colonisation of Spain is of particular importance to this story, because it is the prelude to World War II. The success of Franco combined with Anschluss (the annexation of Austria to form Großdeutschland) to provide Hitler with the basis for further aggression to the East. The war also provided the means by which Italy was subordinated to German foreign policy priorities - it was in exchange for Italian hegemony in the Mediterranean that Italy accepted German rule in Austria. Every pressure pushing toward war in Europe was channelled through Spain during Franco's war of conquest. I thought about writing this after reading Andy Durgan's brilliant, concise book about the history and historiography of the Spanish Civil War. It barely touches upon the colonial backdrop, never references it as an explanatory factor (so far as I can tell) and at several points refers to certain atrocities against civilians such as the terrorist bombing of Guernica as novel. Paul Preston's account of the Civil War is better in this regard, and there have been numerous smaller studies and monographs that admit this as an important factor, but I might mention that Sebastian Balfour's Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War is the best account yet. Replete with original research and sharp insights, I cannot recommend it highly enough (supposing you can afford the high cover price). I draw on it liberally in what follows, as well as a volume of essays co-edited by Balfour and Preston, Spain and the Great Powers in the Twentieth Century.

Spanish power in Morocco was initially the result of military penetration, on the one hand, and 'peaceful penetration', the injection of capital and particularly of mining capital in the north, on the other. Arising ten years after the defeat of Spain by the United States in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, known then as the 'Disaster', and in the context of the 'Scramble for Africa', Spain's bid for a resumption of some world power status was frustrated by the manouevring of its imperial rivals, England and France in particular, and by the growth of a militant working class and an anti-military culture. Essentially, in negotiations with France in 1909, Spain was permitted a small 'sphere of influence' in the north of Morocco, dominated by the Rif, while France controlled the remainder. Later in 1912, they and the 'international community' agreed that the spheres should become Protectorates, and they awarded themselves the right to intervene militarily. On the face of it, they were committed to defending the rule of the Sultanate - it was pro-sovereignty imperialism - but in reality, the arrival of European troops and commerce both disrupted the delicate balance of tribal society and weakened the already limited grip of political elites. Although the commitment of troops to Morocco stirred mass public opposition, and even led to an anti-war strike in Barcelona when indigenous resistance against mining interests led to a military occupation to pacify the country, it encouraged conservative Catholic constituencies for whom the Reconquest against the Moorish infidel was still a worthy political goal. And, ironically, military disaster seemed to temporarily overcome public scepticism - both in 1909 and in 1921, when resistance inflicted harsh defeats on the Spanish troops, a temporary upsurge in militarism resulted. The political elite, mainly guided by 19th Century Liberalism, oscillated between the 'peaceful penetration' of the neo-colonial business lobby and the strident racialism and conquest policies of the colonial military, tending more and more toward the latter as the situation became more difficult.

It was during the 1909 conflict that the Army of Africa first hit upon the idea of using an army of collaborators, known as the Regulares, often drawn from some tribal elites opposed to the insurgent tribes. They also found that they could negotiate with local rulers, such as the leader of the Beni Aros tribe, the sharif Muley Ahmed el Raisuni, who proved to be the most extraordinarily untrustworthy native of the lot. Like the Krim family, which was initially pro-Spanish, he sided with Spain wherever he did so for pragmatic reasons, not because he was particularly happy with colonialism. Unlike Mohammed Abdel Krim, who would become famous simply as Abdel Krim, even his resistance was opportunistic and subject to change at a moment's notice. And unlike the Krim family, he was never particularly interested in modernisation. The Krims, while religious traditionalists, were modernisers in other respects who had hoped that Spanish capital would bring schools, hospitals and trade, and the eventual rebellion of Abdel Krim was in part due to the fact that this had proven to be a pipe dream - all the Spanish brought was repression. Abdel Krim began his rebellious career by aligning with the Central Powers in the Great War, and later took up arms himself. Raisuni was, by contrast, a thief and a vicious tormentor of his subjects, and his sole claim to legitimacy was during his periodic jihads against the Christian crusaders. He was also a brilliant diplomat who succeeded in conning the commander-in-chief of the armed forces Lt Col Manuel Fernandez Silvestre into believing that he was a loyal Spanish servant, not once but several times.

It was during this war also that a new colonial identity was formed that was increasingly opposed to the metropolis, especially among younger officers whose career advancement depended upon military action. The right-wing militarists were contemptuous of metropolitan business interests and the back-door deals that often excluded the chain of command, but neither were they content with a religious motivation for their war: for them it was a paternalistic civilising mission, a charitable attempt to break the will of an infantile race of Moroccans and subject them to Spanish education. In this, they had the enthusiastic support of King Alfonso XIII, who insisted on breaking lines of communication to discuss matters directly with officers. The resistance in the Rif steadily acquired the contours of a classical twentieth century anti-colonial movement. It was clearly familiar with, though no one elaborated, the guerilla military doctrine later to be espoused by the Viet Minh - if the enemy masses his forces he loses ground, and if he scatters he loses strength. Such was persistently a problem for the Spanish high command. In order to demoralise the resistance, General Alfau added to the usual run of scorched earth destruction of homes and cattle the decapitation of prisoners - a photograph of Legionnaires holding heads aloft was ironically later used by the Falange to claim that the communist International Brigades were beheading 'patriots'.

In the aftermath of World War I, the Spanish took the opportunity to try to take full control of their Protectorate. This initiative included the foundation of a Foreign Legion, proposed by Franco's comrade, Col. Jose Millan Astray, which would takeover most of the donkey work from ordinary Spanish soldiers. To the indigenous Regulares, it added impoverished recruits from across the capitals of Europe. And they also dispensed a great deal of bribery to get tribal chieftains on their side - this latter proved a serious weakness, for while bribery could temporarily keep elites on side, there was nothing enduring about it and nothing that could stimulate popular support. Therefore, any widespread uprising would inevitably pressure chiefs to reject the latest bribe and take up arms. And, of course, it was at this point that Abdel Krim started to form his army of jihad against the occupiers. It was precisely the money built up by the Krim family through mining contracts with Spanish firms that enabled Abdel Krim to bring about tribal unity, acquire some sophisticated armaments, and make the first step toward realising his goal of establishing an independent Rif republic. It was Krim's army that inflicted the most humiliating defeat the Spanish army ever experienced, the series of events from 22 July to 9 August 1921 known as the 'Disaster of Anual'. Following a series of extraordinary military victories, Krim was able to set up a professional police force and a government, administering justice on the basis of Quranic law. It was in this battle that the young Francisco Franco first demonstrated his zeal, but it was to no avail - Krim controlled most of the Spanish zone and was expanding into the French zone. It bears mentioning that Krim's troops were quick to reflect the brutality of the colonisers with the Spanish prisoners they took, many of whom were tortured to death in grotesquely savage ways. It was a heroic war, theirs, a genuine war of liberation, but even such wars have rarely been free of this kind of atrocity.

At any rate, the Spanish counter-offensive (which managed to recruit Raisuni) had the backing of an inflamed chauvanistic reaction domestically, and a growing consensus among the political elite that extreme measures were needed. These extreme measures included total war, chemical warfare, bombardment intended to kill everyone in sight, genocidal violence in short. When in 1923 the multiparty government didn't seem to be able to stem domestic discontent or support the colonial venture fully enough, a coup backed to a large extent by the colonial officer corps put General Miguel Primo de Rivera in charge. He was no fascist, however, and was incapable of keeping the support of the colonials because he regarded the Protectorate as itself a danger to Spain. His advocacy of chemical warfare was coupled with a policy of retreat that was unacceptable to the military elite. He came under escalating criticism from the officer corps, especially from Francisco Franco, who was nurturing superiors and even acquiring the sympathy of King Alfonso. When Rivera visited the Legion's headquarters, Franco gave the customary speech proposing a toast to a new visitor, and used it to attack Rivera's policy of retreat. There were supposedly a number of plots to depose Rivera, one of which Franco was implicated in, but Rivera would survive until he lost the support of the King in January 1930. In the meantime, the Spanish air force, using chemical weapons manufactured in contracts with German industrialised, pounded huge areas of the Moroccan land mass, slaughtering people and animals, destroying plant-life, reducing towns to rubble. Balfour has done some good work in exposing this, because it has until recently been submerged in various fragmentary reports, due to an intentional effort at obfuscation by the Spanish military. Although devised with the specific aim of extermination, this did not stop some arguing that the intent was 'humanitarian' - the aim was not to punish the natives, but to frighten them into their own senses, so that they would submit themselves to 'the educational work of Spain'. I would just point out that this is only one particularly egregious example - in colonial practise, the worst barbarisms were always justified as 'humanitarian', and they were indeed 'humanitarian' provided one accepts the viciously racist purview of the conquerors, just as slavery was 'humanitarian' and concentration camps were 'humanitarian'. Rather than put people through endless misery with progressively slender chance of reward, Krim surrendered at Targuist on 27 May 1926 - to the French, in fact, not the Spanish. The French colonists, as harsh as they were, seemed to have some regard for him and some distaste for the counterproductive repressiveness of the Spanish fightback. But actually, anyone who has read of the French repression against Abd-el-Kader and his supporters in Algeria, or indeed just a fragment of the British repression in India (to wit the imprisonment of 80,000 Indians in a prison in the Andaman islands between 1858 and 1939, all of whom were tortured or used for medical experiments), knows that Spain was no more severe than its colonial rivals.

The victory had some interesting repercussions. Having galvanised a colonial army, it left them with little to do but engage in corruption. It also left them alienated from a Metropolitan political and business class that was trying and failing to modernise. When the Left drove out General Damasco Berenguer and then won municipal elections in 1931, King Alfonso went into exile, and the short-lived Spanish Republic came into existence. Berenguer, who had tolerated the PSOE on account of its moderation (its leader Julian Besteiro was an admirer of the Labour Party), was caught by surprise by the party's participation in a rebellion against him - Besteiro had opposed the revolt, though he later benefited from it. The army, though it might have every reason to be hostile to a Republic, had made no attempt to defend Berenguer, and was sufficiently disenchanted to allow the Republic to exist. The ruling class was hopeful at any rate that the reformers would improve Spain's hitherto lamentable economic performance, even in the context of a global economic crisis. However, the PSOE in alliance with the left Republicans and the Radicals (middle class opportunists with a shifty leader), proved no more adept at modernising the economy than the previous elite had. In truth, they faced a great deal resistance from precisely the class that was supposed to benefit. They tried to rationalise the army, improve conditions for workers (especially rural workers), improve the condition of women, and build schools - only the latter didn't offend some constituency or other. Every improvement in the condition of workers was resisted locally; the army was not at all happy with the downsizing of its bloated officer corps (in fact, the PSOE had attempted to democratise the military by introducing conscription, but had crucially stopped short at extending these reforms to the colonial army); and women had plenty of enemies, not least the PSOE leaders who feared they would elect whoever the Church told them to if given the vote. In 1932, General Sanjurjo - a veteran of the Moroccan campaign - attempted a coup, and the following year, a right-wing coalition was brought to power, with its core constituent, the CEDA, aping the rhetoric of the fascist movements that were rising across Europe (they were going to 'save Spain from Marxists, Freemasons and Jews'). As reforming legislation was rolled back, and employers went on the offensive, the Left went into disarray. The one attempt at resistance was a general strike by the PSOE, which reflected not so much its radicalism but its determination to contain the grassroots with ill-conceived gestures. The strike was defeated rapidly in all but one region, the Asturias, where miners held out for two weeks against the army. It was the intervention of the Army of Africa under Franco's command, which used the Regulares to crush the insurgency, that finished the Asturias. Over a thousand died. As Balfour points out, the use of indigenous Moroccans would have seemed odd, but the workers' rebellion was seen as a Soviet-inspired foreign intrigue, and therefore the hardy natives under good Christian Spanish guidance could be of service.

Similarly, when the Left won the 1936 elections, with a much more radicalised activist population, it was the colonial base that provided the ground from which the conspirators - almost all 'heroes' of the Rif campaign - launched their coup. It was the earliest and easiest part of the campaign. I don't need to tell you that the response of the elected government was pathetic. Essentially, the task of resistance fell in the short-term to extra-parliamentary forces. On the other hand, had it not been for the rapid intervention of Mussolini and Hitler, the fascist army would have got nowhere - the lower orders obstructed the transmission of arms and troops from Morocco to Spain, and it fell to the two fascist powers to supply air lifts. Similarly, while the 'democracies' abandoned Republican Spain to its fate (notwithstanding some occasional efforts by Leon Blum), the fascist powers happily larded the Nationalists with troops and advanced weaponry. Germany's Condor Legion arrived in Spain 19,000 strong, while throughout the war Mussolini supplied a total of 80,000 men. They helped direct crucial aerial bombardment missions, and were more than a match for the International Brigades, who were increasingly subject to de-emphasis because they could be depicted as Moscow stooges. The Soviet Union's aid to the Republic, I might add, was brief and opportunistic. The evidence is plentiful that Stalin's relationship with republican Spain was manipulative rather than cooperative. He expected it to be bourgeois and nationalistic rather than revolutionary, and the PCE (Spanish Communist Party) helped promulgate that policy, with the calculated destruction of any revolutionary upsurge - since it was this spirit which had provided the backbone of the early defense of the Republic, it is unsurprising that the breaking of it destroyed the resistance. The Republic's gold (which was offered in lieu of cash payment for weapons) was underpaid for, and all aid was gradually shut off during 1937, by which time it had become clear that Stalin was considering a rapprochement with the Nazi elite out of fears for its own borders. Despite a couple of border openings from France through 1938, there was nothing coming the way of the loyalists. Franco had decided that he wasn't prepared to opt for a quick victory: his aim was a slow-burning success that would annihilate the Republic and all of its vestiges. In other words, he didn't simply opt for a military strategy, but for a long-term political strategy in which the basis for an alternative social order would be wiped out. He also tried out the Nazis strategy of Blitzkrieg which had already been attempted in Morocco - after all, this was the basis on which chemical warfare had been waged. He relied especially on the Regulares and Legionnaires, who always received at least 50% more pay than the regular Nationalist soldiers. The Spanish army undertook a stern enlistment drive among Moroccoans, but while the Nationalists made a careful pitch to the Moroccans, no such effort was made by the Republicans - who might have been expected to liberate the colonies in order to undercut Franco's base. They were so busy trying to put the French and British governments at ease that they could not possibly conceive of stimulating an anti-colonial revolt in the north of Africa. Instead, the Republicans used their airforce to drop shells indiscriminately on Moroccan towns. It should be said that the fascists had no intention of trying to recruit from the anti-colonial rebels, since they knew their chances were slim. The fascist General Mola instead ordered that anyone who had partaken in that rebellion should be arrested. The fascists recruited Moroccans on the basis that they should wage a Holy War for one of the world's great religions against atheists, Jews and Communists who were inherently anti-Muslim. Had the Republicans been anti-colonialists, this would have been exposed as a mirage: but they were not. In fact, the Regulares were used much as they had been in Morocco - to carry out the most dangerous, onerous work, while the Spanish commanders frequently watched from afar. The colonial methods of mass bombardment, repression, summary execution, torture and pacificatory 'total war' had been learned in Morocco and exported to Spain. And the Army of Africa, which would prove crucial in sustaining the war effort, was valuable for its elite experience in counterinsurgency, and would dominate in the iconography of the post-Civil War fascist regime. It is now known that the Spanish and Italian military compared notes on chemical warfare, that Italian troops trained in such warfare were despatched to Spain, and that tonnes of mustard gas and diphosgene were imported from Germany. Due in part to the overwhelming international scrutiny of the war, these weapons were not used. 350,000 Spaniards, of a population of 25 million, died in the war. Laws were promulgated effectively permitting the arrest of anyone who had ever been involved in any resistance, going all the way back to those who had been involved in the disturbances of 1909. Those captured were detained in concentration camps, with up to 270,000 in the camps by the time the war had finished. Just as in Morocco, prisoners who were not executed were kept barely alive and worked close to death. Slave labour fulfilled an economic function for the new fascist oligarchy. Women were thrown back into their pre-Republican status, and Catholic-inspired legislation ensured that girls would be educated separately to prepare them for domestic servitude. Women who were imprisoned suffered abuse and had their children taken from them, so that the young ones could benefit from Spanish education by being sent to Catholic-run orphanages. Workers conditions were degraded immediately, with the reimposition of low wages, long hours and severe discipline. In the prevailing conditions, people died 'like flies', particularly those whose Republican sympathies ensured that they had their property sequestered. The only way to survive was to have ties to one element of the ruling coalition, or to blindly submit to the new work regime. In all, 200,000 people died immediately following the war due to the disease and starvation that the new conditions unleashed. That was the colonial legacy.

By early 1939, the Republic was lost. There remained some rebel fighters, but the International Brigades were sent home, and the Republic surrendered. The British ruling class, who had always hoped for a Franco victory, recognised the new government founded by the fascists without missing a step. It is worth recalling that there was no real sense in which Britain's war against Nazi Germany was anti-fascist. Hitler had been encouraged against the communists and, as Paul Hehn shows, sicced on them several times. When Britain did eventually turn against Hitler, it tried to have Franco and Mussolini on its side, not Republicans and democrats. Hitler, whom the British had tried to give a free hand in the East, was now about to build his own India. He would annihilate the Jews, annihilate half the Russians and enslave the other half, get rid of the communists and homosexuals and mentally ill others who did not exalt the racial ideal. On behalf of an alien elite, which called itself Aryan on the basis of racial theory developed during to the British subjugation of India, Hitler would try to found a new empire. How much he admired England; how much he would have Germany be like it. Italy had hoped to turn Spain into an economic colony, but in fact it had become an offshore colony of the Army of Africa, the ruthless military dictatorship of northern Morocco.

Consider camouflage. Just as in Nazi Germany, the indigenous Spanish reverted to subterfuge and disguise. Anti-Nazis in Germany wore the regalia and signals of Nazi resurgence, pretending to be pro-Nazi. They were waiting, and holding on, hoping for something better, hoping their pretense didn't transmute into a reality. The Nazi regime was well aware that this was so, and even after almost a decade of state propaganda, they had to rely on extensive welfare systems in Germany, funded by the plunder of the colonies (see Gotz Aly, Hitler's Beneficiaries). The intensive indoctrination programmes could only go so far. In a like manner, socialists in Spain abandoned the militias for safety of work, home and fatherland. They adopted the outward signs of deference. Perhaps they would even make some money in the short-term, and eventually find the means to build an independent republic. The regime was an alien one, a colonial one, with no legitimacy. It was unfair, but it seemed to have won for the time being. Spain, like Morocco, had been subject to Reconquest.

How delicious, you might think. The owners of the owners, the elite of the rentier capitalist class, the ultra-neoliberal wing of the ruling class, are begging for money. One minute it's privatise this, downsize the welfare state, supersize my debt, and don't you dare mention socialism. Now it's gimme gimme gimme. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times is now an ardent statist. I'm not made of stone. I admit to finding this bitterly humorous. But actually, schadenfreude is misplaced for several reasons. First of all, even if a global catastrophe does lead to mass suicides among City executives, they're only going to use the Central Line to top themselves, and that's going to lengthen your journey by an average of 30 minutes every day: who has that time to spare? Secondly, there is nothing new in this. Every time there is a crisis in capitalism, the neoliberals become Keynesians overnight. After the 1987 stock market crash, so-called 'monetarists' were screaming for money to be printed and disbursed in abundance. The US government is known for bailing out at-risk companies and hedge funds the second there's a threat to the system - to their system. As everyone from Noam Chomsky to Nouriel Roubini knows, socialising risk and privatising profit is in the nature of the system. Thirdly, we are going to be the main victims of this state of affairs. Of course, they demand more state intervention, but not for you and I - no, they quite like the idea of a recession disciplining the labour market and holding down wages. In fact, the recession will be used as an excuse to hold down public spending, restrict consumption, introduce more 'flexibility' to the labour market, keep interest rates comparatively high, suppress wages in the public sector and keep the minimum wage down. The 'disaster capitalists', if that doesn't seem like a tautology to you now, are quite adept at taking advantage of such situations.

Some people are determined to be chipper. Perhaps there is reason to be so. After all, the British government announced a fall in unemployment yesterday, albeit at a much slower rate than in recent months. And consumer spending was up in February (the Bank of England could use this as an excuse to keep interest rates at their present level which, while bad the the 'high street' and for manufacturing, is good for the City). Average earnings are steady. Public sector employment, having fallen for eight consecutive quarters, has suddenly risen. Manufacturing actually experienced some healthy growth in March. And there's still a budget surplus. If the cheermongers are right, then the self-evident distress of the US economy may be ring-fenced, and it may indeed be supported through this difficult period by continued growth in Asian markets and Europe. But who can believe this? First of all, the unemployment drop is based on the claimant count - no one takes this measure seriously. Secondly, earnings increases outside the public sector have actually slowed down. Thirdly, public sector employment increase could be seen as a counter-cyclical move, but it is no testament to the strength of the underlying economy. Of course, the government can plough money into it - and they should - but it will wipe out that budget surplus in a jiffy. Manufacturing growth depends on exports, which depends on a globally sound economy - hardly a guaranteed prospect at the present time. Further, it is likely that this was brought about by the recent low value of the pound, which made exports cheaper. That isn't a sustainable situation, and it is not one that the City will accept (hence, they will demand higher interest rates). Finally, consumer spending was reported as rising in the United States as late as last August. There is a lag between the emergence of an underlying crisis and its impact in spending and prices. Consumer signals are not very reliable when things are changing fast. Growth is predicted to slow to the lowest level since 1992.

I do so wish the Good News bible-thumpers were right because, as this article makes clear, the United States social safety net, such as it is, is likely to fail, and the labour movement and the Left is not in a position to make an assertive defense of working class interests. I daresay we in the United Kingdom not in a very much better position. The one exciting pole on the Left has recently been through a horrible split, and we are still dealing with the consequences. (If Londoners want something other than pandering to the City, they should vote for Respect's Left List in the upcoming assembly and mayoral elections, by the way). Realistically, we are staring disaster in the face, and the only chance we have is if the labour movement mounts a serious fightback against the government on pay and conditions, because this will redound to the benefit of all of us. Mark Serwotka has the right idea.

One of the welcome effects of the antiwar movement in the UK has been to, perhaps to some extent irreversibly, roll back a long tradition of militaristic patriotism. This, despite some waning in the postcolonial era, reasserted itself during the Falklands campaign and the first Gulf War. During the 1990s, this was conjoined with the ideology of 'humanitarian intervention', so that the British Army was seen as an anti-genocide action man outfit. But under the surface, opinion was shifting, especially as Iraq wilted and suffered under the sanctions regime and even Daily Mail readers were apprised of its horrors. And that is one reason why the narcissistic compassion that Gilbert Achcar talks about - the exaggerated and ostentatious sympathy with 'people like us' - was less pronounced in the UK than it might otherwise have been after the attacks on the twin towers. People knew almost instinctively that US foreign policy had contributed to bringing about the attacks The antiwar movement over Afghanistan, despite the obviously difficulties, was surprisingly large.

Since 2002, the warmongers have been losing the battle for public opinion. The scale of the antiwar movement, and the foundation of groups such as Military Families Against the War, has done for militarism what the poll tax riots did for Thatcherism (an analogy which contains warnings against complacency, I might add). Recruitment in the armed forces has dropped sharply, as has retention; opinion remains overwhelmingly against participation in the 'war on terror' in its many forms; there is no support for a war against Iran; and the decades-long pro-Israeli consensus has reversed. Even the head of the armed forces has started espousing antiwar views.

Like the US armed forces, the Ministry of Defense has responded to this crisis in part by abolishing or easing restrictions on recruitment. They have also tried the tactic favoured by every tobacco manufacturer, booze merchant and drug-dealer in the world - nail the kids, get them when they're young. One of their more developed programmes is the Defence Schools Initiative, which involves among other things getting elderly veterans to talk to the kids and inspire some weird emotion they call 'respect'. They upped their game in dealing with the press as well, so when it emerged in 2006 that the government had trebled the amount of money spent on propaganda, the Ministry of Defense had - next to the Central Office of Information - the largest number of PR personnel.

The unions have rightly resisted recruitment activity in schools, and the UCL students union has incurred a great deal of contrived wrath for voting to ban military recruiters from campus. The MoD's latest attempt to force pro-war propaganda into the schools' syllabus has been rightly rejected by teachers, and the government has been put on the defensive. And now a multimillion pound PR drive by the MoD to present the bright side of 'military intervention' has angered military families. So, what's next? Send Harry out again? Moan about soldiers not being able to wear their fucking uniforms again? I suppose another round of medals for derring-do, or the lionisation of one particular soldier, will produce a brief PR boost. In some ways, however, the cat is already out of the bag. Groups of people never before touched by antiwar feeling are part of the movement. Former soldiers, military families, an SAS trooper, and a former ambassador, are all in a position to expose the seaminess, corruption and violence of the government's global strategy. The way soldiers are used, chewed up and spat out, is public knowledge, and it militates against the attempt to inspire irrational admiration for those who are essentially victims of the war machine.

Every now and again, the government has a policy review about how it will deal with the national childhood problem. There are a range of themes taken up, but the basic problem is that they are violent, clubbish, bestial and need to be controlled. Britain is, as studies have shown, a particularly harsh place for children to live in. New Labour, representing a virulently authoritarian version of neoliberal social-democracy (if that's possible), proposes a combination of modest poverty-reduction strategies (which fail, both in the specific goal, and in the intended effect), curfews, control orders, ASBOs, hoodie bans, stop and search mechanisms, and more detention. Blair wanted to spy on potential 'problem families' (apparently identifiable through the warning signs of track suits, tatoos, Lambert & Butler cigarettes and an insufficiently appreciative attitude toward the government). The heavily punitive accent of government policy is supported by a culture of child-hating, which is ironic given the late capitalist infantilization of adults (in which capital tries to convert us into impulsive, needy, irrational consumers, cultivating nonsensical enthusiasms so that we part with our money more quickly). A direct corollary of the sentimentality about ickle children is the incredible amount of aggression toward the young in popular culture, especially as they reach their adolescent years, and especially if they're working class. Behind the scenes, if you like, this aggression more frequently takes the form of child abuse by parents than one might think. For example, a study in the UK found that 11% of boys and 21% of girls experienced some form of child abuse. I would have thought that most of this is emotional abuse or neglect, which is horrendous enough, but the study found that when it is narrowed to 'contact' abuse (sexual or physical), 16% of women and 7% of men said that they had experienced this kind of abuse. Obviously, this is not simply an unpleasantness that one can 'walk off' and 'get over'. It exacts a long term psychological toll - shrinking the hippocampus, which deals with emotional responses, and producing abnormal levels of cortisol, which deals with fight or flight responses - and the younger it happens the more severe the effects. Beyond the family, it is also expressed in the other institutions in which a child might be raised: foster care, obviously, and penal custody. On average, two children died in penal custody every year since 1990, and a controversy has recently erupted over the officially sanctioned abuse of children known euphemistically as 'restraint'.

The 'Children's Commissioner' has become an easy target for rightist polemic after criticised the use of painful 'restraints' in custodial institution, which are designed to control behaviour with the application of pain. He spoke of the rights of children, and he lamented some of the authoritarian measures used by the government. Melanie Phillips blustered in the Daily Mail: Children's rights? What about the rights of those who live in fear of young thugs? This was only a particularly forceful version of the raised media heckles of 'dimwit', 'who-does-he-think-he-is', 'waste-of-taxpayers-money', 'we'll-smack-our-kids-if-we-want-to', and so on. (These people do get terribly exercised about their inherent right to beat their children. When a smacking ban was first proposed, they went absolutely bonkers. The comedian Jack Dee, by contrast, suggested that it was a good idea to stop beating kids, but "maybe we should stop fucking them first"). For this particular persuasion, children have only one right: the right to remain silent. Here is one 'young thug' who won't be around to bother the nice people. A fourteen year old boy, who suffered enormous trauma due to deaths in his family, experienced emotional turmoil, and was locked up for 'behaviour difficulties' after allegedly wounding a man. He survived a month in his prison until he was violently 'restrained' by officers, who broke his nose, leaving him terrified, as well as sickened and depressed: he hung himself. But that's just one example. There was also Joseph Scholes, a mentally unwell young man given to self-harm, who was imprisoned for a minor street crime, despite multiple expert witnesses telling the judge that the boy would kill himself if he was put in that kind of environment. Of course, even those witnesses couldn't have known that he would be forced to wear a loose garment resembling a horse blanket, and demeaned and driven to his death within a week. Then there is Gareth Paul Myatt, who died four days into a one year sentence at a 'training centre' run by Group 4 following an 'incident'. Shortly after that death, the government announced £16m for more child prisons.

Now these examples are not incidental. Gordon Brown's twee catchphrase is that "children are 40% of the population, but 100% of the future". We can either collectively vomit over this phrase or try to extract some literal truth from it (or both). The truth is that fucked up children make for fucked up adults. Brutalising children is not going to produce a nation of well-adapted citizens. The clinical psychologist Oliver James points out that one of the most alarming statistics of recent years is the discovery that 90% of the prison population was in some way mentally unwell. As he further elaborates, the causes of this are not rooted in the poor genetic stock of the working class, who are vastly over-represented in all penal institutions. Far more often, it is the result of a particular kind of nurture experienced especially but not exclusively in the first three to six years of childhood. You raise a kid in a comfortable bourgeois home with lots of attention, you get a comfortable bourgeois person. You raise a kid in a strict, authoritarian home with parents trying to break his will through the application of regular violence (tough love) all for his own good, you get a young fascist. You raise a kid in a chaotic household with episodic, rather than structured, violence and abuse, you get manipulative people with poor consciences prone to acting out physical or sexual violence. You raise a kid in a tough working class household with a survivalist mentality and regular insecurity, you get Monty Python's bragging Yorkshiremen. Sorry, I've lost my thread, where was I ...? Oh yes. To extend the logic, suppose you raise children in a cruel, aggressive country with: violent, manipulative, sanctimonious hypocrites in charge; a virulent ethos of social competitiveness saturating the culture; underfunded schools with over-worked teachers and kids bored or stressed through banal lessons and routine examination; few and degraded amenities and hostile over-policing in the remaining public spaces such as shopping centres; violent 'control' of children encouraged on the one hand, with violence exalted in the culture as a means of empowerment on the other; with manifest injustice coupled with powerlessness to do anything about it; and so on. Violence, neglect, hypocrisy, wilful manipulation, insecurity, competition as the sole source of self-esteem, abuse, injustice, indifference - it's a recipe for disaster. Yet the program appears to be more of the same: cut benefits, close facilities, install CCTV, impose stricter discipline in schools, toughen policing, lock more kids up in violent penal institutions, threaten their parents with benefit-cuts if they bunk off school, intensify social competition through more testing - and now, on top of it all, Lord Goldsmith wants kids to swear allegiance to the Queen so that they'll feel more British! If Goldsmith epitomises 'Britishness', then our elusive national 'values' can now be summarised as naked corruption, criminality, careerism, arms dealing, warmongering and a facade of blustering pomposity.

Of course, I would be the first to admit that children are awful people. Having a sensible conversation with anyone under nine years old is almost impossible, and they are as a rule unbelievably tactless. The smaller they are, the less they know about anything. As Randy Newman once sang about rednecks, they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. On the other hand, most population groups have flaws, especially those in the armed forces, and I wouldn't wish the amount of crap kids go through on them either.

There is a growing argument in favour of a one-state settlement to the Israel-Palestine conflict, largely as a result of the failure of Oslo and the intensifying occupation policies that accompanied it. In this vein, there was a brief 'to do' over the question of a one-state versus two-state settlement in Palestine over at the Democrats Diary. There is also a debate on Counterpunch beginning with a highly defensive and bitter attack on the one-state idea by the very sharp Michael Neumann, and now followed up with a counter-point by the former CIA analyst Kathy Christison. I think it's worth discharging some of the acrimony over this question, because our role as pro-Palestinian activists is not necessarily to work for one kind of settlement or the other: it is to strengthen the Palestinians as much as we can, in part by disabling Israel's major patron, so that they can decide what deal to accept and under what conditions. If the two-state argument is mistaken, as I think it is, there is no space for sectarian moralising about it. The fact that some in the pro-Palestinian movement - only a minority but loud enough to be damaging at times - take the view that all two-staters including Noam Chomsky are sell-outs and so on has made it more difficult to have a serious discussion. It also sets a massive elephant trap for activists to fall into. If we spend all our time anathematising others in the movement, we will achieve even less in the future than we have in the past despite what are undoubtedly improved prospects for mobilising opinion. So, I should say the following: to be a 'two-stater' is not the same thing necessarily as a liberal Zionist, since the latter acknowledges no injustice other than the 1967 war and is committed to the moral value of having a Jewish nationalist state, while the former need not be; to be a 'one-stater' is not to be ethereal, aloof and moralistic, neither to foreclose options nor foreswear temporary and unsatisfactory compromise, since a single Palestinian state is a long term goal, the road to which can be marked by many half-way houses; 'one-staters' do not have a monopoly on justice any more than 'two-staters' have a monopoly on political realism.

Well, from the above, it is clear that there are a number of concurrent and apparently incompatible criteria at work in this argument. Justice demands that what is a racist-nationalist state should be abolished by one means or another; that the effects of ethnic cleansing should be reversed as far as possible; and that Arabs and Jews should live together as brothers and sisters. Realism stipulates that such demands are incoherent, moralistic, historically disembodied, almost certainly unattainable, and a diversion from the one true settlement, which is that aimed at by the PLO since 1988, endorsed by the UN, the ICJ, and formally accepted by every actor including Israel - a Palestinian state based in Gaza and the West Bank, with some settlement for the refugees. The argument from justice has a set of historical facts, and an analysis, but no clout; the argument from realism has a concrete plan, a blueprint that Israel could accept and that would potentially stop the bloodshed and provide relief for the Palestinians. This is an alluring story, but there's something oddly disquieting about it. For a start, if 'realism' is so hostile to moralism, why does one detect its tincture in the claim (repeated in Neumann's piece) that 'realism' is a 'real world' solution aimed at ending 'real suffering' in the 'here and now', whereas pursuit of one-state would keep the slaughter in motion. Isn't this exactly the language of strident urgency that liberal imperialism activates in order to suppress rational discussion of the latest 'intervention'? Further, when an argument is raised against unwieldy utopianism and maximalism, there is usually straw flying amid the feathers. What if compromise and settlement turns out to be the utopian option? What if those who consider the long-term survival of the Israeli polity in its current Zionist form a viable option are the idle fantasists? If analogies to previous debates suggest themselves - those between sensible colonialism and anti-colonialism; those between abolitionists and ameliorists - it is because the terms of 'realism' are so familiar. Finally, the argument from 'realism' seems to overestimate the value of legal opinion and 'consensus', in part because it happens to be convenient in conventional arguments to say 'we have the legal consensus, all actors are committed to this in theory, the UN backs it, the PLO has gone out of its way to make it happen, conceding much and receiving little, and only America and Israel's refusenik stance thwarts it'. But diplomacy and law are the products of power, and the relevant centres of power do not at present support even a two-state settlement. How practicable, as opposed to utopian, is a two-state settlement?

Let me take my lead from the 'real world'. In the West Bank, Israel has imposed a "settlement grid", as Virginia Tilley puts it, a network of Jewish Only roads and settlements as well as a 'separation wall' which will eventually incorporate about half of the West Bank into Israel. The colonies and roads are protected by IDF troops, the separation wall by border guards. And the whole system from Jerusalem to Jericho populated by approximately half a million Israelis, many of them fanatics armed to the teeth. It contains 450 roadblocks, 70 manned checkpoints, and 300 kilometres of segregated highway. It is designed to be irreversible. It is designed to make 40% of the West Bank inaccessible to the Palestinians. It is designed to fragment its landscape and eliminate the basis for a viable polity. The settlements have not ceased to expand, and there is no reason to expect that they will in the prevailing circumstances. Israelis will have added motive to try and move into these frontier zones because it is one area where the Israeli state provides a real welfare system of sorts. On top of this, Israel goes to great lengths to frustrate any possible basis for economic development in the Palestinian areas. Not just by withholding tax revenues so that Palestinians can subsidise the occupation; not only by imposing a blockade; not only by stealing land and destroying olive groves; but also through its discriminatory water restrictions, which has had a devastating impact on agriculture and on domestic consumption. We can add to this the impact of movement restrictions on the right to work. This is a policy, as Sara Roy puts it, of de-development. B'Tselem's 2002 report on Israel's settlement policy in the West Bank concludded that Israel's aim was both to rule out the possibility of an independent sovereign state and "drastically restrict the possibilities ... for economic development, and for agriculture in particular". The result of economic restrictions and fragmentation is a system of disarticulated micro-economies attached to the Israeli one, not a potential national economy. The fact that Palestinian society has not completely collapsed in the face of this onslaught is a miracle of resilience. Aside from being a long-term and vitally important national project for Israel, pursued so far with great success, the occupation and colonisation of the remaining Palestinian territories provides the Israeli Defense Force, perhaps the most important power bloc in the Israeli state, with rentier motivations for continuing with the occupation.

As figures such as Virginia Tilley and Tony Judt have argued, even the mere fact of half a million armed colonists with a strong body of support within Israel proper militates strongly against a two-state settlement. This may not be 'irreversible', but any reversal would not originate in the Israeli power structure, which has no interest in it. Further, whatever supposed international 'consensus' exists, it is totally absent in the centres of US power, which are almost entirely supportive of the most aggressive wing of the Zionist movement. Gaza is an interesting case in point. Here, we were supposed to be witnessing a unilateral withdrawal, a peace gesture, and end to the occupation of that part of Palestine as the basis for a future settlement. At the initiative of Ariel Sharon, the settlements were taken apart and the settlers removed to their astonishment and grief. Tears flowed all the way from Gush Katif to the Jordan Valley. What next? Would Sharon really disengage from the West Bank that he was able to so triumphantly reinvade in 2002? Was he really a peacenik, despite all appearances? Dov Weisglass revealed all: it was an attempt to sidestep a peaceful settlement with an imposed Israeli one backed by the US, which would avert Palestinian statehood or any deal for the refugees. The new 'Kadima' coalition ('Avanti' in Italian) that Sharon helped to found has pursued this solution relentlessly: the growing settlements in the West Bank, especially those contiguous with the separation wall; the fostering of civil war and the destruction of Gaza; the planned reduction of Gaza's already heavily infringed territory through ethnic cleansing, and so on. The movement for a two-state settlement could once boast a coalition uniting the PLO with reform-minded Israelis, but that has been decisively defeated for the time being. Indeed, given the Israeli state's hostility, the Palestinian leadership's corruption and opportunism, and the absence of serious regional allies for the Palestinians, it is hard to see how it ever stood a chance. Israel, as Neumann acknowledges, will not accept such an outcome. So the criticism of the one-state solution, that it lacks a supporting agency capable of enforcing it, also happens to apply to the two-state solution.

Let us suppose the increasingly improbable anyway. Suppose that with a two-state settlement in mind, based on UN resolutions 242 and 338 (both formulated when there was much more chance of their being successful), the Palestinian movement acquired reserves of strength and clout hitherto denied it. Let us say it acquired the ability to force an Israeli retreat from the West Bank, and end to the occupation of Gaza, the creation of a unified state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and some kind of settlement for the refugees. Such, the two-state argument says, is eminently possible, though most of its advocates acknowledge that it would not be justice. I agree that it is possible, at least, and that it would represent an improvement in the condition of Palestinians. It would go some small way to meeting the claims of justice, and by ending the war, it could undermine some of the key expansionist agents in Israeli society. It could even open up new possibilities for critical and post-Zionist thought to emerge in Israel, although there is no evidence from past partitions that this is likely to be the case. On the contrary, it would seem to bolster the logic of Zionism and potentially lead to the expulsion of Israeli Arabs who are already in an embattled position. And so long as the United States wished for a strong Israel, the latter would have the resources to defensively recuperate its military position. It would still have its nuclear weapons, a string of bought Arab regimes, a powerful intelligence service and an aggressive posture toward the region as a whole. It could easily formulate or provoke a pretext for re-invasion and annexation. Statehood is no protection from Israeli aggression as surrounding states have discovered. After all, the basis for present-day Palestine in the two-stare vision is territory taken from Jordanian and Egyptian occupation in 1967. And should Israel embroil itself in any regional war that could threaten its own existence, it is sworn to massive retalitatory attacks possibly using its nuclear weapons - the crazy Samson Option. So, the question is, without fundamentally altering the Zionist polity, would a two-state settlement be the basis for peace and stability, even if not for justice, that it is claimed to be? On the basis of the foregoing adumbrations it seems dubious.

At present, there is a de facto one-state solution of sorts in operation (not de jure in the areas of occupation). It is a state of segregation, pass laws, despotism for Palestinians and a thin veneer of democracy for Israelis. Most of those living in it lack the rights of citizenship, and many who do are essentially second-class citizens. It is a 'democracy' but a Herrenvolk democracy, a "Jewish and democratic state" which all political parties in Israel are prohibited from challenging. So, Israel is constitutionally committed to maintaining that formula - the majority of citizens within the state must be Jewish, even as it expands. To grant citizenship status to the Palestinian majority living in the territory controlled by Israel would violate that fundamental principle. The Law of Return, by allowing a massive level of immigration, including of those who aren't in fact Jewish, provides one source for a continued majority in an expanding Israel. Ethnic cleansing strategies and potentially genocide are logical outgrowths of that basic commitment, and we saw one such example in the recent attempted annexation of south Lebanon in which Israel tried to drive out the Lebanese population and take the territory under occupation. For some years, discussion of a one-state solution was seriously curbed in Palestine because the Fatah leadership saw it as being subversive of its diplomatic efforts. The rise of Hamas as the chief beneficiary of the second Intifada, coupled with Israel's policies designed to thwart a two-state settlement, may well have opened up discussion. Recent polling evidence suggests a much stronger level of support for a one-state solution among Palestinians than ever before (70%). It is acquiring support among leading Palestinians too. Ziad Abu-Amr, a former PA minister, and Sharif Elmusa have recently come out for such a settlement. But that would require abolishing the basic structures of the Israeli polity, and implementing Arab-majority rule. How could such a state of affairs be arrived at? I would point out, first of all, that the Palestinians alone lack the structural capacity to overthrow Zionism. They are not a labouring majority whom Israel tries to exploit, but a nationality that Israel is trying to destroy. No Palestinian COSATU will bring Israeli industry to its knees. The odd rocket or suicide attack isn't going to do it either. Secondly, and I am sorry to break this to some of the more naive sects, the Palestinians cannot rely on the solidarity of the Israeli working class, any more than they can rely on the ICJ or Fatah's diplomatic prowess. There is no movement from within to abandon Zionism: on the contrary, 94% of Israelis polled assert that Israel must maintain its Jewish majority. Thirdly, it seems obvious to me that the only contiguous population with an interest in solidarity with the Palestinians is the working population of the Middle East - but they have to free themselves of their mainly US-imposed dictators before they can really help free Palestine. In short, it would require a revolt across the entire region. This is a regional problem, and it must have a regional solution. There is nothing else coming down the pipeline, so far as I can see. Certainly, an international consensus, with regular chronicling of Israel's outrages by the UN or the ICJ, with diplomatic initiatives by those presently helping impose the misery, with international solidarity movements operating under increasing restrictions, and with marches in the street by those far removed from the action - all this can only go so far, and probably never as far as the supposedly very practical two-state settlement.

On March 17, 1937, Mussolini was greeted by notables from Tripoli and presented with a bejewelled sword, that was to symbolise his role as the 'Sword of Islam'. This is an interesting episode, because it is picked on by neoconservative authors such as Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer to give sustenance to their gripes about the Islamification of Europe and its inherent totalitarianism. Of course, it's absolute nonsense, as the notables in question were exhorted to greet Mussolini in this manner (the Duce did enjoy his parades and ceremonies). Libya had by then been re-conquered by Italian forces, and subjected to furious massacres including a bout of genocide. Mussolini's claim to be a liberator of Islam was as meaningful as Napoleon's claim to the same fame when he invaded Egypt in 1798, yet quite often his opportunistic manouevring is taken as a serious policy orientation - "pro-Arabism", it's called. Those lucky Arabs.

There are some reasons why people might feel ill-equipped to deal with this topic. On the one hand, colonial policy, far from being epiphenomenal, was central to Mussolini's ambitions for Italy. On the other, the topic is actually touched on only rather lightly in histories of the Middle East and Africa, as well as in the histories of fascism. In several mainstream histories of the Middle East that I possess, for example, little is even mentioned about the Italian occupation of Libya, and the only one that mentions the genocide is Ilan Pappe's 'Modern History of the Middle East'. It is not discussed at all in Roger Eatwell's book on fascism - Ethiopia is touched upon, Libya glanced toward, but beyond vague adumbrations about 'repression', there is little detail. Even Alexander De Grand's valuable short introduction to the topic of Italian Fascism doesn't spend a great deal of time talking about colonial policy, and has nothing at all about Libya beyond a few references to the 1911 war. Robert Paxton's history, The Anatomy of Fascism, does at least mention some of the policies in both Libya and Ethiopia. In Italian histories, the colonial policy of the fascist regime tended to be overlooked almost entirely right up until the 1970s. It seemed that with the Treaty of Paris in 1947, the Italian elite simply gave up the colonies and agreed not to say too much about it, and the historians followed suit (although there was a fifty volume history produced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was ecstatic about the whole business and Italy's civilizing role). Chemical weapons, concentration camps and genocide are apparently touchy subjects. In some cases, this could be related to the disturbing efforts to resuscitate the Duce's reputation. Where there isn't outright resuscitation, there is a general argument that he was a moderate who transcended left and right, and if only he had stopped in 1936 and resisted the Hitlerian nemesis, then all would have been perfectly fine. For an example of the latter, you might consult the Spectator journalist Nicholas Farrell's biography, Mussolini: A New Life, or Richard Lamb's Mussolini and the British, which argues that Mussolini was essentially a good chap who could have been won to the allied side if he hadn't been so bewildered by the unsporting criticism of his invasion of Ethiopia.

In fact, Italy's capacity to wage war for its own glory was at the heart of Mussolini's political transformation. Having been a revolutionary and a pacifist who made his name opposing the 1911 Libyan war, he shifted rapidly to the right during the first few months of World War I, and was taken up and encouraged by sectors of Italian power including corporate interests, as well as by the French and Belgian governments. He advocated 'democratic interventionism' - instead of neutrality, or Italy fulfilling its obligations in the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austro-Hungary, Italy should support the 'democratic' states. There was no democratic content to the war at all, and Mussolini was in reality siding with the most reactionary elements in Italian politics. Once an opponent of the moderate Socialist leader Bissolati, Mussolini came to rely on him to keep him out of the conflict (he didn't personally enjoy the battle, unlike Hitler), and he was returned from battle to work on his paper, Popolo d’Italia, after a relatively slight injury in 1917. The claim to any kind of socialism, 'national' or otherwise, was shortly abandoned. Il Popolo embraced anti-communism and was the first publication to carry John Spargo's hostile accounts of the Russian Revolution. Whatever Mussolini's spurious appeals to the Italian proletariat, neither the Popolo nor the fasci di combattimento formed in 1919 showed much sign of working class involvement. The fascists had essentially shed the assorted socialists and syndicalists that had comprised part of the initial membership base in Milan, and became a pro-monarchical rightist party of petit-bourgeois and agrarian resurgence. Yet the appeal to some specious notion of 'progress' and workerism would stay in his rhetoric long after he had ideologically, formally and organisationally separated himself from radicalism of any stripe. Even in 1940, he was appealling to 'proletarians' to defend the "Revolution" against the "plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West". The proletarians later killed him and hung him upside down from a meat hook.

I don't need to go into detail about the rise of fascism and the March on Rome, but suffice to say that the reformist Prime Minister Giolitti's attempts to hold the liberal state together in the face of working class insurgency, in part by forming a coalition with the fascists, failed. The elections in May 1921 demonstrated that the Socialists and Communists remained a powerful electoral bloc, and the traditional liberal political class was wilting. Only the fascists could hold back the Left, and when the state began to collapse, the Italian capitalist federation Confindustria indicated support for a combined Mussolini-Giolitti government. Mussolini was able to reassure capital, clergy and monarchy that he was serious and would not attempt any radical experiments, and so he was given permission to sieze power in October 1922. Given difficult international conditions and Fascist Italy's lacklustre economic performance, colonial policy had to be placed on the backburner throughout the 1920s: the siezure of Ethiopia, which Italy had failed to conquer in 1896, would have to wait until 1935. But that didn't mean that Mussolini was uninterested. The Italian Geographical Society (SGI), long a major pillar of the state's expansionist ambitions and provider of explorers to scope out potential territory for conquest (first in Tunisia and Morocco, then Abyssinia/Ethiopia and Somaliland), was patronised early on by Mussolini. Several of its officials were integrated into the administration and the organisation provided much of the vital information for the ongoing wars to reconquer Libya, since Italian control had been reduced to the coastal cities and towns since 1915.

Mussolini's aggressive reassertion of Italian international power began in earnest in 1930 as the depression sank in. In Libya, the colonial authorities finally defeated the insurgency by imprisoning almost the entire "pacified" population in a system of brutal concentration camps from 1930 to 1932. Most of those captured died in the camps. Acting on the military doctrines of General Douhet, a Fascist supporter who advocated gassing, aerial bombardment and 'Total War', the colonialists could pound the 'inferior' natives from the seemingly limitless sky rather than getting down and dirty where the insurgents could mount some resistance. The Arab fighters were attacked with chemical weapons and bombs, destroyed and dispersed into the desert where the Italian air force could finish them off. Official Italian figures estimated a 37% reduction in the population, an authentic colonial genocide. The SGI's explorers were thereafter able to return to Italy with extensive ethnographic, cartographic and anthropological data, in its way 'proving' the progression of what had been a penumbral terra incognita into an enlightened Italian territory. Talk about power-knowledge. They produced studies of race types and a science of colonialism that would come to decisively influence the domestic politics of the Fascists.

Ethiopia, the sweetest plum in East Africa as far as Mussolini was concerned, was one of those territories as yet unoccupied by France, Britain or Germany. It was seen as available - dare I say virgin? - territory. Further, Fascist Italy was still on good terms with Popular Front France, and it would not have expected criticism from Britain for a colonial endeavour of this kind. However, Ethiopia was a member of the League of Nations and could claim its protection. So when Mussolini went to war on October 3 1935, the League voted for sanctions. Britain and France offered a compromise: Italy could have a large part of Ethiopia if it would accept the fiction of a rump Ethiopian state. Italy accepted, but the deal was leaked to the press and died in the exposure. Sanctions were applied, but at any rate without much commitment, and Italian forces proceeded into Addis Ababa to put the crown on a new Italian Empire. The atrocities perpetrated in the war generally passed without comment. Poisonous gas sprayed from airplanes, the bombing of Red Cross hospitals, massacres, summary executions, hundreds of thousands of deaths - these were not matters that other colonial powers had an opinion about unless Mussolini crossed them. Even after WWII, a seventeen-member UN War Crimes Commission specifically excluded Ethiopia, mainly because it was only concerned with crimes committed against European powers, Russia and the United States. How could a British government whose wartime leader approved of gassing natives, and was actually rather fond of Mussolini at times, raise the issue? At any rate, Italy's successes in East Africa radicalised the Fascist regime. Race theory, largely eschewed in its biological variants until 1935, became increasingly important to the regime. The Fascist 'new man' was to be shaped in the new order, and colonial racism became the basis of domestic racism. Just as in Ethiopia racial intermarriage was outlawed, so in 1938 the new 'Manifesto of Fascist Racism' forbade 'racial' intermarriage along the lines of Hitler's Nuremberg Laws. Mussolini had once enjoyed a small amount of Jewish support, and he had no objection to the Zionists - he particularly admired of Jabotinsky, who returned the compliment - but the regime began to discriminate against the country's ancient, well-integrated Jewish community. That persecution, of course, was not to become extermination until the so-called Republic of Salo. Unlike the Nazis, who could buy off business and popular constituencies throughout their spiralling derangement with the booty of pillage in Eastern Europe, Mussolini had little to show for his involvement, and nothing to offer either worker or parasite. The Italian ruling elite, desperate at the failure of supporting the German side in the war, tried in 1943 to oust Mussolini and have him arrested. The Nazis rescued him, occupied the country, and formally restored Mussolini's dictatorship, albeit within the confines of a puppet state. The agents of the Republic were the most radicalised and vicious sections of the fascist elite, and pursued the extermination of the Jews far more vigorously than most Italians were prepared to, and waged an unusually savage war of repression to stymy the leftist insurgency beginning in 1944.

Fascism did not need colonialism in order to be vicious and repressive. But the colonial idea gave it an impulse of radicalisation that led to its most destructive, and self-destructive phase. There could hardly be a more chilling example of Aime Cesaire's reminder that before Europeans were the victims of fascism, they were its accomplices; that "they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack."

We have heard from people like UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard, who says that the Zionist regime is worse than apartheid. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe now argues that Israel is pursuing a genocidal policy in Gaza. The Israeli government's open threats of ethnic cleansing and mass violence in civilian areas alongside the repeated sieges, the imposed starvation, the mass imprisonment and the killings, coupled with a deep-rooted perception of Palestinians as a 'demographic threat' and, well, everything else, could be seen as adding weight to this view. But if the Israeli strategy is genocidal, this is the latest degenerate stage in an ongoing counterinsurgency war, the character of which is not well understood even by our own gluttonously free press. Well, this is what can be said about the ordinary run of the mill war, when there isn't a major theatre attack, a mass crackdown, a re-invasion, an annexation or another country to bomb: Israeli troops repeatedly use indiscriminate violence, deliberate violence against civilians including against minors, they use civilians as human shields, they detain tens of thousands illegally, and they torture and rape prisoners. If you're a B'Tselem, Amnesty, or even Human Rights Watch worker concerned with Israel/Palestine, you encounter daily, grinding brutality that is rarely if ever reported. Let me give you only a few examples. Here are some excerpts from the latest B'Tselem report on human rights in the 'Occupied Territories':

Of those killed in 2007, at least 132 were civilians who were taking no part in the hostilities at the time they were killed. As for another 50, we were unable to determine the relevant circumstances. According to these figures, approximately 35 percent of the Palestinians killed in 2007 in circumstances known to B'Tselem were civilians not involved in the fighting. In 2006, 348 civilians uninvolved in the fighting were killed (54 percent). Illegal behavior of an individual soldier and his commander is not the only cause for the high number of Palestinians killed who were not taking part in hostilities and posed no danger to security forces. The primary reason for these deaths is Israeli policy, set by the army’s top echelon: illegal easing of the military's rules of engagement, approval of operations that constitute disproportionate attacks, and failure to carry out independent investigations in cases in which innocent Palestinian civilians are killed.

...

Another example of illegal expansion of the rules of engagement is the establishment of “death zones” in areas close to the Gaza perimeter fence. According to testimonies given to B'Tselem, certain units are ordered to open fire automatically at any person approaching the fence, without giving prior warning and regardless of the circumstances or the identity of the person. This practice is particularly grave because of the lack of demarcation, by signs or otherwise, of the area in which entry is prohibited. In 2007, security forces killed 55 Palestinians who tried to cross the Gaza perimeter fence or were near the fence, in some cases even at a distance greater than 100 meters. Of these, at least 16 were unarmed and not engaged in hostilities, including four minors.

...

In 2007, B'Tselem documented in detail 74 cases in which security forces beat (by punching, kicking, clubbing, or hitting with rifle butts), humiliated, or threatened Palestinians. The perpetrators were soldiers (in 41 cases), Border Police officers (27 cases), and members of the regular police (6 cases) ... B'Tselem’s monitoring of demonstrations against the Separation Barrier since 2004 indicates that about 1,000 demonstrators have required medical treatment due to injury from rubbercoated metal bullets, beatings, or tear gas inhalation. Over 320 of these people were injured in 2007.

...

More than 6,000 Palestinians from the West Bank were detained in 2007 by Israel’s security forces. A significant majority of them were subsequently interrogated by the Israel Security Agency on suspicion of involvement in "hostile terror activity". In these interrogations, the ISA, together with the Prison Service and Israel Police, routinely use prison conditions and interrogation methods that individually constitute forbidden ill-treatment.

...

The phenomenon of soldiers using Palestinians to perform dangerous military tasks or to protect soldiers from gunfire (in other words, using them as human shields) continued in 2007. Until mid-December, B'Tselem documented 10 such cases, although it is likely that this represents a minority of the cases that occurred.

These are conservative estimates based on documented cases, but they clearly describe the systematic use of indiscriminate killing, beatings, mass imprisonment, torture and the use of Palestinians as human shields. I quoted some other examples of Israel's regular brutalisation of civilians here. I want also to comment specifically on the treatment of Palestinian children before moving on, because the deliberate harming of children in any war is indicative of its degeneracy - and is used as an indicator of such in most other wars. The arrest and long-term detention of children is typical. For example, in the months of February to May 2002, 8,500 Palestinians were arrested in the West Bank, 10% of whom were children. The circumstances were characteristic of an Israeli crackdown: door to door house searches, with the rounding up of anyone who the soldiers deemed a threat. The children, like their relatives, were frequently beaten before being arrested, handcuffed, blindfolded for long periods of time, denied access to medical treatment which they needed, and subject to physical and psychological torture. One fifteen year old boy described being beaten for an hour, his legs trampled on, then thrown from one corner of the room to another for fifteen minutes, then sprayed with cold water, then tied to iron steps which caused him to fall and injure himself, then punched in the face. He also had cigarettes stubbed out on his body and was struck with a steel ruler. That's just one example. (See Catherine Cook et al, Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel's Detention of Palestinian Children, Pluto Press, 2004). The deliberate baiting and shooting of children has also been reported. Chris Hedges wrote in 2001 of this practise by Israeli soldiers at an Israeli colony ('settlement') near the Palestinian refugee camp Faqah:

It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker.

"Come on, dogs," the voice booms in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!"

I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: "Son of a bitch!" "Son of a whore!" "Your mother's cunt!"

The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.

A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.

Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered - death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo - but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport. (Chris Hedges, 'A Gaza Diary', Harper's Magazine, 1 October 2001).

El Salvador, Guatemala, Sarajevo, and Algeria - those are instructive comparisons. At any rate, this is just to indicate some of the dimensions of Israel's barbarism that are usually unnoticed or, more accurately, suppressed. It is a routine grind of racially aggravated terror and humilitation, increasingly accompanied by various systems of explicit segregation, including 300 kilometres of roads exclusively for Israeli colonists in the West Bank. To it can be various forms of economic blockade, with predictably devastating effects. As to its roots, I have already argued that the reason for Israel's resemblance to apartheid South Africa is because of their emergence from a very similar historical complex of causes - colonialism and race ideology in particular. The attachment to race theory, for example, was presumably why it didn't seem odd for Zionist leaders to be inviting Adolf Eichmann to visit Palestine in 1937; why Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Likudism, so admired Mussolini (who was himself pro-Zionist); why Mossad was working with the Gestapo to arrange Jewish deportation from Germany at the behest of Reinhard Heydrich in 1939, later a chief architect of the Nazi holocaust (he gave his name to one of its chief components, Operation Reinhard); and why the Haganah (the Zionist paramilitary which formed the core of the IDF) was receiving arms from the SS. It was, all of it, part of the same murky world of colonial domination, racist mysticism (the blood and soil kind) and volkish nationalism.

And the techniques of repression that I have described are rooted in, specifically, the British colonial rule over Palestine, with which the Zionists periodically collaborated, and in the inheritance by the Zionist leadership of Britain's counterinsurgency war, which continues. Some of the key training for Zionist paramilitaries before 1948 was in supporting British colonial repression of the Palestinian Arab national liberation struggle in 1936-9, just as fascism was ravaging Europe and the Gestapo, Wehrmacht and SS were refining their own techniques of counterinsurgency. The collaboration in the repression had started as the revolt began in 1936 with the formation of the Jewish supernumerary police, which was 1,240-strong, but expanded over the next two years so that by 1939, it numbered 14,500 men. The training they received was usually passed on to thousands of others who were not included in the force. The Special Night Squads were a notoriously brutal manifestation of this collusion. Orde Wingate, a senior British army officer and Zionist, organised these. His role in formulating Israeli military doctrine is still commemorated. He is credited with having inculcated the principles of surprise, offensive daring, deep penetration and high mobility, and one of his most notable pupils was Moshe Dayan. He also taught them torture, on-the-spot executions, mass detention without trial, black flag operations. All of which was perfectly normal for the British. In general, British strategy was that any suspicious-looking "Johnny Arab" who looked suspicious could be shot out of hand, while beatings were given out routinely during raids. And the British were not shy of drawing on their extensive history of counterinsurgency in India. Charles Tegart, who had controlled special branch in the Calcutta police, was requisitioned to Palestine during the revolt, where he provided his expert assistance in the formation of Arab Investigation Centres (forebears of Facility 1391) where Palestinians would be tortured. However, the Special Night Squads acquired a justified reputation for brutality of a kind that would be familiar in today's death squads, including the Special Police Commandos for example. (What does is it say about the world's military and intelligence classes, that 'special' for them always means particularly gruesome murder and torture? For most of us, I suspect, 'special' is a wine-drenched sunset or a kind of fried rice). Aside from this valuable tutelage, at any rate, a further 50,000 Haganah troops were trained by the British army during World War II.

It is useful in that context to consider the Zionists at the height of their success, with the Arab armies easily defeated, and at least 700,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed through a system of terror, massacres, the destruction of villages, and dispossession based on a detailed plan implemented throughout 1948. It had been in these operations, beginning with Operation Nachson, that the various Zionist paramilitaries had first bonded together in a single effort. From that unity, that brothership of blood, was forged the IDF. By 1949, the plan had been more or less fulfilled. But the techniques which they had learned during the 1936 revolt and after would continue to be invaluable. As Ilan Pappe describes it in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), there was little let-up in the humiliation of, and attacks on, Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinian men were held in pens after systematic search-and-arrest operations, before being moved to concentrated prison camps. The category of 'suspicious Arab' was the basis for many of the arrests, as remains the case today: they closed off cities or towns, started searching the houses, and selected their victims. They took them off to be brutalised, subject to forced labour, or summarily executed. Former Irgun, Stern Gang and Haganah troops were employed as camp guards, and they were - despite occasional formal recriminations - allowed to get away with murder, including the Kfar Qassim massacre in which 49 Palestinians lost their lives. In the towns and villages were Palestinians remained, they were frequently subject to on-the-spot murder, as in Jaffa where Red Cross discovered a pile of bodies and were told by Israeli authorities that the people had been shot for not obeying the curfew between 5pm and 6am (during which time Israelis took the opportunity to loot Palestinian property, thus compounding the earlier waves of expropriation). They were forced into ghettos, as in Haifa were the 3-5,000 Palestinians who remained after 70,000 Palestinians were expelled, were driven into tiny living quarters in the city. ID cards were issued to help restrict and control their movement. They were also subject to rape. One case describes how soldiers had wanted to rape a girl, so they killed her father, wounded the mother, and allowed at least one soldier to assault the girl. Another girl, twelve years old, was kidnapped by soldiers in the Negev in mid-1949, had her head shaved, and was raped and tortured for several days by 22 soldiers in the platoon until one of the men killed her. In general, the Palestinians were subject to martial law, based on the British Mandate's emergency regulations imposed in 1945, which limited rights of expression, movement, and organisation, a status that ended only formally in 1966. And all the while, the theft of the land continued, as did the expropriation, vandalism and desecration, while the refugees were prevented from returning.

That was the Zionist movement and state in its moment of triumph, when the 'threat' of Palestinian self-government had been decisively defeated. They required no Hamas to goad them into it. It was the behaviour of self-confident promulgators of the Iron Wall - a doctrine fit for a Duce - schooled in technique by the most vicious bastards to have ever enslaved a quarter of the planet.