a defence of the analysis of the machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie that is related to the question of Greece and class...

I did get you wrong there Capricorn and I apologise. There are a couple of quotes from me above that I did not make. I don't know where they have come from.
One of the campaigns against the working class, particularly with the election of Obama, is the question of "open and honest government". This has been one of his main selling points and it certainly struck a cord around the world. It would imply that the majority of people have seen government as closed, dishonest and secretive, in a word machiavellian.

Joseph K has a quote from me in a box on the 12.1. saying: Baboon wrote: "well did you post on the internal forum about doing it". I did not write this. There's another quote from Alan attributed to me which is presumably a joke. Is there an "internal forum"? I don't know about it. Is this a joke also or is it a usefult tool for sorting problems out? I would like to know if there is. I don't know. I do not think that admin are machiavellian nor that there is a conspiracy against me.

But on the serious issue:

Reading some posts above and elsewhere I think that it is fairly uncontroversial to say that the bourgeoisie plot and scheme, that they use infiltration, terrorism and manipulation in order to pursue its own aims against both the working class and its imperialist rivals. But to see these simply as "conspiracy theories" is to underestimate the degree of totalitarianism that has evolved in the organisation of the bourgeoisie, particularly its democratic sector, during the development of state capitalism.

Having your own citizens bombed, a prospect that Capricorn finds unlikely, is a useful weapon for any imperialism. There were some press reports during the IRA bombing campaign that the Warrington bombing was allowed to happen by British intelligence. There is no doubt that many of those arrested, tortured and jailed by the British state for IRA "spectaculars", were completely innocent individuals and the state knew it.

Terrorism also offers the capitalist state a great deal of scope for manipulation. We can see the revealing interview above with Cossiga of Italy. Or in the misguided idealism of the rail saboteurs in France (whether they were the ones caught or not) where the state "lets things happen". Again the Italian Red Brigades during the 1970s were heavily infiltrated and manipulated by both the Italian secret services and the US (Nato) "Gladio" network.

Not too long ago the Islamic fundamentalist Abu Hamza was presented by the tabloids as a terrorist and encourager of suicide bombers. He was reported later, in the same tabloids, to be working for British intelligence.
The role of the FSB (KGB) iin planting and exploding bombs in Moscow tenements in summer 1999 has been well reported. Similarly, how 50 armed Chechens managed to get into a Moscow theatre in an area where a single Chechen could expect to stopped by police many times a day. The murder of Russian civilians, the murders of civilians in Chechynia, brought Putin and the KGB back into power over the Russian mafia (up until then a stabilising force).

The bourgeoisie's policy of letting things happen, provoking or encouraging them for their own imperialist aims is nothing new and represents a complete breakdown in any rules of war, Geneva convention, or United Nations.

The idea that the bourgeoisie goes to war from one day to the next, that these events are not planned, discussed, "massaged" and engendered in advance is to greatly underestimate the enemy of the working class. Does anyone seriously think that WWI started because an ArchDuke was assassinated? Duirng the beginning of WWII, there is plenty of evidence that Churchill and Britain deliberately provoked the bombing of their own civilians by gradually increasing the brutality of bombing of German civilians.
The idea that a bourgeoisie, all of them, whose hands are drenched with blood, would baulk at the bombing of their own civilians, allowing its own citizens to be killed by foreign agencies, is naive in the extreme.

Rather than seeing "conspiracy theories" everywhere, it would be better to look at the underlying machiavellianism of the whole ruling class.

I think that the French article shows that there is an element of a general warning that acts of resistance will be classed as "terrorism" and that this is part of a general warning to the working class. In fact, as far as I remember, French rail workers striking over pensions were labelled "terrorists" by element in the French state.

I've never read the Irish publication mentioned above. But in the past (not over Gaza) I have found Al Jazerah quite useful. On the Warrington issue specifically, if I have time I will research the source if not it would be useful if you addressed the general political analysis because there are enough examples to go on in the meantime that contradict your analysis that the bourgeoise would not be involved in the killing of their own civilians.
The difference with WWI and the way terrorism is used in the current period.
Whereas Gavrilo Princips' assassination was rooted in the tradition of populist and terrorist action against Tsarist absolutism, then the use of terrorism made by the US to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and situate its military forces in 3 ex-Russian republics is of a different order altogether. Terrorism today is a weapon of the major powers.

The similarities between Pearl Harbour and the Twin Towers are evident in the use that US imperialism has made of them. Supposedly surprise attacks by a duplicitous enemy, they allowed the US ot pursue its own murderous foreign policy under an overwhelming patriotic fervour accompanied by substantial increases in state totalitarianism, not least of the media, and repression. I think it a reasonable assumption, taken with what everyone seems to agree is the lies, manipulation and ruthlessness of the bourgeoisie that we know about, that the US bourgeoisie was taken by surprise by neither event. My opinion is that this is further underlined by the obvious fact that imperialist war in the 20th and 21st centuries requires the total mobilisation of the civilian population as well as the armed forces. The lying and manipulation of the bourgeoisie reaches new levels with the development of state capitalism during this same period. In passing, the organisation and intelligence of the bourgeoisie has been demonstrated in its reaction to the economic crisis and in its capacity for social control.
Obviously, the bourgeoisie does not control everything; there are accidents, real factional disputes (sometimes bloody), disagreements constantly taking place within its structures and there is also the element of the class struggle - though the machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie is also present here seen both in reaction to the Russian revolution and the mass strike in Poland, 1980.
The bourgeoisie, even with its partial consciousness, is well capable of formulating planning, strategies and tactics at the level of the totalitarian state with the control measures of state capitalism giving it the tools and wherewithal to implement them at a scope and scale never seen before. This is the machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie. To see these expressions as simply "conspiracy theories" is to greatly underestimate the power and capacity of the capitalist state.

In response to Jef C on Gaza thread (and others)

The period known as the "phoney war" in the first year of WWII was far from that.
Dozens of British bombers (after some dummy runs) were sent to bomb German warships in the North Sea. Their bombs fell on harbours, residential areas and Denmark (NYT, 5.9.39).
Denmark was hit once again in a British response to the bombing of Skapa Flow, March 1940. April 12 1940, the British bombed the civilian area of Hedigenhafen. They also bombed occupied Oslo as well as the northern town of Heide (NYT, 26.4.40). The Germans kept protesting that they would respond to the bombing of civilians areas with like. But they didn't. 11.5.40, British bombers bombed Monchen-Gladback (Rumpf, "Bombing of Germany").
A German government opinion poll, overseen by the SS, reported on 14.5.40 that British bombing attacks "carried out on open cities and villages have caused great disgust but not any great disquiet among the population".
Ordered to bomb Dusseldorf station, a British bombing crew who couldn't find it, dropped their bombs anywhere. May 24, 1940, Hitler issued a directive authorising the Luftwaffe "to attack the English homeland" but they didn't.
June 1940, the British bombed Genoa and Milan and again, Dusseldorf also Munster and Wertheim where the RAF dropped firebombs and came back low machine gunning firemen.
The above opinion poll then reported "a general rage". The overall damage and deaths from the bombings were small, but the British bourgeoisie understood and had worked on the terror of ariel bombardment and were gradually ratcheting it up.
August 1940, the British bombed Hanover, Hamburg and dropped delayed-action bombs on Lippspringe. Hamburg had been bombed on and off for two months. On September 2, 1940, the British dropped phosphorus bombs on the Black Forest, Oberhay Woods and the forest of Grunewald on the outskirts of Berlin as well as the forests of Thuringa. Still the Luftwaffe held off.
September 10 1940, the Reichstag was hit, the Brandenburg Gate, a Jewish, Catholic charity hospital and the Berlin Academy of Art. the Ruhr and the Rhineland were bombed from July 1940.
By October, Hamburg had been bombed 36 times; Bremen 31; Berlin; Dortmund, Dortmund-Ems canal, Duisberg, Ehang, Essen, Franfurt, Hanover, Homburg, Kiel, Krefeld, Magileburg, Mannhiem, Nordeny, Onsnabruck, Soest and Wilhemshavan had all been bombed an average of over fifteen times each. Plus the forests and villages.
In August 1940, Churchill expressed his anger to De Gaulle that the Luftwaffe hadn't responded. "When will they come?" he asked. he told De Gaulle then that "the bombing of Oxford, Coventry and Cantebury (will bring the US) into the war". Coventry was bombed on November 15, 1940.
The retaliation had to come. Indeed that was the desired objective and what the British bourgeoisie had been planning for in their war against civilians in Germany and German-occupied Europe. At every stage in bombing civilians the British were first. The first to use night bombing, phosphorus, incenderies, 500lb and then 1000lb bombs. In the first year of the war British research in biological and chemical warfare was speeded up (they had already used ariel chemical warfare on the Kurds in the 20s)
When the Luftwaffe bombed London on December 29 1940, the War Cabinet, in the person of Under-Secretary Cadogen expressed his relief. "The Germans are fools" he said.
During late 39 and 1940, Churchill was making speeches saying that Britain would never be the first to bomb civilians. But they were doing it from the beginning (and worse - see below) and this was part of a deliberate policy of imperialist provocation.

Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker, is not a book as such but a series of statements, recordings, protocols, papers in the words of civilians but mostly of the ruling class itself.

Amongst other things it shows how British democracy, at the beginning of the war, instituted a deliberate policy of the starvation of mainland Europe, killing most women, children, the sick and the elderly. The victors write history so no one knows how many hundreds of thousands, or more, were killed by these actions. Ex-US president H. Hoover called it a "holocaust" years before the word was given a capital letter and applied to exclusively to the Nazi death camps.
The book also clearly shows, with appropriate references, the complicity of the US and British bourgeoisie's in the genocide of the Jews. It also shows, in the bourgeoisie's own words, how the US forced Japan into attacking the "homeland".
It also demonstrates the the humanity shown by German civilians during the war towards Jews, and the price that they paid for it.

In short, it shows the machiavellianism and murderous organisation of the democratic bourgeoisie. There are a great deal of illusions in democracy that have been shown on here and elsewhere. Today, the British bourgeoisie are calling the Israeli bombing of Gaza "unacceptable". These ruthless past masters of civilian massacres and ariel terror are currently engaged in, and have been for some time, exactly the same type of "action", ie the terror and murder of civilians, in Afghanistan. Just as they were in Iraq under machiavellian pretexts and just as they will be in the future.