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(2 Golda Meir once said: "Who are the Palestinians? It is not as if we just came to a country called Palestine and there were Palestinians and we forced them out. They never existed. And if they existed, where are they?" • So GUPS has taken a firm stand against Zionism, and a lot of universities and polytechnics in this country have supported us. One of them, Sunderland Poly, has taken the initiative to expel the Jewish Society from its students' union simply because it has in its constitution that it will promote Israel and Zionism. • And it has accepted another Jewish society that will promote Jewish culture and the Jewish understanding amongst / British and other nations. For us Palestinians the rise of the PLO in 1965 was a most important event [forces]. During that period, and following the exodus in 1948, Palestinians were

(3 feeling helpless. They were scattered, they were living in refugee camps and they had no one to turn to, they had no one to protect them. They were all disillusioned by the Arab nations telling them that they would [will] fight for them and they [will] get them back to the country. Because we had no army at that time and most Palestinians joined Arabic armies. So they were disillusioned, and the rise of the PLO just gave them hope and they all joined whole-heartedly. That is why, in 1965, when the PLO declared itself as the Palestine Liberation Organisation, an independent body of all Arab regimes, thousands of Palestinians flocked in to join it. have The Western media [has] always been picturing the PLO as a bunch of terrorists directed from Russia. We, as a students' movement, have the task of getting the right message to all the people of the world.

(4 The PLO is not a terrorist organisation. It is a large democratic organisation that contains eight main groups that ② exist in the Palestinian [player?]. ? Its executive committee is elected democratically from the PNC. The PNC Consists ① [Council] of 400 and it [is] represented [by] all the people, even the people on the West Bank and / Gaza. [Those people] [they] have 169 delegates, from the West Bank and Gaza. And although these people Cannot vote, because they are not allowed to leave Israel to go and join, and because they fear the repercussions of Israeli practices on them, they vote indirectly, but they do vote and they are accounted for. The PLO's first operation in the occupied territories was on the 21st of March 1968. It was in a village called al-Karameh. About fifty Palestinian fighters [were] faced the Israeli army there for the first time. They fought bravely with simple weapons

(5 and they fought against a well-trained and well-equipped army. They inflicted heavy casualties amongst them and they did not stop until they were all murdered. was This [has been] a very special occasion for us and a symbol of victory and the start of the revolution. We celebrate this every year Gups this year is celebrating it in London next week, on Sunday the 31st of March at the Camden Centre, Bidborough Street, WC1, at 6 p.m. So we call upon all of you to share with us this special festival which as a is the symbol [of] for the struggle all liberation movements against imperialism and Zionism. We salute all people present here, from all liberation movements, and we hope that we will all be able to learn from eachother, because each of us has special experiences which we can and

will benefit from, and we call on you to organise more seminars like this, because we all have one enemy and one fight which is the fight against imperialism. Because what has been taken from us by force we will have to get [it] back by force. Thank you. Victory to the PLO! Victory to the struggle of the Korean people! Long live all solidarity.... [drowned in applause] (6

(1 SRSP ----- Thanks, Comrades, First I'd like to bring forth the greetings from the Scottish Republican Socialist Party and, as a representative for them, to the Korean people, to the great leader Kim Il Sung and to the heroic people in Korea themselves. ----- Juche is a term (...) in Korea on the question of independence/self-reliance. It was a term, in actual fact, which was sometimes used in another sense in China under Mao Zedong, and I find it difficult today (...) to differentiate between what Mao says and what Kim Il Sung says, because both of them say exactly the same, as far as I am concerned. [Took up point from Frans about mistakes in China - split on 'peaceful co-existence - Cultural Revo- lution - NEP - step back.] The point that I found was tremendous during the 50s and the 60s was the fact that, in Asia, we found three tremendous people appearing at the same time. There was Mao Tsetung, Kim Il Sung and Ho Chi Minh, arising all around the same period and all propounding revolutionary theory. This was fantastic, at that time, because the Communists and Marxists (...) here in Britain, in particular, (...) and possibly through the whole

(2 of Western Europe, had gone along purely economic roads, trade unionism and [the] fight for better conditions within a capitalist framework. The questions of revolution really hadn't come across. Mao, Kim Il Sung and Ho Chi Minh put forward ideology. It was the first time that people in this country had heard what was ideology for many, many years since Marx had died and all of a sudden communists started to understand what Marxism was and • What ideology was, and so people grasped it, and in particular the young people grasped it. [Excesses. Juche not to be applied mechanically, as Maoism was in the 60s.] I am 100% behind the proposition of Juche, because Juche, in actual fact, is the only way • in which we are going to achieve socialism and national liberation. We must become self-reliant, we must believe in ourselves. If we don't believe in ourselves, nobody else can ever believe in us. What I also believe is that we ourselves have got to put up our own philosophers, our own leaders and our own theoreticians, without total reliance upon external factors to guide. We ourselves create theory in our everyday practice. Correct ideas, as Mao Tsetung pointed out, don't fall from the skies. They arise from practice. We ourself, we are involved in practice

(3 in the day-to-day struggles, whether it be in work or, as we see through the miners' struggles recently in this country, we have developed further ideas as to what the nature of the state is. Many people have wakened up over the past few months in this country to the role of the police force in this society, which apparently, as put forward by Kinnock and that, has been a neutral body, the meat between the sandwich. But they are not the meat between the sandwich. The miners happen to be the meat between the sandwich in this country, because on either side of them they were faced with oppression. You get oppression of the Labour Party, the betrayals of the Labour Party and the trade union movement, which have done everything possible to stop the miners forging great links with the rest of the working class in this country, because the Labour Party realise that the basis of capitalism, which they function within, is the only way they can function. They are parasites upon society them- selves. They have no desire to change society. And on the other side we have the police force, with the whole state apparatus, to grind the workers down on that side. So it turned out that the miners and the working class are the meat between the sandwich, not the police force, who play a very active role, a very conscious role. - - -

(4 The lesson I see we have learned from the economic struggle here, and the political Struggle that has developed in Britain, has been the nature of the state. It is the finest lesson. Lenin and Marx both pointed it out, and Mao Tse-tung and Kim Il Sung have pointed this out also in their writings, that the state is a major thing in all things in society. If we don't grasp the nature of the state we cannot wage a struggle • against it, because we don't know what we are dealing with. We are dealing with some mythical thing unless we see it in concrete circumstances. (...) It controls everything that we are concerned with. (...) So that, unless we grasp the nature of the state, we cannot move forward in a revolutionary movement. In the 50s and 60s the role (...) which was played here in the Western society was the Asian tradition coming through here. It was a tremendous thing, to see students all over this country grasping it (...) as a new-type philosophy, the new man they were after. Precisely the new man they were after, because they were talking about themselves. We are capable of changing life. We are capable of changing society. That came forward very much so in the 50s and 60s. [Internal disputes followed in China, Albania, etc. Maoists here had never really understood the nature of internal contradictions. - Economism - Counter-

(5 revolutionary role of reformists since 1920s: "They have no desire to change it and have no desire to see the working class change it."] So we must go back to ourselves. We must develop Juche independently. We must know that we form our own leadership, that we are capable of developing a party here in this country, a strong revolutionary working-class party which would unite all the basic factors within the United Kingdom, and it can be done. [Contradictions different in Ireland and Scotland - must be tackled differently - Marxism a methodology.] Another point (...) [is] the question of nationalism and socialism. Often, often people say, and particularly people here in Great Britain (...) England (...) speak about the nationalists or the republicans as very petty-bourgeois nationalists. We are dividing up the greater working-class element in Britain. Now that is absolute rubbish and it has been pointed out many, many years ago by all the most theoretical and outstanding Marxists we have ever had (...) that nationalism and internationalism are interdependent upon one another; that the national struggle is a component part of the class struggle in an oppressed country and must be considered as such. There can be no division between one and the other.