Interview with Ganapathi, Leader of India’s Growing Maoist Revolution

This is a great interview with the Supreme Commander of the Indian Maoists, Ganapathi. He is little known and almost never heard from or even seen. The Indian government supposedly does not even know what he looks like. They have only a grainy photo from some years ago.

The Indian Maoists are having spectacular success, and I support them all the way. Not because that’s my nature, but because all of the other parties, from Congress in the Center to BJP on the Right to the CPI-M (Communist Party of India-Marxist) on the Left, have utterly failed the Indian people in every way imaginable. And they’ve had 72 years to get it right. It’s time to say enough is enough and look at some other alternatives. Hopefully, the Maoists could build India up like Mao built up China and then maybe they could transition to a mixed economy like the Chinese have now.

Lalgarh is an area of West Bengal, a state that has been ruled by the CPI-M for 20 years now. This party has completely failed the people in every way imaginable. One could argue that they are not even much of a Communist party anymore. The Maoists have taken over this region of western West Bengal and now control most of it. The people in this region are tribals, or adivasis, the indigenous people of India who are outside the caste system, but nevertheless on the bottom of the ladder. The tribals in Lalgarh are called Santalis.

Much of the state of Bihar is now controlled by Maoists and they hold sway over all of Jharkand. They are in many areas of Orissa, but do not control the whole state. Chattisargh is seriously overrun with Maoists and is almost Ground Zero for the rebellion. They are also in the far eastern part of Maharashtra.

They suffered a serious setback about a decade ago in Andhra Pradesh and this is what the reporter was referring to. I don’t know the details, but it looks like just a concerted counterinsurgency project by the state. The Maoists are starting to get a bit of a presence in Haryana, but it’s mostly the armed propaganda stage at this point. They are also organizing in Dehli and other big cities, but they have a lot of problems in urban areas and it’s going to be really hard to get an urban insurgency going.

Everywhere the Maoists have their most intense following with the tribals and adivasis, the lowest of the low. I am not sure to what extent they have support with Dalits and other low castes.  It’s true that they have lost some top leadership lately, but I figure they will just replace them with underlings. This interview took place in Dandakaranya, in Chattisargh.

People who oppose the Maoists are asked what precisely India should do instead, considering the failure of all of the attempted capitalist models so far.

It’s interesting, and tragic, that the Left are the only people on Earth other than some fellow successionists who support the nationalist struggle of the Tamils in Sir Lanka. The entire rest of the world, imperialist and statist, has lined up with the Sinhala-Nazis. And you people ask me why I’m a Leftist. What good are the alternatives?

We Shall Certainly Defeat the Government

The supreme commander of CPI (Maoist) talks to Open in his first-ever interview.

At first sight, Mupalla Laxman Rao, who is about to turn 60, looks like a school teacher. In fact, he was one in the early 1970s in Andhra Pradesh’s Karimnagar district. In 2009, however, the bespectacled, soft-spoken figure is India’s Most Wanted Man. He runs one of the world’s largest Left insurgencies—a man known in Home Ministry dossiers as Ganapathi; a man whose writ runs large through 15 states.

The supreme commander of CPI (Maoist) is a science graduate and holds a B Ed degree as well. He still conducts classes, but now they are on guerrilla warfare for other senior Maoists. He replaced the founder of the People’s War Group, Kondapalli Seetharaamiah, as the party’s general-secretary in 1991. Ganapathi is known to change his location frequently, and intelligence reports say he has been spotted in cities like Hyderabad, Kolkata and Kochi.

After months of attempts, Ganapathi agreed to give his first-ever interview. Somewhere in the impregnable jungles of Dandakaranya, he spoke to RAHUL PANDITA on issues ranging from the Government’s proposed anti-Naxal offensive to Islamist Jihadist movements.

Q Lalgarh has been described as the New Naxalbari by the CPI (Maoist). How has it become so significant for you?

A The Lalgarh mass uprising has, no doubt, raised new hopes among the oppressed people and the entire revolutionary camp in West Bengal. It has great positive impact not only on the people of West Bengal but also on the people all over the country. It has emerged as a new model of mass movement in the country.

We had seen similar types of movements earlier in Manipur, directed against Army atrocities and Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), in Kashmir, in Dandakaranya and to some extent in Orissa, after the Kalinganagar massacre perpetrated by the Naveen Patnaik government.

Then there have been mass movements in Singur and Nandigram but there the role of a section of the ruling classes is also significant. These movements were utilized by the ruling class parties for their own electoral interests. But Lalgarh is a more widespread and more sustained mass political movement that has spurned the leadership of all the parliamentary political parties, thereby rendering them completely irrelevant.

The people of Lalgarh had even boycotted the recent Lok Sabha polls, thereby unequivocally demonstrating their anger and frustration with all the reactionary ruling class parties. Lalgarh also has some distinctive features such as a high degree of participation of women, a genuinely democratic character and a wider mobilization of Adivasis. No wonder, it has become a rallying point for the revolutionary-democratic forces in West Bengal.

Q If it is a people’s movement, how did Maoists get involved in Lalgarh?

A As far as our party’s role is concerned, we have been working in Paschim Midnapur, Bankura and Purulia, in what is popularly known as Jangalmahal since the 1980s. We fought against the local feudal forces, against the exploitation and oppression by the forest officials, contractors, unscrupulous usurers and the goondaism of both the CPM and Trinamool Congress.

The ruling CPM, in particular, has become the chief exploiter and oppressor of the Adivasis of the region, and it has unleashed its notorious vigilante gangs called Harmad Vahini on whoever questions its authority. With the State authority in its hands, and with the aid of the police, it is playing a role worse than that of the cruel landlords in other regions of the country.

Given this background, anyone who dares to fight against oppression and exploitation by the CPM can win the respect and confidence of the people. Since our party has been fighting uncompromisingly against the atrocities of the CPM goons, it naturally gained the confidence and respect of the people of the region.

The police atrocities in the wake of the landmine blast on 2 November [in 2008, from which West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had a narrow escape] acted as the trigger that brought the pent-up anger of the masses into the open. This assumed the form of a long-drawn mass movement, and our party played the role of a catalyst.

Q But not so long ago, the CPM was your friend. You even took arms and ammunition from it to fight the Trinamool Congress. This has been confirmed by a Politburo member of CPI (Maoist) in certain interviews. And now you are fighting the CPM with the help of the Trinamool. How did a friend turn into a foe and vice-versa?

A This is only partially true. We came to know earlier that some ammunition was taken by our local cadre from the CPM unit in the area. There was, however, no understanding with the leadership of the CPM in this regard. Our approach was to unite all sections of the oppressed masses at the lower levels against the goondaism and oppression of Trinamool goons in the area at that time.

And since a section of the oppressed masses were in the fold of the CPM at that time, we fought together with them against Trinamool. Still, taking into consideration the overall situation in West Bengal, it was not a wise step to take arms and ammunition from the CPM even at the local level when the contradiction was basically between two sections of the reactionary ruling classes.

Our central committee discussed this, criticized the comrade responsible for taking such a decision, and directed the concerned comrades to stop this immediately. As regards taking ammunition from the Trinamool Congress, I remember that we had actually purchased it not directly from the Trinamool but from someone who had links with the Trinamool.

There will never be any conditions or agreements with those selling us arms. That has been our understanding all along. As regards the said interview by our Politburo member, we will verify what he had actually said.

Q What are your tactics now in Lalgarh after the massive offensive by the Central and state forces?

A First of all, I wish to make it crystal clear that our party will spearhead and stand firmly by the side of the people of Lalgarh and entire Jangalmahal, and draw up tactics in accordance with the people’s interests and mandate. We shall spread the struggle against the State everywhere and strive to win over the broad masses to the side of the people’s cause.

We shall fight the State offensive by mobilizing the masses more militantly against the police, Harmad Vahini and CPM goons. The course of the development of the movement, of course, will depend on the level of consciousness and preparedness of the people of the region. The party will take this into consideration while formulating its tactics. The initiative of the masses will be released fully.

Q The Government has termed Lalgarh a ‘laboratory’ for anti-Naxal operations. Has your party also learnt any lessons from Lalgarh?

A Yes, our party too has a lot to learn from the masses of Lalgarh. Their upsurge was beyond our expectations. In fact, it was the common people, with the assistance of advanced elements influenced by revolutionary politics, who played a crucial role in the formulation of tactics. They formed their own organisation, put forth their charter of demands, worked out various novel forms of struggle, and stood steadfast in the struggle despite the brutal attacks by the police and the social-fascist Harmad gangs.

The Lalgarh movement has the support of revolutionary and democratic forces not only in West Bengal but in the entire country. We are appealing to all revolutionary and democratic forces in the country to unite to fight back the fascist offensive by the Buddhadeb government in West Bengal and the UPA Government at the Centre.

By building the broadest fighting front, and by adopting appropriate tactics of combining the militant mass political movement with armed resistance of the people and our PLGA (People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army), we will defeat the massive offensive by the Central-state forces. I cannot say more than this at the present juncture.

Q The Centre has declared an all-out war against Maoists by branding the CPI (Maoist) a terrorist organisation and imposing an all-India ban on the party. How has it affected your party?

A Our party has already been banned in several states of India. By imposing the ban throughout the country, the Government now wants to curb all our open activities in West Bengal and a few other states where legal opportunities exist to some extent. The Government wants to use this draconian UAPA [Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act] to harass whoever dares to raise a voice against fake encounters, rapes and other police atrocities on the people residing in Maoist-dominated regions. Anyone questioning the State’s brutalities will now be branded a terrorist.

The real terrorists and biggest threats to the country’s security are none other than Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram, Buddhadeb, other ruling class leaders and feudal forces who terrorize the people on a daily basis.

The UPA Government had declared, as soon as it assumed power for the second time, that it would crush the Maoist ‘menace’ and began pouring in huge funds to the states for this purpose. The immediate reason behind this move is the pressure exerted by the comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie and the imperialists, particularly US imperialists, who want to plunder the resources of our country without any hindrance.

These sharks aspire to swallow the rich abundant mineral and forest wealth in the vast contiguous region stretching from Jangalmahal to north Andhra. This region is the wealthiest as well as the most underdeveloped part of our country. These sharks want to loot the wealth and drive the Adivasi people of the region to further impoverishment.

Another major reason for the current offensive by the ruling classes is the fear of the rapid growth of the Maoist movement and its increasing influence over a significant proportion of the Indian population.

The Janatana Sarkars in Dandakaranya and the revolutionary people’s committees in Jharkhand, Orissa and parts of some other states have become new models of genuine people’s democracy and development. The rulers want to crush these new models of development and genuine democracy, as these are emerging as the real alternative before the people of the country at large.

Q The Home Ministry has made preparations for launching a long-term battle against Maoists. A huge force will be soon trying to wrest away areas from your control. How do you plan to confront this offensive?

A Successive governments in various states and the Centre have been hatching schemes over the years. But they could not achieve any significant success through their cruel offensive in spite of murdering hundreds of our leaders and cadres. Our party and our movement continued to consolidate and expand to new regions. From two or three states, the movement has now spread to over 15 states, giving jitters to the ruling classes.

Particularly after the merger of the erstwhile MCCI and People’s War in September 2004 [the merger between these groups led to the formation of the CPI (Maoist)], the UPA Government has unleashed the most cruel all-round offensive against the Maoist movement. Yet our party continued to grow despite suffering some severe losses. In the past three years, in particular, our PLGA has achieved several significant victories.

We have been confronting the continuous offensive of the enemy with the support and active involvement of the masses. We shall confront the new offensive of the enemy by stepping up such heroic resistance and preparing the entire party, PLGA, the various revolutionary parties and organisations and the entire people. Although the enemy may achieve a few successes in the initial phase, we shall certainly overcome and defeat the Government offensive with the active mobilization of the vast masses and the support of all the revolutionary and democratic forces in the country.

No fascist regime or military dictator in history could succeed in suppressing forever the just and democratic struggles of the people through brute force, but were, on the contrary, swept away by the high tide of people’s resistance. People, who are the makers of history, will rise up like a tornado under our party’s leadership to wipe out the reactionary blood-sucking vampires ruling our country.

Q Why do you think the CPI (Maoist) suffered a serious setback in Andhra Pradesh?

A It was due to several mistakes on our part that we suffered a serious setback in most of Andhra Pradesh by 2006. At the same time, we should also look at the setback from another angle. In any protracted people’s war, there will be advances and retreats. If we look at the situation in Andhra Pradesh from this perspective, you will understand that what we did there is a kind of retreat. Confronted with a superior force, we chose to temporarily retreat our forces from some regions of Andhra Pradesh, extend and develop our bases in the surrounding regions and then hit back at the enemy.

Now even though we received a setback, it should be borne in mind that this setback is a temporary one. The objective conditions in which our revolution began in Andhra Pradesh have not undergone any basic change. This very fact continues to serve as the basis for the growth and intensification of our movement.

Moreover, we now have a more consolidated mass base, a relatively better-trained people’s guerrilla army and an all-India party with deep roots among the basic classes who comprise the backbone of our revolution. This is the reason why the reactionary rulers are unable to suppress our revolutionary war, which is now raging in several states in the country.

We had taken appropriate lessons from the setback suffered by our party in Andhra Pradesh and, based on these lessons, drew up tactics in other states. Hence we are able to fight back the cruel all-round offensive of the enemy effectively, inflict significant losses on the enemy, preserve our subjective forces, consolidate our party, develop a people’s liberation guerrilla army, establish embryonic forms of new democratic people’s governments in some pockets, and take the people’s war to a higher stage.

Hence we have an advantageous situation, overall, for reviving the movement in Andhra Pradesh. Our revolution advances wave-like and periods of ebb yield place to periods of high tide.

Q What are the reasons for the setback suffered by the LTTE in Sri Lanka?

A There is no doubt that the movement for a separate sovereign Tamil Eelam has suffered a severe setback with the defeat and considerable decimation of the LTTE. The Tamil people and the national liberation forces are now leaderless. However, the Tamil people at large continue to cherish nationalist aspirations for a separate Tamil homeland. The conditions that gave rise to the movement for Tamil Eelam, in the first place, prevail to this day.

The Sinhala-chauvinist Sri Lankan ruling classes can never change their policy of discrimination against the Tamil nation, its culture, language, et cetera. The jingoistic rallies and celebrations organised by the government and Sinhala chauvinist parties all over Sri Lanka in the wake of Prabhakaran’s death and the defeat of the LTTE show the national hatred for Tamils nurtured by Sinhala organisations and the extent to which the minds of ordinary Sinhalese are poisoned with such chauvinist frenzy.

The conspiracy of the Sinhala ruling classes in occupying Tamil territories is similar to that of the Zionist rulers of Israel. The land-starved Sinhala people will now be settled in Tamil areas. The entire demography of the region is going to change. The ground remains fertile for the resurgence of the Tamil liberation struggle.

Even if it takes time, the war for a separate Tamil Eelam is certain to revive, taking lessons from the defeat of the LTTE. By adopting a proletarian outlook and ideology, adopting new tactics and building the broadest united front of all nationalist and democratic forces, it is possible to achieve the liberation of the oppressed Tamil nation [in Sri Lanka].

Maoist forces have to grow strong enough to provide leadership and give a correct direction and anti-imperialist orientation to this struggle to achieve a sovereign People’s Democratic Republic of Tamil Eelam. This alone can achieve the genuine liberation of the Tamil nation in Sri Lanka.

Q Is it true that you received military training from the LTTE initially?

A No. It is not a fact. We had clarified this several times in the past.

Q But one of your senior commanders has told me that some senior cadre of the erstwhile PWG did receive arms training and other support from the LTTE.

A Let me reiterate, there is no relation at all between our party and the LTTE. We tried several times to establish relations with the LTTE but its leadership was reluctant to have a relationship with Maoists in India. Hence, there is no question of the LTTE giving training to us. In spite of it, we continued our support to the struggle for Tamil Eelam. However, a few persons who had separated from the LTTE came into our contact and we took their help in receiving initial training in the last quarter of the 1980s.

Q Does your party have links with Lashkar-e-Toiba or other Islamic militant groups having links with Pakistan?

A No. Not at all. This is only mischievous, calculated propaganda by the police officials, bureaucrats and leaders of the reactionary political parties to defame us and thereby justify their cruel offensive against the Maoist movement. By propagating the lie that our party has links with groups linked to Pakistan’s ISI, the reactionary rulers of our country want to prove that we too are terrorists and gain legitimacy for their brutal terror campaign against Maoists and the people in the areas of armed agrarian struggle.

Trying to prove the involvement of a foreign hand in every just and democratic struggle, branding those fighting for the liberation of the oppressed as traitors to the country, is part of the psychological-war of the reactionary rulers.

Q What is your party’s stand regarding Islamist jihadist movements?

A Islamic jihadist movements of today are a product of imperialist—particularly US imperialist—aggression, intervention, bullying, exploitation and suppression of the oil-rich Islamic and Arab countries of West Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, et cetera, and the persecution of the entire Muslim religious community. As part of their designs for global hegemony, the imperialists, particularly US imperialists, have encouraged and endorsed every war of brazen aggression and brutal attacks by their surrogate state of Israel.

Our party unequivocally opposes every attack on Arab and Muslim countries and the Muslim community at large in the name of ‘war on global terror’. In fact, Muslim religious fundamentalism is encouraged and fostered by imperialists as long as it serves their interests—such as in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, and Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan.

Q But what about attacks perpetrated by the so-called ‘Jihadis’ on innocent people like it happened on 26/11?

A See, Islamic jihadist movements have two aspects: one is their anti-imperialist aspect, and the other their reactionary aspect in social and cultural matters. Our party supports the struggle of Muslim countries and people against imperialism, while criticising and struggling against the reactionary ideology and social outlook of Muslim fundamentalism. It is only Maoist leadership that can provide correct anti-imperialist orientation and achieve class unity among Muslims as well as people of other religious persuasions.

The influence of Muslim fundamentalist ideology and leadership will diminish as communist revolutionaries and other democratic-secular forces increase their ideological influence over the Muslim masses. As communist revolutionaries, we always strive to reduce the influence of the obscurantist reactionary ideology and outlook of the mullahs and maulvis on the Muslim masses, while uniting with all those fighting against the common enemy of the world people—that is, imperialism, particularly American imperialism.

Q How do you look at the changes in US policy after Barack Obama took over from George Bush?

A Firstly, one would be living in a fool’s paradise if one imagines that there is going to be any qualitative change in American policy—whether internal or external—after Barack Obama took over from George Bush. In fact, the policies on national security and foreign affairs pursued by Obama over the past eight months have shown the essential continuity with those of his predecessor. The ideological and political justification for these regressive policies at home and aggressive policies abroad is the same trash put forth by the Bush administration—the so-called ‘global war on terror’, based on outright lies and slander.

Worse still, the policies have become even more aggressive under Obama with his planned expansion of the US-led war of aggression in Afghanistan into the territory of Pakistan. The hands of this new killer-in-chief of the pack of imperialist wolves are already stained with the blood of hundreds of women and children who are cruelly murdered in relentless missile attacks from Predator drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And, within the US itself, bail-outs for the tiny corporate elite and attacks on democratic and human rights of US citizens continue without any change.

The oppressed people and nations of the world are now confronting an even more formidable and dangerous enemy in the form of an African-American president of the most powerful military machine and world gendarme. The world people should unite to wage a more relentless, more militant and more consistent struggle against the American marauders led by Barack Obama and pledge to defeat them to usher in a world of peace, stability and genuine democracy.

Q How do you look at the current developments in Nepal?

A As soon as the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) [CPN(M)] came to power in alliance with the comprador-feudal parties through the parliamentary route in Nepal, we had pointed out the grave danger of imperialist and Indian expansionist intervention in Nepal and how they would leave no stone unturned to overthrow the government led by CPN(M).

As long as Prachanda did not defy the directives of the Indian Government, it was allowed to continue, but when it began to go against Indian hegemony, it was immediately pulled down. CPN-UML withdrew support to the Prachanda-led government upon the advice of American imperialists and Indian expansionists. We disagreed with the line of peaceful transition pursued by the UCPN(M) in the name of tactics. We decided to send an open letter to the UCPN(M). It was released in July 2009.

We made our party’s stand clear in the letter. We pointed out that the UCPN(M) chose to reform the existing State through an elected constituent assembly and a bourgeois democratic republic instead of adhering to the Marxist-Leninist understanding on the imperative to smash the old State and establish a proletarian State.

This would have been the first step towards the goal of achieving socialism through the radical transformation of society and all oppressive class relations. It is indeed a great tragedy that the UCPN(M) has chosen to abandon the path of protracted people’s war and pursue a parliamentary path in spite of having de facto power in most of the countryside.

It is heartening to hear that a section of the leadership of the UCPN(M) has begun to struggle against the revisionist positions taken by Comrade Prachanda and others. Given the great revolutionary traditions of the UCPN(M), we hope that the inner-party struggle will repudiate the right opportunist line pursued by its leadership, give up revisionist stands and practices, and apply minds creatively to the concrete conditions of Nepal.

Q Of late, the party has suffered serious losses of party leadership at the central and state level. Besides, it is widely believed that some of the senior-most Maoist leaders, including you, have become quite old and suffer from serious illnesses, which is also cited as one of the reasons for the surrenders. What is the effect of the losses and surrenders on the movement? How are you dealing with problems arising out of old age and illnesses?

A (Smiles…) This type of propaganda is being carried out continuously, particularly by the Special Intelligence Branch (SIB) of Andhra Pradesh. It is a part of the psychological war waged by intelligence officials and top police brass aimed at confusing and demoralising supporters of the Maoist movement. It is a fact that some of the party leaders at the central and state level could be described as senior citizens according to criteria used by the government, that is, those who have crossed the threshold of 60 years.

You can start calling me too a senior citizen in a few months (smiles). But old age and ill-health have never been a serious problem in our party until now. You can see the ‘senior citizens’ in our party working for 16-18 hours a day and covering long distances on foot.As for surrenders, it is a big lie to say that old age and ill-health have been a reason for some of the surrenders.

When Lanka Papi Reddy, a former member of our central committee, surrendered in the beginning of last year, the media propagated that more surrenders of our party leaders will follow due to ill-health. The fact is that Papi Reddy surrendered due to his loss of political conviction and his petty-bourgeois false prestige and ego. Hence he was not prepared to face the party after he was demoted by the central committee for his anarchic behaviour with a woman comrade.

Some senior leaders of our party, like comrades Sushil Roy and Narayan Sanyal, had become a nightmare for the ruling classes even when they were in their mid 60s. Hence they were arrested, tortured and imprisoned despite their old age and ill-health. The Government is doing everything possible to prevent them from getting bail. Even if someone in our party is old, he/she continues to serve the revolution by doing whatever work possible.

For instance, Comrade Niranjan Bose, who died recently at the age of 92, had been carrying out revolutionary propaganda until his martyrdom. The social fascist rulers were so scared of this nonagenarian Maoist revolutionary that they had even arrested him four years back. Such is the spirit of Maoist revolutionaries—and power of the ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism which they hold high. When there are serious illnesses, or physical and mental limitations to perform normal work, such comrades are given suitable work.

Q But what about the arrests and elimination of some of your senior leadership? How do you intend to fill up such losses?

A Well, it is a fact that we lost some senior leaders at the state and central level in the past four or five years. Some leaders were secretly arrested and murdered in the most cowardly manner. Many other and state leaders were arrested and placed behind bars in the recent past in Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Haryana and other states.

The loss of leadership will have a grave impact on the party and Indian revolution as a whole. We are reviewing the reasons for the losses regularly and devising ways and means to prevent further losses.

By adopting strictly secret methods of functioning and foolproof underground mechanisms, by enhancing our mass base, vigilance and local intelligence, smashing enemy intelligence networks and studying their plans and tactics, we hope to check further losses. At the same time, we are training and developing new revolutionary leadership at all levels to fill up the losses.

Q How do you sum up the present stage of war between your forces and those of the Indian State?

A Our war is in the stage of strategic defence. In some regions, we have an upper hand, while in others the enemy has the upper hand. Overall, our forces have been quite successful in carrying out a series of tactical counter-offensive operations against the enemy in our guerrilla zones in the past few years.

It is true that our party has suffered some serious leadership losses, but we are able to inflict serious losses on the enemy too. In fact, in the past three years, the enemy forces suffered more casualties than we did. The enemy has been trying all means at their disposal to weaken, disrupt and crush our party and movement.

They have tried covert agents and informers, poured in huge amounts of money to buy off weak elements in the revolutionary camp, and announced a series of rehabilitation packages and other material incentives to lure away people from the revolutionary camp.

Thousands of crores of rupees have been sanctioned for police modernization, training and for raising additional commando forces; for increasing Central forces; for training Central and state forces in counter-insurgency warfare; and for building roads, communication networks and other infrastructure for the rapid movement of their troops in our guerrilla zones.

The Indian State has set up armed vigilante groups and provided total support to the indescribable atrocities committed by these armed gangs on the people. Psychological warfare against Maoists was taken to unheard of levels.

Nevertheless, we continued to make greater advances, consolidated the party and the revolutionary people’s committees at various levels, strengthened the PLGA qualitatively and quantitatively, smashed the enemy’s intelligence network in several areas, effectively countered the dirty psychological-war waged by the enemy, and foiled the enemy’s all-out attempts to disrupt and smash our movement.

The successes we had achieved in several tactical counter-offensive operations carried out across the country in recent days, the militant mass movements in several states, particularly against displacement and other burning issues of the people, initiatives taken by our revolutionary people’s governments in various spheres—all these have had a great impact on the people, while demoralising enemy forces.

There are reports of desertions and disobedience of orders by the jawans posted in Maoist-dominated areas. Quite a few have refused to undertake training in jungle warfare or take postings in our areas, and had to face suspension. This trend will grow with the further advance of our people’s war. Overall, our party’s influence has grown stronger and it has now come to be recognised as the only genuine alternative before the people.

Q How long will this stage of strategic defence last, with the Centre ready to go for the jugular?

A The present stage of strategic defence will last for some more time. It is difficult to predict how long it will take to pass this stage and go to the stage of strategic equilibrium or strategic stalemate. It depends on the transformation of our guerrilla zones into base areas, creation of more guerrilla zones and red resistance areas across the country, the development of our PLGA.

With the ever-intensifying crisis in all spheres due to the anti-people policies of pro-imperialist, pro-feudal governments, the growing frustration and anger of the masses resulting from the most rapacious policies of loot and plunder pursued by the reactionary ruling classes, we are confident that the vast masses of the country will join the ranks of revolutionaries and take the Indian revolution to the next stage.

Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers

Incredible article.

I had heard of this before, but I had never seen it written down quite so precisely. The article is in the journal of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine, so suffers from being written in English as a second language, but it’s still pretty much intelligible.

The anecdotes are stunning: Reinhard Heidrich, Hitler’s favorite top officer, returning home drunk one night, looks in the mirror and sees his reflection. “Foul Jew”, he hollers, pulls out his revolver and shoots the mirror to shards. Eichmann, later sentenced to death for genocide in Israel, tormented by other boys at school who called him a “small Jew.”

Hitler signing a waver on 78 of his top officers who were partly Jewish or had parents who married Jews, declaring his determination that they were 10

A pure Jewish German escapes from occupied France to Germany and is called up to the SS, where he serves. His own mother is murdered at Auschwitz. His soul is tormented, “Am I a victim or a persectuor?” 150,000 descendants of German Jewish war veterans who have permission to move to Israel via the Law of Return. Wild debates in Israel over letting the grandchildren of German troops move to Israel.

A top German half-Jewish officer, a colonel, on his way to promotion to general, is shipped to Poland and witnesses the Warsaw Ghetto. He breaks down and his promotion is denied on the grounds of psychological weakness.

A well-known photo of a German youth in a helmet, blond, blue-eyed, Aryan, used to promote Nazism in Nazi propaganda. The model was Werner Goldberg, a German soldier with a Jewish father. A German soldier, a religious Jew, returns after the war and relates how he repeatedly saw German soldiers engaging in Jewish religious rituals at the front, with no one stopping them. Goering thundering in his headquarters, when confronted with Jewish officers in his ranks, “In my headquarters I decide who is a Jew and who is not!”

The article is a review of the book, Jewish Soldiers of Hitler: Untold History of Nazi Racial Laws and People of Jewish Origin in the German Army by Brian Rigg, a Jewish convert to Christianity, US Marine and volunteer in the Israeli Army.

 

"Girls," by Alpha Unit

Gil Elvgren was a Minnesota-born painter who is famous for his pinup art. Some think of him as the most important of all the pinup artists. To Elvgren, the ideal model had the face of a 15-year-old and the body of a 20-year-old. It is always noted that his art combined the two. I’ll say that for artistic purposes, Elvgren’s ideal woman was probably between 17 and 18, only because the average of 15 and 20 is about 17–the age that men evidently find women to be most beautiful (see here). To me, the women in Elvgren’s paintings appear mainly to be adult women who might be posing as 17-year-olds. The artist George Petty, on the other hand, seems really to have captured this image of the 17-year-old in his pinup art, not only because of that big, wholesome smile he gave his girls but because a lot of them are on the telephone! The women in these idealized portraits of American White womanhood are always called pinup “girls.” Just as dancers of all varieties are called girls. Models are routinely called girls. So are prostitutes. When women are presented for mostly male “consumption,” they are nearly always presented as girls. Many men describe young women as “happy,” which is part of their appeal. In a Bob Seger song about a man who has fallen for a dancer he likes to watch in “a little club downtown,” he says of her:

Unlike all the other ladies, she looked so young and sweet…

Young. Sweet. Happy. An infatuating combination. You don’t stay young. So you don’t stay sweet. But a charming older woman is one who has retained a spark of that girlish sweetness. Or at least one who can give that impression.

References

Seger, Bob. 1976. “Main Street.” On Night Moves [Record]. Hollywood, CA: Capitol Industries-EMI.

“Girls,” by Alpha Unit

Gil Elvgren was a Minnesota-born painter who is famous for his pinup art. Some think of him as the most important of all the pinup artists.

To Elvgren, the ideal model had the face of a 15-year-old and the body of a 20-year-old. It is always noted that his art combined the two.

I’ll say that for artistic purposes, Elvgren’s ideal woman was probably between 17 and 18, only because the average of 15 and 20 is about 17–the age that men evidently find women to be most beautiful (see here). To me, the women in Elvgren’s paintings appear mainly to be adult women who might be posing as 17-year-olds.

The artist George Petty, on the other hand, seems really to have captured this image of the 17-year-old in his pinup art, not only because of that big, wholesome smile he gave his girls but because a lot of them are on the telephone! The women in these idealized portraits of American White womanhood are always called pinup “girls.” Just as dancers of all varieties are called girls. Models are routinely called girls. So are prostitutes.

When women are presented for mostly male “consumption,” they are nearly always presented as girls.

Many men describe young women as “happy,” which is part of their appeal. In a Bob Seger song about a man who has fallen for a dancer he likes to watch in “a little club downtown,” he says of her:

Unlike all the other ladies, she looked so young and sweet…

Young. Sweet. Happy. An infatuating combination.

You don’t stay young. So you don’t stay sweet. But a charming older woman is one who has retained a spark of that girlish sweetness. Or at least one who can give that impression.

References

Seger, Bob. 1976. “Main Street.” On Night Moves [Record]. Hollywood, CA: Capitol Industries-EMI.

Peter Tobin, “India and Nepal – Big Brother Little Brother Part 2″

This is the 2nd part of Peter Tobin’s excellent essay, India and Nepal – Big Brother Little Brother. He is a fine writer and I am honored to present his work on my site.

This post is very long, running to 115 pages on the Web. Nevertheless, it is not a difficult read, as I have read it several times already. Still, it would be best to print it out and read it at your leisure.

This article deals with the recent history of India and Nepal in a manner in which most of us are not familiar.

He also ties in Indian nationalism with Irish nationalism and compares and contrasts the two movements. Tobin’s analysis is interesting for a Marxist, as he negates the notion that the IRA is taking a progressive stance in calling for the unification of all of Ireland.

Instead, he sees it as opposed to the progressive axiom of self-determination. A proper Marxist POV, says, Tobin, would be for Irish nationalists to allow the right of self-determination to the counties of Northern Ireland. He compares this reluctance on the part of Irish nationalists to Indian nationalists’ refusal to grant the right of self-determination to Muslims on the subcontinent, a fascist project that led the violent partition of India, endless war in Kashmir and a very hostile reality between India and Pakistan.

Hence, Irish national unification nationalism, like Indian national unification nationalism, is a fascist project as is the case with most national unification or nation-building projects, not a progressive or Left one.

There are many other interesting tidbits here. Tobin notes that the Hindutva movement actually has its roots in normative Indian nationalism and the Congress Party itself and such heroes as Gandhi and Nehru can be seen as Hindutvas themselves. That India has always dominated Nepal in a brutal and callous way shows that India itself, like Israel, must now be recognized as an imperialist power in its own right.

I made quite a few edits in the text, but for style, punctuation, grammar and spelling only.

1947 INDIA SPRINGS FROM THE HEAD OF MARS

Over the past generation India has shed its non-aligned status and has formally placed itself in the Anglo-Saxon camp. For a number of reasons, some of which I will outline below, it has become a fully active member of the ‘War on Terror’.

To a large extent this has laid bare that which was previously obscured by the radical rhetoric and sometimes practice of the Congress leaders of the pre and post independence movement: that is the phenomenon of a Hindu Great Power chauvinism which lays claim to the entire subcontinent including the Hindu Kush, the Himalayas and what is now Pakistan.

It was initially conceived in the first decades of the twentieth century by the nationalist ideologue Savarkar who introduced the concept of Hindutva (Hinduness) to describe all movements and parties under the umbrella of Indian nationalism.

It is there in Nehru’s Discovery of India written from 1942 onwards while interned by the British. Published in 1946, it formed the Hindu response to those who would challenge the territorial assertions of Indian nationalists. The extreme form of Hindutva can presently be seen in the murderous cretinism of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, Indian People’s Party) founded in 1980 and now the second largest party in the Lok Sabha.

It is salutary to note that Modi, the leading BJP minister in the Gujarat regional government, personally organized the massacre of over 2,000 Muslims in that state in 2002. The BJP is also pro-American and committed to the neo-liberal project.

There is therefore no substantial ideological or political difference between the BJP and the CI Establishment in this claim to the entire subcontinent. What they have, they hold; where they don’t have control, they have consistently followed expansionist policies of economic and military penetration to achieve that end.

Following independence, initial animus was directed against what were held to be the pretensions of Jinnah’s Muslim League in claiming national rights based upon majority Muslim populations in the North West and East of India. Jinnah rightly claimed that in a few years he had turned:

Muslims from a crowd into a nation.

The emergence of Muslim nationalism provoked the Indian Congress politicians and ideologues into the corrupt, anti-democratic inveigling of a large chunk of Kashmir into the nascent Indian state completely disregarding the wishes of the vast majority of the population there for integration with their coreligionists in an equally nascent Pakistani state.

It reflects, like Irish nationalists in their continued refusal to accept self-determination for the Loyalist population in the six counties, their rejection of a ‘two nation’ theory applying on the subcontinent.

That and the seizure of Hyderabad began India’s first, but by no means last, war of aggression in 1948.

As the largest power on subcontinent, India has always acted with impunity in defending and extending its border and influence. Besides the wars with Pakistan which culminated in the dismantling of that state in 1972 with the detachment of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), it had the arrogance to launch a war against China in the Askhai Chin in 1962.

Its military caste, inflated with hubris inherited from its former imperial master, expected a walkover. The military ignoramus, Mountbatten, who had been parachuted into the high command of SEAC (South East Asia Command) in 1943 over the head of the more competent General Slim, through his royal connections, claimed that India had:

A magnificent army, a capable air force, and a good navy brought up by the British. Look at the terrain and tell me how the Chinese can invade. (sic) I would hate to plan that campaign.

The only correct statement in the above was that the Indian Army was a British creation; its officer class was comprised of Koi Hais (Anglo-Indian Blimps) who, emboldened by all their wars and particularly the walk-over in annexing Portuguese Goa in 1961, were gung ho for war against China. L’appetite vient en mangeant.

In the final event, their army was outmaneuvered, outfought and outclassed by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and the Indian government was forced to withdraw its troops and territorial claims which, significantly, were based on the British unilaterally imposed McMahon line. (Vide: India’s China War, Neville Maxwell, 1969.)

These territorial assertions were partly based on the fact that the Askai Chin is part of Kashmir, the whole of which Indian nationalists lay claim to, as detailed earlier, but significantly also on the basis that the new line was a secret provision of the 1914 Simla Agreement between the then Dalai Lama and Britain and followed upon the British invasion of Tibet a decade earlier. British historians euphemistically refer to this event as the ‘Younghusband Expedition’.

It was inspired by the adventurist Viceroy, Curzon, seeking to exploit the growing weakness of Manchu China by encouraging Tibetan separatism and to forestall the Russians from gaining influence in that region, reflecting the anti-Russian ‘forward’ school of Raj expansionism that had been evident in Afghanistan and North India throughout the 19th century.

The Chinese had never accepted this invasion or the agreement that resulted from it and which changed British policy, a policy which up to 1904 had recognised that Tibet was under the suzerainty of the Court of the Middle Kingdom. The emerging Kuomintang, from its progressive beginnings under Sun Yat Sen to the later years of the Bonapartist reaction of Chiang Kai Shek, upheld the ‘One China’ policy.

After China ‘stood up’ with the 1949 Liberation, there was even less likelihood of it accepting the spurious legacy of Curzon’s geopolitical cartography. It was not, therefore, as the deluded Mountbatten stated, an ‘invasion’ but a consistent policy of refusing to acknowledge imperialist borders aimed at fragmenting China. The Chinese Communists fought a defensive war against India in order to re-assert the acknowledged historical unity of their country.

Delhi’s aim of enforcing what had begun as a British land grab emphasizes how completely Nehru’s Congress government adopted the reactionary politics and territorial parameters of their former colonial masters. In this sense the war of aggression against the People’s Republic was not an aberration but was entirely consistent with India’s general expansionist policies on the subcontinent and particularly consistent with its attitude towards China.

A long standing animus towards the Communist country was previously seen in the comfort and aid given to the Tibetan Yellow Hat clique and their post 1914 attempts to secede Tibet from China.

Despite all the rhetoric of Third World solidarity that came out of Bandung in 1954 and the Panch Sheel (five points) agreement, where the two countries had agreed not to interfere in each others’ internal affairs, India allowed these separatists, fronted by the youth Gyatso, the Dalai Lama (a CIA creature then as now), a haven after the failure of their American-backed armed uprising in 1959 which the Indian government allowed to be organised from Kalimpong (Nehru himself admitted that the place was ‘a nest of spies’).

After the defeat of this Tibetan ‘Bay of Pigs’, they were allowed to resettle in Dharmsala, which was said to be the biggest CIA base in the world outside of Langley at that time. India essentially allowed the US to pursue its proxy war against China from its territory.

Its anti-colonial soul was further betrayed to a new, but equally expansionist, superpower, when Congress accepted its British inheritance from the instance of independence. For example, it took over with alacrity the policy of keeping Hindu rulers in majority Muslim areas; the British had pioneered this stratagem after the success of the first Sikh wars in 1846 in Jammu and Kashmir based on the principle of divide and rule.

Independent India inherited directly these petty princelings and through them disenfranchised the Muslim populations in those states.

Only lip service was paid to Gandhi’s pacifism. For years before his assassination, he had already been marginalized by the radical group around Menon and Nehru who were the real powers in formulating policy and strategy. Like the Dalai Lama, he has since become a saint to sections of a gullible, dim, historically ignorant Western petit-bourgeoisie.

Nehru put this more aggressive and hardheaded projection of the national interest very clearly in the Lok Sabha in 1959 in relation to the border dispute with China:

But where national prestige and dignity is involved, it is not the two miles of territory, it is the nation’s dignity and self-respect that becomes involved. And therefore this happens.

Yet he continued to delude himself, invoking Gandhi, that “basically we are a gentle people” who “emotionally disliked war,” that had been forced on them by the “warlike Chinese.”

The controversial but perceptive Bengali writer Chauduri, (Inter alia he argued that the Indians were originally Europeans who had been corrupted and denatured by an exotic, tropical environment.) in an acclaimed series of essays, saw through the hypocritical rhetoric, and penetratingly observed a few years after the war:

Hindu militarism is a genuine and powerful force, influencing Indian foreign policy…the conflict with China was inspired almost wholly by Hindu jingoism with the Hindu possessiveness as a second underlying factor. (The Continent of Circe, Niraud C. Chauduri, 1965. p. 107. Circe was a sorceress and weaver of spells from Greek legend.)

This bellicose militarism swept the country, reactivating the concept of the Dharma Yuddha (righteous war) but in a degraded and incompetent form. It demonstrated what a powerful force militarism had become since independence.

However the defeat in the Indian-Chinese War not only strengthened the position of the ‘capitalist roaders’ within Congress but led to one of the biggest defeats of the Party in the history of elections anywhere, when it was swept away in Jaipur in 1962 by a the victory in a ballot by the Swatantra party which championed the free market and was backed by business and many of the former princes.

It proved to be Nehru’s ‘last hurrah’ and effectively ended his political dominance. It was also the end of the experiment with socialism, and India began the sad trajectory that has culminated in its present junior partnership in transnational capitalism.

What this jingoist war did reveal was that the imagined form of an herbivorous Orientalized humanism could not conceal the real substance of a carnivorous and hegemonic bourgeois nationalism. The Gandhian hiatus was a thin varnish which tried to cover an historic Hindu martial spirit, that had as its ideological lodestone the aggressive ardor and warlike tales of the Mahabharata.

1950 INDIAN INTERVENTION IN NEPAL

This newly emergent Indian imperial policy can be clearly seen in the response to the crisis in Nepal in 1950 which saw an alliance of Nepal Congress and King Tribhuvan against the hundred and fifty year rule of the Ranas.

The Ranas were a feudal dynasty that controlled Nepal for that historical period. Unlike their earlier homologues, the Russian Boyars, they did not face a Ivan the Terrible until Tribhuvan, and they exercised a firm grip with a succession of Kings being more or less figureheads. After they seized power with the help of the British in 1846, they remained firmly allied to the East Indian Company and post 1857 Raj in defending British interests in Nepal.

It was the Ranas who facilitated the recruitment of Gurkha mercenaries into the British Indian army, for which they received a payment per head.

During the 1930’s and 40’s, Nepal was swept up in the growing and powerful campaign for independence in India, and there were attempts to set up a Nepalese Congress Party which drew support from primarily the Hindu populations in the Kathmandu Valley and the other major urban centers and from the Terai, which borders India.

The Ranas’ response was brutal suppression – activists were hung or imprisoned, and many driven into exile; principally to India, where they received asylum and support from the Congress Party and the government it subsequently formed in 1948. Nepali Congress was therefore launched in India in 1950 under the auspices of the Congress government.

It is of some significance that at its first conference, NC repudiated non-violence as a tactic in the struggle against the Ranas and began agitating for an armed invasion from India to coincide with an internal uprising in the towns and cities.

Though they were dependent on support from India, such was the situation in Nepal that they were prepared to take a position on the application of Gandhian passivity and its obvious uselessness to the Nepalese situation. The ‘saintly’ pacifist Mohindas consistently held firm to the principle of non-violence and had little sympathy for those who advocated armed struggle.

Thus he refused to intervene to save Baghat Singh, a revolutionary Communist who advocated and engaged in armed struggle, from execution in 1931. By his silence, Gandhi colluded in his execution. Gandhi also retained a dislike for the martial pretensions of Subhas Chandra Bose. For all his vaunted humanism, he was a social reactionary who resolutely defended the caste system.

This militant stand reflected the radicalism of the new born NC. Many of its early leaders, such as GP Koirala and his brother, BP Koirala had cut their teeth in the brutal struggles to establish trade unions in the jute mills of Biratnagar, Nepal’s largest industrial concentration close by the Indian border. GP became the first Prime Minister after the 1990 Andolan and remains an influential NC leader at the present time.

NC’s militancy was in stark contrast to the Congress Party of India which had undergone a process of embourgeoisiement and a growing attachment to Hindu chauvinism. This was reflected in its subcontinental strategy as regards to Nepal and similar neighboring states, as they were all considered as being within India’s sphere of influence.

The unruly Nepalese infant party was to find its interests subordinated to this world view, and this was clearly shown in the events between 1950/2. Nehru initially encouraged and assisted in preparing NC for an armed incursion into Nepal. The current Ranas, the Shamshers, were regarded by Indian nationalists as having been British clients and, as noted earlier, had proved ruthless in persecuting the embryonic nationalist movement. Nehru stated in the Lok Sabha in 1950:

In the inner context of Nepal it is desirable to pay attention to the forces that are moving in the world – the democratic forces, the forces of freedom and to put oneself in line with them, because not to do so is not only wrong according to modern ideas but unwise according to what is happening in the world today.

By late 1950, preparations for an incursion by the Mukti Sena (Liberation Army), as the armed wing of NC styled itself, were well advanced. Though its rank and file were mainly Nepalese, stiffened by a core of recently demobbed Gurkhas, it was largely officered by ex-Indian National Army Boseites.

That this was facilitated by an Indian Congress government demonstrated the schizophrenic attitude to Bose and his forty thousand strong Indian National Army (INA) recruited from Japanese prisoners of war. When they launched an invasion of India in alliance with their Japanese allies in 1944, their cry was ‘Chalo Delhi‘ (on to Delhi), the cry of the 1857 rebels. This consciously emphasized the continuity of the ‘long revolution’.

By declaring for armed struggle against the British, Bose repudiated the Satyagraha strategy (literal translation: ‘to maintain the truth’.) This was the name given to the program of civil resistance. Gandhi used this definition because he wanted to distinguish it from Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience. That Bose allied himself with Japanese expansionism was a logical step; “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

It was the same conclusion that Irish nationalists, such as Pearse, Connolly and Casement, reached prior to 1916, in respect to Germany, and indeed a policy the rump of the IRA continued during the 1939-45 war. In respect to the struggle for Irish independence, this line of march succeeded in the years immediately following the 1916 Easter Rising and reasserted the physical force tradition over the parliamentary wing of Irish nationalism.

The charismatic Bose, however, while remaining on the margins of nationalist agitation and not able to shake the grip of the Gandhian Congress Party over the movement, nevertheless engendered, at least, posthumous respect for his patriotism and commitment. Such was his popularity with Indians in the closing years of the war that Gandhi and Nehru, albeit from different positions, were forced to oppose the British proposal to try ex-members of the INA. (Bose died in a plane crash in 1945 and so was beyond British lynch law.)

He became a hero, revered because he had frightened the British not just with the INA as a direct military threat but with the prospect that its very existence provided a mutinous pole of attraction to its own Indian Army. This reflected the nervousness evinced by the British that followed the first great War for Independence in 1857 with respect to internal security and, for example, was the reason the Raj refused to send Indian Army regiments to the Mesopotamia campaign in 1915 during the First War.

Eventually his martial spirit proved more attractive to Indians than the pacifist pieties of Mohindas. Satyagraha was replaced by Duragraha (to hold by force). The former, in the eyes of militant nationalists, demanded too much Dhairya (forbearance) in the face of the enemy. It was not surprising that Gandhi’s assassin, Godse, was a leading Hindutva militarist fanatic.

The incursion into Nepal from India succeeded in linking up with internal opposition forces, and within a month, the Ranas were destabilized. But India at this stage was concerned with stability on its border, and complete victory was snatched away from NC with India forcing a three way agreement between the Ranas, the King and NC.

The NP leader, GP Koirala’s, aim of a constitutional monarchy was dropped, and the issue of a promised constituent assembly was kicked into the long grass, Tribhuvan, his successor, Mahendra and the Indian government all reneged on it. Monarchical absolutism asserted itself, and within a few years the prisons were filled with Congress activists along with many Communists whose movement had grown since the founding of the CPN in 1949, a response to the failure of NC and its lack of radicalism.

The Party’s launch coincided with the first translation of the Communist Manifesto into Nepalese by its first leader, Pushpa Lal (also a veteran of the Biratnagar trade union struggle). The work had an immediate resonance among the radical intelligentsia, especially the sections on pre-capitalist social formations that were immediately relevant to the Nepalese situation.

In addition, there were the Manifesto’s political demands, many of which had already been achieved in developed bourgeois democracies, e.g. progressive taxation, free education and elections, which were revolutionary demands in the context of a authoritarian, feudal state.

In 1960, Tribhuvan’s successor, Mahendra, consummated this process by declaring an end to political parties and parliamentary government and instituting the Panchayaat system, a feudal talking shop convened under the King. This lasted until the first great Andolan in 1990 which relegalized the parties and reintroduced a Parliament complemented by, what was intended to be, a constitutional monarchy.

Thus for forty years, successive Indian governments did little to assist Nepalese democrats in their struggle against monarchical absolutism.

Nehru’s government had in fact used the crisis of 1950 to extract yet another unequal treaty, the first of which had been initiated by the British in 1816 with the imposition of the Sugauli Treaty, which made Nepal a captive market for industrial goods produced in India, followed by the later Nepali-India Trade Agreement of 1923 which created a ‘common market’ between the two countries.

The 1950 Peace and Friendship Treaty extended that grip and gave the Indians monopoly control over Nepal’s commercial, industrial and finance sectors. This was reviewed every ten years, and the events from 1990 onwards have seen no change in India’s economic domination; it is presently estimated that 8

They also took over from the British the process of exploiting Nepal’s huge water resources initiated by the 1920 Sherada Dam Agreement and cemented by the further exploitation of the 1954 Kosi Agreement and 1959 Gandaki Agreement.

The Indian ruling class took further advantage of the 1990 upheaval to have all the Nepalese rivers declared a ‘common resource’ for Nepal and India in a ‘Joint Communique’ between the two governments. They added a qualitative twist in 1996 with the Integrated Mahakali Development Agreement which assumed control of the entire Mahakali River for India’s power and irrigation needs.

As Bhatterai, (now number two in the leadership of UCPN(M) after Prachanda) noted:

The Mahakali Treaty, however, has adopted a more devastating form of neocolonial exploitation and oppression by talking equality in theory but in practice ensuring monopoly in the use of water and electricity to the Indian expansionists and imposing trillions of rupees of foreign debt upon Nepal. (B. R. Bhatterai, The Political Economy of the People’s War, 1998, published in The People’s War in Nepal – Left Perspectives, editors A. Karki & D Seddon, p.128)

All of these agreements have progressively dispossessed Nepal of its greatest natural resource. They have particularly affected the Terai, the southern plains contiguous to India and Nepal’s ‘grain basket,’ in order to benefit Indian industrial and agricultural interests.

From the outset India has used its geographical, political and economic position over Nepal to ensure that its hegemonic interests predominated.

When it suited, they allowed Mahendra and his successor, Birendra, to expand and consolidate power, but when the latter attempted to take an independent position specifically by ‘playing the China card’ by buying and importing arms from the People’s Republic in the late 1980’s, they responded with a refusal to renew a trade and transit treaty in 1989 and effectively launched a economic blockade on Nepal.

This, on a country that by this time could not produce enough to feed its population, was devastating, and it caused tremendous deprivation in Nepal.

This crucially weakened Birendra’s Panchaayat and provided the nexus for the 1990 Andolan. (This was as important as the People’s War from 1996 to 2006 proved in creating the conditions for the second Andolan.) The thinking in Delhi with respect to the uprising was that Nepal was now so dependent on India they could manage and control any resulting democratic change as they had always done.

Not only was the major Nepalese party, NC, completely in their pocket by this time, but there was a growing Hindu comprador capitalist class which which would automatically respond to their influence without being urged to.

In the nineties and the first years of the new century they were content to allow the fledgling democracy under NC and its principal ally, the CPN(UML) to attempt to turn Birendra into a constitutional monarch. This changed when the PW grew in influence, and there emerged a strong connection with the Indian Maoists.

The crucial event which propelled them, yet again, to back monarchical despotism was the beginning therefore of the PW in 1996. There was a hitch with the murder of Birendra and his family, allegedly by the Crown Prince, Dipendra, in 2001. He somehow managed to shoot himself in the back of the head with an assault rifle and took two days to die. Thereafter he was referred a the ‘King in a coma’.

It has since emerged that the attack was carried out by an American trained special forces unit organised through RAW (cf. the CIA murder of Ngo Dinh Diem, the Vietnamese President, in 1963; of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1960; of Panama’s Torrijos in 1968; and the numerous bungled but hilarious attempts to assassinate Castro.)

It led to the accession of Gyanendra, who after 9/11 gave the US a pledge to reinvigorate the war against the Maoists, which Birendra had shirked, provoking American fury and his subsequent assassination. Gyanendra in return received armaments and dollars from the US. The fact that he could act autonomously in giving this assurance emphasized the crucial flaw in the 1990 settlement which had left the RNA subject to unilateral, monarchical control.

After a visit by Powell in February 2002 where this understanding was cemented between the Americans and Gyanendra, the Indian government found itself in a bidding war with Uncle Sam and their faithful British ally.

It was keen to see its previous influence restored with the belief that the Anglo-Saxons would undermine their former neocolonial control ceded to American interests and particularly their desire to encircle and monitor the growing power of China. The inclusion of the secular Maobaadi as ‘terrorists’ can be seen in this light.

The Indian government had been to the fore in supplying the regime with arms and logistical support. The supply of armaments was, however, suspended after Gyanendra’s dismissal of his government and the restoration of monarchical absolutism. Indian policy from 2002 onwards represented a break from the ‘two pillar’ strategy which supported both the parliamentary forces and that of the King. At the heel of the hunt, they did not care “what color the cat was as long as it caught the mouse.”

The reasons successive Indian governments had failed to make a objective evaluation of the Maoist movement related to the threat they represented to stability in the region and particularly their threat to abrogate such Indo-Nepalese agreements as the Peace and Friendship Treaty of 1950, the 1996 Mahakali Treaty along with all similar unequal treaties.

Also of significance to them was the Maobaadi’s networking with India’s own Maoists, which had finally led to the establishment of the Coordinating Committee of Maoist Groups in South Asia in 2001, creating a formal structure to expand revolutionary armed struggle in that region. It only confirmed Indian paranoia.

India had, from 1996 onwards, identified with the monarchy and the parliamentary forces, and along with the US, UK and Belgium poured in armaments to equip the growing Royal Nepalese Army, which by 2006 was approximately 70,000 strong. India provided 25,000 Insas combat rifles, the US 20,000 M16 carbines, South Africa and Belgium 2,000 machine-guns.

Britain further provided two Islander STOL (Short Take-off Or Landing) reconnaissance aircraft, which were adapted and fitted with 50mm heavy machine guns and 200mm mortar bomb racks which, along with two Russian M17 large helicopters, were used to massacre villagers in Maoist held territory as they gathered for political meetings.

The RNA was up against the PLA of 30,000 that had grown from half a dozen Maoist urban refugees which had gone “into the jungle” in 1996 armed with a couple of rusty Lee Enfields but which had built offensive and defensive capacity by expropriating arms and munitions from the police and the RNA.

The Indian government during this period abandoned its previous pragmatic policies which sought a stable Nepal. Their backing of Gyanendra and the reactionary parliamentary forces only exacerbated the crisis. The CPN(Maoist)s’ call for the ending of all the unequal treaties was not unique; it was shared by many in Nepal. The shrinking strata of national capitalists supported this policy as they resented the expansion of Indian domination of the Nepalese economy with the attendant rise of a comprador class.

On the question of solidarity among the Maoist parties on the subcontinent, the Indian government wrongly saw them as a monolithic and undifferentiated entity, which precluded them from showing any flexibility. Instead they resolutely refused to talk to the Nepalese Maobaadi. This was despite the fact the influence of CPN(Maoist) was on the rise (by the time of Jana Andolan in 2006 they controlled nearly 8

If the Indians wanted a stability on their northern border, there was a necessity to engage with the Maoists at either a formal or informal level.

There is some evidence that CPN(M) recognised the strategic threat that India presented and were concerned that at some stage they would send in their army to forestall or overthrow any regime with pretensions to independence. They were also worried that the fall-out from 9/11 had placed them on the US list of ‘terrorists’ and were prepared to try and reduce their growing list of foreign enemies by exploiting contradictions among them and by attempting to detach India from the Anglo-Saxons.

To this end, the anti-Indian rhetoric of the Party was toned down in the few years after 2001 as they tried to establish some form of dialogue with the Indian government. They were comprehensively rebuffed.

India chose to stay aligned with the US, which regarded the Nepalese Maoists as a bloody and inflexible party; the US Embassy even raised the specter of a Khmer Rouge style takeover in Nepal. They accepted therefore Gyanendra’s argument that they should be included in the War Against Terror the US launched in 2001. What was significant in their inclusion was that the Maoists were secular and thus did not qualify for the nomenclature of Jihadist.

The Americans, with the acquiescence of the Indian government, therefore extended the original criteria to define a terrorist entity as where “…two or more people combine to threaten existing property rights.” This was a active policy which included US military ‘advisers’ training and equipping the RNA and flooding Nepal with CIA operatives.

Like the global phenomena of AIDS, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Avian flu, the Americans were everywhere in Nepal and so became hated by the Nepalese. I witnessed this first hand on both my visits to Nepal. They were so unpopular that many visiting American students used to stitch a Maple Leaf decal on their backpacks in a pathetic attempt to pass as Canadians.

Despite Indian worries regarding potential threats to subcontinental hegemony from outside powers, they looked on as the Americans and Gyanendra sabotaged the peace talks in January 2003 between the Maoists and the then Prime Minister Deuba. They even expressed anger at being marginalized by not being consulted beforehand by either of the two parties engaging in the talks exploring the possibility of peace.

The Maoists were acting in good faith, as they had long indicated a desire to ‘leave the jungle’ and enter the multi-party system.

Apart from suspending arms shipments, which by that time were surplus to the RNA’s requirement, they never seriously challenged Gyanendra’s suppression of all political parties in 2002 until 2005 when, alarmed at the growing success of the Maoists and the impact any victory would have in India, they relinquished the ‘Two Pillar’ policy in favour of the parliamentary parties.

Sotto voce they were equally perturbed at the growing US presence and influence in Nepal which threatened their traditional hegemony. At this juncture they ceased calling the Maoists ‘terrorists’ and facilitated peace talks between the seven parliamentary parties and the Maoists in India. It was obvious to them by now that Gyanendra was a busted flush.

How had a secular republic born in a bitter struggle against imperialism, within only sixty years, reached a fundamentally reactionary and chauvinist polity? This is I want to address in the next section – that and to contrast India’s weaknesses and strengths in the successful struggle against the Raj and the failure after 1947.

IRISH AND INDIAN NATIONALISM – A COMPARISON

The duplicities, antidemocratic maneuvering and aggression shown towards the Muslim League and Pakistan were underpinned by hostility to Muslim claims to self-determination wherever on the subcontinent they formed a majority.

Muslims were not granted any rights to a national identity, as they were seen as Indians under the skin (there is little racial difference) who needed to have their ‘false national consciousness’ stripped away to reveal their ‘true’ Indian identity.

It is very similar the ideological position that Irish nationalists use to deny Protestants in the six counties of Ireland a right to a national identity. Irish and Indian nationalists saw their respective Protestant and Muslim communities as settlements through conquest.

This concept of a national essence is bourgeois metaphysics; it falls into the category of historical idealism. From a materialist position, a nation is first and foremost an historically constituted stable community of people who share a common culture, language and mode of production from which arises a national consciousness. It is where an ideology becomes a material weight.

The other striking similarity between Hindu Indian and Irish nationalist assertions is the claim to hegemony over a defined geographical territory. In the case of the former, it is to the whole subcontinent, including the retaining arc of the Himalayas, and in the latter to all the island of Ireland.

In the case of the former, it arose from a determination to hold on to the territorial parameters established by the British and fortified by the ancestral Hindu belief that the ‘Land of Snows’ was in mystical counterbalance to the Gangetic Plains and Mount Olympus of the Indian gods.

For Irish nationalists, it was the myth that there had been an ‘historic Irish Nation’ prior to the arrival of the British. But the defeat of the High King of Ireland, Brian Boru, at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 by the armies of Leinster and Dublin effectively ended any maturation of the embryonic nation. Thereafter until the Anglo-Normans arrived in 1170, the island was a patchwork of petty tribal families engaged in semi-permanent warfare. It was these divisions which facilitated Strongbow’s incursion.

The failure of the Irish tribes to establish a recognized central kingship was noted four hundred years later by a Tudor agent, who reported to Henry VIII:

There be more than sixty countries inhabited by the King’s Irish enemies, where reigneth more than sixty chief captains, whereof some calleth themselves kings, some kings peers, and every one of the said captains makes war and peace for himself, and holds by sword and hath imperial jurisdiction, and obeys no other person.

That much is to the debit, and it exposes the ideological and political limitations of bourgeois nationalism, but it has to be set against the fact that whatever the negative features, the Irish and Indian struggles for independence were genuine anti-imperialist movements against their British imperial masters.

Each was an heroic and ultimately successful trailblazer for many subsequent anti-colonial struggles.

The tactics that eventually achieved the final expulsions of their respective British occupiers differed: the Irish, after the late 19th century parliamentary Home Rule campaign which collapsed in ignominy after 1916, successfully pursued a strategy of guerrilla war with the mass support of the agrarian Catholic population, while the Indian movement under Gandhi’s leadership pursued a policy of mass agitation and civil disobedience purportedly based on Ashima (non-violence).

Nevertheless, each of these national liberation struggles were bitter and bloody in strikingly similar ways. In the case of the former, for all the subsequent pacifist gloss emerging from the secular beatification of ‘Gandhiji’ about the campaign to drive out the British, we know that for every Robert Emmet, James Connolly or Kevin Barry there was a Mangal Pandey, Lala Lajpat Rai or Bhagat Singh.

The ‘Quit India’ movement organised at the height of the British empire’s life and death struggle with the Japanese Empire was no tea party. The notion that Congress achieved independence through nonviolence was a myth, fostered by the Congress Party and particularly Nehru to bolster his credentials as a principled international statesman working working for world peace and nuclear disarmament – India became a nuclear power post-Nehru.

There was genuine political and ideological support from Irish nationalists with the Indian struggle, a genuine sympathy with fellow anti-colonialists based upon the assessment that what the British first practiced in Ireland – famine, war, dispossession, exploitation, ethnic cleansing and genocide – they then visited on the rest of the World.

de Valera underlined that solidarity when he took George Washington’s words:

Patriots of Ireland , your cause is mine.

and in 1920 said that

the cause of Ireland is the cause of India, Egypt and Persia.

Fittingly he was an honored guest at the Indian independence ceremony in 1948.*

Stalin, the CPSU’s principal spokesman on the national question, noted the link between the two struggles:

Not only has bourgeois society proved incapable of solving the national problem, but its attempts to “solve it has inflated it and turned the national problem into a colonial problem and has created against itself a new front stretching from Ireland to Hindustan. (Marxism and the National Question, Tenth Congress CPSU, J.V. Stalin,1921, pp. 106/7)

In the postwar years, the two new states followed a similar domestic and foreign policy, and in this lay the seeds of their present vicissitudes. Early attempts by the Irish to develop an agrarian based economy free from dependence on British capitalism proved abortive. The endeavors of the newly elected Fianna Fial government of 1932 to pursue policies to protect and stimulate Irish agriculture and industry behind import taxes led to a tariff war with Britain.

This reflected the need of all newly independent countries, whether nationalist or Communist, to pragmatically follow the advice of the great German empirical economist, Frederick List. In opposition to the theology of Smith and his ‘hidden hand,’ he observed that newly emerging nations needed to protect their home markets and their fledgling home industries with tariffs against the predations of the existing dominant world economic powers of finance capital.

He further argued that the ‘visible hand’ of the state is necessary to stimulate and oversee the process. His prognostications led to establishment of the Zollverein, which drew the many German states and principalities into a customs union that laid the economic basis for Germany’s political unification in 1871.

Thus India and Ireland came to the conclusion that if they continued to allow unfettered access to their home market by more powerful and technologically advanced free trading imperialists, then so long would they be economically dependent, as they could not hope to compete on a level playing field.

In its own way, India initially followed List’s principles, with a socialist twist. Encouraged by the Congress leadership around Menon and Nehru, it launched a programme of nationalization and attempted to lay the basis of a planned economy with a series of five year plans.

Although they achieved a growth in GDP of

As Lenin pointed out clearly and as was later developed by Mao, there needed to be both a cultural revolution and a radical transformation of extant property relations following the political seizure of power which involved the masses in a complete revolutionary challenge to the existing order.

The newly empowered Indian Congress government failed to grasp this post-imperial axiom, and thus the caste and the feudal land systems were left untouched.

In the intense political and ideological rivalry that existed between the two newly liberated countries of Communist China and Congress India, it was, however, the former who succeeded economically and lifted their people out of absolute poverty and immiseration with a commitment to the ‘cradle to grave,’ ‘iron rice bowl’ policy and by comprehensively taking the socialist road.

It was the Chinese Communists who saw that in Stalin words that:

…the national and colonial questions are inseparable from the question of emancipation from the power of capital… (Ibid, The National Question Presented, J.V. Stalin, p. 114)

It can be argued that in the final analysis, China has integrated itself into world capitalism, but its socialist, autarkic period up to the late 1970’s enabled it to do so on its own state capitalist terms.

Compare China, even in its Maoist period, to the squalor and degradation that the majority of Indians, both in town and country, continue to live in, and only a fool or a reactionary would not conclude that India has failed by any measurable criteria.

India, under the growth and influence of a bourgeois comprador class, has integrated itself into the economic neoliberalism of the Anglo-Saxon world.

Chaudari predicted with remarkable foresight this eventuality earlier when he wrote:

Working within the emerging polity of the larger Europe, the Anglo-Saxon can be expected to lay claim to a special association with India on historical grounds. In plain words I expect either the United States singly or a combination of the United States and the British Commonwealth to re-establish and rejuvenate the foreign domination of India. (Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, N.C. Chauduri, 1951.)

Later, in 1962, he observed:

In the fulfillment of their destiny the American People will become the greatest imperial Power the world has seen, and they will repeat their history by having the blood of the Dark Indian on their head as they have that of the Red. (The Continent of Circe, N.C. Chauduri, 1965, p. 85)

THE STRUGGLE FOR INDIA & NEPAL

This revolution has now reached India and here the minerals which it stands in need of are found for the most part in the territories of the aboriginals. Very powerful forces stand behind the movement: the policies, interests, money and technical skills of nearly all Western nations: and, above all, the all-consuming Hindu avarice.

All this in combination is breaking down the isolation of the aboriginal, threatening not only his security but existence. There is a Hindu push towards the wilds, which never existed before, and very large vested interests are being created for the Hindus in the homelands of the primitives. The white ants are on the march. (Ibid, N.C Chauduri, 1965, p. 76)

Given the failure of autarkism, India has increasingly adopted neoliberal economic policies, making India safe for international capital and expanding the wealth of the Hindu ruling class. This process was cemented during the 2006 meeting with Bush by the commitment of the Indian government where India agreed to ‘liberalize’ their economy by opening it to multinational companies looking for cheap labor and expanding the extraction of India’s natural resources.

Although as can be seen in the prescient quote above, notwithstanding that it was written in terms that would now be termed as passé or non-PC, the seeds were planted a generation ago. In doing so they have heightened the contradictions within Indian society and have led to campaigns of resistance springing up in opposition to a reactionary economic strategy enforced by state terror which is accurately defined as fascist by revolutionary Communists on the subcontinent.

In this respect the much heralded ‘economic miracle’ of the past few years is only confined to 1

For the rest of the population in both town and country, living conditions have worsened considerably over this period. The majority of unfortunate rural Indians still eke out a primitive existence in Stone Age conditions. Most of these peoples live in conditions of deprivation, without regular access to decent nutrition, health care, education, clean water, etc.

The manic need of transnational imperialism to seize India’s resources to feed wasteful overconsumption in the developed Western World, as was noted earlier, has led to land wars against the indigenous Adivasis in India’s poorer regions like Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Bihar, West Bengal, Madya Pradesh and Jharkand.

To enforce these policies, gangs of rightwing vigilantes, goondas, licensed by the regional and central authorities, are conducting what at best can be described as ethnic cleansing and genocide against these tribal peoples. The process noted by Chauduri in the 1960s has considerably accelerated over the past decade.

The three major parliamentary parties, CI, BJP and the CPI(M) or Communist Party of India(Marxist), are committed to expanding this reactionary program further, which can be clearly seen in the states where one or the other of them is in power. In Chhattisgarh, for example, where the BJP hold sway, there is an attempt to fast-track this process and allow voracious extractive monopolies to plunder resources following the dispossession of the tribal ethnics at the hands of vicious paramilitary Salwa Judum (Freedom Marchers, sic).

The only serious opposition to this neoliberal capitalist strategy are principally the Maoist groups, in alliance with the affected Adivasis, who are engaging in armed struggle in many states, forming a red belt that runs down the spine of India.

They have an armed presence in over 180 of the 600 departments of the country, and they have been described by the Indian CoS as presenting the ‘greatest menace to India’s internal security.’

The Indian ruling class is agitated by the threat of Maoists exercising any sort of power and enacting a radical programme in Nepal, which they have hitherto dominated and where their ‘mini-me’ Nepalese counterpart has so slavishly followed their path into even deeper reaction.

It is true that during the struggle against the King, culminating in his defeat, India facilitated peace talks between the Maoists and NP and the UML, which led to the Maoists declaring a cease fire. The alliance that arose between the Seven Party Alliance and the Maoists worked to overthrow the monarchy.

The Delhi government, for example, released Guarev, a UCPN(M) politburo member, and its principal spokesman on foreign policy, so that he could participate in these talks. But the depth of the ongoing hostility to the Maoists is reflected in the fact that he was interned along with thousands of indigenous Maoists and tribal resisters, without charge or trial for three years, under the draconian State Security laws inherited from the British. These are the same laws under which they martyred Baghat Singh.

The motives for this temporary change lie not in India reconfiguring its policy towards Nepal but because they expected that the Maoists would not prove up to the task of operating within a multi-party democracy and would fail any substantial electoral test.

They were not alone in this assessment; internal and external observers thought the Maoists would come a poor third in any such contest. To some extent this was not entirely a complete fantasy, as in the 1994 elections an earlier incarnation of the Maoists, the UPFN (United People’s Front Nepal) failed to win a single seat in a contest where the UML emerged as the winner with 88 seats, followed closely by NC with 83 seats.

What went against their 2008 expectations was the fact that the inspiration brought about by the PW dramatically increased the electoral appeal of the Maoists among a critical mass of the population. So it was that the Maoists confounded all the pundits gathered in Kathmandu by winning 4

The key to the present crisis is the refusal to accept that the CPN(M) had a mandate for change and this is what provoked the subsequent plotting against the Prachanda led government.

The Americans played a strong role in the orchestration of the anti-Maoist campaign. The US has steadfastly refused to remove the designation of ‘terrorist’ from them, unlike Delhi which had not used the description since 2002.

The US State Department reinforced this scheming with a recently commissioned survey on the 2008 election in order to undermine the credibility of the electoral success of the UCPN(M) by alleging that it was the product of brute force and intimidation. They specifically singled out the Young Communist League for vilification and cited their defensive campaign against Indian inspired and separatist agitations in the Madesh bordering India.

Although the Party honored its word given during the peace talks with the SPA and put the 30,000 strong PLA into UN supervised cantonments, it had in reserve almost 300,000 YCL cadre for the electoral battle which for a number of reasons proved crucial to electoral ascendancy. A prominent bourgeois journal claimed that:

The YCL is just another name for Maoist guerrillas not openly carrying guns. (An Armless Army, The Nepali Times, 20/27th April, 2007)

Their relative numerical strength in a population of just over 23 million is a reflection of the appeal of the Maoists to the youth of a country where nearly 6

This US policy parallels with their policy towards Hamas in Gaza which had, at the behest of the West, called a cease-fire in 2006 and similarly entered an electoral battle.

When it proved similarly successful, it was similarly rubbished, and the goals for lifting the isolation of Hamas were moved further away. Here too, the leadership of the US was determinate and expressed the message to those it still regards as ‘terrorists’ that “however you play the game – you will lose!”

‘WAVING THE RED FLAG’ – THE CPI(M) & CPN(UML)

I have covered so far the role that India has displayed in relation to Nepal. I have also tried to outline how the NCs’ development and present objectives either coincide with or are determined by this neocolonial power. I now wish to turn to the UML, ostensibly a ‘left’ party, and show how it came to campaign in this ‘orgy of reaction’ that saw the Maoists driven from power. Although it was precipitated by right wing Army officers, the final blow against Prachanda and the UCPN(M) was the UML’s withdrawal from the coalition government and subsequent open support of Katawal’s actions.

How did this happen?

That a Communist party should sabotage a left government committed to radical policies in alliance with internal and external reaction came, initially, as a shock to many.

Notwithstanding the fact that many of members I was privileged to meet were sincere, dedicated comrades and which made the critical analysis I eventually reached all the more difficult, though I was impelled to do so by a sense of Communist commitment.

What misplaced use of dialectics by the UML leadership led them to such a clearly reactionary pass?

Was it unique, or did it mirror the drift of the CPI(M) away from revolutionary Communism and a capitulation to a pro-capitalist position?

I will argue the latter; that each party reached similar political and theoretical positions and modified, or even abandoned, socialism under the dead weight of reaction on the subcontinent and beyond. Their mentors and paymasters are drawn from those sources.

I first got involved in Nepalese politics through GEFONT/UML.

In October 2005 I went to Nepal for two reasons; the first to trek up the Khumbu to Everest Base Camp, and secondly, as a Communist, I had become interested because the People’s War had been raging there since 1996 against the unpopular American, British and Indian backed feudal monarchy and the supine, corrupt parliament.

I did not have to go far to establish contact, as UML’s trade union wing GEFONT was organised at the hotel where I stayed on arrival (which was owned by the King’s sister) and I met their shop steward – who was also its Maître’d’. Through him I visited their head office in Kathmandu on the wonderfully named Putali Sadak (Butterfly Road) and there met Chairperson Neupane and other members of the executive, among whom were Bishnu Rimal and Binda Pandey, and their research and international officer, Budhi Acharya.

I found myself more at home than in the UK, where Communists have to work within a single Laborite trade union movement, the TUC. The Nepali trade unions are organized like their French counterparts, with the main political parties each having their own union centre. The Nepali Trades Union Congress (NTUC) was, for example the trade union face of NC. GEFONT, in this respect, has the same relationship with the UML as the CGT has with the PCF, although, unlike the CGT, GEFONT’s 300,000 members are also Party members.

I was particularly impressed that pride of place, in a very busy, comprehensive and dedicated research department, was given to a shelf with Progress Publishers‘ forty two volume editions of Lenin. I could not imagine a British trade union head office being so equipped. I had a similar frisson when I visited the UML office in Pokhara and saw, proudly displayed, on the wall of the Regional Secretary’s office, posters of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

The division between the two Communist parties is not parallel with the splits in the West: there is no anti-Stalinist crawling to petit-bourgeois liberalism or any reflection of the Sino-Soviet split in their mutual opposition. Trotskyism, as in any genuine revolutionary struggle in the developing world, has no purchase or relevance. Disagreements are fundamental and are not based on what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.”

I was also struck by the wide range of activities GEFONT was engaged in; they were fighting battles against child labor, for literacy and numeracy programmes, campaigns to eliminate bonded labor (Kamaiyas), women’s rights, etc., battles which in the West we had long ago won. Alongside these endeavors, they were also occupied with the more recognizable free collective bargaining activities on behalf of diverse industrial and service groups that is part of our normal warp and weave.

In addition, health and safety is taken very seriously in a country where life is cheap, hard and short. For example: as a carpenter and ex-building worker for most of my working life, it was a shock to see masons and their laborers manhandling large blocks of dressed natural stone in flip-flops! The quality, however, of their tradesmen, including carpenters and joiners, was really outstanding, especially given the primitive conditions they work under.

The quality of GEFONT’S propaganda and research on this range of issues was excellent, detailed and exhaustive, equal if not superior to that of any UK union.

I was also informed that the following April, the population led by the SPA in the urban centre – principally in the Kathmandu Valley – together with the Maoists who were dominant in over 8

I went home, but with my appetite whetted, and I resolved to come back the following April. I continued learning the language, studying its history and writing, and wrote what in retrospect was a naïve article which the Labour & Trade Union Review was good enough to print. In this piece I drew on the spirit of unity that was evident across the political spectrum and was particularly pronounced between the two Communist parties previously and literally at war over the difference in their respective strategies of armed or electoral struggle.

I also attempted to get my union, UCATT (Union of Construction, Allied Trades & Technicians), to establish fraternal links, but as with any labor organisation it balked at association with ‘Communists.’

I finally counted at least seven serious Communist parties, CPN(M) and the UML being the biggest, as opposed to the UK where the various organisations laying claim to being Communists amount in relative terms to three men and a dog, as opposed to these Nepalese parties which could count on the support of 6

To this end, I went through dialectical contortions, arguing that the two principal parties, despite the profound differences between them over strategy, were each correct from the positions they occupied in a society where the unequal development between the urban and the rural was strongly pronounced.

Hence the UML flourished in the strong civil society of the towns and cities because they reflected the objective economic and political needs of the urban masses against the relatively advanced, though increasingly comprador, capitalist system which applied there. In any event, the Maoists proved surprisingly strong in the urban centers as the 2008 election showed. They even defeated the UML General Secretary of Nepal in the two Kathmandu seats where he stood!

The Maobaadi, advancing People’s War on the other hand, reflected those values of the rural masses in a struggle against a residual but still strong martial feudalism that had received a new lease of life from the backing of the Anglo-Saxon and Indian governments who advocated and promoted increased military repression against the ‘terrorist’ threat in the countryside.

That was then and this is now: with the alliance between the bourgeois parliamentary parties and CPN(Maoist) shattered and with the former backing the military against the political authority of the Prachanda government.

The UML support for the Katawal coup places them firmly in the camp of bourgeois reaction and counterrevolution. It provides a classic case that it is not what you call yourself but what you do that counts.

Neither is that position an aberration in respect of the UML but instead reflects a process that has been ongoing since the 1990 Andolan.

This was a turbulent period, with twelve changes of government in eleven years. The UML were enthusiastic participants in this parliamentary game and even provided a Prime Minister for nine months in 1994 with the UML General Secretary Adikhari replacing GP Koirala, the leader of an increasingly fractious NC.

This decade long charivari did much to discredit the parliamentary parties as more and more Nepalese became increasingly disenchanted with these displacement politics activated in lieu of necessary radical action. They had had high hopes that, following the success of the Andolan and the humbling of Birendra, Nepal would go through a transformation where the many problems that had gestated under the monarchy would be swept away with measures that, for the first time in Nepalese history, would favour the masses.

They expected programs to tackle poverty (Nepal is the 17th poorest country in the World), to deal with illiteracy, child labor and the caste system, to enact justice and equity for the Janjatis; of these, ending feudalism (especially on the question of land ownership) being the most prominent. It was also hoped this new democracy would expand and modernize Nepal’s lamentably underdeveloped infrastructure.

That these problems were not dealt with was not, however, solely due to the narcissistic political squabbling during these wasted years.

Another crucial factor limiting any room for a radical program was that from the launch of the ‘new democracy’ in 1990, GP Koirala’s NC government continued and expanded Birendra’s initiative in 1985, admitting the IMF and the World Bank as arbiters of Nepal’s economic and social destiny. These multilateral bodies are the economic arm of American imperialism and enforce neoliberal capitalist nostrums through the comprador class in whatever particular country they have either a foothold or full control.

The mechanism used is the euphemistically named the ‘Structural Adjustment Program,’ (I have retained the American spelling) which implements privatization and price-dictated market policies.

What semblance there was in Nepal of a mixed economy was dismantled; a process overseen by economic hit men dispatched there as IMF/WB enforcers. Thus subsidies on fertilizer, essential goods and services were abolished, and the few enterprises that were state controlled were privatized.

This meant that prices on such items as petroleum doubled overnight, causing tremendous hardship for the majority of the Nepalese people who were reliant on that commodity for domestic use and transportation. Privatization in its turn led to redundancies, closures, asset stripping and the slashing of wages and conditions for the employees kept on by their new masters.

This latter was carried out for purely ideological reasons even if the enterprise was a thriving, going concern. They were sold off at four or five times less than their extant value in the face of any commercial logic. It was similar to the legalized theft that was initiated during the corrupt, philistine Thatcherite period in the UK, although no scraps were thrown to the Nepalese masses as a bribe as happened there. All the plunder went either to Nepalese compradors or Indian capitalists.

The SAP also terminated the licensing system which had assisted those enterprises which were export-led and left them at the mercy of more powerful and developed external economic interests which have successfully penetrated the Nepalese market.

Also drastically affected were state expenditures in health and education. Even the minimum welfare provisions that did exist were reduced, and tariffs that protected Nepalese industries, particularly small scale manufactures, were ended.

These policies were enacted during the high water mark of triumphalist free market capitalism, and they were no different to those forced upon the countries of the former Soviet Bloc or indeed anywhere else the tentacles of this global octopus envelops. A similar breed of carpetbaggers to those that swept over Eastern Europe after 1989 poured into Nepal, with Indian capitalists to the fore.

In Nepal, as elsewhere, these destructive ‘Year Zero’ economics caused tremendous hardships for the respective peoples who fell under their aegis.

THE UML AND THE STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROGRAM

As has been noted, the NC government that took power in 1990 was an enthusiastic participant in the SAP, demonstrating the growing influence of a comprador bourgeois in its ranks. Politically and ideologically, it demonstrated that NC had become the Nepalese wing of CI.

How then did the newly formed UML respond to the SAP and its harsh effects on the mass of population? How did it respond to the phenomenon of globalized capital out of which the SAP stratagem emerged?

How did it address the fact that the dominance of international capital intensified the socioeconomic disparities between the developed and the developing world?

The answers to those questions reveal the crucial dilemma that lies at the heart of its political theory and practice and show how it occupies the same terrain already inhabited by its Indian homologue, the CPI(M). It also demonstrates the gulf between it and the CPN(M).

In regard to the first question, they did not fail to note the deleterious impact on the living and working standards of the Nepalese masses.

A prominent UML commentator summed up the results:

…the State after 1990 haphazardly followed neoliberal economic policy which did not actually suit Nepal’s constitutional vision and socio-economic reality. This produced a systematic race to the bottom dynamics, poverty, inequality, social alienation and political protest.

Analyzing the mistake of policy makers, a social scientist says – “The post 1991 governments, however, deviated from the welfare state and sought to create a subsidiary state where poorer people subsidized the rich and the powerful. It was actually the outcome of heavily increased pressure of Globalization in our national scenario.” (Challenging Globalization, World of Work, B. Rimal, 2005 p.214)

Given this recognition, what policies did the UML advance to oppose the negative effects of IMF/World Bank diktats on Nepal?

In this respect, I will concentrate on one major policy advanced in response to the demand of the IMF under the SAP for privatization of sixteen publicly owned enterprises, as it is indicative of the UML’s general politico/economic strategy. I will quote below from GEFONT policy statements, given that its policies are interchangeable with those of the UML.

In the first place, it acknowledges the role of transnational capital’s liberalization of the Nepalese economy but gives some role to the pressure from the indigenous capitalist class:

The business class, basically the big house bosses has high influence on the state power now. This kind of influence, although it was limited before 1990, highly expanded after the restoration of multiparty democracy. With a high volt emphasis on privatization after 1991, lobbying of big houses has increased manifold. (Study & Research, 2004, Section 14)

The principle driving this demand is that:

Instead of taking a long and arduous route for a new company, eases the prospective investors into a ready-made business enterprise. (Ibid, Section 4)

It also complains that:

With the blind and haphazard privatization of public enterprises, both production and employment have been adversely affected. (World of Work, 2005, p. 215)

However, this did not mean that there was a root and branch opposition to this reactionary program and its clear deleterious effects on Nepal’s people; instead, it promoted a policy of attempting to minimize those effects and making the process more efficient. The slogan therefore was:

Selective liberalization – selective privatization. (Ibid, p.47)

In other words; rather than the ‘blind and haphazard’ approach, it wanted one targeted on enterprises that needed ‘restructuring’ so they could compete better in the world market. So, for example, loss making, unproductive and technologically backward jute mills were among those where privatization was supported. It was even suggested that the Hetaunda cotton mill be added to the list; despite the fact that it had an adequate capital structure and modern machinery, it was ‘operationally inefficient’.

There was a complaint against privatization where enterprises were profit making and also when new private owners did not deliver the promised benefits or even where they were closed down; as in the case of an agricultural tool factory. They also complained where blatant asset stripping was evident, as in the case of the Bansbari Leather and Shoe Factory.

Generally they were concerned that the program, whether it showed successes or failures, had no provisions for either retraining or redeployment for the increased unemployment it created.

The most significant privatization that was supported was that of Nepal’s existing water utilities. The reasons given were that it was severely undercapitalized and operating with antiquated technology. It also had meager coverage of the country with 7

My GEFONT/UML comrades were extremely defensive and noted that it only contributed 1

Later, in a spirit of ’emotion recollected in tranquility,’ it became clear that while it was an extant severely underdeveloped utility, it was perhaps Nepal’s greatest natural resource, with a truly massive developmental potential. Vide my earlier section on India’s long established recognition and exploitation of this resource through successive unequal treaties.

Furthermore, I noted that its commodification gave it an exchange value that overrode its use value as a basic necessity for all life, human or otherwise. It had instantly become a source of profit that devalued its crucial importance for day to day existence.

In the final analysis, however, the overarching criticism of privatization was that it was ideologically driven and not based on any economic rationality. The main reason that the entire program of liberalization was failing, GEFONT/UML argued, was because there was a failure to give an adequate role to the state.

It was argued that where SAP’s had been extremely successful, government intervention had played a dominant role, as in South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, where these programs had produced ‘high growth with equity’. (Ibid, p.47)

But these were singular exceptions in long established social and economic formations which were contrary to the anti-statist presupposition behind the neoliberal phenomenon which originated in the US and the UK during the Reagan/Thatcher years and was thereafter imposed on the rest of the world through the IMF, WB and WTO.

The state was, therefore, not a mechanism for solving social and economic problems; it was, as Reagan asserted, the problem. So the governments of developing countries were there to serve principally as facilitators of international finance capital.

This even applied within the imperial heartlands, as was noted by the Washington insider, Robert Reich, in his book, Supercapitalism :

Democracy and capitalism have been turned upside down.

In short, the political institutions of bourgeois society no longer regulate capitalism, but instead market forces regulate the political institutions. It is they who say what is and is not possible.

This naivete regarding prospects for the utilitarian state in the face of the dominance of monopoly capitalism ran through the UML like the print in a stick of rock. It informed their desire for tripartism, for industrial democracy, a mixed economy, Keynesian deficit spending and for an expanded welfare state when these have become anathema to the major world capitalist powers.

What they wanted was the type of social democratic settlement that had marked the postwar years in Europe until the 1970s, not realizing that this was a tactical contingency that Western capitalism had conceded to its labor movements and working classes not because it was some inevitable evolution of a humane economic consensus but simply to make the system more attractive to the peoples of the ‘Free World’ in the face of competition from a planned, ‘cradle to grave,’ full employed, socialist Eastern bloc.

America, while supporting this social democratic settlement among its European allies through, e.g., the Marshall Plan, was able to avoid these stratagems because its labor movement was comparatively weak, and its working class consciousness was underdeveloped and fragmented.

Therefore, despite the fact that the immiseration of the 1930’s was as pronounced in the US as it was in Europe, there was no equivalent pressure there to follow a similar course. This, plus the fact that the rapid expansion of its consumer culture began shortly after it switched to a fully employed wartime economy, as opposed to Western Europe where conspicuous consumption started fitfully and differentially, began a good fifteen or twenty years after the war.

What social change did come to the US as a implicit result of the existence of a USSR Soviet Bloc was in the granting of civil rights as demanded by a powerful national lobby, led by the NAACP, to the descendants of its black slaves. Similarly, the struggle against Apartheid only succeeded because of the direct support of the USSR.

With the gradual erosion of socialism following the de-Stalinization initiated by Khrushchev in 1956, free market capitalism began a process of reassertion. It was spurred on by the fact that the Keynesian solution to the problems of underconsumption and unemployment, which had distinguished capitalism before the postwar social democratic consensus, was coming to the end of its useful life as it had led to the rapid increase in the rate of inflation, creating social and economic instability.

Monetarism became one of the main free marketeers’ instruments for addressing this problem – a brutal policy of restricting the money supply would increase its value, not just by making it scarcer as a commodity in itself but by reducing government expenditures, specifically on welfare provisions. It also decreased overall consumption, although Thatcher’s regime added the additional measure of rolling back the hitherto strong British trade union movement that had flourished during the war and after.

It was, however, the suicide of the USSR in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Bloc that finally saw the end of this historically contingent postwar settlement. Capital now saw no need to keep its working classes mollified through the mechanisms of full employment and welfare statism. Social democracy proved to be a comparatively short hiatus in the history of capitalism and was replaced by the predatory neoliberal model which finds crude, brutal expression in contemporary world capitalism.

In the developing world, which had been drawn into the world market and where a growing proletariat is increasingly becoming the source of increased absolute value to expansionist transnational monopolies, the neoliberal model’s dominance could be maintained through either the neocolonial stratagems of creating and supporting comprador bourgeoisies in these super-exploited countries or by using the model’s superior military might either directly or indirectly by Western invasion or arming it’s comprador stooges to crush any progressive resistance to the hegemony of Western imperialism, or where necessary, an admixture of these modalities.

Iraq is an example of the former, Nepal of the latter.

The UML, like its sister party, the CPI(M), has not understood, therefore, that the social democratic dog has barked but the caravan of finance capital has moved on.

There is a similar naivete in the UML’s self-image on offering a middle way between the Scylla of capitalist imperialism and the Charbydis of Communist revolution. In this sense, its propaganda is replete with condemning the excesses of these oppositional forces, e.g.:

Today’s Nepal is in the quagmire of extreme Leftist and Rightist ideologies and, as such, (is) caught in the crossfire of violence and counter violence (of) these extremist ideologies. (Ibid , p.iii)

And again:

The “People’s War” launched by the CPN(Maoists), the Communist faction heavily marred with ultra Leftist thinking and terrorist activities, has been a serious concern of Nepali politics. The state is still under the control of reactionary and anti-worker forces. And the movement for the democratization of Nepali society still continues. (One Union, 2005, p.2)

The UML too thought that it could beat the Maoists electorally following the 2006 ceasefire and the subsequent April Andolan. In fact, it was humiliated and lost a third of its electoral support.

The UML has also promoted extreme military measures against the Maobaadi both before and after it became a member of Koirala’s NC government when it launched in the 1998 ‘Killer Sierra Two’ operation; a brutal army crackdown under the guidance of American and Israeli military advisers against the Maoists and their supporters over a more extended geographical area than Operation Romeo in 1996.

Throughout the period of the PW, it backed any repressive legislation against the Communist revolutionaries. Though still steeped in the idea of Communist opposition, the leadership was determined to play the role of a respectable parliamentary opposition, and the glaring contradiction gave it problems with its rank and file. It maintained this posture despite a drain of cadre who take their Leninism seriously which continues to this day. It has also led to a fierce debate withing the leadership.

The leadership’s re-branding has been described as an attempt to become a Eurocommunist style party and to move away from Leninist insurrectionist vanguardism. Gramsci, a great original Marxist thinker, became widely read among leading cadre. I was asked to send an English edition of Prison Notebooks to a Central Committee member, as it was difficult to obtain anywhere on the subcontinent. I was only too pleased to do so, and it made me realise how much we in the West take easy access to such theoretical works for granted.

The UML was attempting to give intellectual ballast within a Marxist spectrum as a means of justifying its embrace of reactionary politics. As was noted earlier, unequal development between the urban centers, particularly the Kathmandu Valley, and the countryside, particularly in the West where the Maoists flourished, was pronounced.

It meant that a strong civil society existed in the former, and therefore using a Gramscian conceptual framework was no mere fanciful affectation but could be accurately used as a tool of descriptive critical analysis.

The Maoists implicitly recognised how developed this urban civil society was. It was one of the reasons they modified Mao’s original PPW strategy in the context of Chinese conditions of “letting the countryside encircle the city,” realizing that any attempt to take urban areas by force would lead to a Pyrrhic victory at best and therefore a political defeat. The UML’s problem was the political line that was grafted onto this matrix that left it open to a charge of opportunism.

Whatever the new strategy, it steadily lost electoral support from the highpoint of 1994 when it emerged as the largest party with 3

The most crucial problem the UML faces is not its participation in parliamentary politics but its attempt to find a middle ground between two irreconcilable forces. In the developing world, the contradiction exists in its most antagonist form as the privileges of the Western World depend upon the increasing deprivation of the populations of the former.

War, famine, hunger, dispossession and superexploitation is the lot of the majority of the peoples in this Third World. The stark choice facing the twenty-first century is, to paraphrase Luxembourg, “Socialism or capitalist barbarism,” or as Arundhati Roy, the writer and activist, put it in relation to India, “either justice or civil war.”

There is no halfway house, and attempting to inhabit one will not only fail but implicitly gives support to a reactionary status quo.

It has also led increasingly to the UML, like the CPI(M), giving explicit support to, if not actually initiating, retrograde policies and stratagems. The Maoists have gone as far as claiming that the UML is in thrall to US and Indian interests, and that is borne out with its participation in the coup that provoked the resignation of Prachanda and the withdrawal of the then CPN(M) from government. It openly backed the CoS, Katawal, with one of its rewards being the installing of UML leader as Prime Minister.

What is also illustrative of the UML’s subservience to Indian interests is the failure to ever criticize the policies of successive Delhi governments. I have previously detailed, for example, how Indian administrations have used their economic and geographic dominance to force a series of unequal treaties on Nepal, following the example of their previous British masters. The Maoists have consistently called for their repeal, and this is a popular Nepalese demand.

Yet the UML is silent on the issue for the most part. In one instance referred to earlier, they were actually the government that facilitated and signed the 1996 Mahakali River Treaty (Mahakali River Integrated Development Treaty). This marked a new low, even by the standards of previous treaties, in giving India full control of the river in return for next to nothing. When it was ratified by the Parliament, it outraged many Nepalese who concluded all the parliamentary parties involved were Indian stooges, and rumors even circulated that the UML lead negotiators had taken money under the table.

Another measure which brought UML further opprobrium, especially from the Janjatis, was the decision to broadcast news in Sanskrit, which is spoken by no one in Nepal. This further fueled the resentment among those tribal groups already aggravated by the imposition of Nepali as the national language and the introduction of compulsory Sanskrit in schools which were controversial features of the 1990 Constitution.

Nepali, like Hindi, is a member of the Indo-Aryan group of languages which have their roots in Sanskrit (similar to the role that Latin played in Europe in relation to the evolution of the romance languages). Nepal is a multiethnic, multilingual society with over sixty ethnic groups, each with its own language, customs and religions.

For over two hundred years, these groups were excluded from political and economic power by dominant Brahmin castes who established Hindu dominance and sought to impose cultural and linguistic homogeneity upon all the peoples of Nepal.

In the Panchaayat era of Mahendra and Birendra, the slogan “One people – one language – one religion,” only intensified the resentment of the Janjatis against the phenomenon of Hindu domination. Unlike their Indian counterparts, the Adivasis, they form a sizable part of the population, and they supported the first Andolan by way of challenging Hindu hegemonic chauvinism. They felt betrayed however by the policies of the new democratic parliament which actually took steps to consolidate Hindu power.

This was especially true of the first NC government who dominated the shape of the new constitution and was controlled by the upper Hindu castes. What was surprising was the notionally progressive UML continued and even intensified the entrenchment of Hindu cultural and political control when they took over the reins of government from NC in 1994. The issue of the Sanskrit radio news emphasized this reactionary policy.

Consequently, many Janjatis flocked to the Maoist banner after the PW was launched in 1996 as the Maoists offered to reverse the domination of the minority Hindus in favour not only of the tribals but of the Dalits and the Terai Madeshi. The campaign against Sanskritism and the demand for cultural, political and economic freedom was an important part of the CPN(M) program.

It served to underline the fact that the UML, despite its residual Leftist rhetoric, was firmly set on a path of reaction first trodden by the CPI(M). How far this has taken the latter is shown by the recent events in West Bengal where a ‘Left Front’ government has been in power for over thirty years and now openly represents monopoly capitalist interests. It has gone, in the words of one local critic, “from Marxism to marketeering.”

This has been dramatically shown by its attempts to ethnically cleanse Adivasis from a 40 km square area around Nandigram, designated by the government as a Special Development Zone (SEZ), so that Salim, an Indonesian based multinational, can establish a huge chemical complex there.

Local resistance has been so fierce that the government dispatched 4,000 armed police, cadre and goondas to crush it. The violence and terror of this campaign led, in one notorious instance, to a massacre of 14 unarmed demonstrators. Consequently, leading CPI(M) cadre have been targeted and assassinated by Maoist guerrillas, acting as the armed wing of the CPI(Maoist).

It was mentioned earlier that this is prompted by the central government as part of the accommodation to a neoliberal strategy and is replicated in the individual states selected by whatever party is in power. The Left Front regime’s ruthless behaviour is in this sense no different from that of the BJP in Chhattisgarh, even to the extent of sending in CPI(M) cadre leading gangs of armed goondas against the Adivasi resisters.

That the UML is capable of such reactionary extremities is not in doubt; in its brief period of government, it proved that, far from establishing a progressive hiatus, it was indistinguishable from its NC predecessor, not only continuing its reactionary policies but formulating new ones of its own.

CONCLUSION

Like the NC, the UML has become a creature of Indian interests, and while each has developed by a different political route, they have arrived at the same destination. As they each largely draw support and membership from the Hindu segment of the population, they are culturally and linguistically homogeneous to India. Consequently they each find no great difficulty in pragmatically deferring to India’s economic and strategic power.

Like the Maoists, they recognize that, for example, Nepal is not self sufficient and is dependent on Indian imports to feed its population. Unlike the Maoists, however, this serves to bolster their pragmatism in the face of that power. Generally, again unlike the Maoists, they have no fear of Indian expansionism and would not even recognize the term. They rather see the growth of India’s influence as a natural reflection of its overall dominance in all the important spheres alluded to above, including its geographical position in relation to landlocked Nepal.

They are each willing agents, even if unconsciously, of the ‘Sikkimisation’ of Nepal. Sikkim voted in 1948 to stay out of India but gradually succumbed to Indian influence, a process stimulated by failure to produce an efficient government under its monarchy and which culminated in the 1975 occupation by the Indian Army and the subsequent referendum which a majority of the Sikkimese voted to ditch their King and become the 22nd state of the Indian republic.

They are each what could be termed ‘Indo-pendent’ parties, and thus, along with the reactionary pro-Indian officer class of the Nepalese Army, they found no difficulty in collaborating and scheming with primarily the Indian government but also with those of the US and UK in a campaign of sabotage against the Prachanda-led administration which culminated in the military coup recounted at the beginning of this article.

The weight of India’s actual and potential leverage on Nepal has also been implicitly recognised by the UCPN(M) and is one of the principal reasons behind its decision to move from the strategy of protracted People’s War and to the arena of multiparty democracy. It is, like freedom, a recognition of necessity; the realization that India could strangle any Nepalese revolutionary government at best or crush it by military intervention at worst.

It the understanding that there is no Socialist Bloc that can aid and support it, as was evident in the case of the Chinese Revolution, which could rely on the solidarity of the USSR to pursue its People’s War against a comprador Bonapartist Kuomintang clique and which led to victory in 1949.

Prachanda, in a recent meeting in London, said, in this respect:

The UCPN(M) cannot copy either the Bolshevik insurrectionist 1917 seizure of power in Russia or that of the CPC’s victory in China in 1949 but has to ‘develop’ its own strategy based on a concrete analysis of existing Nepalese conditions.

The looming and threatening power of Indian reaction is one of those conditions. The UCPN(M) has upset dogmatic Western Maoists by this adaptation to the existing reality and has developed a strategy to recognize the particularity of Nepal in the 21st century.

The acceptance of multi-party democracy by the UCPN(M) is such a ‘development’ and is not an opportunist stratagem to achieve power but is a long-standing principled policy to establish a ‘new democratic state’ in place of the present bureaucratic/comprador structure. It does not contemplate, therefore, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat following a Protracted People’s War, Prachanda in a speech in 2002 articulated this position:

…we want to clarify once again we are committed to guarantee party freedom in the new state power to be constructed after the destruction of feudal autocracy. The state envisaged by us will not be a one-party dictatorship. The freedom to operate political parties according to one’s ideological convictions and contest elections will be guaranteed.

There only the activities of such elements upholding feudalism and inviting foreign domination will be curbed. We are committed to establish and develop a people’s democratic system of the twenty-first century. Such a democratic system won’t be a mechanical imitation of the traditional kind but will be guided by the people’s needs of the twenty-first century.

In this light the commitment to draw the previously oppressed and excluded classes and castes within Nepalese into this process is a part of extending and deepening this ‘new democracy.’

It also accepted that this stage of political transition will be dominated, in the words of Bhatterai in a 2008 interview, by a “capitalist revolution”who further gave the assurance that, “We will not nationalize large scale industry and we will respect free enterprise.” That this is not in contradiction with orthodox Marxist-Leninism, as he further said:

Marx, Engels and Lenin have already addressed this question. Between feudalism and socialism there is capitalism. But we have not yet had a capitalist stage in Nepal. It is therefore necessary to develop one.

The desire of the UCPN(M) was:

To go beyond Mao. We need to elaborate our own model. Marxism is not a religion, it is a science. We want to develop Marxism. (Le Monde, 11/04/2008, Author’s translation)

This capitalism will not be a comprador but a national one. It is a distinction that Mao himself made:

In the period of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the people’s republic will not expropriate private property other than imperialist and feudal private property, and so far from confiscating the national bourgeoisie’s industrial and commercial enterprises, it will encourage their development. We shall protect every national capitalist who does not support the imperialists or the Chinese traitors. In the stage of democratic revolution there are limits to the struggle between labour and capital.

The labour laws of the people’s republic will protect the interests of the workers but will not prevent the national bourgeoisie from making profits or developing their industrial and commercial enterprises, because such development is bad for imperialism and good for the Chinese people. (On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism , Mao Tse-Tung, 1935, pp. 168/9 Selected Works, Vol.1)

Following a recent Central Committee meeting which produced unity after a party sanctioned ‘two line struggle’ regarding this position, a member of the UCPN(M) politburo wrote:

And those who were in favour of restructuring the state explained that they too were engaged in a struggle, but it was a different type of struggle which may look Rightist and reformist in form but that in essence it was neither Rightist or reformist. This is because all these steps are being taken not to consolidate the old feudal and comprador/bureaucratic set-up but to achieve a new restructured state. (Thesis, Antithesis & Synthesis, Hsila Yami, Kantipur Times, August 2009)

This is a classic exposition of the “negation of the negation.” It demonstrates the subtlety and sophistication of the Nepalese party cleaving closely to Mao’s analytical methodology. It has been criticized by the Communist Party of India(Maoist) as Rightist deviation from the strategy of PPW which intends to culminate in the smashing of the existing state. They are rightly engaged in armed resistance the length and breadth of India against the forces of a social-fascist comprador state.

But they will find it even harder than in Nepal for the “countryside to encircle the city”, as civil society is even more entrenched in Indian urban centers than in Nepal.

It is certainly a qualitatively different application from the religio-dogmatic, karaoke forms that pass for Maoism among some Western anoraks.

Finally, there is no inevitability that the strategy of the UCPN(M) will be successful, any more than there is about the victory of the worldwide proletarian revolution, but it is certainly better equipped, intellectually and politically, to handle the twists and turns that are distinctly manifest and unique in Nepal as they are indeed in all revolutions.

*My grandfather,Gabriel Byrne, was typical in this respect; he was a volunteer with the 6th Battalion of the Irish Republican Army during the 1918-21 War of Independence. He took the Republican side in the civil war that followed and for a while was de Valera’s driver. He was interned for a time in the Curragh and remained a ‘Dev’ man until his death in 1969.

He came from the Dun Laoghaire working class and started life as a railwayman at the station there, from which many Volunteer operations were launched including a famous ambush on the Marine Parade, two hundred yards from Dun Laoghaire station, where several Black and Tans died in a bomb attack on their Crossley Tender. In peacetime, through hard work combined with a shrewd business sense he became a newsagent in Monkstown next door.

He never lost his republican radicalism or his antipathy to British imperialism. When I was twelve, he thrust E.M. Forster’s Passage to India into my hands and said: “If you want to know what the British were like in India – read this!”

**I was not surprised by the results, as during April 2006, I went on a solo trek around the villages off the Annapurna Trail, a region that was supposed to be one of the few rural areas left under the control of the God-King’s army. Equipped with some Nepalese language, I found ubiquitous evidence of Maoist activity and propaganda and that they had almost total support from the people thereabouts.

One of the few exceptions was an ex-Ghurka shopkeeper who by coincidence had been quartered at barracks in Aldershot where I had worked as a carpenter during the late sixties. The CPN(M) opposes the recruitment of Ghurka mercenaries into either the British or Indian armies.

If I gave the Maoist greeting, Lal Salam (Red Salute), to peoples in fields or villages, it was readily returned, and I made many friends. The commitment was genuine and heartfelt and shaped by years of oppression from a state which was only visible in a repressive military form. The PLA was stood down in that area as part of the CPA.

If you Google: “Peter Tobin – Bishnu Rimal,” you will find an interview I conducted with the latter (a UML Central Committee member) a few days after the victory of the Andolan which will confirm that I guessed right on the depth of Maoist support.

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bhattarai, B. Monarchy versus Democracy.

Chauduri, N.C. The Continent of Circe.

Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of History.

Karki, A & Seddon, D. The People’s War in Nepal – Left Perspectives.

Mao Tse Tung. On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism, Selected Works, Vol. 1.

Marx, K. The Future Results of British Rule in India, Selected Works, Vol.1.

Maxwell, N. India’s China War.

Misra, A. War of Civilizations – The Long Revolution (India AD 1857).

Muni, S.D. Maoist Insurgency in Nepal.

Rimal, B. Challenging Globalization.

Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National Question.

Thapa, D. A Kingdom Under Siege.

Yami, H. Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis.

PERIODICALS & JOURNALS

Himal – Southasian

Kantipur Times

Le Monde

Nepal Telegraph

Nepali Times

The Worker, Journal of the UCPN(M)

UML/GEFONT PUBLICATIONS

One Union

Study & Research

Trade Union Rights

World of Work

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Kumar Sarkhar for his explanation of the term Bhadralok, and also for drawing my attention that any description of Indian civil society that does not represent its multiethnic, multilingual and multifaceted political culture and therefore exaggerates Hindu hegemony will be unbalanced. While I do not therefore resign myself from the ‘Two Nations’ theory in respect of Ireland, I do need to study the Indian experience further – after all comparisons might be odious.

He has also provided me with details of the position of the CPI(M) with regard to partition and their discussions with Stalin and Zhdanov representing the CPSU. This has pointed to a gap in the article relating to early history and development of the Indian CP.

I would like to thank Tongogara Tewodros for drawing my attention to Hegel’s views on slavery.

I would also like to thank Sudeshna Sarkar for correcting a Tourette’s grammatical tic I had developed by correcting my spelling of Hindu names, and by pointing out that KP Bhatterai was the first PM following the 1990 Andolan, and not GP Koirala. Her article on a sacred Hindu relic was helpful because it detailed the section of the Mahabharata where the Pandavas brothers flee to the Himalayas racked with guilt at the enormity of their victory over the Kuaravas brothers following the mythic battle of Kurukshetra.

This episode both bears out and challenges the notion of a historical martial Hindu spirit (which is proposed by Chauduri and which this article tries to confirm with the history since Independence); it confirms it in the battle, which although one among many, is pivotal, it modifies it with the anguished withdrawal of the victors. This rejection of the world finds its echoes throughout Hindu literature and history where powerful figures step down, practice virtue and find spiritual solace.

It was not particularly confined to Hindu myth – we have the historical figure of Siddhartha Gautama who relinquished his princely status in order to ‘become one with himself and the universe’ and become Buddha in the process.

Finally, I would like to thank her generally for a vigorous exchange on issues raised in the article.

Peter Tobin September 2009

"Race, Sex, and Other Dirty Things, Part 2," by Alpha Unit

New Alpha Unit. In this post, she clarifies some misconceptions in her earlier post, Race, Sex and Other Dirty Things. I understand her POV, but I wonder if there are cases where it is not true. But her POV does make a lot of sense. I hadn’t quite characterized it that way completely in my mind before. Part of the problem is that not all racism is based on notions of race purity, so her characterization makes sense more in a modern Western spirit of racism than in that of other cultures and eras. The racial purity thing seems actually to have been a relatively late and often Western innovation. Earlier tribes, I suspect, did not care much about race purity. But tribal males have always cared about protecting access to their own females while willfully attempting to raid the females of other tribes. The points about slavery are well-taken. Race is not nearly as significant as people would have you believe. This seems obvious to many people who would say, “We all know that by now. The Human Genome Project told us that.” Well, I’m saying that Race is an obfuscation. A fog. A smokescreen. A distraction. Some of the things that one race of people does to another race of people are not rooted in Race. The most obvious example is slavery. Most people understand that slavery is something human beings have been doing to one another for millenia. Every race has practiced it. Every race has been victimized by it. So slavery isn’t coming from Race. It is coming from something else. There is nothing about being Black that inclines people toward enslaving others. There is nothing about being White that inclines people toward enslaving others. Enslaving others is a human predilection. People love exercising power and control over other people. Something that upsets many people is what Robert wrote about in his post The Fake White Slavemaster Black Slave Rape Epidemic. The subject is the sexual abuse of female slaves in the South, and also sexual relationships between White men and Black women in the postbellum South. This is a touchy subject for Black women in particular. But as I pointed out, males have engaged in this sort of behavior throughout history. It crosses racial and ethnic lines. Race complicates the picture a great deal, but this kind of behavior isn’t coming from Race. It’s coming from male sexuality. And human nature. This doesn’t make it any less upsetting. But those guys didn’t act that way because they were White. They acted that way because they were guys. People wonder what I mean when I say that racism at its core is about sex. Racism isn’t all about sex, but I think sex is its nucleus. I’m not the first person who’s made that suggestion, by the way. The reason sex lies at the heart of racism is that sex is the way a race propagates itself. If racial purity is your objective, then you have to exercise some degree of control over who people in your race are having sex with. Whites in the United States have written along these lines for a very long time. Not all of them have been virulent racists. One Southern White author from long ago candidly stated that it didn’t matter, even, if there were White men who had a preference, sexually, for Black women. What mattered was the preservation of the White race itself, which was reason enough to avoid such relationships. Anyone who disputes that male sexual anxiety lies at the heart of racism simply is unfamiliar with what racists themselves have said on the subject. I say that it is primarily male anxiety because other males are the competition when it comes to having and controlling access to women. So this is what I’m talking about when I say that racism is mainly about sex. And this is what I mean when I say that race can obscure what’s really going on in some situations.

“Race, Sex, and Other Dirty Things, Part 2,” by Alpha Unit

New Alpha Unit. In this post, she clarifies some misconceptions in her earlier post, Race, Sex and Other Dirty Things. I understand her POV, but I wonder if there are cases where it is not true. But her POV does make a lot of sense. I hadn’t quite characterized it that way completely in my mind before.

Part of the problem is that not all racism is based on notions of race purity, so her characterization makes sense more in a modern Western spirit of racism than in that of other cultures and eras. The racial purity thing seems actually to have been a relatively late and often Western innovation. Earlier tribes, I suspect, did not care much about race purity. But tribal males have always cared about protecting access to their own females while willfully attempting to raid the females of other tribes. The points about slavery are well-taken.

Race is not nearly as significant as people would have you believe.

This seems obvious to many people who would say, “We all know that by now. The Human Genome Project told us that.”

Well, I’m saying that Race is an obfuscation. A fog. A smokescreen. A distraction.

Some of the things that one race of people does to another race of people are not rooted in Race. The most obvious example is slavery. Most people understand that slavery is something human beings have been doing to one another for millenia. Every race has practiced it. Every race has been victimized by it. So slavery isn’t coming from Race. It is coming from something else.

There is nothing about being Black that inclines people toward enslaving others. There is nothing about being White that inclines people toward enslaving others. Enslaving others is a human predilection. People love exercising power and control over other people.

Something that upsets many people is what Robert wrote about in his post The Fake White Slavemaster Black Slave Rape Epidemic. The subject is the sexual abuse of female slaves in the South, and also sexual relationships between White men and Black women in the postbellum South. This is a touchy subject for Black women in particular.

But as I pointed out, males have engaged in this sort of behavior throughout history. It crosses racial and ethnic lines. Race complicates the picture a great deal, but this kind of behavior isn’t coming from Race. It’s coming from male sexuality. And human nature. This doesn’t make it any less upsetting. But those guys didn’t act that way because they were White. They acted that way because they were guys.

People wonder what I mean when I say that racism at its core is about sex. Racism isn’t all about sex, but I think sex is its nucleus. I’m not the first person who’s made that suggestion, by the way. The reason sex lies at the heart of racism is that sex is the way a race propagates itself. If racial purity is your objective, then you have to exercise some degree of control over who people in your race are having sex with.

Whites in the United States have written along these lines for a very long time. Not all of them have been virulent racists. One Southern White author from long ago candidly stated that it didn’t matter, even, if there were White men who had a preference, sexually, for Black women. What mattered was the preservation of the White race itself, which was reason enough to avoid such relationships.

Anyone who disputes that male sexual anxiety lies at the heart of racism simply is unfamiliar with what racists themselves have said on the subject. I say that it is primarily male anxiety because other males are the competition when it comes to having and controlling access to women.

So this is what I’m talking about when I say that racism is mainly about sex. And this is what I mean when I say that race can obscure what’s really going on in some situations.

Science Proves It: The Best Age For a Woman is 17

Studies all over the world have shown that men and boys find that the most beautiful women of all are aged 17. This makes sense because at that age a female is fertile, healthy and has a long, healthy breeding and mothering period ahead of her.

So, here in the US, what is normal is deemed sick, evil, perverted and pedophilic.

We have been discussing this theme here for a while now, and here is yet another take on it, this time from the UK.

Suffice to say that most of the outrage over grown men looking at young women and teenage girls comes from females. The fact that this perfectly normal behavior has become pathologized in feminized America shows you what happens when you let women take over your society: catastrophe.

This disaster will continue apace until enough non-mangina males and real women (not feminists) rise up and overthrow the Female Dictatorship that we labor under, restoring a more normative unbiased rule of law in which neither the male nor the female view of sex is prejudiced or given preference.

"There Was An Old Woman," by Alpha Unit

Latest by Alpha Unit. Pretty interesting stuff! We have been discussing on here for awhile why human females live on past menopause (or past their age of “usefulness” to put it brutally). No one seems to exactly know why. The latest research, cited by AU below, is about as good an explanation as any that I’ve read. One good evolutionary reason for menopause is that past a certain age in Paleolithic times, an older woman was quite likely to die during childbirth. Menopause had survival value for females in that it allowed them to survive by shutting off the reproductive organs around the age at which childbirth becomes quite deadly. On the other hand, these women have already had kids when they were younger, so where’s the evolutionary value (since her genes are already passed on anyway, even though she’s dead)? It may be that in tribes where the women did have go through menopause, the older women simply died. The death of the grandmothers was so harmful to the group that these groups went out. Some tribes that evolved menopause managed to keep the grandmas around, and thereby failed to go extinct, passing their genes on. Any tribe that goes extinct is evolutionarily useless. This suggests that grandmothers had survival value for the tribe as a whole. And what might that value have been? These questions are very difficult to answer, but it’s fun to play around with them. It is one of the most bizarre (and annoying) commercials I’ve seen on TV. The California-based HMO Kaiser Permanente advertises itself with images of post-menopausal females, including a cheerleader, and a singer intoning in the background: “When I grow up, I wanna be an old woman….” What? I mean, I hope to be an old woman one day, since the alternative is to drop dead right now. But what is so wonderful about being an old woman? My mom would know, I suppose. But I have the feeling she wouldn’t want me to ask her. If I did, she would probably smile at me and say, “You’ll see.” What good is an old woman, anyway? Researchers have been trying to figure this out for decades now. Apparently there shouldn’t be any old women. The Grandmother Hypothesis, mentioned here , is an attempt to explain why human females survive past menopause. Supposedly the older females help nurture their grandchildren, who benefit from their accumulated wisdom and expertise. But there are skeptics. They point out that these older females use up resources that could be going to the younger generations, offsetting any benefit the younger ones get from having them around. Maybe what matters isn’t what Grandmother can do for anybody but why she went through menopause in the first place. Researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Exeter published an explanation last March. In summary, they say that females go through menopause in order to prevent sexual competition between themselves and the younger females in the family. According to the press release:

In natural fertility populations, women on average have their first baby at 19 years and their last baby at 38 years; in other words, women stop breeding when the next generation starts to breed.

One of the researchers explained that women everywhere experience a rapid decline in fertility after the age of 40, and, on average, stop having children about ten years before the onset of menopause.

It also helps to explain why in some societies (particularly in Africa and Asia), women are required by social law to stop having children when their first grandchild is born.

And why should older females bow out of the competition? Reproduction is more taxing on the female body, obviously, than on the male body. It’s probably better for babies to be carried by and delivered from younger, fitter female bodies. So my guess is that at the time daughters are in their prime childbearing years, menopause switches on for mothers, knocking them out of the game. This is probably the way grandmothers really help their grandchildren. Any accumulated wisdom and expertise they bring are just secondary benefits. Older women manage to bow out of reproduction and yet live on. And nobody seems able to figure out exactly why. Maybe those old women in the commercial know but aren’t telling. Could be that they know there’s no reason to be jealous of those younger women being pursued by older men. They know those younger women have something to look forward to: menopause. As for the older men…what are they going to get that’s nearly as liberating?

“There Was An Old Woman,” by Alpha Unit

Latest by Alpha Unit. Pretty interesting stuff! We have been discussing on here for awhile why human females live on past menopause (or past their age of “usefulness” to put it brutally). No one seems to exactly know why. The latest research, cited by AU below, is about as good an explanation as any that I’ve read.

One good evolutionary reason for menopause is that past a certain age in Paleolithic times, an older woman was quite likely to die during childbirth. Menopause had survival value for females in that it allowed them to survive by shutting off the reproductive organs around the age at which childbirth becomes quite deadly.

On the other hand, these women have already had kids when they were younger, so where’s the evolutionary value (since her genes are already passed on anyway, even though she’s dead)? It may be that in tribes where the women did have go through menopause, the older women simply died. The death of the grandmothers was so harmful to the group that these groups went out.

Some tribes that evolved menopause managed to keep the grandmas around, and thereby failed to go extinct, passing their genes on. Any tribe that goes extinct is evolutionarily useless. This suggests that grandmothers had survival value for the tribe as a whole. And what might that value have been? These questions are very difficult to answer, but it’s fun to play around with them.

It is one of the most bizarre (and annoying) commercials I’ve seen on TV.

The California-based HMO Kaiser Permanente advertises itself with images of post-menopausal females, including a cheerleader, and a singer intoning in the background: “When I grow up, I wanna be an old woman….”

What?

I mean, I hope to be an old woman one day, since the alternative is to drop dead right now. But what is so wonderful about being an old woman? My mom would know, I suppose. But I have the feeling she wouldn’t want me to ask her. If I did, she would probably smile at me and say, “You’ll see.”

What good is an old woman, anyway?

Researchers have been trying to figure this out for decades now. Apparently there shouldn’t be any old women. The Grandmother Hypothesis, mentioned here , is an attempt to explain why human females survive past menopause. Supposedly the older females help nurture their grandchildren, who benefit from their accumulated wisdom and expertise.

But there are skeptics. They point out that these older females use up resources that could be going to the younger generations, offsetting any benefit the younger ones get from having them around.

Maybe what matters isn’t what Grandmother can do for anybody but why she went through menopause in the first place.

Researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Exeter published an explanation last March. In summary, they say that females go through menopause in order to prevent sexual competition between themselves and the younger females in the family. According to the press release:

In natural fertility populations, women on average have their first baby at 19 years and their last baby at 38 years; in other words, women stop breeding when the next generation starts to breed.

One of the researchers explained that women everywhere experience a rapid decline in fertility after the age of 40, and, on average, stop having children about ten years before the onset of menopause.

It also helps to explain why in some societies (particularly in Africa and Asia), women are required by social law to stop having children when their first grandchild is born.

And why should older females bow out of the competition?

Reproduction is more taxing on the female body, obviously, than on the male body. It’s probably better for babies to be carried by and delivered from younger, fitter female bodies. So my guess is that at the time daughters are in their prime childbearing years, menopause switches on for mothers, knocking them out of the game.

This is probably the way grandmothers really help their grandchildren. Any accumulated wisdom and expertise they bring are just secondary benefits.

Older women manage to bow out of reproduction and yet live on. And nobody seems able to figure out exactly why.

Maybe those old women in the commercial know but aren’t telling.

Could be that they know there’s no reason to be jealous of those younger women being pursued by older men. They know those younger women have something to look forward to: menopause.

As for the older men…what are they going to get that’s nearly as liberating?

High Traffic Continuing On Robert Lindsay

A new record for 2nd highest traffic was set on October 22.

Old record: 13,571 October 17
New record: 13,964 October 22

The very next day, a new record for 5th highest traffic was set:

Old record: 13,261 October 20
New record: 13,313 October 23

Very high traffic is continuing on the Blogger site. This post in particular, in addition to its Spanish translation, have been going like gangbusters.

Robert Lindsay Now In Top 500 Blogs On The Net

The Blogger blog, that is, not this one.

I don’t know this one is, but it’s not in the Top 500. More like the top 800.

Traffic on the Blogger site is now averaging 8,373 visitors/day. That’s very high, but it will be hard to go much beyond that I think. It will take some real effort. Blogs in the same traffic arena include small dead animals, Blogger News Network, The Other Side of Kim De Toit and Language Log. LL is an excellent Linguistics blog, Kim De Toit is a flipped out neocon maniac from Detroit, small dead animals is a progressive antiwar blog and Blogger News Network is an interesting effort at being an investigative citizen journalist blog.

Let’s see how long it stays up. There are already some Net Nanny moralfags saying they are reporting it to Blogger.

More Record-Shattering Traffic on Robert Lindsay

On October 20, a new record for 4th highest day was set. The Blogger site continues to draw extremely heavy traffic.

Old record: 12,511 October 18
New record: 13,261 October 20

The very next day, October 21, a new record for 2nd highest day was set.

Old record: 13,571 October 17
New record: 14,334 October 21

Once again, very heavy traffic was ongoing on the Blogger site. On the WordPress site, two posts, Secular Rise in Black IQ and Head Size: Evidence For a Eugenic Effect and Ann Dunham Nude Pics? were popular.

The former is a fascinating article that really needs to be discussed more, since apparently I’m the only one talking about it. That’s what’s frustrating about being a minor writer. The findings in the first post ought to be being discussed in the New York Times. Instead they molder away on some unlikely blog on the Internet.

"Race, Sex and Other Dirty Things," By Alpha Unit

We love fixating on race. It’s very convenient. As long as we’re focusing on race, we don’t have to focus on what’s really in front of us: sex. To me, sex is the Prime Mover in human relations. It’s what everybody really cares about and worries about, on the deepest levels. Racism at its core is all about sex. An honest racist will admit this. Some White men involved in relationships with Black women report that a common, although juvenile, question other White men ask them about their women is “Is it pink on the inside?” One way or another, the real fascination is on sex and sex organs and what it’s like to have sex with someone of another race. Race just can’t keep up with sex when it comes to the way people behave and interact with one another. You might say that the history of Black-White relations in America is really the story of sexual competition between two groups of men. It is well known that when a subjugated people live among those who subjugate them, the women of the subjugated group are at the disposal of those in power. In effect, the men in power own all the women. They have sexual access to the women in the subjugated group but do not allow access to the women in their own group. I submit that this has nothing to do with race. This is purely sexual. This is male behavior. Of course, this is no good whatsoever for relations between men and women in the oppressed group. This can only make a bad situation worse for them. What has happened is that one group of men has defeated the other and is asserting dominance over the men they have defeated. And women are the pawns in this game. So now the men and the women of the oppressed group have a Trust issue. And a Respect issue. Again, this is sexual in nature. This has nothing to do with race. There is nothing extraordinary about what these people did. And nothing extraordinary about how the other people reacted. For some people, it is vitally important to block from their view how ordinary Those Other People really are. And that’s just it: there is nothing extraordinary about them. Your decision that race matters more than anything else says nothing about reality; it says something about you. Who knows what could happen once you start seeing those people the way you see yourself – as rather ordinary? You might have sex with them or something. And you might like it. And then we’re all going to hell in a hand basket.

“Race, Sex and Other Dirty Things,” By Alpha Unit

We love fixating on race. It’s very convenient. As long as we’re focusing on race, we don’t have to focus on what’s really in front of us: sex.

To me, sex is the Prime Mover in human relations. It’s what everybody really cares about and worries about, on the deepest levels. Racism at its core is all about sex. An honest racist will admit this.

Some White men involved in relationships with Black women report that a common, although juvenile, question other White men ask them about their women is “Is it pink on the inside?” One way or another, the real fascination is on sex and sex organs and what it’s like to have sex with someone of another race.

Race just can’t keep up with sex when it comes to the way people behave and interact with one another. You might say that the history of Black-White relations in America is really the story of sexual competition between two groups of men.

It is well known that when a subjugated people live among those who subjugate them, the women of the subjugated group are at the disposal of those in power. In effect, the men in power own all the women. They have sexual access to the women in the subjugated group but do not allow access to the women in their own group.

I submit that this has nothing to do with race. This is purely sexual. This is male behavior.

Of course, this is no good whatsoever for relations between men and women in the oppressed group. This can only make a bad situation worse for them. What has happened is that one group of men has defeated the other and is asserting dominance over the men they have defeated. And women are the pawns in this game. So now the men and the women of the oppressed group have a Trust issue. And a Respect issue.

Again, this is sexual in nature. This has nothing to do with race.

There is nothing extraordinary about what these people did. And nothing extraordinary about how the other people reacted.

For some people, it is vitally important to block from their view how ordinary Those Other People really are. And that’s just it: there is nothing extraordinary about them. Your decision that race matters more than anything else says nothing about reality; it says something about you.

Who knows what could happen once you start seeing those people the way you see yourself – as rather ordinary?

You might have sex with them or something. And you might like it. And then we’re all going to hell in a hand basket.

Finnish Translation of Face Split Diving Accident Video Is Up

The Finnish translation of the Face Split Diving Accident Video post is up on the Blogger site. It’s titled Sukellusonnettomuus. The word “Sukellusonnettomuus” means “Diving accident”. Diving = sukellus. Accident = onnettomuus.

I am really excited about this. It’s my first Finnish translation ever. I actually get a very large number of visits from Finland, which is amazing for such a small country, but Finland is one of the most wired places on Earth. It’s also wealthy and has some of the fastest broadband speeds. That’s all due to their horrible failed socialism, of course.

One of the fun things about these sites is that I get to work for foreign languages a lot as a result of the translations. I don’t just cut and paste translations up there. Unfortunately, they often need a fair amount of work. I can usually work the languages pretty well, but Finnish was really a mess. I could barely make heads or tails out of that language. That’s one Heck of a crazy language.

On another matter, in posts about how to drive traffic to your website, you seldom hear about the use of translations. I translate high-traffic posts when I can get translators, and in some cases, it has worked out very well. It’s hard to find people to do it for free, but there are people out there who like to do stuff like this for fun. I actually get quite a bit of traffic out of translations, especially Spanish, French and to a lesser extent Portuguese.

Young Pussy Likes Old Cock

Well, in some cases anyway (sorry for the French in the title). A friend of that said that to me once. He was in his early 40’s, a swinger and a little bit bisexual. He kept trying to get me to drive up to his place for these semi-sex parties, but I didn’t have the energy, so I never made it, plus the thought of sex in groups has always sort of frightened me (audience factor), though I’ve done something like that a couple of times in my youth.

Anyway, regarding the title, see here. It’s pretty much of a teen site, so you’ve got to figure that those are mostly genuine posts. It’s amazing the number of even underage teenage girls (14-17) who have a thing for guys in their 20’s, even 30’s and amazingly into their 40’s and even over 50. I was wondering why these little 13-14 yr old girls around here were looking at me so much. I thought they hated me, but maybe I need to think again.

A lot of these precious little innocent snowflakes have Daddy issues, such as no father, but not all. So a girl has no father? So what? So she likes older guys because she has no Dad? So what? A lot of the posts are out of the UK, where apparently the AOC is 16, so some of these interesting relationships were actually consummated. A lot of them have crushes or infatuations with their teachers. I’m familiar with that, having spent years as a teacher.

This explains the epidemic of arrests of hebephilic behavior (statutory rape). Truth is, it’s more or less normal for humans to do this sort of thing. It’s only that we’ve decided as civilized folks that we wish to proscribe this normal aspect of human relations, which is our right, of course.

This may also explain the rage, fury, violence and hatred that even the mention of hebephilic or statutory rape behavior (now glossed absurdly as “pedophilia”) arouses in Americans. Hey idiots! It’s normal!

I think that deep down inside even the most shitheaded of these fanatics realizes that those who engage in this behavior are basically just acting normal. If it’s simply normal behavior, what the Hell? That makes it all the more dangerous, doesn’t it? If it’s sick, evil, perverse, bizarre and insane, we don’t much have to worry about it, really. Only a few idiots and freaks are going to do it…

…I was in town the other day, or a few weeks ago, or in a dream, and we were talking about Harry Baker. I pointed out that he was a hebephile and not a pedophile. My friend looked at me that I was violating a million social rules at once. “A guy who likes teenage girls is a hebephile. A guy who likes kids is a pedophile,” I explained. As soon as I said the part about “teenage girls”, the guy in back of me’s eyes lit up and locked on mine. His body got agitated, like he was getting ready to hit me.

I was in a pizza joint a while back, or ten years ago, or earlier today. I was chatting up the hottie little clerk. I asked her if she went to the high school or if she had graduated. (I figured she was 18 or so). She smiled and said she had graduated already and was going to go to cosmetology school. I said, “So you’re 18, then?” She smiled and said yes. This is all legal so far, right?

I turned around. Some 50 year old fat guy who looked like he just ate a whole warehouse full of pizza was lumbering up out of his chair like an elephant from a watering hole. His eyes were locked on mine. He was staring at me. He was staring me down. He was getting out of his seat, and it looked he was going to fight me. I turned around and gave him my best prison stare until he backed down…

This is what it’s all about, the Mass Hysteria. Why are people so insane about this stuff? Because it’s normal!

If it’s actually normative behavior, that’s downright terrifying. It means that if it is not violently proscribed, hopefully with a fanatical and bizarre propaganda campaign and Gulag-type court sentences, it could well explode and you could have an epidemic of it.

This is the rationale behind most anti-sex and anti-drug behavior too. Sexual behavior is coded as bizarre or sick – words like slut, whore and pig are used to describe normal humans who just like to fuck. If we don’t do this, everyone will start fucking everyone, and all Hell will break loose.

Drug use is treated as wickedness made flesh, when it truth, it’s simply a normal human endeavor to want to get high. The drug puritans must know this deep down inside. Of course humans want to get high. Most of us do. It’s only normal. So if we don’t clamp down hard, we’ll have a nation of useless stoned out hopheads.

Teenage girls actually want to fuck older guys. Older guys actually want to fuck teenage girls. And if we don’t slam down on this like an anvil, they’ll all start fucking like rabbits and society will probably collapse.

I still think that any guy more than six years older than a teenage girl who messes around with her is out of his damned mind, and these days, even 20 year old’s are incredibly going down. But the number of older adults getting nailed on this stuff is mindblowing. All I can say is what idiots.

Reading through that page, I wonder how many of these older guys are actually “chasing after innocent teenage girls?” Maybe some of these little chickies are actively pursuing these men? But no matter, if you’re a man and you’re so weak that you don’t have the manly responsibility to say no to a teenage girl, you deserve the full weight of the law.

Roman gives this post 14 teddy bears. That's one of the highest possible ratings.
Roman gives this post 14 teddy bears. That's one of the highest possible ratings.

Four New Records on Robert Lindsay

Four new records were set on Robert Lindsay in the past few days as traffic on the Blogger site continues at very high levels. A new record for second highest day was set on Saturday, traditionally a slow day. These two posts were especially popular.

Old record:  10,923 October 15
New record:  13,571 October 17

Then a new third place record was set on Sunday, usually the slowest day of the week.

Old record: 10,923 October 15
New record: 12,511 October 18

Next the 3rd highest record was immediately broken the next day, on Monday.

Old record:  12,511 October 18
New record: 13,436 October 19

A new weekly record was set, smashing the old record by almost double.

Old record: 47,281: September 14-20
New record: 89,933: October 12-18

This works out to an average of 12,848 hits a day for the week.

What Happened To All The Good Men? You Did.

Sorry folks, I’m still on that War Between Men and Women post. I just can’t get enough of it.

Plus I think I’m a bit sick. There’s all sorts of flu bugs going around, including the Swine Flu, here in California. I know a couple of people who got that Swine Flu, and it is no ordinary flu bug! No way! They are sick as Hell! For like two or three weeks. We are talking older adults here, 40’s.

This post was very interesting. Feminists want the career and all that, no problem, but then they still want to be Cavewomen and chase worthless Alpha Bad Boys. That’s who they leave their dutiful husbands for, holding the bag too. American feminists were largely responsible for a bill that incredibly passed the US Congress to crack down on “mail-order brides” from overseas. The rationale was that the brides are abused, so the law was to protect them. In truth, it makes it hard for US guys to get a bride from Overseas.

This bill was clearly motivated by spite and hatred. American women, especially older ones, feel that they can’t compete with babes from Russia, Thailand or the Philippines. These foreign women have way too many positive attributes – like being nice!

Reading about the horrors of divorce, or even, sadly contemporary American marriage* (especially the no sex bit) makes me glad I never took the plunge. It’s funny that people have been thrashing me my whole life for making this decision. Especially women. The implication, also, was that I wasn’t much a man for not marrying. Guys don’t seem to give a fuck, really. Some young married men were pissed, but you wonder if it’s insecurity. Why are women so pissed at guys who won’t marry? Hmmm. Looking at the horrorshow below, I wonder…

Having to give money to help support the woman’s new boyfriend must be incredibly painful and humiliating. That’s the sort of thing that hits a man’s ego in the most painful and sensitive place. It’s Impotence territory! It makes my dick droop just thinking about it. Think of it in Caveman terms. Your Cavewoman left you for another guy. Implication – you’re not much a man, and he is. He’s a man and you’re not. Now you have to hunt food and bring it to the smirking bastard sitting in his cave with your cheating ex-girl and your kids. That motherfucker is raising your kids!

They snipe and nag until he gives in to keep the peace. Once she has his testicles in a jar over the mantle, she loses respect and the attraction is no longer there. The only thing left is the money. So she leaves him and takes half.

That part is incredible. Well of course. Women want power over men. So they snipe and nag until he gives in, and now he’s a pussy whipped idiot. Of course, now she has no respect for him whatsoever, since no woman respects a pussy-whipped idiot, even when they create one. What’s left? His money. She leaves him and takes half of that. Think of it, in Caveman terms, the guy’s been humiliated over and over and robbed blind. Wow, I can’t imagine it.

And career women often don’t clean house or cook anymore. I’m amazed at the number of young women these days who can barely even cook toast. Incredible. What man would marry one of these? So on top of everything else, the house is a mess and there’s no cooking. WTH, man? What is the guy getting out of this deal?

The solution, according to this guy, is a return to traditional role models. Why we ever thought that anything less than Nature’s Way could ever work in the first place is a mystery.

*I honestly do not mean to hammer on you married guys out there. If you’re happily married, all the power to you, man!

anti-feminism makes you sexy June 9, 2009 by Anonymous, 18 weeks 4 days ago Comment id: 37152

There is a reason why older women are hostile to this idea. They are also hostile to the idea of an American male marrying foreign women. This hostility often sounds like your typical women-hating-women jealousy crap, or maybe it is expressed as racism. How many women have you heard call an Asian girl a slut when she is dating an African American or Caucasian? Older single women are having a hard time finding men who are serious about marriage.

I watch my brothers get screwed in court, lose their kids, assets, and income. I watch them forced to send money to their ex-wife’s boyfriend(s). I hear all of them complain about not having sex after marriage (usually because either or both are too damned tired), but sometimes they get cutoff almost immediately after the ceremony. Possibly the worst is child support for a child that is not yours.

The cases of women lying about being on birth control, or having your baby without your consent. There is a trend that nobody wants to admit. Modern feminist women are crappy wives. They cheat with immature alpha males- hence the growing forever-bachelor pick up artist population. They treat the real men like crap.

They snipe and nag until he gives in to keep the peace. Once she has his testicles in a jar over the mantle, she loses respect and the attraction is no longer there. The only thing left is the money. So she leaves him and takes half. The worst offense of them all- they put career over their kids. The division of labor in the household is extinct. We have sloppy houses and kids fed on a constant stream of fast food or frozen crap. Honestly, is this how you remember growing up?

Ladies- you can fixate your anger on us. Call us perverts, call us immature, etc. All your arguments here don’t seem to be changing my mind. I am one of those elusive men that you can’t find.

42 yo widower, married for 22 years, who was primary caregiver to a woman who suffered more and longer than anyone should. Luckily we married young and she was a true believer in traditional marriage. We had bliss while she was with us. We barely ever fought- and when we did, we followed the rules given to us by our chaplain when we were first married. It was a very very rare thing.

Anyway- there is an answer out there to your question- “What happened to all the good men?”

The Answer is this:

You did.

And do you know how to fix it? I will tell you, but you will call me a sexist – here it is:

Play to your strengths and let men play to our strengths. I will love you, protect you, and provide for you. In return you will be supportive and nurturing. You will take child raising seriously. We’re talking about cooking meals, cleaning the house, and teaching our children. Anything less is a career woman or just plain lazy.

I personally have no issue with career women- I have some close friends who have taken that path. But don’t wake up one day after living the “Sex in the City” lifestyle and decide that I’m your guy. Guess what- I have no use for you. I don’t need your money and I don’t need your sex. If that is all you offer, then the risk is just too great.

What I need is what nature gave you – your maternal instincts. Whether you admit it or not, what you need is my paternal instincts. So – if you want to compete with the foreign and younger ladies – just write down these traits and start working on them – or you could hang out with your bitter girlfriends and have misandry hate parties. I wonder how long that will make you happy.

Dumbass Of The Day

From here.

friendship and time pass rich woman June 6, 2009 by Anonymous, 19 weeks 10 hours ago Comment id: 37086

I AM MAN 29 YEAR I LIKE SEXI WOMAN . 25 TO 33 YEAR . I AM TIME PASS SEXI WOMAN MY HELP YOU SOME MONEY . I LIKE SEXI WOMAN PLEASE CONTECT ME : ID: ritesh225601@yahoo.co.in

in this time i am search job internet . i am thin amd averge bodey . i am tallk phone . please my mail address . i am speek in hinde thank you

i am wait ladey so joine me .

* reply

I am really thinking of turning this into a pickup artist site along the lines of Roissy, et al. All I’ve got to say is that this guy has got what it takes. I’ve heard he’s been deluged with offers from women since he posted this PUA masterpiece on the Net. The PUA community has taken note of his swag and game and many posts have been written on how other Betas can replicate it.

He’s also got the write your own ticket thing in the job department down pat. Forget these fancy resumes. Just follow the approach above – it works! As evidence, I have been told that this bonehead has just been granted an H-1B Visa that every “liberal” in the US Congress insists is absolutely necessary. The job thieving settler was invited into our country by the US government.

A middle aged White man with kids, a mortgage and a family was forced to train this clown as his replacement and then fired. The White guy lost his house and his wife left him. She took the kids. This Hindu 1-B is filled with hatred for the US and especially for White people, but the Left in the US loves that, so no matter. After the White guy lost his house, the Congress of Traitors passed a resolution celebrating the man’s displacement, then the Congress of Crooks took a recess to go eat at $100 lunch Washington restaurants.*

*The whole post is a joke. He never got an H-1B permit. He’s currently in India.

"Bitter Old Harpies vs. Dirty Old Men," by Alpha Unit

Latest from Alpha Unit. I really like this post. She and I have been reading the comments on this post for the past couple of days. In fact, my eyes are aching right now. The whole older man – younger woman thing is a little bit silly, because it doesn’t exist all that much, really. In this town here, you almost never see any outrageous examples of it. Up in the mountains, you never really see it either, except for Harry Baker, and he was anomalous. There was another fellow in town who recently died of a drug overdose at age 47, and he liked young women too. Well, he liked them of all ages really. His name was Richard. He died like he lived, in a woman’s bed in Mariposa. But Richard was Rich, from Newport Beach, with Newport Beach family money. He ran a business in town, but the money came from the family. The only place I saw a lot of younger women – older guys was in Hollywood and Beverly Hills. I used to live and work up there and I spent most of my 20’s in Hollywood nightclubs as part of the LA Music Scene. I was one of the first punk rockers, and I’m still a punk. Anyway, you did see it up there. I can’t get a real young woman these days, but a few years back I could. At age 44, I had an 18 year old Korean girlfriend. Since then though, not so much. At age 52, the women I can get at best as young as 26-33 and up. Under 25, and it seems like they think I’m too old. To me, a young woman is an object of beauty. Like a Redwood tree, a waterfall or a European cathedral. They are simply an aesthetic pleasure to look at, like looking at fine art. And I still fine myself looking at them sometimes, even though a lot of them really hate it. If they ever bothered me about it, I would have to say, “I’m sorry, but you’re so beautiful, I could not help looking at you.” Young women always think guys my age are trying to fuck them. Truth is, we are not. We know we don’t have a chance with these chicks. They’re obviously way more dirty-minded than we are. If I’m discussing the weather, to the young woman’s mind, this is secret code for, “I want to fuck your brains out baby!” Truth is, I’m actually just talking about the weather. Really. Around here, the Hispanic girls look really hot from teens to about mid-20’s or so. After that, they get married, pregnant and fat. These Hispanics are a handsome race, though, I must say. It’s a nice mix, the Indian and the White. When a teenage girl, age 16 or so, starts getting that classic curved body, to me it simply excites a primal impulse. I look at it, and the Caveman in me says, “Jump on it! Impregnate it!” What you are seeing is an evolutionary advertisement of extreme fertility. Around here, these young Hispanic chicks are so fertile I think you can probably impregnate them by looking at them with lust in your eyes. When those immaculate rounded hips start showing up, that looks like an ad too. It’s an advertisement screaming, “These hips are meant to carry babies. Impregnate me baby!” As far as the older women are concerned, it’s just sour grapes, that’s all. The guys? I dunno. 7 years of marriage, a couple of kids, she’s 35, and sex is a memory. After age 40, a lot of couples are hardly fucking anymore. Maybe the women don’t care, but a lot of guys in their 40’s are still horny as Hell. It seems to be a fact of life that older men like younger women, and in some cases, vice versa. It seems true over most all human cultures all down through time. Screaming “pedophile” at Mother Nature isn’t particularly helpful. Mother Nature didn’t make most males natural “pedophiles.” On the other hand, most older women could not be less interested in boy toys. The Cougar phenomenon offers women a chance to do what the boys do, but that seems to be a minor movement. I don’t know any older women around here with much younger guys. I used to be involved in relationships like that. Lot of fun, I was 21 and she was 37. Both at the peak of their sex drives. Match made in heaven. Onto Alpha Unit:

I’m a 50 yr Aussie male and I love younger women. The women I see my age are fat or just plain ugly and no amount of help will fix them. Who wants to go after something all worn out? I think after women have menopause the ugly factor kicks in.

So said the Aussie male in the comments section of a blog post Old Men Chasing Young Women: A Good Thing. This is the post Robert referred to in “Perverts” Are Adaptive. The most common description some of the older men gave of older women was “bitter.” So in addition to being fat and ugly, they were bitter, which amplified their ugliness tenfold. So what do the fat, the ugly, and the bitter think of older guys who try to get young women into bed?

Worn out men belong with worn out women.Old men coming on to you is also, erm, rather gross. Shame nature cruelly made the old badgers pointlessly reproductive. …I have never understood why a young woman wants a wrinkled, boring old man, who tells stories of the times when she wasn’t born yet and complains of aches and ways of the modern world.”

Some of the comments were far more vicious, including references to adult diapers. But most arresting is the sentiment expressed by the commenter who said to a 25-year-old woman:

Your worn out 48 year old boyfriend is an old pervert and you have no integrity.

A 42-year-old man with a 22-year-old girlfriend was told that he is:

…a pedophile whose moral codes are corrupted.

How is this man’s involvement with a 22-year-old woman an example of pedophilia? Or, as Robert put it to me, basically, “What is up with these women?” If it is perfectly natural for a mature man to be sexually turned on by a beautiful young woman (and it is), then why is that natural desire labeled “dirty?” Anyone who thinks this must think sex itself is dirty. Or at least scary. Which it is. The sexual impulse can be disruptive, destabilizing, or even destructive if not properly channeled. No wonder human beings instituted marriage. In their wisdom our forebears knew that such a tremendous force needed to be contained. Maybe these women fear men who don’t seem to recognize this. To them, maybe these guys are just having way too much fun wallowing in unbridled lust with young luscious babes. A man is apt to forego all rectitude with such a distraction. And Civilization will collapse. Don’t you guys see that? Since men are bigger and stronger and less likely to give a damn, women can’t really stop them. So we resort to shrill denunciation, hoping to shame them into behaving themselves. But it might as well have been a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire on that comments thread. Those men were Stanley Kowalski to their Blanche du Bois.

I’ve been on to you from the start! Not once did you pull any wool over this boy’s eyes! You come in here and sprinkle the place with powder and spray perfume and cover the light-bulb with a paper lantern, and lo and behold the place has turned into Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile! Sitting on your throne and swilling my liquor! I say – Ha – ha! Do you hear me? Ha – ha- ha!

References

Williams, Tennessee. 1947. A Streetcar Named Desire. The Estate of the Late Tennessee Williams.

“Bitter Old Harpies vs. Dirty Old Men,” by Alpha Unit

Latest from Alpha Unit. I really like this post. She and I have been reading the comments on this post for the past couple of days. In fact, my eyes are aching right now.

The whole older man – younger woman thing is a little bit silly, because it doesn’t exist all that much, really. In this town here, you almost never see any outrageous examples of it.

Up in the mountains, you never really see it either, except for Harry Baker, and he was anomalous. There was another fellow in town who recently died of a drug overdose at age 47, and he liked young women too. Well, he liked them of all ages really. His name was Richard. He died like he lived, in a woman’s bed in Mariposa. But Richard was Rich, from Newport Beach, with Newport Beach family money. He ran a business in town, but the money came from the family.

The only place I saw a lot of younger women – older guys was in Hollywood and Beverly Hills. I used to live and work up there and I spent most of my 20’s in Hollywood nightclubs as part of the LA Music Scene. I was one of the first punk rockers, and I’m still a punk. Anyway, you did see it up there.

I can’t get a real young woman these days, but a few years back I could. At age 44, I had an 18 year old Korean girlfriend. Since then though, not so much. At age 52, the women I can get at best as young as 26-33 and up. Under 25, and it seems like they think I’m too old.

To me, a young woman is an object of beauty. Like a Redwood tree, a waterfall or a European cathedral. They are simply an aesthetic pleasure to look at, like looking at fine art. And I still fine myself looking at them sometimes, even though a lot of them really hate it. If they ever bothered me about it, I would have to say, “I’m sorry, but you’re so beautiful, I could not help looking at you.”

Young women always think guys my age are trying to fuck them. Truth is, we are not. We know we don’t have a chance with these chicks. They’re obviously way more dirty-minded than we are. If I’m discussing the weather, to the young woman’s mind, this is secret code for, “I want to fuck your brains out baby!” Truth is, I’m actually just talking about the weather. Really.

Around here, the Hispanic girls look really hot from teens to about mid-20’s or so. After that, they get married, pregnant and fat. These Hispanics are a handsome race, though, I must say. It’s a nice mix, the Indian and the White.

When a teenage girl, age 16 or so, starts getting that classic curved body, to me it simply excites a primal impulse. I look at it, and the Caveman in me says, “Jump on it! Impregnate it!” What you are seeing is an evolutionary advertisement of extreme fertility.

Around here, these young Hispanic chicks are so fertile I think you can probably impregnate them by looking at them with lust in your eyes.

When those immaculate rounded hips start showing up, that looks like an ad too. It’s an advertisement screaming, “These hips are meant to carry babies. Impregnate me baby!”

As far as the older women are concerned, it’s just sour grapes, that’s all.

The guys? I dunno. 7 years of marriage, a couple of kids, she’s 35, and sex is a memory. After age 40, a lot of couples are hardly fucking anymore. Maybe the women don’t care, but a lot of guys in their 40’s are still horny as Hell.

It seems to be a fact of life that older men like younger women, and in some cases, vice versa. It seems true over most all human cultures all down through time. Screaming “pedophile” at Mother Nature isn’t particularly helpful. Mother Nature didn’t make most males natural “pedophiles.”

On the other hand, most older women could not be less interested in boy toys. The Cougar phenomenon offers women a chance to do what the boys do, but that seems to be a minor movement. I don’t know any older women around here with much younger guys. I used to be involved in relationships like that. Lot of fun, I was 21 and she was 37. Both at the peak of their sex drives. Match made in heaven.

Onto Alpha Unit:

I’m a 50 yr Aussie male and I love younger women. The women I see my age are fat or just plain ugly and no amount of help will fix them. Who wants to go after something all worn out? I think after women have menopause the ugly factor kicks in.

So said the Aussie male in the comments section of a blog post Old Men Chasing Young Women: A Good Thing. This is the post Robert referred to in “Perverts” Are Adaptive.

The most common description some of the older men gave of older women was “bitter.” So in addition to being fat and ugly, they were bitter, which amplified their ugliness tenfold.

So what do the fat, the ugly, and the bitter think of older guys who try to get young women into bed?

Worn out men belong with worn out women.Old men coming on to you is also, erm, rather gross. Shame nature cruelly made the old badgers pointlessly reproductive.

…I have never understood why a young woman wants a wrinkled, boring old man, who tells stories of the times when she wasn’t born yet and complains of aches and ways of the modern world.”

Some of the comments were far more vicious, including references to adult diapers.

But most arresting is the sentiment expressed by the commenter who said to a 25-year-old woman:

Your worn out 48 year old boyfriend is an old pervert and you have no integrity.

A 42-year-old man with a 22-year-old girlfriend was told that he is:

…a pedophile whose moral codes are corrupted.

How is this man’s involvement with a 22-year-old woman an example of pedophilia?

Or, as Robert put it to me, basically, “What is up with these women?”

If it is perfectly natural for a mature man to be sexually turned on by a beautiful young woman (and it is), then why is that natural desire labeled “dirty?”

Anyone who thinks this must think sex itself is dirty. Or at least scary. Which it is.

The sexual impulse can be disruptive, destabilizing, or even destructive if not properly channeled. No wonder human beings instituted marriage. In their wisdom our forebears knew that such a tremendous force needed to be contained.

Maybe these women fear men who don’t seem to recognize this. To them, maybe these guys are just having way too much fun wallowing in unbridled lust with young luscious babes. A man is apt to forego all rectitude with such a distraction.

And Civilization will collapse.

Don’t you guys see that?

Since men are bigger and stronger and less likely to give a damn, women can’t really stop them. So we resort to shrill denunciation, hoping to shame them into behaving themselves.

But it might as well have been a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire on that comments thread. Those men were Stanley Kowalski to their Blanche du Bois.

I’ve been on to you from the start! Not once did you pull any wool over this boy’s eyes! You come in here and sprinkle the place with powder and spray perfume and cover the light-bulb with a paper lantern, and lo and behold the place has turned into Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile! Sitting on your throne and swilling my liquor! I say – Ha – ha! Do you hear me? Ha – ha- ha!

References

Williams, Tennessee. 1947. A Streetcar Named Desire. The Estate of the Late Tennessee Williams.

Portuguese Translation of Russian Neo Nazi Video Is Up

A Portuguese translation of the Russian Neo Nazi Video post is now up at the Blogger site. It’s titled Vídeo Decapitação Neo Nazi Ruso .

Incredible New Record On Robert Lindsay

Before I start, I would like to apologize for not writing very much lately. I’ve been extremely tired and I’m just not getting a whole lot done.

Old record: 10,923 October 15
New record: 21,920 October 16

As you can see, an unbelievable new record was set, doubling the previous record and breaking the 20,000 hit barrier for the first time.

Most of those were coming in to the Blogger site, mostly to see this classic, and once again, mostly from that horrible socialist/Communist state called Sweden (a gigantic site called Existenz, where I got ~15,000 hits), where the socialists have so destroyed the economy that almost all of the starving Swedes, when they are not dying in the frozen socialist gulags of the North, are so bored that they are on the Net all the time.

They do this because socialist mismanagement has wrecked the economy so severely that almost the entire population has a computer and a high speed connection and the high speed is one of the fastest and cheapest (per kB) on Earth. The state got heavily into the broadband industry and forced some evil regulations on it and even wasted tons of money on the broadband network. The result is the clusterfuck of Swedish broadband.

That about everyone except the reindeer owns a computer is similarly outrageous. Owning a computer is a privilege, not a right! Only a failed socialist state would so nuke the economy that every worthless peon has a computer.

This article also got Reddited, which usually brings in a lot of traffic since Reddit is a huge site.

If anyone has any good suggestions for ad programs, like the Amazon referral program, text link ads, anything like that, let me know. I already have Blogads up, but the interface is really hard to work, tech support doesn’t exist, and no one’s bought an ad yet. I can’t run ads here, but I can run them on Blogger.

New Top Visitor Record On Robert Lindsay

Just two days after a new top visitor record was set on Robert Lindsay, the record was smashed by almost 700 hits. This oldie but goodie was a popular post on the old site, with many visitors coming in from Sweden.

It’s interesting how the failed socialist system in that horrible statist Hellhole has resulted in one of the best connected nations on Earth. In terms of broadband connectivity, the statist nations are kicking the asses of the freemarket dumbfucks like the US. I’m not saying that the market lacks benefits – it does many things quite well. But private unregulated cable and phone monopolies in the US do a laughably piss-poor job of connecting up the nation. This is one case where those evil socialists are definitely kicking some capitalist ass.

But that’s how the capitalist dumbfucks of the US want it, right? High speed access only for the rich and well-to-do, and everyone else on dialup or computer-less. After all, high-speed is a privilege, not a right. But it’s not at all. Aside from the computer itself, the price of high speed is negligible. Some US cities are offering free high-speed wireless for free to anyone who wants it. That’s the way it ought to be, really. High speed ought to be like the interstates, if you’ve got the gas, you’re on the road. No tollbooths on interstates, no tollbooths on the Net.

I’m laughing as I watch these “socialist losers” kick American ass all the way to the 1 yard line on high speed access. American shitheads, addicted to their free market heroin. Drug addiction ruins, whether neoliberal or opiate.

By the way, we finally broke 10,000 hits/day.

Old record: 9,525  October 13
New record: 10,923 October 15

“Perverts” Are Adaptive

Since the evil feminist Cunts and their wussy mangina counterparts say that any older man (over 47 or so) going after a much younger woman is automatically a “pervert,” not to mention a “pedophile”, a “creep” and a “weirdo”, I would like to point out a new study showing that older men (over 50) who reproduce with young women are actually good for humanity.

As the researchers put it, “It turns out that older men chasing younger women contributes to human longevity and the survival of the species.”

I just met a guy, homeless guy, hiking in the national forest. He had been hiking all the way through Yosemite at age 57. He’s in good shape. Although he’s a working class guy (works every day when he can), he’s still homeless. I gave him a ride and dropped him off at the mission.

He told me that two years ago in Carson City, Nevada (he travels all over the West), he had a 22 year old girlfriend. She was surrounded by all these guys her age, all hardass and tough, but she thought they were all a bunch of morons, so she wanted a guy who was a little more mature. I had always heard that teenage girls think the guys their age are idiots, but I didn’t know it extended up into the 20’s.

I met a 20 year old college girl a few years back (no dating, just friendship, but she used to send me risque pics of herself). She said, “All men are boys up until age 40.” Well, it’s probably true, right? I mean, I was, sort of, anyway.

Anyway, this 55 year old guy, with nothing going whatsoever, got a 22 year old chick! Hear hear! Don’t listen to the bitches or these punk kids. Go for it, my Brothers! If you want a young woman and you can get one, go ahead and go for it, even if you have to grab a gang of hardened criminals (Joke!) and rob a trainfull of Viagra to keep it going.

As a result, Puleston said, older male fertility helps to select against damaging cell mutations in humans who have passed the age of female menopause, consequently eliminating the “wall of death.”

I don’t really understand this, but the authors felt that theory helped to explain why human survive past the age of female menopause (We do.). There’s never been a good explanation of why.

One theory, the Grandmother Hypothesis, suggests that we need to keep older women around to show everyone else the ropes. It’s interesting, but I never liked it all that much. This theory seems to make a lot more sense, though I don’t completely understand it either.

There are a lot of cool comments at the end. The usual stuff about young women being repulsed and sickened by older guys who commit the horrible crime (worse than serial homicide for sure) of looking at them. And then some cool comments from the Brothers trashing these silly young bitches for being the mean, vicious, selfish, vain, empty-headed vessels of extreme fertility that they are.

It’s interesting that most of the commenters can’t punctuate, spell or write a coherent sentence. This seems to be true whatever the age or sex. I guess they are just typical American dumbfucks.

It’s really sad that we live in a society that allows males and females to become successful, acquire good jobs, buy nice homes, get good high paying jobs, pile up a lot of nice possessions, etc., when they are so fucking stupid and uneducated that they barely write better than a hillbilly in a shack. What a sick society.

You can accumulate all the money and fancy shit you want, while having the education and skills of a fucking backwoods Moonshine maker. I have more respect for the hillbilly. He lives in a shack, has no car, and barely gets by. He doesn’t pretend to be what he isn’t. But I wouldn’t give him a $50,000/year job.

Only in America. We need to seriously consider that a lot of high-paid Americans are dumber than a bag of hammers or a box of brick shit. It’s pretty common that you meet a person from another country who makes far, far less than their American counterpart yet who has education, class, style and erudition. They keep up on current events and are proud of the skill with which they write in their cultivated native tongue.

America is a land of rich, fat, overpaid ignoramuses and dumbfucks with no class, no taste and no youth style other than shaved pussies, nipple rings and more tattoos than a cannibal.

What a disgrace. I hope at least the stylish Europeans kick our fucking asses. I just met a few busloads of French tourists in town. A fine example of what White people could be if they weren’t aspiring to be backwoods hillbillies with $50 haircuts and new model cars. They put these fat, stupid, ignorant American slobs to shame. I was embarrassed for my people.

New Visitor Record Immediately Broken on Robert Lindsay

One day after a new visitor record was set on Robert Lindsay, it was immediately broken, by quite a bit too – 700 hits. This post was popular on the Blogger site, while the post on Philip Garrido’s Blog was popular on this site. This is because Jaycee Lee Dugard has just come out in public in People Magazine with photos and an interview. On the Blogger site, once again, the Diving Accident video post was very popular.

Old record: 9,525,  October 13
New record: 10,234, October 14

New Record High On Robert Lindsay Yesterday

A new high record was set on Robert Lindsay yesterday, October 13, breaking the old record by almost 1,000 hits. I will probably be setting new records for a while now.

The Blogger site is going like gangbusters now. I just achieved the highest visitor total ever on a Blogger site. This post in particular is very popular.

Old record 8,568, September 18
New record 9,525, October 13

Portuguese Translation of Face Split Diving Accident Video Is Up

The Portuguese translation of the Face Split Diving Accident Video post, Video Acidente de Mergulho Rostro Dividida ao Meio, has been done. If you are looking for it, I dunno, maybe check here?

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