Alt Left: The Russian ‘Denazification’ PR Disaster: How, Why and What To Do

The Russian ‘Denazification’ PR Disaster: How, Why and What To Do

by Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker blog

Maybe it’s worked in Russia, but a military operation in Ukraine based on “denazification” has been a total public relations disaster everywhere else. Quite simply: Russia should have known that the use of the word “Nazi” totally shuts down any discussion in the West. Russia is waging a new type of military operation but they lazily or foolishly thought that “denazification” was a new enough concept to base its justification around for non-Russians — they have paid a price of total intellectual defeat so far in the battle for hearts and minds.

They could have known it was coming – I wrote about this issue just two weeks prior to the start of the Ukraine operation, in an article on France’s elections titled, France’s conservatives cry out for National Socialism – Zemmour’s response?:

“Ah, old Adolf – we can’t bring him up in the West, can we?

Many have heard of Godwin’s Law, or the rule of Nazi analogies: an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches. However, an important corollary is that whenever someone compares someone or something to Nazism – that person has lost the argument and/or the argument is summarily over.

Essentially, the world is to accept that all discussions of Western politics cannot discuss the anti-Western Liberalism ideology which was German Nazism.”

Yes, Russia should have accepted that in February. Practically nobody west of the Oder River understood what Moscow meant by “denazification”, and they still don’t after a month of Russian explanations.

Russia’s military operation has made much harder by failing to recognise the iron Western cultural reality of Godwin’s Law, and the reality that the West only associates Nazis with anti-Semitism and – not at all! – with Russophobia, despite the 20+ million Russian deaths at the hands of the Germanic Nazis.

This is how iron that law is: Political science PhD holders have responded to me with, “But… Ukraine’s president is Jewish – how can there be Nazis?” If you cannot even get Western political science PhD holders to see where you are coming from – even remotely – you have zero chance to get the average Westerner to understand you.

Thus it’s a total, ongoing public relations catastrophe.

It’s not an easy problem to fix

It’s such a huge problem I actually have to discuss it in detail in my new book on the Yellow Vests, in a chapter titled: “Where the West is stuck: The fascism of the 1930s and the ‘fascism’ of the 2020s”. The West is stuck in misunderstanding what fascism is, and in 2022 Russia has not solved this problem; they have maybe even made it worse?!

It’s not an easy problem to fix, but in April 2014 I must say that I was farther along than Russia is in 2022 – well, at least I tried to propose some solution in a column for PressTV titled, “Ukraine: The Rise of the ‘Nalis’”.

I can’t find a link for it anywhere – I’d complain about how Iran’s PressTV has been so deplatformed but – thanks in part to the awful Russian public relations campaign – Russia has now become even more deplatformed than us, wow! If someone finds a link, great, but these highlights show the idea still holds up: the combination of rabid Nationalism and far-right Liberalism (in economics, politics and in anti-socialism) is still the problem in Ukraine. The column began:

“The combination of ultra-nationalists and ultra-liberals who have overthrown the Ukrainian government is indicative of a new type of political party in the region: National Liberals, or ‘Nalis’. They are to be differentiated from ‘Nazis’ – National Socialists – only by the economic ideology of liberalism (otherwise known as free-market capitalism).

But it is a mistake to call the protesters in Ukraine “Nazis”. Yes, at Maidan Square there was plenty of footage taken of neo-Nazis, fascists, violent anarchists and other types who showed up to a political protest in camouflage and armed with a firearm. But they are actually “Nalis” – National Liberals.

That’s why not all of Ukraine’s protesters should be called Nalis: There are true progressives who were calling for legal, constitutional changes to the corrupt Yanukovych government. Unfortunately, they have been outgunned by the Nalis, who have deposed a president unconstitutionally, voted to ban the Russian language and whose violent tactics have created the real possibility of civil war.

Many of these people are true Nalis: economic nationalists who do not even want to join the EU.

But the moneyed set of the Nalis certainly do. They want to work with the US and the EU to institute IMF-led austerity reforms. They want to reduce pensions, reduce government subsidies on things like heat, reduce wages and increase corporate protections to foster a capitalist society. All you need to do is look at their proposals and it’s clear: they want free market liberalism…but of course for the benefit of themselves and the other moneyed Nalis.

Two things are certain: Western politicians will back the Nalis to the hilt. Of course, always putting the best interest of the EU or US or Germany (or many others) well-before the interests of the Ukrainian people.

And two: The Western media, passionately pro-Nali and just as passionately anti-Russian and anti-Putin, will also be unquestioningly backing the Nalis until the bitter end.”

Did “Nali” catch on? No, but did Russia come up with anything better?

Are they even strenuously pushing the term “Ukrainian Civil War”, which is no longer just a “possibility” but today’s reality, in my estimation?

I understand how Russians would use “Nazism” synonymously with “Russophobia”, just I understand how Jews would use “Nazism” interchangeably with “anti-Semitism”, but clearly most Westerners do not understand the former and only the latter. Given that the “Nalis” have been around since 2014, and given that the US has used shameless Russophobia to distract from the political failures of the two mainstream parties in their 2016 election, I’m surprised that Russia couldn’t come up with a better way to express “pathological and murderous hatred towards Russia”?

“Anti-Russianism”, “Russophobic paramilitaries”, “Nalis” – somebody better come up with something better than “denazification” because it takes more than hating Russians or Jews to make a Nazi, and because “denazification” has clearly not worked. If they don’t come up with something – anything – other than “denazification” they will never explain the situation in Ukraine correctly. Take Nali, or improve upon Nali, but come up with something to increase diplomatic understanding.

However, Russia needs to not only admit they got it wrong, but they need to get at the root of why they got it wrong, and this is actually much harder for Russia.

Russians need to ask why they get – as their failed PR campaign proves – “Nazi” as wrong as the West does

It’s not really that the times have changed and “Nazi” is outdated – it’s that “Nazi” was never accurate to begin with in Ukraine, as I wrote back in 2014.

Racism or xenophobia – the hating of Russia – isn’t enough to make one a Nazi, merely a racist. Germanic Nazism had political and economic components, and to ignore them is only ignorance and only causes more ignorance. The West only associates Nazis with anti-Semitism, and that’s foolish, but some Russians think associating Nazis with anti-Russianism is a complete picture, and that is just as foolish.

Incorrectly believing that it does is to totally ignore the economic factor, and the factor of political structure, and to merely make ethnic/identity politics the only factor – it is also to lay the foundation for total PR failure outside of Russia, and that cannot be denied.

The obvious difference is that Russia is on the right side of being against the “Nalis”, but… they don’t even know what that means, or what being anti-Nail implies for their society going forward – and the implications are revolutionary-big.

The Western and Russian elite leadership both misuse “Nazi” because it serves them – cui bono applies here too.

Both Russian and Western elites do not want to seriously talk about the economic/political aspects of socialism – of any variety – whatsoever. This is because post-1991 both regions’ elites began to wrongly take for granted that Socialist Democracy is a failure (China has emphatically disproven this, thankfully) and thus Russia adopted many aspects of what I term “Western Liberal Democracy”.

I can list a half-dozen synonyms: liberalism, neoliberalism, ultra-liberalism, English parliamentarian oligarchy, Western democracy, Nali-ism, etc. It all comes down to the same thing: liberalism, which is the ideology that emerged after the downfall of absolute monarchy in 1789 and before the establishment of socialist democracy in 1917.

The West is fighting for Western Liberal Democracy, and thus they do not permit honest discussion and honest critiques of Western Liberal Democracy. This explains why there is no admission regarding the historical reality that Nazism and 1930s European fascism won power precisely because so many people realised that Western Liberal Democracy was nothing but awful oligarchy. Most of Russia does not understand this either – not since 1991 – and thus they are stuck between aping Western Liberal Democracy and rejecting Socialist Democracy.

Putin definitely doesn’t want to talk about socialism honestly – or even acknowledge its achievements in Russia – because socialists are not just an ideological rival but an actual political one, unlike in the West: The Communist Party is the main opposition party in Russian parliament. Clearly, Western Liberal Democracy still has plenty of detractors in Russia.

But Putin is thus at an absurd and contradictory place in his political outlook: He wants to oppose Western Liberal Democracy’s surprising counter-attack on Russia with… more Western Liberal Democracy in Russia? It’s illogical, and thus it can’t work, and here’s why:

Putin is essentially saying that he wants Russia to take the Iranian road of taking total sanctions war head-on, but… without the influence of 1917? It won’t work. In 1979 Iranian political leaders were aware of Marxism, Leninism and Maoism, and they were also aware that Western Liberal Democracy was an awful economic and political model, and as a result they nationalised the economy to a degree only surpassed by North Korea and (maybe, I contest) Cuba – that’s the only way to beat sanctions!

What Russia is proposing in response to the Western counter-attack is truly radical for them in the sense that it is a total overturning of the economic and political choices of Western Liberal Democracy, and thus of many Russian choices post-1991. I don’t think Russia realizes how radical what they are proposing to do in response to sanctions really is, and how much it requires a complete rethink in political terms and interpretations of history – is Putin willing to embrace the USSR’s political and economic past?

What’s certain is that if Russia wants true sovereignty and independence as a response to the Western sanctions war – if they want to follow the Iranian road, as I first posited here, in an article which deserves way more attention, given that Russia now has 5

Yes, the EU isn’t sanctioning Russian fossil fuels, but France just announced they want no more Russian gas by 2027. The EU sanctions and what they portend are serious.

The Iranian road led to sovereignty – and maybe even an actually-signed JCPOA which would be more proof its correct choices – because Iran rests on totally different (i.e. revolutionary) economic power and political power structures than those of Western Liberal Democracy. Russia cannot defeat a sanctions campaign with Western Liberal Democratic structures – it’s a system geared to protect oligarchs, of course.

Does Russia have oligarchs? Of course, to Western Liberal Democrats west of Russia “oligarchs” only exist in Russia, never in the West – absurdly and falsely. Listening to Westerners, “oligarchs” must only be a region in Siberia, perhaps? But oligarchs are not going to help counter sanctions; they are not going to accept mass nationalisations; they are not going to accept price controls, profit limitations, central planning, etc. and etc. and etc.

If Russia continues to face off with the West a la Iran they can either have a revolution in thinking or they can fail. Western Liberal Democracy will not save them, as Russians were told in 1991.

Perhaps Putin is just bluffing about his totally anti-capitalist response to the Western sanction war? Or perhaps it’s truly a new world, with China-Russia-Iran leading the way?

But the fact that no one in the West can easily grasp Russia’s intellectual campaign for the war indicates a major problem. Russia needs to think and talk honestly about political terms, and I recommend starting with “denazification”. This will, I think, necessarily take them into bigger issues, such as how a “bring on your sanctions” stance necessarily reacquires very revolutionary (or perhaps return-to-revolutionary, for Russia) changes.

Should Russia fail to realise this, it may reveal that they are as intellectually stuck as the West: If the conflict in Ukraine is only about Russia-hating, then they have succumbed to the same identity politics worldview of the West – they have made “race” the end-all be-all of their political-economic discourse. It will be proof that they have ignored the class warfare lens, the imperialist lens and 1979’s “maybe we do need some spiritual morality in our socioeconomic policies?” lens. These are all lenses which came around between 1917-1991, which current Russian leadership has rather disavowed.

These are strong, serious ideas, but they are motivated by the catastrophic failure of the “denazification” idea outside of Russia, which seems like thus far the biggest failure in Russian planning for their military operation.

Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

Alt Left: This War, Like Most Wars, Is All About Economics (All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars)

You would think of idiot humans realized this, they would not support war so much, but this is the dirty little secret that the masters of the world never let you in on: wars are not usually about any threat to the nation. They’re often simply about economics.

Capitalism Says It’s OK To Kill People for Money

Capitalism is a system where people literally kill people for money. Furthermore, capitalism says that killing people for money is an absolute necessity. Capitalist fanboys keep saying there can be a capitalism that is not about killing people for money, but it never shows up. The profit motive uber alles and the neoliberal state are all about killing people for money. If a corporation has to kill people to make money, it does it. If the state tries to stop a corporation from killing people for money, the corporation fights with all of its might.

You guys wonder why I’m a socialist. Well, for one thing, I don’t agree with killing people for money. That is, I don’t agree that money is more important than people’s health and lives. So that sets me against the entire capitalist system right there.

You Never Have Freedom of the Press Under Capitalism

Furthermore, under capitalism, a large section of the population is brainwashed into corporate  thinking and either believes the constant lies of the corporations or thinks that killing people for money is a-ok. And the media under capitalism is always controlled by the largest corporations who are always pretty reactionary so you never really have freedom of press under capitalism.

In capitalism, freedom of the press belongs to anyone who owns a printing press. Which is just about no one. The necessity of advertising means that any media outlet that goes against the corporate state will die on the vine. Generally left media outlets have to be propped up somehow either by the state or by wealthy interests. Marshall Field was a progressive multimillionaire in Chicago who used his money to finance relatively liberal newspapers.

With the advent of the Internet, everyone now owns his own printing press, including yours truly! This means that for the first time in forever, the rich and the corporations have lost their monopoly over the media. The reaction has been extreme. Although the state itself doesn’t censure much, it has simply outsourced the censorship to the private sector to get around the 1st Amendment restrictions on censorship.

For some odd reasons, all of the large Internet and social media corporations have decided to become mouthpieces for the CIA, the State Department and the National Security State. How does this work? Does the state blackmail these guys? Does it point a gun to its head? Or do the interests of US corporations always naturally line up perfectly with the interests of the CIA, the State Department and the National Security State?

As those the purpose of those three is to advance the power and violence of the state in the interests of corporations, it would seem that the alliance of corporations and state is not accidental. Corporations rely on the corporate state to retain their money, power, and stuff. The state works for the corporations by providing the power of economic and military violence to advance corporate interests. And a completely controlled media acts as stenographer for the corporate state and the corporations themselves.

Those Hundreds of US Military Bases All Over the World Are Meant to Prop up the Dollar

I don’t think all this wild thrashing about of the declining US empire going to work. I think the West is writing its death warrant. The whole base of US hegemony is the US dollar as fiat currency for the whole world. All of those US military bases are meant to prop up US hegemony and the dollar as fiat currency. And the dollar’s mastery is enforced by all of those military bases.

In recent years, every single country that went off the dollar got attacked by the US either with sanctions, coups or coup attempts, assassinations, contras, economic wars, or even military attacks. Those bases are a gun pointed at the head of every country telling them that if they go off the dollar, they will get attacked.

The power of the US military is what props up the dollar, not the other way around. If you want to know the reason for those insanely expensive defense budgets we pass every year, this is it right there.

The 800 billion defense budget, which every Democrat votes for, even the most progressive like Sanders and AOC, is what props up the dollar and allows US hegemony over the world.

The US rules the world right now and has since the fall of the USSR. Of course we let it go to our head in terms of hubris in the manner of a Greek tragedy. Pride goeth before the fall. Total power leads to extreme arrogance and the thought that one can get away with anything. It also leads to extremely desperate measures if one’s position on top is threatened by anyone. The US will fight tooth and nail to prevent a multipolar world. It’s our worst enemy.

Face It – Russia Has Lost the Ukrainians in a Psychological Sense

Almost everything Ukie you are seeing in this war is fake! That’s the bottom line here. This is the most hysterical and over the top propaganda campaign I’ve ever witnessed in my life, and I lived through the entire Vietnam War. But it was never anything like this, no way. And there wasn’t this neverending fakery, lies, and false flagging going on back then too.

The West is lying so much that we are getting to the point where recent history itself as documented by Wikipedia and the US media anyway is going to end up being largely fake. Isn’t that what we used to say about the USSR? You’d open a history book and it would be a pack of lies? I remember a photograph of two men with Stalin who were later purged and later the photograph had them airbrushed out.

Critics say no one wants to move to Russia. I’d say that if Russia had a warmer climate, a lot of people would be moving there. Many people from the former SSR republics – Belorussia, Ukraine, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirghistan, and Turkmenistan move to Russia to make more money every single year. The number of immigrants is huge, and an anti-immigrant movement has started in Russia. Also, many people move from the non-Russian republics to the Russian SSR every year, especially from the Caucasus.

Critics say Russia is poor. Russia has a high income. I believe PCI is ~$17,000. That’s just fine.

I grew up around Israeli and Jewish former Soviet expats mostly Russians, Ukrainians and Uzbeks.

Former Soviet Jewish expats are all super-Russia haters for dumb reasons.

IMO, NATO should declare war on Ukraine and invade western Ukraine.

That will cause a war with Russia for sure. You don’t want even a non-nuclear war with Russia.

But if Putin goes further and attacks Finland, he needs to be killed. It’s as simple as that.

I’m not sure that’s on the table or not. But it’s been known forever that NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine was a huge red line for Russia, and if it happened, Russia would probably invade. So we deliberately pushed for it anyway, just to cause a war!

You realize that NATO is overjoyed about this war and that it deliberately baited and pushed Russia into this war, right? Why? So they could shut them out of Europe. Which they just did! It’s a US project. The US project in Europe has always been:

Keep the US in, keep Russia out, and keep Germany down.

So now we’ve thrown Russia out of Europe. Guess where the Europeans will have to buy their stuff now? The US! This is just another sleazy, dirty war all about economics, just like most capitalist wars. You guys wonder why I’m a socialist. Capitalism causes war. Case in point: Ukraine.

If Ukraine surrenders it won’t matter. The Russians will still have their referendum in the East and they will still put in an acceptable government in the center. They may put in a referendum in the South too. Russia doesn’t want to occupy Ukraine. That will be for the antifascist Ukrainians.

In that case, the “real Ukraine” will just move to Western Ukraine, and then it will be a real Nazi country! After that, NATO will start this mess all over again, and sooner or later, Russia will have to attack Western Ukraine.

It’s going to be hard to put a puppet government in the West. They hate Russians way too much there.

The majority even hate Russians in the center, so I’m wondering how this works. I’d bet that no more than

Eight years ago, half the country was pro-Russian and half was pro-Ukie. It’s not like that anymore. The majority of Ukraine are not anti-fascists at the moment. Instead, they are pro-fascist.

At one time, a lot of Ukies saw themselves as Malorussians – Little Russians or really Central Russians – sharing linguistic, religious, and historical ties with Mother Russia. This way of thinking was common with the generations born up until 1920. This seems to be gone. In a way, Russia has lost Ukraine. The majority are either fascists, pro-fascists, or neutral. They’ve turned into Russia-haters. Eight years of relentless propaganda will do that.

There are still a lot of pro-Russians in the South and the East. 400 Ukrainian reservists in Kharkiv have formed the Ukrainian Liberation Army and now fight alongside Russian troops to liberate their land from fascism. At least 40 Ukrainian soldiers went over to the DPR Army in the east. In Kharkiv, Russian troops try to buy food in the stores, and the shopkeepers tell them to take it for free, as they are so happy to be liberated by the Russians. They were not happy living under those Nazis all those years.

As far as killing Putin goers, there have already been 20 assassination attempts of plots against Putin. They all failed. We won’t be able to kill him, and if we do, we are definitely at war with Russia.

Alt Left: What Does Extreme Antisemitism Look Like?

It looks something like this. This is from a commenter who just appeared on my site. He will banned. If you go over to unz.com, a majority of the commenters on just about any post are about like this guy. And far too many of the articles are something along these lines. Unz is a Jew and why he allows this Nazi-style fanatical conspiratorial and obsessive antisemitism on there is beyond me. He even pushes it himself. Has he converted out? Does he have a death wish?

I hate to genocide-monger and Holocaust-scream. That’s what hysterical Jews do. But when antisemitism reaches a certain fever pitch, it’s the real deal, and trust me, this sort of antisemitism (which usually shades into Nazism) is definitely not good for the Jews. Homicide, mass murder, and even genocide of Jews has historically tailed this sort of talk.

I don’t mind critique of Jews or even limited antisemitism. “Water-cooler antisemitism” is fine with me. In fact, it’s virtually normal Gentile behavior. Jews are pretty hard people to like!But even there it would be better to limit your distaste for the group itself and keep an open mind about Jewish individuals, who in my experience are often great folks. Go ahead and dislike the group, but give the individual a chance. It’s only human.

But I won’t put up with homicidal or genocidal Nazi antisemitism. Another word for this type of antisemitism is obsessive, conspiratorial antisemitism. This sort of thing is not a Left value, nor is it an Alt Left value. On the other hand, cultural critique is fine and all ethnic groups are up for grabs as far as that goes.

I’m a weird person. I look at most every argument I come across with an open mind to see if it’s true. And I look at this sort of antisemitism with an open mind too. I will never agree to murder or even harm Jewish people for being Jewish, so that’s not up for grabs. But I always analyze this sort of thing with the idea of “Is what these people say about Jews actually true?” If what they say is true, then I will have no choice but to believe it. I still won’t want to kill them, but I’d have to admit that wild antisemites are right and Jews are just evil.

My careful opinion after reading this sort of thing for many years is that it’s basically nonsense. It’s simply not true. The problems of Whites are not being caused by a bunch of Jews. It’s capitalists who are parasitical, not Jews. Jews are White even if they won’t admit it. And they are smart. Jews don’t even run the media anymore. They did for a long time, but now the media is mostly run by these huge faceless multinational corporations who are into movies, music, TV, etc. too.

When I do my media research, I see a lot of media companies are being run by Gentiles. Have you noticed that the tone of the media doesn’t change one bit when ownership goes from Jewish to Gentile. I have. The media has a single mindset and media Jew and media Gentiles all pretty much think alike. I haven’t even seen coverage of Israel and the Middle East change that. The big media Gentiles are just as Zionist as the big media Jews. This implies that in the US, Zionism is simply a philosophy of the power elite, the rich and the corporations. Zionist power is American power. They’re tied at the hip.

Yes, Facebook censors the Israel-Palestine conflict because the owner is Jewish. But Gentile Twitter is just as censorious on the subject last time I checked.

Jews aren’t “forcing Whites out of their homes and businesses.” Good God, whatever gave him that idea?

Jews do not run America’s welfare, education and employment bureaucracies, sorry. Gentiles do, not that it matters.

To the extent that Whites are struggling and having problems, it’s due to a crisis in capitalism, not due to a bunch of Jews!

See why they call antisemitism “the socialism of fools.”

Obviously, I’m not endorsing the apparent homicidal and genocidal antisemitism below. This post is purely educational. All of this sort of antisemitism is just crazy and the people who perpetrate this type of thinking, in my opinion, have simply gone crazy. They think they’ve found the key to all the problems in the world. Simple! It’s all down to those damned Jews! Alas, if only it was that simple, but most important issues in society are confoundingly complex. Which, of course, is why humans opt for the easy answer that explains it all.

Antisemitic rant starts here:

The audacity! Jews have no right to be talking about Whites. The pretentiousness of being in control! The fantasies of global power!

Jews – you annoy people. You’re not smart. You cheat, lie, and steal from us. You’re deceitful, and parasitically annoying.

Jews manipulate the American education.

Jews FEAR the Brits. We have all they want: looks, intelligence, abilities, talents, godly pure non-mixed genes. Other races bring dark energy and result in a tragic Earth if we allow them to fulfill their desires.

What puzzles me is why have we allowed the Jews to think they are either White or smart.

Jews – we are always in control and will use violence to remove you.

Hitler was right.

We helped the enemy escape and take root in America, taking the Internet and the media. All TV networks are Jewish propaganda. The Jews put out lies for Whites using sources such as Jewbook.

We are becoming aware. God has asked me to expose the evildoers (Jews). My current mission is to show the Gentiles the truth behind the parasitic Jew. You Jews will try to force my Anglo fellows out of their homes and businesses take them by any means except it won’t work because you’re a bunch of scared cowards, twats, and pussies. We must take out the Jews now. It will be up to the middle class and the power class to do this.

They lie to Blacks. African Americans know the facts behind the Jews’ schemes and don’t fall for them.

The are the alien, the true enemy, and now it’s time to remove them from our America. The Jews are now operating our welfare, education, and employment bureaucracies. This is causing Whites to struggle and have a lot of difficulties.

The Jews refer to us as goyim. This must stop as this is an insult to us Gentiles. The Gentiles are God’s given Chosen, and the Jews are just jealous, sick, desperate filth.

Avoid Jews. Learn about them. Watch them, follow them, and engage anything Jewish to expose their agenda in America.

Alt Left: Cultural Left Identity Politics and Degeneracy Doesn’t Need Jews Anymore

Yes, Jews were influential in all of these movements at the start. But they’ve all gone mainstream now and there are not a lot of Jews to be seen. I get the feeling that once a movement loses its subversive “shock the Gentiles” character, the Jews get bored and take off for greener pastures.

Jews aren’t the source of all of White people’s problems. Every Jew in the US could go to Israel tomorrow and anti-White politics and the rest of the Cultural Left would keep chugging right along because racism against Whites has simply gone mainstream. A lot of non-Whites are drinking this Kool-Aid and there are plenty of self-hating Whites out there flagellating themselves.

For instance, let’s look at modern antiracism, especially Critical Race Theory, which is what almost all modern antiracism is anymore. CRT didn’t get cooked up by a bunch of Jews. Actually it came from intellectual Blacks, particularly Derrick Bell in the 1970’s, a Black legal scholar. Almost all of the big names in CRT nowadays are Blacks or other non-Whites. The few Whites seem to be Gentiles.White-hating doesn’t need Jews anymore. It’s on automatic.

Same with feminism, gay rights, trans rights, hatred of the West, worship of non-Whites and the rest of the loony Cultural Left. None of these things need Jews to keep going anymore. America’s Jews could all go to the moon and this sort of thing would keep chugging right along.

Feminist man-hatred has gone mainstream. There aren’t even many Jewish feminists at the top anymore.

Gays don’t need Jews to push a radical gay agenda. There aren’t even that many Jews at the top ranks of Gay Identity Politics (IP). There are just a bunch of homosexuals pushing a homosexual project, exactly as you might expect.

Trans IP gets called a Jewish project because a few rich Jews such as the Pritzkers fund it to some extent. On the  other hand,  this has also gone mainstream and even more disgustingly, a huge corporate capitalist Trans Industry consisting of sleazy pharmaceutical companies, surgeons, hospitals, and clinics doling out hormonal toxins and mutilating the bodies of anyone dumb enough to avail themselves of one of their hospital beds. Trans IP is now the Trans Industry, as capitalist as the tobacco industry and about as sleazy.

This is a mistake of crazy antisemites. Where the problem is capitalist corporate sleazeballs of any ethnicity, the crazy antisemite just sees a bunch of Jews. The antisemite says we don’t have capitalism in the US. Instead we have “some Jewed up bullshit.” Get rid of the Jews and Gentile capitalism will be all warm and fuzzy and nice. It will even cuddle up with when you go to sleep and lick your face lovingly.

This is folly! Ok, let’s try an experiment. Let’s let all of the US Jews take off for the moon. You think US capitalists will suddenly turn into nice people?

I’ve got some news for you. Jewish capitalists are capitalists. Gentile capitalists are capitalists. Capitalists of both groups act like…get this…capitalists! Isn’t that shocking?

Nevertheless, this has gone on automatic and it doesn’t need Jews anymore either. Jews aren’t any more tranny or gay than non-Jews.

Porn doesn’t need Jews either. Ever checked out Japanese porn? Not a Jew in sight. Swedish, Danish, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Turkish, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, French, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, German, Colombian, Mexican, and Argentine porn is being pushed by…people of those ethnicities! Isn’t that surprising? Not a bunch of Jews. Probably not a Jew in sight in any of those national porn industries. British porn seems to be run by British Gentiles last time I checked.

Gentile men are just as perverted, sick, and twisted sexually as Jewish men. We’re not choirboys and Jewish men don’t have a patent on depravity. Gentile men are men. Jewish men are men. They act like…get this…men! Amazing, huh?

And in case you are wondering, yes,  I have seen national commercial porn from all of those countries.

Think about it. Suppose all the Jews in the US moved to the moon tomorrow. Do you have the slightest doubt that Gentile perverted men wouldn’t continue to run the porn industry? And the porn industry is full of Gentiles too.

The Jewish era of porn was in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Yes, there were many Jewish directors, actors, and actresses back then. Yes, there are still some Jewish directors. There are a few Jewish actors and actresses, but frankly their numbers are quite small. I can only think of one male and one female Jewish porn star. Jews were in porn when it was dissident and subversive. Once it went mainstream, I assume they got bored of it as it doesn’t give that “shock the Gentiles” kick anymore.

The 1970’s was also the Italian or Sicilian era of porn. If you watch one of those old porn movies, you see a bunch of Italian names on the credits at the end. Obviously the mafia was running the porn industry back then.

Alt Left: Russia, Ukraine, and the Jewish (and Nazi) Question

Whether Ukraine is a Nazi country instead of just a fascist country is another matter, but keep in mind that fascism and National Socialism can unfold in any society, even a Jewish one. A Jewish National Socialism or fascism is absolutely possible. In fact, many European Jews were fascists and proto-fascists in Europe in 1910-1935.

Some German Jews even support the Nazi Party. In 1935, some German cities had Nazi Friendship groups made up of Jews who supported the regime. Don’t ask me how that makes sense. It was only when the Nazis went anti-Semitic that these Jewish fascists abandoned them. The Jewish fascists were quite OK with fascism but not with an anti-Semitic fascism. The Zionists maintained an alliance with the Nazis through the 1930’s on the cynical basis that the more Jews in Germany were persecuted, the more they would flee to Palestine.

In my opinion, Israel is a fascist Jewish country full of fascist Jews. Fascists need not be anti-Semites! And logically, fascist Israel has made alliance with rightwing fascist regimes all over the world, including Hungary and Philippines. And many young Israelis went to the Maidan to fight with the Ukrainian fascists, mostly because a lot of Jews hate Russia.

On the other hand, Israel is sitting out this war. Many Israelis don’t like Ukrainians and say Ukrainians are Nazis or anti-Semites as they recall the stories of what happened to their relatives and ancestors there during World War 2.

Yet World Jewry has had it in for Russia ever since the birth of Israel. Previously, quite a few Jews had been sympathetic to the USSR, though this was probably not a majority. Certainly they supported the USSR against Nazi Germany. However, with the birth of Israel, the US supported Israel and the USSR supported the Arabs, and World Jewry went over to the West.

Then there was the “Soviet Jews” “let my people go” bullshit, a cynical and totally dishonest campaign started by Western, mostly American, Jews.

First of all, no one was allowed to leave the USSR, not just Jews. The Western Jews dishonestly complained that the USSR after Stalin was anti-Semitic.

Yes, there was the Doctor’s Plot under Stalin, and a group of Jewish doctors may indeed have poisoned Stalin.

After Israel was founded, a number of Soviet Jews supported Western-supported Israel. Stalin saw them as traitors and he executed a number of them in the early 1950’s. I don’t think it was anti-Semitic. People complained to Stalin about killing Jews and he said, “You do not understand! They are all Zionists!” Stalin was married a few times and at least one of his wives was Jewish.

As a result of these executions of Soviet Jews, it is thought that the Jewish physicians executed the Doctor’s Plot. It didn’t much matter as Khrushchev hated Stalin and was more than happy to have him out of the way. Stalin’s coffin was carried across the USSR by train when he died, and massive crowds came out in every stop along the way, even all the way out in Siberia. People fell to the ground and cried. Stain was worshiped like a God.

Afterwards, the USSR got involved in some poorly motivated campaigns that had anti-Semitic overtones. One was the campaign against “Ruthless Cosmopolitanism.” If you know about the dynamics of anti-Semitism and the wandering Jewish internationalist anti-nationalist motif, you can see how toxic this was. The campaign claimed to be against “Zionists,” but the use of the rootless cosmopolitan motif was unfortunate.

From then on, Western Jews complained about horrible anti-Semitic persecution in the USSR. Except there was none. A professor at a major university during this period was interviewed. He said out of 200 professors in his large department, maybe 2-3 of them had no Jewish ancestry. Some persecution! They were persecuted all the way to fame and glory and the bank! He laughed when people mentioned that Western Jews thought Soviet Jews were persecuted.

The Jewish complaint against Russia goes way back, as there was of course a lot of anti-Semitism for centuries in the Russian Empire, where the Jews were restricted at one time to the Pale of Settlement. The Pale is now the equivalent of Western Ukraine, which probably has the largest concentration of Nazis in the world! The Cossacks used to lead pogroms against Jews.

It’s said that the Czars were not even particularly anti-Semitic on a personal basis. Instead they just cynically scapegoated Jews whenever the serfs and peasants rose up against the feudal landlords and the feudal royalty. The Czars saw the revolutionary rage of the serfs and misdirected it towards the Jews. “No, don’t kill us feudal lords and royals. We aren’t the problem. All of your problems are those Jews over there!”

The fact that many Jews worked as tax collectors for feudal lords meant that the only face of feudal brutality that the serfs ever saw were Jewish tax collectors, why by the way where quite vicious about how they loaned money to the peasants. They loaned money to the peasants on usurious terms and when peasants couldn’t pay, they would confiscate their lands. Also, the Jews sold booze to the peasants. The peasants ended up drinking up all their profits and were then unable to pay their loans. It was all pretty low-down and sleazy.

Russian Jews and probably Ukrainian Jews too are some of the worst Jews out there. A lot of them are just criminals. The “Russian” Mafia was 1/3 Jewish. Jews are

For their part, Russian Gentiles have been guilty of some horrendous anti-Semitism, and sadly to this day, there is a lot of anti-Semitism in Russia. On the other hand, it’s not official state policy, and Putin has an excellent relationship with the Russian Jewish community and Israel.

Anyway, the long and bitter history of Jews and Russians has led many Western Jews who often have ancestry from the Pale to be Russia-haters. That they have not extended the same courtesy of hatred to Ukraine too is odd, but it’s probably just Realpolitik, as Western Jews are deeply tied into US and Western imperialism.

Western countries are not so much “Jewish” countries as they are simply capitalist-imperialist countries. This is a mistake that many anti-Semites make. They look around at Western imperialism and see Jewish faces and think that imperialism is Jewish. Of course it’s not. It’s just capitalist imperialism and it’s  no more Jewish than it is Gentile. Capitalists don’t have much religion anyway. Read Marx, “On the Jewish Question.” The only religion of capitalists is the worship of money.

Similarly, ant-Semites look around at Western capitalists and see Jewish faces and conclude that the problem is not capitalism but Jews. But Gentile capitalists don’t act any better than the Jewish ones; in fact, they act worse. Anti-Semites say get rid of the Jews and capitalism will be fine and dandy. This is folly. Actually it will probably be worse, as Jewish capitalists and the Jewish rich tend to be much more progressive than Gentile capitalists and the Gentile rich. I’d rather be ruled by rich Jews than rich Gentiles.

The above is what we mean when we say that a type of anti-Semitism is “the socialism of fools.”

Under Lenin and Stalin, the USSR was probably the most pro-Jewish country on Earth. Israel Shamir said the USSR as an “anti-anti-Semitic” country. But this is also misleading as in the USSR, no one really talked about ethnicity. You were not supposed to talk about it. And Soviet Jews may not have seen themselves as all that Jewish.

Trotsky was Jewish, but he refused to identify as a Jew. He was asked what his nationality was and he said “working class.” So the fact that there were many Jews in this or that Soviet enterprise is of little consequence. As the USSR was committed to opposing anti-Semitism and overthrew the anti-Semitic Czar and led war on the White anti-Semites in the Civil War, of course Soviet Jews warmed to the USSR. But so did tens of millions of non-Jewish workers and peasants.

Jews talk about how synagogues were destroyed, but the Soviets destroyed churches and mosques too. They hated all religions. Lenin put in a law mandating the death penalty for anti-Semitism.

The Bolshevik Revolution was not really a Jewish revolution. There were only a few Bolshevkis. Yes, there were a number of Jews, but there were even more Latvians! Furthermore, most Russian Jews did not support the Bolsheviks. Only a few did. In the election of 1917, 7

Judeo-Bolshevism is a particularly vicious form of anti-Semitism, as this was the ideology behind the Holocaust. Recall the order in which Hitler sent people to Dachau. First were Communists. Next in line were socialists. Third were labor unions. Fourth in line were Jews! Fourth in line! The Nazis were more anti-Communist than anti-Jewish, but as they saw them as one and the same, it was of little matter.

Jews would have you believe that they only banned Jews from leaving the USSR because most Jews can’t envision a world outside of their own people and perspective. It’s like the rest of the world is somehow not even there. Some say that Jews think non-Jews as animals. This is true of the Orthodox, but most Western Jews are not Orthodox.

Simone Weil, a French Jew convert to Christianity, described it in a better way. She said that Jews saw the world like a spotlight on a stage in a play. You know how in a play when the stage is dark, and suddenly a spotlight appears and there is one actor standing there? This is how Jews see the world. There they are, under that spotlight. Everyone else is in the dark. It’s not so much that they hate non-Jews (though the Orthodox do). It’s is more like non-Jews are not even there. They don’t even think about them.

Cyndi Lauper, “Money Changes Everything”

Came out about the same time as the previous song, and Lauper was also a bit of a punk and quite probably a riot grrrl precursor. She was a feminist icon back when feminist was not a dirty word.

This is from a concert in Houston in 1984 or 1985. Notice the orgiastic, uninhibited, Dionysian act of total abandonment on the part of the lead singer. This is the true spirit of rock and roll, but you don’t see it a whole lot. It was there from the very start with Elvis and Chuck Berry and especially Little Richard. We lost the thread there for a while but picked it back up again with the Stooges, Iggy Pop, Wayne County and the Electric Chairs, the New York Dolls, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers and of course with punk rock.

Rock is about cutting it all loose, letting it all hang out, complete abandonment of the senses to pure nature. There’s no place in rock and roll but sanctimonious twits or Neo-Puritans.

I have a lot of young readers on here. If you want to know one truth that will follow you everywhere all through life it is this: money changes everything. You can sit back and plug that sentence into so many questions you have about the world and it explains so many things. I can’t even go into it now. Suffice to say that at least here in the US, yep, money changes everything.

This makes a lot more sense than saying that money is good (capitalism) or maybe not so good (anti-capitalism). More than that, it is simply a “change agent” that when applied to various situations, explains so much of modern human life. Look around you next time you go out into the world and when you see things that don’t make so much sense, just think, “Money changes everything,” and see how many green lights you get. I bet you can drive all the way home without stopping.

Money is a “change agent,” and a very unusual and powerful one at that. It is also something that is almost never discussed on polite day to day society, which seems to be an odd taboo considering that America is all about money.

I dated a Middle Eastern Christian woman for a while, an Assyrian Christian from Iran. She didn’t like Muslims but she hated Israel too. And she wasn’t real keen about Jews either. We were talking about the US and I said this is a Christian country and she laughed at me and shook her head. “I’m a Christian. I know a Christian country when I see one. America is not a Christian country. America is a Jewish country.

The only thing that matters in this country is money. I’ve written many posts where I have said that America is indeed a Jewish country and I think this is part of the reason I am saying this. We are not Jewish in religion. Instead, we are Jewish in spirit. Almost all of the Christians in the US are not Christian in spirit. Instead, they are Jewish in spirit. Which is possibly why American Christianity has been so pro-Jewish and pro-Israel for so long. If the real religion of America is money, then what is the religion of the Jews?

“Money is the jealous God of Israel. The religion of the Jews is the religion of hucksterism.”

– Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” 1845.

Bingo! Like I keep saying, America is a Jewish country, full of 330 million Jews. I’m not saying that is either a good or bad thing, that depends on your opinion. I am simply stating it as fact, do with it what you will.

She said, “I’m sorry, baby, I’m leaving you tonight. I found someone new, he’s waitin’ in the car outside.” “Ah honey, how could you do it? We swore each other everlasting love.” She said, “Well yeah, I know, but when we did There was one thing we weren’t really thinking of and that’s money.”

Money changes everything I said “Money, money changes everything. We think we know what we’re doin’. That don’t mean a thing. It’s all in the past now. Money changes everything.”

They shake your hand and they smile And they buy you a drink They say, “We’ll be your friends. We’ll stick with you till the end.” Ah, but everybody’s only looking out for themselves And you say, “Well, who can you trust?” I’ll tell you, “It’s just nobody else’s money.”

Money changes everything I said, “Money, money changes everything. Ya think ya know what ya doin’. We don’t hold the strings. It’s all in the past now. Money changes everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Money, Money changes everything I said, “Money, money changes everything. We think we know what we’re doing. We don’t know a thing. It’s all in the past now. Money changes everything. Hey, yeah, yeah”

Money changes everything Money changes everything now Money changes everything Money changes everything Money changes everything Money

Alt Left: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, “Merry Christmas (War Is Over)”

John and Yoko in their full-blown hippie phase and the height of the hippie era in the US in 1971. I was a freshman in high school, and I didn’t think much of hippies. In fact, the next year I worked for CREEP (The Committee to Re-elect the President) for the Nixon campaign.

This was the infamous campaign organization that was behind the paranoid Watergate mess. And that whole mess was caused by anti-Communist paranoid McCarthyite fanatics (of which Nixon was one). The broke into the DNC headquarters because they thought the Democrats were Communists!

What’s an insane anti-Communist campaign in the US without a few gusanos (Cuban exiles)? Not much! And sure enough, crazy gusanos played a huge role in this idiotic break-in because gusanos like their compatriots in Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay, are some of the most flat-out deranged anti-Communist fanatics on the planet. The rest of the world doesn’t have much resembling this type, although Hong Kongers are similar. There are plenty in the Baltics and the former East Bloc and in the Ukraine and Belarus. There are probably some in the Philippines too.

Believe it or not, the entire rest of the world doesn’t give two shits about Communism or socialism or any of that. Probably because almost the entire rest of the world is already socialist in one form or another. Latin America is odd as a far rightwing outlier, the last holdout against socialism.

Anyway, John and Yoko released this as a single. The backing singers were done by the Harlem Children’s Choir, and boy were they good! Hey, Black ghettos can produce a lot of decent and talented people. The whole problem with places like that is not that everyone is lousy but more than there are way too many lousy people. I’ve met some of the finest, more morally upstanding folks in the ghetto when I used to teach there. They were often older, of course, but I also met some young ones. They’re often very religious.

Hardcore Christianity seems to be pretty good for Black people. This may be what keeps crime rates artificially low in the Black South, especially the rural South, as opposed to the cities. Also the South is where is actually an authentic and true Black culture or even Black civilization if you will in the US, with deep roots. You see it most in the rural areas, and yes, there is a lot of religion, but a lot of Southern Blacks act really, really good. So good that they would surprise you. And a lot of those smaller Black towns actually function pretty well. I don’t think Blacks up north ever created decent cultures. Even in Harlem, they mostly just created ghettos.

Happy Christmas, Kyoko Happy Christmas, Julian

So this is Christmas And what have you done? Another year over A new one just begun And so this is Christmas I hope you have fun The near and the dear one The old and the young A very merry Christmas And a happy new year Let’s hope it’s a good one Without any fear

And so this is Christmas For weak and for strong (War is over if you want it) For the rich and the poor ones The road is so long (War is over now)

And so happy Christmas For black and for whites (War is over if you want it) For the yellow and red ones Let’s stop all the fight (War is over now) A very merry Christmas And a happy new year Let’s hope it’s a good one Without any fear

And so this is Christmas And what have we done? (War is over if you want it) Another year over A new one just begun (War is over if you want it)

And so this is Christmas We hope you have fun (War is over if you want it) The near and the dear one The old and the young (War is over now) A very merry Christmas And a Happy New Year Let’s hope it’s a good one Without any fear

War is over If you want it War is over now Happy Christmas! Happy Christmas! Happy Christmas!

(War is over if you want it) The near and the dear one The old and the young (War is over now) A very merry Christmas And a Happy New Year Let’s hope it’s a good one Without any fear

War is over If you want it War is over now

Alt Left: On Capital Flight

James Schipper: It is certainly possible to transfer savings abroad, and that is not beneficial for ordinary citizens, but a lot of what rich people do is not beneficial to ordinary people. More important than what rich people do abroad is the income distribution.

Suppose that Ruritania is a closed economy. In a closed economy there can’t be capital flight of course. Let’s further suppose that the richest 1

Capitalists can certainly carry out an investors’ strike. If they really dislike or distrust a leftwing government, they can refuse to invest, but that is possible also in a closed economy. We shouldn’t become obsessed with balance-of-payment problems.

Concerns about balance-of payment are mainly justified when a country has limited export capacity but has to import a lot of essentials. In such a case, it may not only be necessary to have rigid controls on capital outflows but also to restrict the import of luxuries. If a family has limited income, then it should not allow dad to buy expensive cigars or mom to buy designer cloths.

Let’s take 4 rich Peruvians, Pedro, Pablo, Diego and Carlos. Each year, Pedro transfers 25,000 USD to a foreign bank. Pablo imports luxuries worth 25,000 USD each year. Diego employs 5 Peruvian servants with that amount. Carlos adds 25,000 to his Peruvian savings account each year.

There is no difference between Pedro and Pablo. Diego employs Peruvians, but the services produced by those employees are for him. Those 5 servants could be providing services for ordinary Peruvians. It is never enough to look at job creation. We should also look at what those jobs produce and for whom. Carlos is the only one who is doing what rich people should be doing: saving money in order to reduce conspicuous consumption and free up resources for investment.

If capital flight is no big deal, why do nations get so upset about it. Venezuela was losing $50 billion a year to capital flight, money that could have been invested in the economy. It was all going straight to Miami and Houston. Venezuela was so upset about this that they put in capital controls to keep people from moving money out of the country. But every time you do that, you seem to end up with an underground money economy and a dual exchange rate.

Capital flight -> capital controls -> dual exchange rates with black market exchange rate diabolically manipulated by the opposition in Houston precisely to ruin the economy -> fixed exchange rate instead of floating the exchange rate -> wild inflation.

And the capitalists went on strike anyway an refused to put any money into the economy. They ran their factories and firms at 5

The capitalists wave the threat of capital flight over the head of any leftwing government like a Sword of Damocles. They just did it was Castillo in Peru, and it forced him to reign in many of his more leftwing proposals. The main thing they need to do in Peru is nationalize the mining business. Mining is extremely profitable in Peru but all of the money goes to foreign corporate carpetbaggers and parasites and the Peruvians themselves hardly get a nickel.

Castillo merely threatened to renegotiate the contracts with the foreign companies so Peru got more of the money, and the oligarchy went nuts. That is because while the foreign-owned mining industry is disastrous for your average Peruvian, the Peruvian oligarchy, like most in the region, is a comprador oligarchy. They make a lot of money off of those mining contracts somehow or other, don’t ask me how. No matter how much the country itself is getting screwed by foreign corporations raping the country, somehow the oligarchy always positions itself between the corporations and the nation and makes money off of the pillage.

They Peruvian oligarchy said if you try to do the tiniest leftwing thing, we will take all our money out of the country. They also said that that would tank the stock market. That is another sword they wave over our heads. “We will tank the stock market!” They’re basically terrorists. “If you don’t give us what we want, we will use these economic bombs to blow up the economy!

Alt Left: Conservative Arguments against Deficits

Found on the Net:

In 2011, the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman characterized conservative discourse on budget deficits in terms of “bond vigilantes” and the “confidence fairy.” Unless governments cut their deficits, the bond vigilantes will put the screws to them by forcing up interest rates. But if they do cut, the confidence fairy will reward them by stimulating private spending more than the cuts depress it.

In other words, like all conservative economics, it’s nonsense. Or superstition. Or magic. Or they know it’s a big fat lie and they won’t admit it. Probably the latter.

Not to mention that there are no true conservatives anywhere on Earth who even believe in anti-deficit theory in the first place. All modern conservatives, given the chance in office, will balloon deficits wildly. In the US, this is due to another scam. Conservatives deliberately blow up deficits to cause an artificial debt crisis. Then the lying dogs start screaming about the deficits that they themselves created (without acknowledging that they created them) and demanding the destruction of most if not all social spending to fight the deficit crisis. The fact that they got away from this scam for decades is outrageous.

The corporate media of course is in on the whole scam and never blew the whistle on them even once. Americans, who are profoundly idiotic in terms of political economics, finally started to catch onto this scam under Trump a full 40 years after it was implemented under silver-tongued Scammer-in-Chief Ronald Reagan. In terms of political economics, Americans are some of the dumbest people on Earth. All over the world, people vote their class interests. Only in the US and a few other places such as Hong Kong and Colombia do they not do so. Americans are the ultimate class cucks.

Venezuealans and Nicaraguans, dumb spics in most Americans’ minds, have a far greater sense of political economics and class consciousness. No way on Earth could you put a scam like this over them. They won’t fall for it. It’s rather pathetic when dumb spics are vastly more intelligent on political economics than Americans are.

I guess Brazilians and Colombians are dumb enough to fall for it. But Peruvians, Paraguayans, Argentines, and increasingly Chileans ain’t falling for this crap anymore. Neither are Hondurans. Or apparently Mexicans. Salvadorans supposedly have great class consciousness but they just voted in a rightwinger named Bukele. Guatemalans are permanently class cucked and confused, possibly terrorized into supporting rightwing economics, though most of them don’t seem to have a clue about politics or economics. Ecuadorians are apparently easily fooled.

Outside the Western Hemisphere, no one falls for this crap except in the UK for whatever weird reasons they have. The Baltics became extremely class cucked as a reaction against Communism and it was deadly for them. Indians seem pretty class cucked. At any rate, if they have any money at all, they go hard rightwing on economics. You can’t put this scam over anywhere in the Arab World. They won’t stand for it. The Arab World is run by populists. Nor could you in Turkey.

For that matter, in most of the former USSR, it’s not possible to class-scam people. 70 years of the USSR guaranteed that class consciousness is pounded into the sense of all workers. This is what rightwing idiots don’t get about the fall of the USSR. They didn’t end up with this neoliberal paradise full of class cucks that they wanted. Instead, they ended up with a permanently militant working class and a permanently socialist or social democratic state. You can change the form (the state) but you can’t change the contents (what’s in people’s minds).

Alt Left: Neuveau Fascism in South America and Europe

Manuel Rodriguez: Back to politics. What is going on in Bolivia is worrying me. We have fascist squads lynching “undesirables” like peasants. We also see that there have been placed barricades with rubbish and tires that block vehicle mobilization, causing people to be fed up and remove the barricades. You know what this all reminds me? The guarimbas of 2014 in Venezuela and Nicaragua. I can see where this is going.

————————– Separate: There is an tendency that is pretty worrying going on at least in Latin America.

The people are tired of the structural inequalities from the neoliberal policies of the right, causing them to lose in elections whenever they appear as they are, and the people are conscious enough.

The mutation consisted on swapping in the public’s mind the Traditional Right image with Center-Right, which seems like a more popular alternative. The complementary tactic is for thee Center-Right to dress up as the Center-Left, which in reality are already prepared sell-outs whose main purpose is try to divert votes from the Left to help the Right win.

The media did their thing, which was to help Center-Left Boric would win over the Leftist Jadue. The whole purpose of Center-Left Yaku Pérez’ candidacy was to make the Leftist Andrés Arauz lose.

That strategy seems to be being recently changing. They are changing the Center-Right for populist Trump-style fascist Far Right candidates. The most worrying thing is that they are getting a lot of support from the population. Bolsonaro is an classic example. Jose Antonio Kast is a more recent example. It seems that Vamos in Argentina is going to win in the parliament.

I would like to point out that the election in Ecuador was profoundly unfair. First of all, the main opposition party kept getting banned, and its leaders all have warrants out for their arrest on fake charges. This “lawfare” is similar to what was done in Brazil. By the way, the FBI greatly assisted the Brazilian fascists in the lawfare against the Left down there. The US is also engaging in lawfare against Venezuela.

Vamos are Argentine fascists?

Obviously Bolsonaro is a fascist, and Kast is clearly a Pinochet-style Chilean fascist.

Why are people voting fascist? I don’t get it. Although Chile and Argentine both have deep fascist blocs in each country, in my opinion mostly because those are majority-White countries. Brazil is also a majority-White country, which may be why they are going fascist too.

In Latin America nowadays, where you lack a White majority, fascism is hard to install because Latin non-Whites hate fascism. They’ve had quite enough of it. However, they do support it in Colombia. On the other hand, Colombia is also a fairly White country. Fascist roots in Colombia go back to Independence. The country simply has developed a culture of popular fascism for whatever reason. Turkey is very similar. The people get no benefit for voting fascist, but they keep doing it anyway.

There are fascist governments in non-White Haiti, Honduras, and Paraguay, but all of those are dictatorships. The Right seized power with fascist coups – armed in Haiti and Honduras and legislative in Paraguay – and they have ruled by dictatorship ever since.

In the Americas, Whiteness is associated with rightwing authoritarianism and fascism. In Europe this is not the case, but Whites are a huge majority over there. It appears that Whites go fascist when they are in the minority, but Argentina and Chile are majority-White, so I don’t get it.

Really any population descended from the Catholic Spaniards divides into the typical Far Right-Far versus Left Collectivist pattern. This pattern is also seen in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, and Lebanon, all Mediterranean countries. This is also seen now somewhat in France. Spain, France, and Italy are Catholic, Greece is Orthodox, Turkey is Muslim, and Lebanon is mostly Catholic and Muslim. Mediterranean countries are collectivist, so politics tends to be collectivist. Islam, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity are collectivist religions.

Left collectivism is Communism and socialism, while Right collectivism is fascism.

The Catholic East European fascism in Poland and Hungary is different and has a Catholic socially conservative and anti-Communist tint. Liberation theology never took hold in Eastern Europe except in Czechia, where there is a long tradition of “Catholic Communism.”

In Ukraine, the Baltics, and Belarus, the fascism is simply Nazism, pure and simple. Ukraine and Belarus are Orthodox, and the Baltics are Catholic (Lithuania) and Protestant (Latvia and Estonia). The Nazism here stems from World War and the independence movements in these countries making alliances with the Nazi occupiers who promised them independence. The Communists in turn were seen as anti-nationalists who thwarted these nations independence dreams. See below for more on that.

In Orthodox Georgia and Russia, fascism nationalist – ethnic nationalist in Georgia or simply nationalist or “Russian Empire nationalist” in Russia.

Protestant Northern Europe is more individualistic. The Right there is just about dead except in the UK and the Baltics. The Right in the UK is a pale copy of US politics. See below for the anti-Communist roots of the Right in the Baltics.

The Right in the northern individualist parts of Europe is mostly anti-Muslim. It’s conservatism is toned down like all politics in Northern Europe is toned down, so it’s not really fascist, instead a type of Woke Anti-Islam. Otherwise they are very left on social issues. One of their leaders in the Netherlands was a gay man. And they support a more socialist economics, but this is the case for both the Right and Left in most of Europe proper other than the Baltics.

The Economic Right is only popular in the UK, where the political economics mirrors the US, and in Czechia, the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. In all of these places except the UK, it is an anti-Communist reaction where many people are angry about living under Communism in the past, so they have gone to extreme Right economics as an overreaction.

In Estonia and Latvia, support for the economic Right has been disastrous and has almost destroyed both countries. The Economic Right has little power in Russia and Belarus, with only 10-2

Alt Left: Socialism for the Win!

Socialism beating all capitalist countries!

You guys wonder why some of us are socialists. Well, here ya go.

As you can see, Cuban socialism beats all of its capitalist competitors in administering COVID-19 vaccines to the largest number of people in the shortest period of time. And keep in mind that the US has, I believe, a GNP 15 times bigger than Cuba’s and it still totally failed in this competition. In addition, many of those countries have social democracies with attendant socialized medicine, but even that didn’t seem to do very well against socialist planning in the health sector. Cuba beat the UK, Europe and North America as a whole, and the combined groups of high and upper middle low income countries.

I don’t have anything against socialized medicine in social democracies, but it does seem to fair worse against a pure Communist system. And in the UK and parts of Europe, public health is under relentless attack by the capitalists under the rubric of austerity and budget cuts.

The UK in particular has been devastated by these cuts which the Tories have been doing for decades now. Nevertheless, the idiot Brits appear to be ready to march off to vote Tory once again in the next election. The entire media combined to promote the Tories and destroy Labor’s left candidate. The current candidate is a centrist named Starmer and he’s so bad, he loses to pathetic Tories like the clown Boris Johnson. But hey, at least Starmer cleaned out the antisemites in the party! That’s all that matters, right Jews. You all would rather have a damned Tory government than a left Labor government unfriendly to your precious little hate state over there.

I’m not sure about the rest of Europe, but I know that public health has been devastated in Greece. The Left Syriza ran on an anti-austerity program but changed and went Centrist as soon as they got in, supposedly due to “forces beyond their control.”

This shows how hard it is to change the system absent an actual revolution as happened in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Without a truly revolutionary party as we had and have in those countries, the forces of capitalism will simply assert themselves and any Left candidate will be boxed in. This is already happening to Castillo in Peru, who finds his options limited more and more every week by the forces of the military, the big capitalists, the media, and the population in media, which is really all the same thing and could be called the Peruvian oligarchy or in US terms, the Peruvian Deep State.

And we can see how this is happening in the US as Biden progressively scales down his promises. At first he rejected Sanders’ Medicare for All, though it has majority support. Then he rejected Sanders’ free college education, a staple in many countries, including places like Mexico! In its stead he offered free community college. Well, he just got rid of that, too. What’s next, Joe? Free ice cream on Sunday?

Really, I don’t blame him. America is still a terrifyingly reactionary country, and in fact it is nearly a fascist country as about half the population is perfectly willing to vote for fascism and the Republican party is now an undemocratic authoritarian fascist party along the lines of the Latin American Right. It follows because the Latin American Right is run by the oligarchies that run those countries, and increasingly, the US is also an oligarchy and is no longer a democracy at all.

Nor are our elections free and fair. They’ve been hopelessly corrupted since the advent of computerized voting and gerrymandering and serious obstacles placed in the way of voting means that we are absolutely not a democratic country anymore.

Democratic countries do not allow partisan gerrymandering, attempts to steal elections, obstacles placed to discourage voting, and open theft of elections via computerized voting machines. I wonder if we ever had a democracy in this blighted country. Perhaps from 1965-2000, we had a pretty democratic system, but under Reagan, the Justice Department under Sessions interfered to keep voting restrictions against Blacks in while putting Blacks who worked for voting rights in jail. The FBI did this, if you can believe that. And you wonder why I despise feds so much.

The Destruction of the Langues d’Oil Was a Deliberate Project

I got this from a paper on Academia. We see many typical arguments here against the use of dialects and sub-languages of the main prescriptive official language – that speaking them indicates that one is rural, uneducated, backwards, stupid, and not modern, cool, hip, urban, intelligent, and educated. Hence this process of wanting to dissociate with the old backwards ways and associate with the new modern ways continues today.

I was involved for a bit with a German woman in the US. She spoken Hessian, which is actually a separate language under the rubric of High German or Standard German. It is spoken in the Hesse, a wine-growing region in the central-west. She still spoke Hessian, but she told me it was not popular for the reasons above – it meant you were backwards, stupid and uneducated.

She also said something interesting about mutual intelligibility.

We see also the unifying effect of the Jacobin French Revolution, one of the most progressive revolutions the world had seen up until that time. In fact the American and French revolutions were modeled on each other. This was a progressive, modernizing revolution the likes of which had never been seen before. Egalite, liberte, and fraternite – Equality, freedom, and fraternity. It was also quite anti-religious, giving rise to something called laicism or extreme secularism in France.

The idea was to unify all Frenchmen under a single language. The local patois in addition to the other languages non-related to French such as Flemish, Basque, Catalan, the various Occitan and Arpetin languages, Breton, Alsatian, Moselle Franconian, etc. were seen as impeding in particular the fraternite or assimilitory aspects of the Revolution. They also kept people backwards, stupid and perhaps even promoted inequality and lack of freedom, both of which were associated with the ancien regime.

We also see how the local patois were tied into the land, the landscape, the stars, the times of day, the seasons, the foods, the plants and animals, the very lifeblood of the people. To uproot the patois would be to destroy people’s intimate connection with all of these things.

As all of these earthly connections were considered the realm of savagery – after all, the modern man was to liberate himself from the natural world and rule over or move beyond it – the civilization versus savagery motif also came into play. As you can see, lack of patois was seen as due to healthier lives, better food and water, more human interaction, and more money and higher level of civilization. Patois was associated with poor food and water, even poor weather, lack of sociability, poverty, and lack of integration into the monied economy.

As you can see, the development of capitalism in France also played a role here. The rural areas were to be forced into the capitalist mode whether they wanted to or not.

In epistemological terms the aim of Modernity is unequivocally to do away with the Old World, and the French Revolution provided precisely that opportunity. In order to align nature with productive forces, existing environmental regulations had to be done away with at the end of the 18th century (Chappey & Vincent, 2019, p. 109).

Not coincidentally it was also at that same period, from 1790 on, that the Revolutionary governments of France sought to survey the use of ‘patois’ in order to uproot them and replace them with the language of Reason (Certeau, Julia, & Revel, 1975) or at least a revolutionary version of it (Steuckardt, 2011). In line with the Ideologues’ project, this linguistic project was devised to gain knowledge and use this knowledge to transform (and improve) living conditions in the country.

So next, language.

Nowhere is the pre-modern vernacular connection between language and what we now call ‘nature’ better expressed than in a response given to Grégoire’s 1790 survey on patois by the Société des Amis de la Constitutions of Perpignan, in the Catalan-speaking part of France. Asked about how to eradicate the local patois, they retorted:

To destroy it, one would have to destroy the sun, the freshness of the nights, the kind of foods, the quality of waters, man in its entirety. (Certeau et al., 1975, p. 182).

Conversely, in a 1776 account of life in Burgundy, Rétif de la Bretonne accounted for the lack of patois in the village of Nitry in contrast with surrounding areas by resorting to natural explanations: purer air, better grains producing better bread, dairy products, superior eggs, and animal flesh. All those elements were then correlated with the practice of commerce, which brought inhabitants in contact with other localities and generated the need to speak politely (Certeau et al., 1975, pp. 277–278).

In the next village of Saci [where patois was apparently still spoken] one mile away, however, stagnant waters caused the air to be “devouring,” and the local inhabitants to be “heavy, ruminative, and taciturn” (ibid. 278).

In France, the patois are forms of non-language that index a state of wilderness and superstition and point to the savage (Certeau et al., 1975, Chapter 8) – forms of knowledge and practices which were to be uprooted pointing to an absence of a rational outlook on the world and a lack of industriousness (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016) and lust for more money over time.

In that particular view, the patois are immediately transparent forms of language: they are isomorphous with nature and with emotions. Along with the ways of life of their speakers and mores, they are susceptible to description in the natural science sense of the term: mere mechanical facts to be described (Certeau et al., 1975, p. 154). In this representation, mores are opposed to civilization (ibid. 155), rurality to urban life, and patois to language; access to language is thus tantamount to access to civilization.

Alt Left: Karl Marx, “The Genesis of Capital”: The Creation of Capitalism and Its Link to Modern Land Reform

This fascinating document is available in booklet form as it is only ~35 pages. It is an excerpt from the larger Capital volume. It’s not an easy read but it’s not impossible either.

Some of the writing is gorgeous. I read one sentence to my very anti-Communist liberal Democrat father and he swooned over the prose. That one sentence was both perfect and beautiful, though it dealt with some terrible.

In many places, this is forceful – see the fencing of the Commons in the 1300’s, done deliberately to force the peasants into the capitalist mode or production. Indeed theorists said that if the peasants could not be shoved into capitalism, there would be no capitalism, for their would be no workers. It was essential to destroy the peasants ability to live off the land for themselves in order to force them into worse circumstances as industrial workers.

We see this very same rhetoric employed today in India – where it is argued that the tribals in Chattisargh and other places must be uprooted from the lands, have their lands stolen from them to give to mining and forest industries, and forced into the capitalist mode in cities in order to properly develop the economy. It is argued that India cannot develop its economy until the Adivasis have been destroyed. Note that as with the ancient peasants, the Adivasis will live much poorer lives in the cities than the were in the rural areas.

In Colombia, we see something very similar. In Colombia, small farmers own a lot of land. They are able to subsist off this land and they do not need to participate in the larger economy. They grow enough food for themselves and some city people. The process of the Colombian revolution and the genocidal response of the Colombian oligarchy to it is all throwing the peasants off of these small plots, stealing their land at gunpoint (the paramilitaries are used for this), and terrorizing or killing them if they refuse to hand over their land.

The land is then confiscated by latifundias or large landowners who by and large control the Colombian economy. They grow coffee, bananas, etc. and raise cattle for export, generating money for the economy in the process.

In fact, this process has been going on all over Latin America for over 200 years as sort of a slow-motion process of ethnic cleansing and land theft. Smalholders are able to live off the land in Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Paraguay, and Brazil, and this is seen as unacceptable as they only grow food for themselves and possibly for city-dwellers but the produce cannot be exported.

These countries wish to develop an export model of agriculture based on the large scale production of food crops for export mostly to the US. In return, their ability to produce their own food is destroyed, in my opinion, rendering their economies completely backwards. The people are then rendered vulnerable to the purchase of imported food from the US, often packaged or canned food that is not very good for you.

As you can see, the country gets screwed and the US wins both ways. By destroying the basis for feeding themselves, the US wins an export market for its processed foods. By replacing these with food crops for export to the US, the US gets to make money by importing and selling these food crops. In return the country gains nothing.

Only a small landholding and import-export elite (maybe 2

And in the process, of course, the country generates a revolutionary movement, often an armed one.

This can be seen in areas of Colombia. In one particular part of Southern Colombia, most of the rural peasantry had been thrown off the land and most of the land was now held by a few large landowners who were raising cattle on the land. The peasants had been terrorized off of their stolen land and formed ghettos in a large city nearby, which increased the poverty rate and the slump percentage of the city by a lot. Here they were poor, unhealthy, poorly fed and clothed, living in slums in shacks with no sewage systems, clean water or electricity.

These slums began to generate a lot of street crime as they tend to do. Outside of the cities on the main roads, there were soldiers and paramilitaries everywhere and one went from one armed roadblock to the other. Curiously enough, a large guerrilla movement had developed among the few remaining peasants and in teeming slums. Armed guerrillas extorted the latifundias for money that they called “war taxes.” The latifundias now paid a lot of money for paramilitaries to patrol their lands.

In the slums, an urban guerrilla movement was developing. Police, soldiers and paramilitary members were attacked with bombs, RPG’s and automatic weapons all the time and took significant casualties. The war had now moved to the city where there was no war before. Bomb and gun attacks hit city police stations on a regular basis. Death squads and army units roamed the land and the unarmed Left in the form or human rights activists, labor union members and organizers, community organizers and activists, environmentalists, campesino organizations, organizations of slum-dwellers and indigineous leaders were murdered and tortured to death on a regular basis.

The idiot US and the West see this as a process of “Communist guerrillas trying to subvert Colombian democracy, shoot their way into power, and set up a murderous Communist dictatorship which will destroy freedom and prosperity in Colombia”. The vast majority of Americans and others in the West actually buy this bullshit. Many on the Left refuse to support the Colombian guerrilla, insisting that they are anachronistic and that they should try to seek power peacefully. However, since the FARC disarmed, former members and members of newly formed political parties have been massacred like flies. So state terror blocks all road to peaceful change, leaving no alternative but the way of the gun.

Obviously the ridiculous analysis of this situation that Westerners believe has no basis in reality. The Western media cheers on the genocidal Colombian state and says that the Colombian democracy is waging a war against irrational and bloodthirsty terrorism, typically linked with drug trafficking to describe them as criminals and destroy their legitimacy.

As long as this process goes on, Colombia’s economy will stay forever backwards.

It is necessary to do a land reform in the rural areas before any country can prosper economically. Indeed this “socialist” project of land reform which the US spent decades in the Cold War slaughtering millions of people to stop was actually implemented by the US in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan in order to fend off a Communist threat. Oddly enough, it ended up creating the basis for subsequent booming development in those places.

Land reform was and is the basis for the Communist and Leftist revolutions and guerrilla forces in South Vietnam, Thailand, Colombia, Nepal, Peru, Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Paraguay in the past 55-65 years, with some of the revolutions happening later 40 years ago. In Paraguay this process has just started several years ago when a FARC split has taken up arms agains the state.

Alt Left: Fascism, In Its Many and Varied Forms, Continues to Rampage Across the Planet

Rambo: Your friend there is wrong, Highbrow. Fascism is NOT dead. Just look around the world. Trying my best not to spout clichés, it’s very much alive and well. Maybe that’s what Highbrow has been trying to remind people of.

Yes, and fascism now is taking dramatically different forms than it has in the past. In general, fascism is political process set up by capitalists when they are facing a serious threat from the Left. Any rightwing authoritarian regime or dictatorship against the Left, especially a popular one, can only be seen as fascist.

Therefore, there were many fascist regimes in the world in the last 75 years. States in bold house current fascist regimes. States in normal print indicate past fascist regimes:

In Latin America in Guatemala until 1995, El Salvador until 1992, Honduras, Nicaragua until 1979, Haiti, Colombia, Brazil, Peru under Fujimori in the 1990’s, Ecuador, Bolivia under Hugo Banzer in the 1950’s and briefly last year, Argentina under Videla and Uruguay under the generals in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Paraguay, and Chile under Pinochet, but also in Spain under Franco until 1975, Portugal under Salazar until 1974, Croatia and Serbia after the Balkans War, Greece under the generals in the late 1960’s, Ukraine, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Pakistan under Zia in the 1980’s, India, Iran under the Shah until 1979, Liberia under Samuel Doe in the 1980’s, Zaire under Mobutu, South Africa under apartheid, Rhodesia under Ian Smith, Morocco under the king, Brunei under the Sultan, the Philippines, Vietnam under Thieu and Diem, Thailand Burma under the generals, Indonesia under Soekarno, South Korea under Singhman Rhee in the 1950’s until 1980, Taiwan in the 1950’s until 1980 and China in the late 1940’s under Chiang Kai Chek, and Fiji.

Incipient fascism is creeping in the US, the UK, Israel, Poland, and Hungary.

There is presently strong fascist opposition in Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Belarus, Lebanon, and Hong Kong.

Pro-fascist democracies exist in the Dominican Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Georgia in particular and frankly, in the entire EU and NATO because the EU and NATO are supporting the fascist opposition in Latin America, the fascist government in Ukraine, and the fascist opposition in Belarus these days.

There are arguments that the Taliban is fascist, but I’m not buying it. I’m also not buying arguments about “Islamo-fascism.” Nor do I think China, North Korea, Belarus, or Russia are fascist.

More on Moral Differences Between Christianity and Judaism

*Except where otherwise noted, “the Jews” below means Israel or the Jews of Israel, not the Diaspora. Diaspora Jews will be referred to as such.

Mungamunga: I’ll point out the obvious: A look at European history reveals that Christians aren’t any more merciful than anyone else. Its main use in this context is to give Christians the assumed moral authority to be appalled at other people doing what they themselves have been doing for centuries. I’d point out examples like King Leopold of Belgium in historically recent times, but that would be piling on.

I will admit that the NT valorizes mercy, etc. for those who want to practice it, and the OT basically doesn’t. If anything, the fact that Christians had a founder and a text teaching mercy and yet still failed spectacularly to practice it makes them look worse if anything.

At least we are supposed to be merciful. Are the Jews? Look at how they act!

I’m thinking though that that’s why the West has been so appalled at the behavior of the Jews (Israel). The way the Jews act offends our sensibilities. Robert Fisk was reporting from there one time and he said it’s about a difference in values – the Jews value Old Testament values of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. This is where I got the whole idea for this essay – from his article.

I’m having a hard time understanding why the West is so terrible and unmerciful these days.

The West is leading edge of all sorts of rights-based movements that could be argued are based on mercy. Do the Jews believe in equal rights? Hell no. Look at how they act.

The most humane prison conditions are found in the West. Do the Jews believe in humane prisons? Are you kidding?

There are countries in the West that literally have no homeless. Do the Jews believe in helping the homeless? Hell, no. One could argue that the Palestinians are the ultimate “homeless” people – the Gods of Homelessness as it were. Are the Jews building houses for these homeless folks? Hell, no. They are tearing them down and stealing everything of theirs that isn’t tied down.

Even the Jewish “Left” in Israel is shot through and through with OT values. Granted the Jews in the Diaspora act pretty good, but they are secularized and largely removed from the Jewish religion. Their behavior is based on Reform Judaism, a bake your own cake approach to Judaism where you pick and choose what you want to believe and and throw out in the Jewish religion.

“Reform Judaism: Leading the Way to a Better World”

This has resulted in a lot of Diaspora Jews pushing a Left idea that the Jews were chosen by God to lead Gentiles to a better world. I believe this is a bit insulting as it implies that we Christians can’t do it on own, but maybe that’s true and anyway I’m not one to quibble with the idea of leading the way to a better world. The basic concept is great. This is the Judaism of, say, Bernie Sanders. He’s been quoted many times to that effect. It is this impulse that has been behind most of the Jewish-led rights movements in the Diaspora for the last century.

It’s pretty obvious that the behavior of the Jews in Israel – “Jewy” Jews or Super Jews if you want to call them that because they are really Jewish – is not based on such an expansive “lead the Gentiles to a better world” way of thinking. However the Jewish Left in Israel is “progressive except for Palestine” – that is, they buy into the basic package of Reform Judaism of leading the way to a better world when it comes to everything else, but they are fascist monsters when it comes to their treatment of the Arabs. These Left Jews are already heading outside of standard Orthodox Judaism, which one can argue is the true or at least pure Jewish faith undiluted.

Marxism as an “Additive Factor” to the Rights and Mercy Based Approach to Christianity

Another huge justice-based approach has come from Marxism, which in a lot of ways has mirrored a Christian rights-based approach to mercy and fairness. No society ever treated national minorities as well as the USSR did and China does. Sure, Europe is doing this too, but this is also flowing out not just Christianity but the extent to which the Christian-based societies have had their Mercy quotient doubled by the addition of right-based Marxism to rights and Mercy-based Christianity. This is particularly powerful.

I think the Marxists were wrong to attack Christianity. It is the only religion that seems compatible with Marxism. The Jews? Forget it. They can’t do it. The Jewish Marxists in the West and the USSR all left the religion. Muslims? Muslims and Marxism don’t mix real well. It hasn’t worked out very well there, although those societies are based on “socialism for Muslims” as you point out. To that extent, the Jews also have done very well at pushing a “socialism for Jews only” in Israel.

To the Extent Christian Societies are Unmerciful, This Impulse Is Backed Up by Quoting the OT, not the NT

Our failures in the past are not particularly relevant, especially since most of that shitty behavior was backed up by quoting the Old Testament.

If you notice, all of the unmerciful stuff is being pushed by Republicans, who base it on – guess what? The Old Testament! When do you hear a Republican quoting the OT?

The Christian societies of Latin America have been deeply unmerciful, but the Left there has been based on an extreme rights and justice based approach. A lot of this is coming out of an extremely NT-based Catholic philosophy called Liberation Theology that prioritizes “the preferential option of the poor.” You see any of that in Israel? The darling of the Jewish “Left” in Israel now is fully behind Prime Minister Bennett, who openly brags about how many Arabs he has killed and says that the Palestinians will never be free. He’s as reactionary as Netanyahu.

Mungamunga: I would also note that to the extent that mercy, etc. was an ideal in Christian societies, it mainly was practiced among members of the in-group. Jews and Muslims do the same things for each other. That’s the nature of humans as a social species.

Nowadays the West is very merciful towards Muslims, Jews, etc. They have more rights in the West as minorities than they do anywhere else, where they are sometimes not treated real well. How about the Jews and the Muslims? How do they treat religious minorities? Not real well! The Christians are the only people who even try to treat religious minorities well.

A Strictly Theological Argument

In fact, I would argue that the OT isn’t even Christianity anymore. If you asked me, I would say the OT is simply Judaism. It’s not even our religion. And this is true in a theological sense.

I was mostly arguing in a theological sense and I’d prefer to keep it to that. By Christian doctrine, all of the Christians were originally Jews, bound by the Law. We also had Israel. Israel and the Law. The greatest Jew in history, Jesus Christ, came to us, possibly from the spiritual world above, to free us from the Law. In place of the Law, Jesus brought Mercy with a capital M.

The Jews, now Christians, were freed from the Law and ordered to live according to the new religion, the Religion of Mercy. At the same time as they lost the Law, they also lost Israel. So the Jews don’t get Israel anymore by Christian thinking. Instead of them getting, the “Church became the New Israel” in a theological sense. The promised land, the homeland, instead of Israel, became the Church itself. Instead of “next year in Jerusalem,” it became “next year in the Church.”

In addition, with the advent of Jesus and Mercy, the OT itself was “replaced” by the NT. That’s what Replacement Theology is all about. The OT isn’t even relevant to us Christians anymore, except perhaps as an historical document about our less than civilized roots. To me, Christianity is just the NT. We might as well throw out the OT. It’s just Judaism anyway.

Mungamunga: Its main use in this context is to give Christians the assumed moral authority to be appalled at other people doing what they themselves have been doing for centuries.

Sure, but we don’t do this anymore is the argument. And we don’t. Rest of the world following suit? Not so much. But where they are, many of them are aping the West, to their credit.

Mungamunga: I can’t really blame anyone for this, because the Christian ethic demands complete self-abnegation, or you’ve already failed. Turn the other cheek. If someone steals from you, give them more than they stole.

This part of Christianity does not fly. I’ll give you that all right. The problem with Christianity is that it requires you to be “too good.” Most of us are just not “good” enough to be these good Christians that we are supposed to be. We are too sinful in a Christian sense or one could argue survival-based instead of subjection and surrender based. For those who could not be good Christians, they had other options. Atheism, Judaism perhaps, Islam, or a warped OT version of Christianity that frankly doesn’t require you to be nearly as good or at least not so self-destructive and supplicant.

Alt Left: The Syriza Party in Greece: Anatomy of a Sellout

Interesting abstract from Academia. All papers on Academia can be downloaded and reprinted for free. Syriza was the radial left hope for Europe in the wake of the 2008 Depression in which Greece was hit perhaps worst of all. The Right says it was because of Greece’s tax and spend policies, but Greece’s taxes are not high, nor is it’s social democracy particularly robust. The true problem is massive corruption of the political classes at all ends of the spectrum combined with an absolute failure of the wealthy classes to pay as much as one nickel in taxes. In other words, The Latin American Disease (in part) because Latin America suffers from exactly these problems more than anything else.

Syriza had a very powerful voice in opposition to the Austerity Regime demanded by the EU out of Germany (Germany basically runs the EU and lays down the law). There were two ways out of the debt crisis. Either go into crisis austerity and sell off a good portion of their public lands and enterprises, or simply default on their debt and start all over again. Perhaps both would have been equally painful, but I think default would have been best.

As is, a good portion of Greece’s public lands and public enterprises (the health care system, national parks, electric grid, hydropower, a number of actual islands of the country itself) were sold off the lowest of capitalist parasites. Anyone think the national parks, electric grid, health care system, hydropower, and even the very islands of the nation itself will be any better off now that they are in the hands of a lot of greedheads? They’re not. Nothing good ever happens with any of these sell-offs of private enterprises.

Worse, the selling off of the very partrimony of Greece itself was combined with the worst austerity, elimination of health care and all social programs for the masses combined with massive job losses so the masses of unemployed could not count on any state help now that they could not pay their bills. In other words, the Greeks got the worst of both worlds. Austerity and selloff and they gained nothing at all other than emptied pockets and rifled and ransacked goods.

No one could pay for medical care or hospital beds either. Many people were thrown out of their homes because they could not pay the rent and shantytowns of former workers and even middle class people sprung up all over Greece. Some political parties, even the far Right Golden Dawn to their credit, stepped in to try to provide the social help that the state would not.

This was followed by the election of Syriza, which campaigned on not paying the debt and opposing austerity. As soon as they got in power, they quickly changed their tune. I don’t think they sold out so much as they did not have the guts to go through with the program. No doubt there were massive pressures on them to go through the standard austerity model. At any rate, Syriza did not default on its debt like Argentina and Iceland did (to little effect on their economies), and they implemented austerity with full force. They sold out the masses completely.

As they stayed in power, they moved more and more to the right. Now that they are out of power, they have moved even further to the right. There is a new rightwing government called New Democracy in charge about which I know little, except I assume they’re not real great. Syriza is now utterly unable to offer an alternative to ND, while ND has apparently completely failed in the COVID epidemic as most rightwing governments everywhere did, no doubt leaving many corpses in its wake.

We have the standard Latin American model here where the Right (call it the Conservatives in Colombia or ARENA in El Salvador) “the right wing of the oligarchy” is absolutely toxic, but the Left (call it the Liberals in Colombia, the AD and APRA “social democratic” traitors in Venezuela and Peru), etc. are simply the “liberal wing of the oligarchy,” which in practice means virtually no change at all.

AD in Venezuela has combined with the fascist Right to overthrow the Chavistas, backing every coup attempt of various flavors against the government. For all intents and purposes, they’re not much different from Guaido. AD was always just a party to split up the loot from the oil rents from the state oil company amongst the oligarchs and the upper middle class management of the company.

This is very discouraging and it sounds like Thatcher’s TINA (There is No Alternative) response to neoliberalism. Perhaps there is no alternative to neoliberalism and austerity in the EU model, which has always been based on neoliberal orthodoxy. Note that debt cannot exceed

If the situation in the EU is TINA, then Brexit is the way to go. Greece and a few others have been threatening to do that, but the NATO fascist military alliance (NATO has always been run by the US) is the imperialist glue that holds the EU economic community together. A neoliberal economic community held together by a fascist imperialist army. What else is new? Straight out of Milton Friedman (“Neoliberalism cannot be imposed democratically; it must be imposed by dictatorship”) himself. It is very hard to leave NATO. Notice even the Brits didn’t do that. NATO may be an abusive spouse for many of the nations inside the alliance, but if so, most NATO countries are Stockholmed wives.

I don’t know what to say except that this is yet another sellout of the Left.

For all of their faults, the governments of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Argentina have refused to go this route. At the moment, Peru is also challenging this model. The penalty has been repeated coup attempts in most these countries, economic wars, and sanctions, but at least they didn’t sell out. I still think this sort of resistance is the way to go, painful or not.

Our existences have dignity or they are worthless. The EU model is the death of dignity. At least with the Pink Tide, those nations can hold their heads up amidst the ruins and say

At least we are free. We may be poor but at least we are free.

You know that’s got to be worth something.

Outside of the homeland, there is nothing.

– A famous Baath Party intellectual from Iraq

Whatever beefs I had with Saddam, and I had plenty; Hell, at least he was a nationalist in a time when such patriots are scarce and viewed as traitors to the International Globalist Elite based on multinational corporate rule over the rule of actual states. Governments are increasingly irrelevant now that billionaires and corporations have more money and power than many actual countries.

SISP Conference 2021, Online, 9-11 September 2021

SYRIZA back in opposition (2019-2021): Towards a new political direction?

Grigoris Markou

Postdoctoral researcher, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Abstract

SYRIZA’s spectacular rise to power through a radical political proposal and a strong populist discourse has been the field of study of a large number of political scientists in recent years. Alexis Tsipras (Syriza’s leader) in opposition and in power expressed a strong inclusionary populist discourse, placing popular classes at a central position and opposing the political and economic establishment of the country and Europe.

SYRIZA, during its second term began to change its physiognomy, abandoning gradually its radicalism and embracing a typed of “political realism” and consensus, while it began to soften its populist intensity and passion. After the end of its rule (2019), it became clear that SYRIZA’s populism had nothing to do with the populist intensity and passion of the previous years.

SYRIZA (2019-present) continued to maintain some populist slogans and a kind of anti-elitism (e.g. “the many” against “the establishment”), but to a lesser extent.

Furthermore, a huge gap has been created between the party and the popular classes. SYRIZA can’t persuade, mobilize and lead the people against the right-wing government of New Democracy in a period of intense social discontent with the management of the pandemic and the economy by the Greek government and at a time when popular demands for democracy, justice, and labor protection are emerging.

In this presentation, I will present the main characteristics of SYRIZA’s political discourse after its defeat in the 2019 national election, attempting to find if the party continues to express a populist discourse or not through discourse analysis while underlining its new political direction. Furthermore, I will examine the reasons the rapid transformation of the party in a more mainstream and “realistic” direction.

Alt Left: What Are the Causes of Antisemitism?

Jews Out-compete Gentiles, Probably Due to Superior Genetics

I do think that Jews outcompete non-Jews, mostly due to intelligence, and this contributes to antisemitism. And they do tend to hire and promote their own, while exempting themselves from anti-discrimination statutes. I think the Jews are simply superior intellectually, and this allows them to out-compete non-Jews, get more and better jobs, gain wealth, control and monopolize industries, etc.

I will say that Jews act a lot better nowadays. I’ve read how US Jews behaved 100 years ago, and US Gentiles had no choice but to counter Jewish ethnic warfare with anti-Semitism. This is unfortunate and sad. But Jews don’t seem to be doing this so much anymore these days. Control over newspaper media and Hollywood was in fact a Jewish conspiracy, but it was not done to be evil or control the world. Instead it was simply done out of paranoia, the ever-present Jewish mindset.

Jews Took Over the Media and Hollywood Out of Paranoia, Not Evil and a Desire for Money and Power

In the late 1800’s, many US papers were openly racist and White Supremacist. They didn’t say much about Jews, but Jews don’t like it when White Gentiles get racist because that tends to circle back on the Jews at some point. So some very wealthy Jews got together and bought up some big papers to take them out of the hands of the racists. The Ochs and Sulzberger takeover of The Times worked this way.

Jewish ownership of the media used to be a lot worse. Now it’s just conglomerates and billionaires buying up papers. Yet the media still engages in the same behavior that anti-Semites condemned when the “Jewish media” did it. This suggests that the problem is not a Jewish media but more of a general attitude that US media have in common regardless of ethnicity.

Same thing in movies. In the early days of the movies, Birth of the Nation and other movies came out that glorified White Supremacism, in the case of BOTN, the KKK. The Jews were alarmed and figured it would circle back on them some day. Four Jews who came from an area within a 100 mile radius in Galicia got together and pretty much bought up Hollywood, once again to keep it out of the hands of the racists.

It stayed this way for a long time. This is changing now, though some aspects are still quite Jewish, such as TV. However, the movies are diverse. In particular, some Italian directors have now set up huge studios, and they don’t typically hire vast numbers of Jews for their movies. A stroll through the credits will show you that.

Sure, there are still plenty of Jews in Hollywood at all levels, but they don’t exactly run the place anymore. Once again, the movie people engage in behavior via their movies that is exactly the same as the messages antisemites accused “Jewish Hollywood” of pushing, hence the problem again seems to be not so much with “Jewish Hollywood” as with a “general Hollywood way of looking at the world.”

How Stupid Does a Gentile Country Have to Be to Let a Tiny Pissant Tribe of Jews Take Over?

Lastly, antisemites complain about Jews taking over a few Gentile countries in some way. Note that this takeover has mostly been in order to get the government to support Israel because that’s the only common cause they have. Otherwise, Jews hardly concur on anything. Two Jews, three opinions.

Be that as it may, but how stupid do Gentiles have to be to let

The Main Reason for Antisemitism: The Jews Created and Maintain the Left

The antisemite line is that liberalism, the Left, socialism, and Communism are all Jewish plots. In that case, I say let’s hear it for the Jews!

No matter the negative aspects of Jews, we on the Left owe a tremendous debt to the Jews, for the Jewish virtually birthed and raised the Modern Left to maturity, and they continue to support it to this day, although the growth far Right Jewish Fascism in Israel and to some extent in the US has somewhat put a damper on that. True, the liberal Jews in the US supported the Jewish fascists in Israel, but they oppose fascism everywhere else, including here. Jews are some of the leaders in the pro-democracy and anti-fascism movements in the US today. I don’t know what we would do without them.

Jews, Especially Jewish Males, Are Highly Aggressive, Even Thuggish People

I do think a valid critique of Jews is that many are very aggressive people, especially the males. They have a reputation for rudeness, obnoxiousness, ruthlessness, zero-sum games, playing hardball, fighting dirty, throwing out all the rules, and an Old Testament eye for an eye mindset in contradiction to Mercy ideally inherent, though often not present, in Christian societies.

Many of the big Jews in academia and business have a thuggish character. I’ve been told by Jews themselves that this is all down to a culture that demands absolute success or else with no room left for not succeeding. This ends up creating a very aggressive person determined to succeed at all costs with a concomitant terror of failure.

Perhaps aggressive folks are well-liked in our hyper-capitalist society where such belligerent and Machiavellian folks prosper to the heights, but I’m an introvert, and they rub me the wrong way. But that’s no reason to hate or discriminate against anyone. I don’t hate aggressive people. I simply choose not to be around them. Them over there, me here. A divorce.

No ethnic group is perfect and for all of the flaws of the Jews, I think they have tremendous good qualities (see the Jews and the Left above) which may or may not outweigh the bad depending on your views. There are some ethnic groups out there who have what I call “all of the bad qualities of Jews and none of the good ones.” They are truly insufferable.

Alt Left: Psychopathy and the Left

Another really cool comment from a commenter on psychopathy, in this case from a Left perspective. I’m so glad some of my commenters have figured out I’m a Leftie. I am. I’m a really, really weird Leftie, but I’m basically a Leftie. There’s nothing in any form of US conservatism that appeals to me and the Democrats are far better than the Republicans, though my complaint is they are not left enough. On the other hand, I am rather socially conservative for a Leftie, but I have a feeling a lot of us are like that.

In Manuel’s previous post about his own country, Venezuela, where 7

I’m thinking there are lot more “Conservative Left” types out there. I can see quite a few in Nicaragua. There seem to be a lot in Russia and the former USSR, Eastern Europe, Turkey, North Africa, the Basque Country, the Arab World, and especially in China. Conservative Left people are still on the Left. We will vote left most everywhere on Earth. We’re just not down with whatever the latest PC, SJW, woke lunacy of the week is, that’s all.

Manuel Rodriguez: Putting that aside, there is something else I wanted to talk about. Let’s talk about psychopathy from a leftist perspective! This is an angle that nobody seems to take.

I realized that just like patriarchy and capitalism go together, so are psychopathy and capitalism almost bedfellows. The values that capitalism promotes feed into psychopathy allow encourage it to resonate through society almost as an unseen force like gravity. The end products of individualism socially rewarded in capitalism, even though they maximizing one’s material wealth either morally or not and using other people to get it. Capitalism defends its interests from perceived threats with violence, often extreme violence, via endlessly creative methods.

One thing I always wondered about was how psychopathy might effect leftist and revolutionary processes. I thought of cases where a “dictator” type climbs up the social ladder and reaches the top. These people seem to be pretty brutal and in some cases, they have lived like kings via the labor of their countrymen. This same mechanism, these same types are easily able to infiltrate and advance in political parties to where they can climb the social hierarchy, often leading to these people becoming extremely corrupt.

Whenever psychopathy is brought up, there is always someone who points out who psychopathy can be beneficial to society in the case of controlled psychopaths in the police and military. This led me to wonder whether controlled psychopaths may have a role to play in revolutionary processes.

On the whole though, I think psychopaths, controlled and uncontrolled, do more harm than good.

Repost: A Quick Overview of Some Types of Internet Scams

Same thing, reformatting and reposting some old posts. Hope you enjoy.

I don’t talk about it much on here, but I had a Yahoo group with over 1,200 members to fight scammers out of Nigeria and West Africa. We focused on the love scammers. These are people, often males or gangs of males, who use fake pictures of men or women, often stolen from porn or model sites, to engage in fake Internet romances with Westerners, the purpose of which is to get money out of them. In many cases, the scam can go on for years or until all of the money is drained.

Nigeria is Ground Zero for romance scamming, and Ghana is second. Many Ghanaian scammers are Nigerians. It’s also spread to Benin. These are the same scumbags who started off with the famous 419 scams and now are branching out.

They are now into romance scams, fake renter scams, fake buyer scams, fake auction buyer scams, and fake seller scams (especially beetles from the Cameroon).

The fake renter scam works something like the guy is going to rent your place but somehow needs money fronted to him. He never shows up for the room, and you lose the money.

Fake buyer scams involve the use of stolen credit cards to buy stuff in the West and have it shipped to West Africa. Merchants report that out of every 10,000 credit card requests from West Africa, not even one will be legit. The culture of lying, stealing, and general scumminess is so pervasive in West Africa that most credit card companies have banned the whole area from getting any cards. Fake buyer scams also involve overpayment schemes.

They write you a $10,000 check.

But the item is only worth $4,000.

The check is no good. You deposit it and send the $4,000 back to the guy Western Union.

3 weeks later the check goes bad and you lose $4,000.

Similar schemes involving expertly forged money orders, especially US postal money orders, are common. You cash the money order, keep 2

In 3 weeks it goes bad, and now you owe $5,000 or whatever.

And the banks do want to get paid. Banks will often just cash any shitty check for you without even checking to see if it’s any good. They have actually fought legislation to require them to figure out if the check is any good before they cash it. This would be time-consuming and harm their capitalist bottom line.

Auction buyer scams are similar to overpayment scams. I believe that they also set up fake seller schemes. You send the money and the stuff never shows up.

The beetle scams were interesting. There are actually lots of guys who are so weird that they actually collect beetles. They pin them to boards and whatnot. I guess it’s more honorable than politics or pitching prime loans. Anyway, Cameroon has an incredible amount of beetles, including some of the hugest and rarest beetles on Earth. The West Africans quickly infiltrated the beetle lists on the Net and offered to sell these rare beetles. Lots of folks shelled out $100’s for them, and of course they never showed up.

The West Africans have now fanned out all over the world and operate out of many places, doing their scams. The Nigerians are notorious and hated all over Africa by their fellow Blacks for being a nation of liars, thieves, crooks, and all around scumbuckets. There are now expat Nigerian gangs in Libya, Egypt, Spain, Netherlands, the UK, Switzerland, etc.

Nigerians have swarmed in the Balearic Islands of Spain, where if you go into the cafes, it’s all Nigerians, and probably 9

In Nigeria itself, in many of the cafes, many to all of the people in there are criminals sitting there all day and nite trying to rip off Westerners. One of our informants saw a famous local TV newscaster who had lost his job in the cafe trying to steal from Americans.

There is now a tremendous amount of romance scamming coming out of the Philippines. They scam in the open, use their real faces and real names, and shamelessly rip off every American guy they can find. These are usually young Filipinas promising love or marriage to American males. The law enforcement system in the Philippines is terminally broken, and LE does not even bother to arrest or prosecute the scammers. Philippines is starting to seem like as much of a failed state as an African nation.

There is also a lot of Internet crime coming out of Russia, including romance scamming. The romance scammers are the Russian Mafia operating out of Mari-El Republic. Dating sites are saturated with fake Russian chicks promising to marry you. They hire college students, male and female, to write letters to the Western male suckers and draw them in. Female coeds man the phones 24-7. When you call up your Russian lover girl, Natasha answers the phone and pretends to be whoever she needs to be. End of the scam is she needs airfare to come marry you. You fork it over and she never shows.

The Russians to their credit have busted some of the scammers. There have been several arrest roll-ups, and hundreds of crooks have been arrested, but the scamming goes on. With the return of capitalism, Russia has turned into one of the world’s most horrible epicenters of Organized Crime, Internet Crime, scams, and ripoffs.

There are also many scams, including romance, rental, and auction scams, coming out of Eastern Europe. The return of capitalism has also turned much of this area into crime-flooded pestholes, and Organized Crime practically runs the show in many places. Little is known about these criminals, but the auction scams are mostly run by “Romanians.” Investigation revealed that all or nearly all of these “Romanians” were actually Gypsies, possibly the most criminal ethnic group on the planet.

Alt Left: Repost: Interview With a Bhutanese Maoist Leader

This is a repost from some time ago. The old posts are nor formatted properly, so they are very difficult to read. A lot of them are pretty cool for reposts though. This is an interview with a leader of the Bhutanese Maoists who are beginning an armed insurgency against the Bhutanese state.

A little background: Actually, in some ways, this is a racial conflict. About 100 years ago, many Nepalese moved into Southern Bhutan as immigrants. Apparently this immigration was completely legal, as in they were not illegal immigrants. The majority of the people in Bhutan were more Mongoloid Asian types, Buddhists who phenotypically resemble Tibetans and speak a Tibeto-Burman language. The Nepalese were Hindus speaking Nepali, an Indo-European language.

Phenotypically, Nepalese are very unusual. They are on the border between Caucasians and Asians. Some more resemble Caucasians and some more resemble Asians. Most of the ones who moved into Southern Bhutan were more Caucasian types. Anyway, at some point, they become 6

A few decades ago, for some unknown reason, the monarchy simply ethnically cleansed most of the Nepalese out of the country and so ended up with a more mono-ethnic and monocultural state. Furthermore, the Nepalese were forbidden from returning. They have been festering in refugee camps ever since, and have been growing more and more radical.

Soon a Maoist party was born and it developed a huge following in the camps. Very huge! In the past few years, they have began an armed struggle inside Bhutan, but there have only been a few incidents. Apparently they are laying the groundwork for people’s war, which they claim they have not yet began.

Sushil claims that the Bhutanese state is feudal or semi-feudal, and I think he is probably correct. The entire region remains feudal to semi-feudal – India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and even Afghanistan. The feudalism tends to cut across ethnic and religious boundaries and seems to be a regionalism. Recall that Tibetan was actually feudal until the Maoists took over in 1949 and overthrew the feudal monarchy.

In this region, the feudal monarchs usually use religion, as such folks always do and have always done, to enforce feudalism. The Hindu monarchs in Nepal claimed tied closely into their Hindu Gods. More or less the same with the Dalai Lamas in Tibet, similar to the divinely appointed religous-political monarchs that ruled in Europe for so long.

I figure if you throw a bunch of humans on an island, after a while, the strongest will kill and or subject the weaker ones. Some total prick will rise up, call himself ruler – king – whatever, somehow gather up 9

This group has connections to Maoists in Nepal who now form a huge portion of the government (4

An Interview with Comrade Sushil of the Communist Party of Bhutan (Marxist-Leninist- Maoist), the party which is waging armed struggle against the Monarchy in Bhutan. Talks about tactics, strategy and aims of the party.

———— ——— ——— ——— –

Saturday, May 23, 2009

The following Interview was conducted at some point in the previous few weeks. It occurred somewhere in the area of the Indian-Bhutan border.

Lal Salam Blog: Thank you very much for meeting with me. So are you from Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Yes, from Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: From the Bhutanese refugee camps?

Comrade Sushil: Uhh, actually people think that all our party are from the refugees, but i am from Bhutan. I have spent allot of time in India, working, but then also in Bhutan and then in Nepal working for the party as well.

Lal Salam Blog: So you are a cadre of the Communist Party Bhutan (Marxist Leninist Maoists)?

Comrade Sushil: Yes i am a member of the Communist Party of Bhutan (Marxist Leninist Maoist). I have been a member since 2003 and i have worked actively as a whole timer since the same year. I joined the party from within Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: What is the history of the Party?

Comrade Sushil: The CPB (MLM) was established on the 7th of November 2001, and the announcement of the Party was on the 22nd of April 2003. From this time the party has been working with the exploited people in Bhutan. The people are all exploited by the regime, so our party has been working with all the people, mainly in rural areas, but in urban areas also. Mostly we work with the people in the villages.

Lal Salam Blog: So what are the problems in Bhutan? What sort of oppressions are forced on the people of Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: The biggest problem is the feudal monarchy. Because of this monarchy the problems are created. Peoples standard of living has been kept backwards because of the Monarchy. In a third world country like Bhutan, this is because of feudalism. This feudalism is the main problem of Bhutan. This is why the Communist Party, our glorious party, is working to overthrow the regime, and to overthrow feudalism.

Lal Salam Blog: So the goal of the Party for now is to throw out feudalism from Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Definitely. The main aim of our party is to overthrow feudalism and to establish the peoples rule in Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: So you would like to establish a People’s State in Bhutan? Is that what you would have replace the King?

Comrade Sushil: We should not understand like this. We should replace the king with a Proletarian Dictatorship. Our aim, our hope, no our dream is to establish a New Democratic Socialism. Only after that can we achieve our ultimate goal, which is to achieve communism. It is not only our goal to throw out the king and overthrow feudalism in Bhutan, but to establish a peaceful society that can achieve socialism and communism.

Lal Salam Blog: Last year your party started a Peoples War in Bhutan…

Comrade Sushil: No. We have not initiated a protracted peoples war in Bhutan. Since our parties establishment we have however had many rural peoples class struggles and these struggles have used different means. In different ways we have launched many struggles and programs, and we have the aim of reaching a level where we can launch a Protracted Peoples War.

Last year we did initiate some armed struggles, which is only a factor of the rural class struggle. Much of the media proclaimed this as the beginning of the Peoples War, but we are not at that phase. We are trying to reach the level of Peoples War, but we have not yet reached it, and are preparing for it. We do not know how long this will take, it will depend on many factors.

Lal Salam Blog: So there will be more attacks, more bombs and more armed actions in the future?

Comrade Sushil: Certainly. We are preparing for this. There will be more armed struggle. Without the armed struggle, we cannot change the situation in our country. We cannot change the state power. We will one day take the state power, but for now we are in preparation, making networks with the peasants and in the cities, training, preparing for the struggle.

Lal Salam Blog: Do you think Peoples War can be successful? Bhutan is already a very brutal state. As many as a sixth of the population lives in exile and the state has beaten, attacked, arrested and even raped and murdered those it perceives to be political activists?

Comrade Sushil: Our parties thought is that only by waging the armed struggle and the Peoples War can we win the liberation of our exploited people. I believe so. Thousands of people have been evicted from Bhutan, we are very aware of this. Why were they evicted? They were evicted after political activism and movements. They were evicted because the people in the southern belt had a high political consciousness. This is totally not a refugee problem, this is a political problem. It is a problem of a brutal monarchy and a restrictive feudal system. Without destroying these institutions we cannot solve these problems.

Our party is launching this armed struggle to liberate the exploited people and we know that one day we will be successful. This is a long term plan, it will take many preparations, and without this and without correct politics we cannot be successful. We have this ideology, the Marxist-Leninist- Maoist and this is a political weapon. With this weapon we believe that one day we will be successful.

Lal Salam Blog: So have you learnt much from the experiences of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and their experiences in Nepal? Are there close or special links between your parties?

Comrade Sushil: We do not have special or direct links with this party. But, and also like communists all around the world, in Peru, India or the Philippines we have ideological links. These places all have communist parties leading revolution through the armed struggle, and with all of them we have ideological links and an ideological relationship.

That means we support them ideologically and they support us ideologically. We have a relationship with the CP Nepal (Maoist) , but also with the CP India (Maoist) who are also waging an armed struggle. We don’t receive any physical support, or anything like that, but we should understand that we are all communists, and we are all internationalists, and we receive and give moral support.

Lal Salam Blog: What does your party think about Prachanda Path and the Nepali Maoists synthesis? It has been controversial to some international communists.

Comrade Sushil: About this Prachanda Path. It is something we should study. And also it is not only a thing to be studied, it has shown it has the ability to guide workers actions. I don’t want to comment more because the ideological things i have had not sufficiently studied, and till now our party has not discussed at length Prachanda Path.

Lal Salam Blog: The Maoists in Nepal have given up their Peoples War and taken a new tactic in pursuing the Constituent Assembly elections. Is this a correct tactic in your parties opinion?

Comrade Sushil: In regards to the UCPN (M) we do not think that they have given up their goals. We think they are pursuing another way, another tactic to establish a peoples state. We don’t think they have established the proletarian dictatorship. So we, our party, does not think that they have achieve state power. We too will go for a Constituent Assembly at first, and only after that can we step or jump or leap forward to a New Democratic revolution.

In the context of the Maoists we don’t think they have state power, and are still struggling for it. It is a fact that the future shows you which path you must take, you can only pick your path depending on the concrete situation you face. We will also move for a constituent assembly elections and a new state, but without establishing the proletarian people at the center of this new state then it cannot reach higher and improve the lives of the people. We think that the Maoists of Nepal face similar situations to us, and have similar actions, so we will continue to watch closely.

Lal Salam Blog: So a Constituent Assembly is a tactic that you are interested in for change in Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Actually it is the tactics and strategy of communist parties in the third world. Third world countries are semi-colonial and semi-feudal. So without a New Democratic Socialism stage we cannot reach socialism. So we are in this revolution, it is a peasant revolution we can say. So to reach our aims, to some extent we should aim for a Constituent Assembly, and this is our main slogan and the main aim of the present situation in our revolution.

That is not our only slogan, and out only goal, and it isn’t the only thing that we campaign around with the peasants and people of Bhutan. And we don’t want or aspire to another bourgeois constitution, but we need a constitution that is in favor of the oppressed and poor people of Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: Last year the government of Bhutan held elections, in a very restricted and controlled way, but the western media still presented this as a opening up and of “democracy”. If there was to be a more open electoral system, would the CPB (MLM) pursue peaceful politics through elections?

Comrade Sushil: WE think there is only one path to real democracy in Bhutan. We don’t believe in the current “democracy” this is well known. And we don’t think that this system can lead to real democracy. The international community has its formula and they see votes and call it democracy- but there is no such thing in Bhutan and it is not possible to impose a real democracy from the outside into Bhutan.

Any “democracy” that the regime brings into practice itself will be done in such a way so that real power continues to be restricted and kept in the hands of the old order, and not in the hands of the mass of exploited people, so that this “democracy” could not be used against the regime. Even if the regime cast out the king, it would not fundamentally change it. Our party will not make compromises with that order. We wont co-operate with their agenda, we have another agenda that is contradiction to theirs.

We are going to establish the rule of all the people while they just want to exploit them. There is this contradiction between the people and the regime. Our party struggles because of that. If they were to try and set up a “democracy” for then when we should not be a part of it. When i say this it does not mean that we are militarists. The people want peace, and don’t want to live in terror but this regime suppresses and exploits the people, they already live in terror. It is not a hobby to carry out armed struggle, it is our only option the liberation of our people.

Lal Salam Blog: Bhutan is such a tiny country, and it has very close relations, with India in particular. If you care to reach peoples war, do you think India would interfere to defend its interests?

Comrade Sushil: On this the whole party is very much conscious. But in the present situation India is not so dangerous to Bhutan. China is quite dangerous. 11,500 square kilometers of Bhutan’s lands have been occupied and taken by China. So we are surrounded by two very large and powerful countries, who are always looking to interfere into Bhutan. They have two ways of interfering. Political intervention and direct intervention. There are Indian Army camps established in Bhutan. There are several big barracks. We have known this but we don’t think they will intervene directly.

Maybe at some point in the future. There will be political intervention, and we can try to counter this with our allies by rousing grassroots support for our cause in India. We are already doing this. If they try to intervene militarily it will be a heavy cost for them, a bloody and long civil war. Also the regime and the fuedalists don’t want this. They want to defend their borders, protect his kingdom. We also want to establish the sovereignty of Bhutan, so we will always fight foreign influence, from India as well as China.

Lal Salam Blog: I understand that your party has allot of support amongst the refugees in Nepal.

Comrade Sushil: We are not just a party for the refugees. We have support where ever our people are.

Lal Salam Blog: So in India, Nepal and Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Yes.

Lal Salam Blog: And your party does work amongst all the communities of Bhutan and across the whole country, not just in the southern Belt that is largely Nepali speaking?

Comrade Sushil: The southern belt is not only Nepali speaking, but there are people from many communities there as well. Myself i haven’t been to the north as yet, our party does work there, but i have been working in the south and also in the east. In allot of people, and in the media there is allot of confusion. The CPB (MLM) is not just a party in the refugee camps, and not just Nepali speaking. We have cadres of many ethnic backgrounds, and our party works all over Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: For the refugees in Nepal is it true your party favors repatriation in Bhutan rather then resettlement in third countries?

Comrade Sushil: It is not that our party policy is just to return people to Bhutan. It is not a solution. Liberating the people of Bhutan is the only real and long term solution to this problem. We are not for resettlement, and we are not for repatriation in Bhutan without changing anything else. Moving people around like they are animals is not a solution. That is our position. There needs to be a political solution to this, and only then can the refugees get their rights.

Some people have said our party was created to agitate for the repatriation of refugees, this is not the case. Our party was established within Bhutan and amongst the people. We are in favour of all the oppressed people.Only understanding the problem of the refugees as a problem of the political structure of Bhutan that we can find a solution. Our party was not established for the refugees, but for all the Bhutanese.

Alt Left: The People Choose Democracy over Aristocratic Rule in Latin America

Down in Latin America, once the Left takes over the state, they prove to be so popular with the poor majority that the oligarchic parties of authoritarian Right shrink to ~2

The Right literally cannot win in places that have tasted socialism like Nicaragua and Venezuela. The only way they win is by cheating, election fraud/rigging, and coups of various kinds – electoral, lockout, economic, legislative, judicial, and military. Or they run as Leftists and then turn hard right the minute they get in like Lenin Moreno in Ecuador.

In other places, people seem to be rejecting aristocratic rule.

A majority in Colombia seems poised to elect a fairly leftwing politician.

A literal Marxist, a Palestinian Chilean, has been leading polls in Chile for some time now.

A Marxist just barely won the Presidency in Peru.

The rightwing coup in Bolivia was overthrown, and the Left won handily again.

Argentina has been electing the leftwing Peronist Fernandez dynasty for some time now. The only way the Right won last time was because rightwing banksters on Wall Street deliberately crashed the economy so the Right got in on the protest vote.

In Paraguay, the last democratic election elected a Leftist, a former priest. He was overthrown in a legislative coup, and it’s been a rightwing dictatorship ever since.

Honduras elected a leftwinger, and a moderate one at that, in its last democratic election. The US immediately sponsored a coup, and it has been a rightwing military dictatorship ever since.

The Left has been winning in various Caribbean islands for some time.

Haiti has been under one form or another of rightwing dictatorship ever since US Special Forces removed President Aristide at gunpoint in a military coup. Aristide’s party, Lavalas, was extremely popular and got 9

The fascist Bolsonaro is now unpopular, and the moderately leftwing Workers Party is now ahead in the polls. The PT was removed in a judicial coup via lawfare with the help of the US FBI (I knew there was a reason I hated feds). The President and Vice President were literally put in prison on completely fake charges. This is the only Bolsonaro got in. However, Brazil definitely has a significant base for fascism as in Colombia for whatever reason.

Lopez Obrador or AMLO for short won the recent election in Mexico, a country long marred by extreme election fraud. He’s the most leftwing president in some time. However, he has governed from the Center. Nevertheless, the Mexican oligarchy (with deep ties to the Catholic Church) nevertheless has been threatening a coup ever since he took office.

The Right only won in Ecuador last time around because Lenin Moreno banned the leftwing party and exiled its leader, Correa. The government has stated that he will be jailed if he returns. The charges are faked. The Right only won last time around because the election was grossly unfair. There was no actual election fraud in terms of altering the vote, but the campaigning leading up to the election was grotesquely unfair.

Cuba, A Failed State?

President Biden insists that Cuba is a failed state.

Nope.

They have the best education system in Latin America.

The highest rate of physicians to population on Earth.

A medical system so good that extremely rightwing anti-Communist fanatics all over Latin America gave been flying there for years. A lot of people now fly there for medical tourism, but the state charges them.

Cuba is a world leader in the medical technology field, and it competes well against capitalist corporations.

They still make the best cigars on Earth.

A very high

This tiny island with noting under a total blockade just marketed an excellent Coronavirus vaccine, and it has four more in the pipeline.

Its COVID rate and death rate is the lowest in Latin America.

It has the highest number of agronomists per capita on Earth.

Some people are making good money with their small restaurants, especially the ones they set up in their homes or as bed and breakfasts. There are parts that are so prosperous you would think you were in Europe.

They’ve eliminated rural poverty.

And best of all, Cuba is beating the US in life expectancy and infant mortality! Pathetic! Cubans live longer and have less important mortality than we do, a country that is nine times wealthier!

Tell me again how great US capitalism is. We are an order of magnitude wealthier, and they’re beating us in essential health figures. US capitalism is pathetic! We’re getting our butt kicked by some tiny, impoverished, blockaded island! If our system is so great, why can’t we beat Cuba?

Alt Left: Francis Miville on the Need for a Do-over of the American System

He is commenting on my post here. Full Democracy in the US Will Be a Boon for Democrats and a Catastrophe for Republicans.

What I meant is an Alt Left notion of “The system is too far gone for reform. Let’s tear it all down and start over again from scratch,” which is exactly how I feel about my country.

However, I meant just the basic political system and culture. However, that would indeed take a “Cultural Revolution” if you will. And many countries had them. We had a huge cultural revolution in the 1960’s. It’s not all about Red Guards.

The sickness is baked far too deeply into the system. The State Department, the Executive and Legislature Branches themselves, the legalization of mass bribery and corruption via money-based elections, the Pentagon, the CIA, and even the FBI – they all need a wipe it out and start over again cleansing.

Look at how hard it will be to dismantle even US imperialism. Imperialism is baked into US society from top to bottom. 500 military bases overseas? Sanctions? Embargoes? Economic warfare? US control of the world monetary system via the dollar as fiat currency? The sickness of the weapons for oil deal with the Gulf Arabs, the alliance with fascist Turkey, NATO its very self (which is controlled by the US), on and on.

For instance, few know this, but the CIA is baked into all of US society at the levels of the elite class and the corporations. The elite class (the rich), the corporations, the powerful lobbies, ethnic and commodity-based, the Pentagon, the Treasury Department, the Commerce Department are all baked in with the national security state and its vast intelligence arm consisting of 17 different out of control agencies with a $30 billion budgets for scullduggery, lying, cheating, thieving, murder, and overthrowing other countries via coups of all sorts, including the fake color revolutions.

These are the people who killed Kennedy.

These are the people who run this country. The oil barons in Texas, the Silicon Valley uber-rich, the capitalist bastards on Wall Street and at the Wall Street Journal, the sick and twisted FIRE sector, the last of which basically a parasitic and non-prodcutive form of wealth creation via speculation or as I call it “a giant casino in the sky.”

That’s the US economy now – a giant casino in the sky for rich people. All the rest of us? We can go pound sand. That or get rich, which is usually accomplished by mass lying, cheating, and thieving on an individual level. We are now virtually governed by corporations and billionaires. We have billionaires taking over NASA for their own sleazy ends. We’ve outsourced everything to the billionaires and the corporations.

When you study the Kennedy Assassination, you realize that there was a vast group of people either in on it or supportive of it, and many of them have talked. A friend had lunch with LBJ’s attorney, who said Kennedy was killed by “the foreign policy establishment of the United States.” And that right there is the Deep State, and not only that, but the Deep State also encompasses all of the above via the support of the rich and the corporations for US foreign policy.

The Pentagon and the CIA work for Exxon and Elon Musk, not you and me. We overthrow foreign governments for the Richard Bransons and the Chevrons, not for you and me. How does it feel to join the US Army and become the personal army of and risk your life for Monsanto and Rex Tillerson? You died in a US war? Sucker! You died for Jeff Bezos and the Blackrock Group! You proud of yourself now, wherever you are, chump?

Because the rot and evil is so “baked in” to the system, it is going to be very hard to change. Look what happens in Latin America where they try to do similar cleansings of the oligarchies and diseased societies they created. You get coups, economic warfare, sanctions, embargoes, propaganda wars, assassination attempts, lockout strikes, color revolutions, stolen elections, lawfare, guarimbas, contra armies engaging on counterrevolution, on and on.

I am absolutely certain that at least some of those will happen if we try to do a do-over on America. The big guns are just not going to like it, and they will do everything in their power to stop it.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I am especially irked when I hear so many ne’erdowells whining about their beloved Trump having been defrauded of his sure win election by the evil globalists and America’s now being in great danger to suffer a Mao-style Cultural Revolution at the hands of the “ultra-Left”.

Such a degree of abuse of words might terminate faster than we think, as English as an international communication tool fit for intelligent exchange of ideas. First of all, how come the Republican Party is “red” and any state refusing it “blue”: that seems to go together well with the US being the only country refusing to go metric.

Had America been endowed even with a tolerably good semblance of democratic system as used to be usual in Europe and still is here and there, Trump would have had no chance to be anything more than a backwater talk show animator and maybe the governor of Missouri or Louisiana turning that state into a laughingstock for the nation and triggering that state to go full radical Socialist Left the election after. Trump was imposed onto America thanks to its stochastic electoral system.

The system looks like that of the old Republic of Venice (which was more or less a kind of rigged from behind roulette-like game of chance, with the difference they claimed of chance and not of the people’s will) against a definite majority’s will by both the financial forces revolving around the Goldman Sachs bank and Netanyahu.

Netanyahu is Trump’s alter ego in the Old World (Russia playing a subsidiary role in that enterprise). He was actually a kind of Israeli governor directly imposed at international level against America’s own Zionist, but still to intelligent oligarchy just as a reminder to the nation that they are no longer sovereign and are to be treated like any African dependency where no intelligent people need apply from now on.

Alt-Right fell for that trap, bar very few thinking people. In a certain sense, Trump has been America’s first real “black” president.

They fear for a Mao-style Cultural Revolution to happen by the American ultra-Leftist forces. For the time being I see nobody on the American horizon still trying and succeeding in part to impose the cult of his personality as a kind of savior or Emperor Cyrus rather than Orange-Hue-Tan.

He is in the real position (though not in mental capacity, and probably not in mental disposition neither, as he doesn’t give a damn for his adoring crowd) to head a Cultural Counterrevolution to be followed by a Great Leap Backwards leading to the transformation of the US into the Neo-Medieval Republic of Gilead as described by Margaret Atwood in Handmaid’s Tale.

Actually I have also come on my own to your own conclusion: The US is indeed in great need of some Mao-like Old Far Left Cultural Revolution that should do away with all “olderies” and force all conservatives to acknowledge at last, through violent behavioral psychiatric techniques if need be, that there is absolutely nothing worth conserving in the US and that all has to be rebuilt from zero, and preferably from Ground Zero.

There is no single historical non-fake monument worth preserving except North Harlem’s Cloisters: the few other ones of decent colonial style have been all demolished to make room for cheaper and cheaper built and dearer and dearer sold condos, except a few that were built by slavers still having descendants caring for their property, but that kind of historical monument is rather to be classified with Holocaust Museums in my opinion.

The general infrastructure is in such a state of disrepair that bombing it all first would probably come out cheaper than getting back a working one. Most cities of the Rust Belt are already kind of bombed, so why not finish the job? There is nothing worth fireworks in the background; instead, there is everything worth fireworks in the structure.

As it is a Cultural Revolution we are talking about here, my opinion is that at the present moment no university is worth preserving. That is an euphemism: There is rather an emergency case for burning them all down, while what needs to be taught could be taught for free on the internet, preferably from as far overseas as possible. The diplomas emitted by them should be all declared void as has been done with Trump University sheepskins. Showing one in order to get any job should be an offense.

Among the olderies to be done away with first are the American religions: they are 10

By what kind of economic miracle has America, which used to be the chief manufactured goods exporter of the world and won two world wars as such, turned into a chief exporter of only religion and mega-churches only (if we except the military sector from our equation, which is concentrated in the former Slaving South)? Has America so many saints, sages, and masterworks of timeless wisdom to be exported to the planet?

There should be only one single tax: Henry George ** 2. His equation was by the square of the value of real estate owned per owner or co-owner, which would make collectivization the only survivable solution while preserving personal liberty.

Activities not resulting in the production of physical goods, including religion, law, education, and medicine, should be declared out of reach of any lucrative enterprise and the attempt to make them lucrative classified together with prostitution. That is, either they are practiced for free as leisure, or they are charities (for real needy ones), or they are public services.

Alt Left: Chaos in Lebanon

Alt Left: Cornel West Is a Great Man

Alt Left: Malcolm X on Gusanos (Worms) or Anti-Castro Cubans

Alt Left: Argument: There Is No Peaceful Road to Socialism

Transformer: I saw this on Facebook with a discussion about Communism and this is a statement from a Libertarian:

The Marxist delusion of no government always leads to absolute tyranny. The anarcho-communists sweep away tolerably governments and pave the way for the Stalins, Maos, Pol Pots, Castros, Mugabes, Chavezes, etc. It’s not that they justify Stalinism, but that they justify measures that always result in Stalinism, and they still don’t have a clue as to why that keeps happening.

I disagree with his statement that the governments before these revolutions were tolerable.

The CIA supported Pol Pot.

Yes, the US supported Pol Pot the whole time they were in and for many years afterwards as guerrillas.

You are certainly free as a liberal to Leftist to oppose Marxism. A lot of people on the Left, especially liberals, are against Marxist dictatorships. There’s a good argument against them. They’re not exactly democratic.

Chavez was not a dictator at all. Venezuela under Chavez was one of the most democratic countries on Earth. Mugabe wasn’t really a dictator. The opposition always ran in every election, and Mugabe always got the most votes not counting fraud. Same thing in Russia. Putin always gets the most votes whether he steals a few or not. Same thing in Belarus. The opposition runs every time and Lukashenko always gets 75-8

There’s never been any serious electoral fraud in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Haiti, Iran, Syria, or Peru or most places the US has alleged that massive electoral fraud allowed the Left to win. I can’t recall the last time the Left anywhere on Earth had to steal an election to win. It’s usually the Right who does that.

Anarcoms have never completed a successful revolution. The no government thing is supposed to be way off in the future and it’s never happened anywhere. The “Stalinism” is just the dictatorship of the proletariat. It’s part of Marxist theory. It’s not an aberration or anything. Look at Honduras, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Bolivia, Guyana, Peru, Mexico, Italy, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Iran, etc.

There’s no peaceful way to put the Left in power. Anytime a Left government comes in, there’s this nonstop war to overthrow it, usually culminating in a rightwing fascist coup. They always ruin the economy, first and foremost. This is why orthodox Marxists regard the peaceful road to socialism as either a sick joke or a great idea that is not possible in the real world. Lenin called advocates of the peaceful road to socialism “parliamentary cretins.”

Alt Left: Rural Land Reforms: An Overview

What’s odd is that imperialism went along with land reforms in a lot of other places such as Europe and the Middle East. All of the Middle East has done a land reform.

That was one thing the wave of Arab nationalist leaders who came to power in 1950-1970 did right away, including the Baath in Iraq and Syria, Yemen, Nasser in Egypt, the FLN in Algeria, Tunisia, and Qaddafi in Libya.

I believe there was some type of land reform done in Palestine too. If you read Ghassan Kanafani, the Palestinian Leftist, in the 1930’s, he talked about how terribly exploited the Arab fellahin or peasants were in Palestine.

If you went to Yemen in the 1960’s, there was a portrait of Nasser in every house.

I’m not sure if a land reform was ever done in Morocco. It’s been ruled by a fairly rightwing king for a long time.

A land reform was probably done in Lebanon, but I don’t have details. Likewise with Jordan.

Nothing grows in the Gulf anyway, so there’s no need for a reform.

I’m not sure about Sudan or Mauritania, but I doubt much grows in Mauritania except date palms.

In all of these places, land reform was a very easy sell for whatever reason, probably because neoliberal capitalism seems to be antithetical to Islam itself. The feudal lords of the former Ottoman Empire had tried to justify feudalism on the basis that in the Koran it says something like, “Some are rich and some are poor, and this is a natural thing” but that never went over too well.

The idea that in an Islamic country, the rich Muslims were viciously exploit the poor Muslims is nearly haram on its face. You just can’t do that. All Muslims are part of the ummah. All the Muslim men are your brothers and all the Muslim women are your sisters. Also individualism never made it to any part of the Muslim World other than the Hindu variety in Pakistan and Bangladesh, but that’s not really the same radical individualism that we have in the West. It’s just an ancient caste based system.

The first thing the Communists did in Eastern Europe was to do a land reform. You will never hear it here in the West, but until 1960, the Communist regimes in the East were very popular with industrial workers and also with the peasants.

In most of the world, peasants and rural dwellers are leftwingers. This is even the case in Western Europe in France.

The US is odd in that it’s farmers are so reactionary. That goes against the usual trend.

Yes, farmers are said to be conservatives, but that usually just means social conservatism. In most of the world, peasants are literally Alt Left: left on economics and right on social and cultural issues.

A land reform was definitely done in Iran.

Obviously one was done in the USSR, and the large landowners have not yet consolidated themselves in the former USSR, mostly because everybody hates them. Large landowners have taken over some of the state farms in Russia, but for whatever reason, they are not very productive. In fact, many of the state farms are still in existence. I am not sure what sort of arrangement they have now.

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After World War 2, the US supported land reforms in some places as a way of heading off a Communist threat. This is one great thing about the Communists. So many great steps of social progress were only done out of fear or terror that if these were not done, the Communists would take over. Now that that threat is gone, one wonders what motivation the oligarchs have to give up anything.

In particular, land reforms were done in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. They went over very easily. And in fact, the subsequent economic growth occurred right on the back of these reforms. There is a good argument that you can never develop a proper economy without first doing a land reform.

First of all, you need to get rid of the problem of rural poverty.

Second of all, you need to feed your own people. Large landowners in these countries typically grow food for export or simply fallow the land and keep it as an income base or a source of wealth.

When crops are grown for export, there is a problem in that the nation does not grow enough food to feed its people. This is a problem in Cuba and Venezuela right now, and it should not be. These are very fertile countries and there is no need to import food, but they have gotten hooked on some sort of “crack” of importing their food for whatever reason, possibly because most of their farmland was being used to grow crops for export.

When a nation can feed itself, this means it can feed its urban workers. This is extremely important and it is part of the reason that Stalin went at such breakneck speed in his collectivization. He had to feed his urban workers so he could industrialize because even back then, he was looking into the future and seeing that he was going to have to fight Hitler.

I’m not quite sure why, but no country seems to be able to properly industrialize and develop as long as the problem of rural poverty exists.

And once you are feeding your own people, you have solved a lot of other problems. Money that would be wasted importing inferior food from the West, especially the US, can now be spent on actual development of a national economy. The elimination of rural poverty gets rid of a constant revolutionary bur in the side of the state.

The US has always opposed land reform in Latin America because large US corporations are usually involved in growing foods for export down there. See Dole Pineapple in Guatemala. We want all of their agricultural land to go for export crops so US corporations can grow those crops or make money importing them. And we do not want them to grow their own food. That way there won’t be so much land for export crops which we need to make money off of.

Also, we want them to spend all of their food money importing lousy processed food from the US. So we make money on food both ways – importing food from crops grown for export to the US and in exporting processed food to the Latin America. This processed food is not very good for you and it is implicated in a lot of health problems in these places.

This is why the US opposes most efforts at land reform in the Americas.

An exception was made in El Salvador. After 200,000 people died, the US and the Salvadoran oligarchs were forced to the negotiating table and a land reform was one of the first things they pushed. I recall a piece written soon afterwards where the reporter went out to the rural areas and interviewed recipients of the land reform. They basically said, “Well, at least we can eat now. It wasn’t like that before.”

In semi-feudal countries, there is debt bondage whereby large landowners rent out their land to sharecroppers or peasants who never seem to get out of debt. This is a very primitive form of development.

The Philippines is notable that there has never been a land reform. And of course they have a vicious Communist insurgency.

Nor has there been one in Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, Paraguay, Honduras, or Argentina. The first five countries are horribly screwed up. Colombia and Paraguay have active armed leftwing guerrillas, and Guatemala did for many years. Haiti is a disaster. Honduras has a vicious rightwing dictatorship that has murdered over 1,000 people.

Argentina is mostly urbanized, but the landed rural elite still runs the country. Any talk at all of land reform or even taxation of large estates as was done recently under Christine Fernandez, and the ruling class starts making ominous threats of a coup. I assume something similar is going on in Uruguay. Those countries are urbanized though, so large landownership is not such a problem.

I’m not sure if there has ever been a land reform in Brazil, but there is no dearth of large landowners.

The fact that Colombia, Guatemala, and Haiti are so backwards is largely because there has never been a land reform.

The land reform was incomplete in Venezuela.

It is interesting that every country that fails to do a land reform seems to end up with a Communist or Leftist insurgency at some point or another. It’s almost without fail. This goes to show you that most Communist insurgencies in the Third World are over the most basic things dating all the way back to French Revolution: land and bread (food).

As far as land reforms go, they were done in Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Peru.

I’m not sure about Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, Panama, Jamaica, Belize, the Guyanas, Chile, and most of the Caribbean.

And I’m not sure if one ever got done in the Dominican Republic after Bosch.

In El Salvador, 200,000 had to die in order for a land reform to take place. Roberto D’Aubission, the godfather of the Salvadoran death squads and the most favored visitor at the US Embassy, once said that “We will have to kill 200,000 people in order to prevent socialism in El Salvador.” What he meant by socialism was land reform.

It is notable that no land reform was ever done in India, nor in Pakistan or even Bangladesh. I had a friend whose parents were large feudal landowners in Pakistan who rented out land to farmers who ended up in debt peonage. In 1986, 14 million people a year were dying of starvation related diseases in the capitalist world. Most of that was in South Asia in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India. Most of these deaths were attributed to the problem of the private ownership of land.

There is a problem with the private ownership of land. In the US, we think this is sacrosanct, but on a worldwide basis, it doesn’t work very well. What do you need all that land for? What do you need more than, say, an acre and a house? Nothing, unless you are a farmer.

In China, all land is owned by the state. All homeowners lease the land, often on 100 year leases. I’m not sure how it works in the countryside.

In Mexico, much of the land is owned by the state also, a product of the land reform that occurred after the Revolution. One of the major demands of the Revolution was land reform. Pre-revolution, most peasants usually lived like serfs. The state land in Mexico is called ejidos.

If you ever can’t make it in the city, if you become unemployed or homeless, you can always go out to the countryside and take up residence in an ejido, which are something like communal lands that are formed by the group that makes up the ejido. You join this group, work the land, and get a share of the crop. At least you have enough food to eat. So in Mexico the ejidos are a stopgap measure.

In China too, if you can’t make it in the city, you can always go back to the rural areas, take up residence, and work the land. At least you will have enough to food to eat. It is illegal to be homeless in China. If you are homeless, the police pick you up and put you in shelters, which are something like college dorms. They also encourage you to go back to the countryside if you have relatives back there. In recent years, many people have moved from the countryside to the cities to make more money. Those that don’t make it can always move back to the farm.

There was debate a while back about privatizing state land, but it ran aground on the idea that the state ownership of land was necessary as a stopgap measure in the event of urban poverty. In addition, state ownership of land has prevented the development of a national oligarchy or plutocracy.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been adamant that the  development of a national oligarchy or plutocracy must be prevented at all costs. Once they develop, they are sort of like an infection in that they soon spread and take over society. The CCP has billionaire party members who are members of the People’s Assembly.

Guess what these “Communists” are advocating for? Reduction or elimination of taxes on the rich, massive reductions in social spending, state repression of labor, and the privatization of land along with most of the rest of the economy. I think this goes to show you that billionaires are the same everywhere. Whether in a Communist or capitalist country, a rightwing or leftwing country, billionaires always have precisely the same class interests that barely vary at all. It’s usually something like this:

Reduction or elimination of taxes on the rich, massive reductions in social spending, state repression of labor, and the privatization of land along with most of the rest of the economy.

This goes to show that class interests of various classes are nearly a  law in a mathematical sense and not even a theory of social science. This was what Marx was getting at when he spoke of the laws of economics. They are so predictable that we can almost class them with the laws, theorems, and corollaries of mathematics instead of the typical “true for now” theories of most of the sciences.

I have a feeling that a Hell of a lot more things are laws, too, especially in terms of basic human behavior. So many of these things seem almost unchangeable. Of course they would never apply to everyone, but it’s pretty obvious that they are general tendencies.

Alt Left: Capitalism Will Always Tend Towards Fascism: Does that Mean It Is Fatally Flawed?

DiscoCat: The Far Left has an explicit goal of ending capitalism. The Far Right does not. This is why when forced to choose between the Far Right and the Far Left, liberals, capitalists, industrialists, and plutocrats will always choose the Far Right.

It is precisely for this reason that the wealthy industrialists and plutocrats in Germany supported Hitler’s chancellorship campaign in 1931. They didn’t give a flying fuck about his nationalism, bigotry, warmongering, and antisemitism. Most of the plutocrats probably thought Hitler’s ravings were just harmless antics to galvanize his base. Whatever it takes to rile up the mindless cattle and garner their support. All they cared about is that he would let them keep their ownership of the factories and protect their interests from socialists and communists.

The plutocrats will always support fascism as a bulwark against socialism if they feel the latter’s gaining popularity among the masses. They usually don’t like fascism but they’re driven to support it by pure self-interest and pragmatism.

Thank you very much for this comment! And by the way, welcome to the site if you are new here!

I have felt this way a long time myself. I think it goes deeper than this though. Many of the leftwingers that got overthrown by fascists were just liberals who did some tinkering around the edges. Arbenz in Guatemala and many others such as Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic were overthrown for trying to do a land reform. The leader of Honduras and Aristide in Haiti were overthrown by fascists for literally raising the minimum wage! That’s all they did. And Bill Clinton helped overthrow Aristide and Hitlery Clinton herself literally overthrew the leader of Honduras and installed a fascist coup that very quickly murdered 1,000 social activists.

This has happened many times. The new Peruvian leader has promised to do only very mild reforms and he’s already being called a Communist. The mild reformer of the PT, Lula, was overthrown in a judicial coup that was assisted by the FBI! I told you Feds are crap. Feds are the worst pigs of them all.

So I disagree where the poster says all of these people go fascist for fear that the Left will end capitalism. It appears that any threat to their profits at all is enough to cause the capitalists to put in a fascist regime. So I think the comment should be amended from fear of the overthrow of capitalism to the fear of any loss of profits and income at all.

A while back, I told my mother that down in Latin America, it is routine for the Right to murder trade unionists and union leaders. She shook her head and said, “That’s because down there, if you’re in a union, they think that means you’re a Communist.” I would point out that that was all done with the help of the US, especially the CIA.

The US has been murdering union members in Latin America for 60 years now, and probably even longer if you consider the Banana Revolt in the Uraba of Colombia in 1921. And every one of our Latin American interventions from 1910-1950 was done on the basis more or less of “kill the trade unionists,” among other things. The Sandinistas of Nicaragua are named after Augusto Sandino, the leader of Nicaraguan guerrillas who fought the US Marines in Nicaragua for many years.

That’s exactly correct. I’d like to add that not one thing has changed. Social activists including union members and leaders, are murdered every day in Colombia for years now.

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