Capitalism – Beyond Highbrow

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 54% more sanctions than the previously most sanctioned country, Iran — then they must realise that they cannot possibly achieve such goals via Western Liberal Democratic methods, as WLD is anti-sovereignty and pro-1%er globalist class warfare.

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 5% of the population of Kiev is pro-Russian.

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 3% of the population. And due to the long infighting between Jews and Russians, there is a lot of bad blood. Russian Jews probably hate Gentiles more than any other Jews. Russian Jews make bloody Marys out of vodka and say they are drinking the blood of Russian Gentiles!

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, 70% of Russian Jews voted for the Zionist Party, not the Bolsheviks. They were more tribal than Communist, as usual. They say that maybe one Jew in ten is a radical, but maybe five out of ten radicals are Jews. People see that and think “Jews are Communists” while forgetting that 90% of them are not radicals at all.

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: 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 10% of Ruritanians have 64% of national income. The average income of the richest 10% is than 16 times higher than the average income of the remaining 90%. To a social-democrat like me, that certainly would be highly undesirable, but there is no capital flight to worry about.

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 50% capacity and stockpiled and even destroyed goods in order to create artificial shortages to wreck the economy.So they stopped the capital flight but not the capital strike.

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: 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 20% of the population) gains and the vast majority of the poorer people lose as they can no longer feed themselves, no longer own land and are self-supporting, have to resort to unhealthy foods that they need much of their income to purchase, and they also are rendered much poorer as low wage proletariat in the slums of the large cities.

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.

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 3% of GNP in any given year. That’s far too low an amount of public spending to run a country decently. There was no reason to put that in other than for neoliberal orthodoxy which despises all public spending for whatever rationale they have for doing that, either ideological, war of ideas, or economic.

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 2% of the population, a minority not including them, take over the country? If they had any sense, they wouldn’t allow it. I have no sympathy for Gentiles who let some tiny pissant tribe of humans take over their country. They’re fools and they got what they deserved. They handed the Jews the keys to the castle, and the Jews said thanks and walked right in. What did anyone expect them to do? If it was a hostile takeover, it was a consensual one.

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 70% of the citizens state openly that they are Chavistas (polls show that 70% of the population support the Chavista program), and hence Leftists, indicated nevertheless that this country is terribly patriarchal and most of the men and women for that matter are very socially conservative. I’d even venture so far as to call them backwards.

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 20% for yourself, and send the rest WU to West Africa.

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 90%+ of them are engaging in Internet crime. They are in the Gulf States, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, and now China. Everywhere they go, the Nigerians are head over heels in crime, usually confidence games and cons.

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.

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 % of the people have university degrees and advanced degrees.

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

malcolm x on anti-castro cubans, aka gusanos, when they complained about him meeting with fidel and expressing solidarity with the cuban revolution pic.twitter.com/FWUdTeityG

— ☀️👀 (@zei_squirrel) July 13, 2021

I have to say that in a lot of ways, Malcolm really as a great man. Notice to the gusanos rioting now in Cuba. The people are not with them at all, trust me. Only 10,000 demonstrated all over the island. Most of them were young people, often teenagers, and some were marginal elements, often lumpens, typically criminals or those who refuse to work. There were some bourgeois elements in Havana.

In the town where the demonstrations originated, even there, they were not the majority. Much larger pro-government groups went out to confront he vendepatrias (countrysellers) at every demonstration. In the town where they claimed to take over the Young Communists headquarters, even there, their crowd of 200 was outnumbered by a crowd of 400.

There are very serious problems in Cuba, but 100% of them have to do with the blockade. The things that the contras want will not solve any problems and their heroes in the US and in the Latin American Right are the ones who caused all these problems in the first place. Cuba’s income has collapsed by 80% due to COVID. They have a very hard time importing much of anything due to the embargo and anything they do import has to go through third parties, etc. and the markups end up being considerable.

So Cuba is not able to engage with the world on a free trade basis at all. For instance, the electricity plants have not been maintained since 2014 because the embargo prevents the importation of spare parts. Cuba could not import any ventilators for COVID due to the blockade which covers all medicines and medical supplies and most foods, so they had to build their own.

This tiny country, blockaded by the whole world, was able to build their own ventilators. Cuba’s rate of saving hospitalized COVID patients is very high despite a serious shortage of drugs. The country has made five different COVID vaccines. The first, with an efficacy rate of 93%, has just been released for emergency use. Nevertheless, the epidemic is hitting them very hard and they have had to expand medical facilities because existing ones were not adequate to cover the problem.

But the new facilities and the overwhelming of the hospitals due to COVID overwhelmed the electricity system. The heat added to the strain. Workers came from all over the country and worked all week to get one substation running, but the temporary fixes usually only last for a month.

Food and medicine has collapsed because of the economic collapse and the embargo preventing Cuba from buying these things on the open market. You have to stand in line for hours for basic necessities. Furthermore, an opening of the economy to market conditions has resulted in a lifting of price controls. The result has been that prices have risen 3X. So you can see that moving towards capitalism caused inflation to skyrocket in Cuba.

Furthermore, most goods are now available only at special currency stores, but most people do not have access to that special currency. The regular currency stores are empty. The result has been that huge mafias have developed who buy things wholesale from the special currency stores and then resell them in the regular currency, but they are marked up by up to 3X. However, there are up to 500,000 of these criminals in Cuba now and there doesn’t seem to be much to do about them. The cops don’t even really try to stop them.

The truth is that since most people only have access to regular currency, the existence of these resellers and mafias seems to be inevitable as that is the only way that ordinary people can buy what they want. There are a lot of complaints about these special stores and the state currency manipulations that they are a result of, but the currency decisions seem to be based on sound, if rather capitalist, economics. I don’t know what can be done about the problem of these stores.

I really don’t know what the Cuban government could do to make any of the problems of the country go away. Can someone please tell me what the government should do to go about making even one of these problems they have better?

Most Cubans know capitalism up front, and they explicitly dislike the very idea of it. They don’t even like the US model. And the Latin American models of capitalism don’t like very enticing compared to what Cubans already have. Even the Dominican Republic, Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, and even Uruguay seem pretty awful compared to Cuba.

For one thing, there is almost no crime in Cuba and the drug use and sales rate is very low. There is almost no drug smuggling. There are no street gangs to speak of, nor are there any beggars in the streets.

During the decade when Nicaragua switched to capitalism, the roads were full of potholes and were nearly undriveable, children carried their chairs to school every day because the school had no chairs for the students, the streets were lined with dirty, hungry children and the first word out of their mouths was to ask you for a coin. Now that Ortega and the Sandinistas are back, all of that is gone. Nicaraguans have lived under both the Sandinistas and their capitalist rightwing enemies and they majority do not want the Right to come back into power any time soon. They have seen how the Right acts when they are in power.

If they let them back in, they will do the same thing all over again. The Venezuelans are the same way. The Right has only ever espoused dismantling every since achievement of the Chavistas. However, 70% of the population support the Chavista project and describe themselves as Chavistas. With a population of 70% Chavistas and an opposition that has pledged to dismantle the entire project, is there any wonder that the Chavistas win by ~70% every time? Why wouldn’t they?

And Nicaragua is sending very few immigrants to the US. The Central American immigrants flooding “the misery, crime, violence, and poverty” of the region are all coming from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. They are not coming from Nicaragua. There’s a reason for that. Also, Nicaragua has had very low rates of COVID cases and deaths, while at least Guatemala was utterly devastated by the disease.

It is true that there are contras in Cuba. It’s certainly not illegal to be a contra and they are quite easy to find. Contras represent ~14% of the population because that is how many people voted agains the last Constitution. The contras calling for a US fake humanitarian intervention and invasion are certainly much less than that.

Guaido, the Venezuelan contra, had 4% support last I heard. His project of sanctions and US invasion has 12% support. Sanctions themselves have only 18% support. The general opposition has ~27% support.

The Right has ruled Haiti since 1994 when Lavalas was overthrown by the US and Aristide was forced into exile. Aristide won 92% of the vote the last time he ran. That’s how many Haitians supported and support Lavalas. All of the US-installed regimes ever since have had the support of ~8% of the population.

The opposition in Nicaragua also has ~25%. The last poll had them at 23%. However, the position of the contras who tried to overthrow the government with a violent coup in 2018 has only 15% support. The latest poll shows Ortega winning 77%-23% against the opposition.

It is not true that the opposition is being forbidden from running. Some people who took money from the US to stage a violent attempt to overthrow the government have been arrested. Others have had their political privileges revoked for life. This is exactly what should happen to all of the Venezuelan coup-mongers, and some are already under house arrest or have been banned from politics for 15 years. None of these Nicaraguan coup plotters were candidates for any political party.

The US has been trying to insert these traitors in the political parties since 2018, but no party will take them. These are not politicians. They are not even associated with any political party. In fact, there are 17 different political parties running against the Sandinistas in the upcoming election. It’s perfectly legal to be in the opposition in Nicaragua. You only must follow the laws. As in Venezuela, the Nicaraguan contras are only ~25% of the population and they can never win at the ballot box, so they try to overthrow the government by force again.

The thing is that the contras in Cuba are all reactionaries. They wave American flags and they all want to go to neoliberalism. They are rioting because COVID is peaking in Cuba, but even there, Florida, a very wealthy capitalist state in the US, has had twice as many cases per capita and five times as many deaths per capita. In the Latin American countries that the US-flag waving mercenaries emulate, COVID death rates are 10, 20, and 50X higher than in the US.

Even in the “successful” Latin American countries like Chile, COVID has been disastrous. By the way, Chile is hardly a model for Latin America. The place is a disaster.

It’s not some groovy West European social democracy. There are no groovy West European social democracies in Latin America. The people who are trying to emulate just that are Maduro, Ortega, Correa, Fernandez, Lula, Morales, and the recent winner in Peru, Castillo – the ones who are being called Communist Pink Tide countries. An actual Communist is ahead in the polls in Chile and a moderate Leftist appears poised to win even in Colombia, the last holdout of the populist Right.

All of these people who have already served in power have either all been overthrown by the US or there have been attempts to overthrow them.

The US only tolerates hard Right regimes in Latin America. This has always been the case. Part of the problem is that Latin America never had Social Contracts as Europe did. The oligarchs and the Right have always been reactionary and fascist and are to this day.

In contrast, in Europe, the true reactionaries and fascists are all but defeated, and social democracy rules the day. Latin American style Rightists do not exist in Europe. The only thing close to that economically was in Eastern Europe in the Baltics, and these places failed horrifically with the 2008 Depression. Even Poland and the Czech Republic are not so rightwing as everyone thinks.

The most rightwing government in Europe is in the UK, and they are to the Left of the Democratic Party.

Republican Party-Latin American Right economics is unpopular all over the world.

I will grant that it is popular in a few places. It retains majority support in Colombia, but with the recent riots and the genocidal response of the regime to them, this seems to be ending. In Hong Kong and Singapore, two very wealthy more or less “fake states” – fake because these states cannot be replicated elsewhere – rightwing economics remains popular. However, the working classes in Hong Kong mostly support China and hate the rightwing government, and in Singapore, the main opposition party has Marxist roots.

The way of the world seems to be socialism or at least some kind of socialism, at the very least some variety of social democracy. Neoliberalism is disliked or even hated on most of the planet. Bottom line is nobody likes it and nobody wants it. In places where it gets polled as in Latin America, it has the support of 8-27% of the population, with an average of 26% support for the project in general which declines to 8-18% when it comes to the coup-mongering Right that calls for sanctions, violent coups and US interventions. This is the political demographic of the oligarchs and their supporters.

It’s minority now and appears to be minority for quite some time into the future. Economic conservatism and conservatism in general believe in rule by the aristocracy or oligarchy. Liberalism by contrast means rule by democracy or rule by the people. As the aristocrats, oligarchs and their supporters are always a minority – 25-30% seems to be a good ballpark figure, they generally hate democracy and tend to rely on antidemocratic means of getting in and staying in power.

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.

50% of the food in the Russia comes from small farms, typically grown on dachas. Dachas were vacation homes that were given to all Soviet workers. They were also given a bit of land, enough to grow some crops on. After 1991, all workers were allowed to keep their dachas and small plots. This was a great idea because most of the produce in Russia is coming right off of these farms.

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.

Alt Left: “The Macroeconomics of Economic Populism in Latin America,” by Rudiger Dornbush and Sebastian Edwards

I didn’t actually read the book, but James Schipper did. Below I will quote from an article from NACLA that critiques the book well.

James Schipper: Perón came back from exile, and then won the election with a landslide. Unless the Argentines are complete political idiots, this demonstrates that he tried to accomplish something for the masses. Ordinary voters may not understand much about economics, but they usually sense who is on their side and who is not.

The US, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia are three Anglosphere countries that keep voting for rightwing economics despite themselves. The masses have been harmed by neoliberalism in all of these countries, but every four years, they march off and vote for it again. I think part of the problem is that ordinary people are voting against mass immigration and other leftwing stupidities in all of these countries. They don’t realize that neoliberalism comes as an add-on to anti-immigrant policies in the Anglosphere. Voters in the Anglosphere are political idiots.

You can see why people keep voting for the Chavistas in Venezuela. Sure, the economy is a mess, but no one blames the government. 70% of the population openly state that they are Chavistas. Things may be bad now but they know that the opposition is not their friend! This is why they keep voting for Ortega in Nicaragua, Lukashenko in Belarus, and Putin in Russia. These guys are on their side, and the voters can figure that out.

James Schipper: Many years ago, I read a book called The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America, in which it is explained how leftist populists in LA, despite their unquestioned commitment to improving the economic lot of the poorest segment of the population, often fail because they overreach.

Wikipedia has an article called Macroeconomic Populism, which explains briefly how overambitious economic populism can backfire.

I would agree that acting too fast too soon isn’t a great idea and a slower approach might work better. But we don’t see a lot of cases of economic stupidity like this nowadays in Latin America.

Yes, I think that book is not good. One man worked for the World Bank. Their basic attitude is “Don’t rely on government to try to fix economic problems and help the poor. It fails every time.” In other words, it’s hopeless. Massive inequality a problem? Sure. What to do? Nothing! Because everything you do is going to fail. I dunno.

Here is a critique of the book:

https://nacla.org/news/2012/4/20/latin-america-unravels-populist-putdown

The book is referred to in this book review of another book as “an outdated, far-right, academically dishonest book.”

From the article.

Rudiger Dornbush, and Sebastian Edwards, two University of Chicago-trained economists.

See? They were both trained at the University of Chicago. That’s the home of Milton Friedman, neoliberalism, the Chicago Boyz, the neoliberal whiz kids who caused so much destruction all over the world, especially in Latin America. UoC/Friedmanite economics doesn’t work. Period. It causes massive inequality, significant gains for the top 20% and a serious drop in income for the bottom 80%. This is exactly what happened from 1980-1992 under Reagan-Bush. Sure, if you are in the top 20%, I would say neoliberal economics is the way to go. But if you’re not, it’s economic suicide.

They complain about D and E’s portrayal of Chile:

The most astonishing example of the book’s studied ignorance happens to be one of the most indisputable and well-documented examples of U.S. intervention: Chile.

According to Chapter 7 of Dornbush and Edwards’ book, written by Felipe Larraín (currently Chile’s Finance Minister) and Patricio Meller, the “decline and full collapse of the [Allende coalition government] experiment during the years 1972-73 is a clear consequence of the ‘successful’ overexpansive policies implemented in 1971.”

Never mind that Nixon reacted to the 1970 elections determined to “smash Allende,” telling then-CIA director Richard Helms to “make the economy scream.” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh details the earliest destabilization campaigns, carried out even before Allende took office:

Approval was granted for a last-minute increase of the propaganda activities designed to convince the Chilean Congress that an Allende election would mean financial chaos. Within two weeks, twenty-three journalists from at least ten countries were brought into Chile by the CIA, and they combined with CIA propaganda “assets” already in place to produce more than 700 articles and broadcasts both in and out of Chile before the congressional election – a staggering total whose ultimate influence cannot be measured.

By late September, a full-fledged bank panic had broken out in Santiago, and vast amounts of funds were being transferred abroad. Sales of durable goods, such as automobiles and household goods, fell precipitously; industrial production also dropped. Black-market activities soared as citizens sought to sell their valuables at discounted prices.

Ok that’s a case of capital flight. Venezuela had the same problem. All I can say is that it upholds Lenin’s idea that the peaceful road to socialism, while a great idea in theory, simply never works in real life because the capitalists simply sabotage the economy.

Larraín and Meller mention Nixon, Kissinger, Richard Helms, I.T.T., and/or Pepsi precisely zero times in their scholarly analysis. Whereas U.S. Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry threatened that “not a nut or bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende,” doing “all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty.”

Like I said, they failed badly to include the US massive economic war it waged against Chile. The same exact program was used against Venezuela, with the same results. The sanctions on Zimbabwe and Nicaragua also caused hyperinflation.

The only hyperinflation I’ve seen lately was caused by capitalists waging economic war against the state or by US sanctions. Usually both are going on at the same time. In Venezuela, the capitalists won’t stop raising prices. They love the hyperinflation because they’ve used it to play the currency black market to make a bundle. And they deliberately created it by shutting down production and hoarding goods.

At one point, Maduro put the army in charge of enforcing price controls, and the inflation stabilized for a while, but then they were withdrawn and they went back up again. However, after floating the currency along with a drop in the value of real wages and a reduction of most people’s savings, inflation was subdued. I’d hate to see these guys’ analysis of Venezuela. In fact, Krugman is already saying that Venezuela and Argentina are modern cases of this macroeconomic populism.

The authors argue instead that all state efforts to create a decent economy will fail and the only thing that will work is neoliberalism.

The authors explain that “the message emerging from the papers in this book is clear: the use of macroeconomic policy to achieve distributive goals has historically led to failure, sorrow, and frustration.” That’s why they helpfully disabuse Latin America of its “naive confidence in the ability of governments to cure all social and economic ills.”

However, neoliberalism doesn’t work either:

Second, it is worth noting that Cambridge development economist Ha-Joon Chang has analyzed the effects of these supposedly self-defeating macro policies. He finds on the contrary that “developing countries did not do badly at all during the ‘bad old days’ of protectionism and state intervention in the 1960s and 70s. In fact, their economic growth performance during the period was far superior [3.1% in per capita GDP a year for Latin America] to that achieved since the 1980s under greater opening and deregulation [1.1% a year from 1980-2009].

…And even that rate was partly due to the rapid growth of countries in the region that had explicitly rejected neoliberal policies sometime earlier in the 2000s – Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela.” In fact, when Dornbush and Edwards published their book in 1991 denouncing “overly expansive” macro policies, Latin America and the Caribbean – largely compliant to IMF diktats at that point – had already averaged an entire decade of negative 0.3% growth rate per capita (1980-1990).

If you are going to read books about economics, I recommend Ha-Joon Chang. As you can see, neoliberalism in Latin America failed completely. Even its proponents admitted that it failed, but their attitude was the usual, “We didn’t give it time enough. Give it some more time and it will start working.” Yeah, right.

Larraín and Meller focus their attention exclusively on the macroeconomic policy errors of Allende’s Unidad Popular (UP) government. Its efforts to “increase real wages and to improve Chilean income distribution failed completely,” they contend, dryly adding that it “took eight years, up to 1981 (during the ‘peak of the boom’), for real wages to recover the level they had held in 1970 before the UP government.”

Larraín and Meller omit from this account Pinochet’s post-1973 reign of terror in which tens of thousands were imprisoned and killed and an economic policy during the dictatorship that led to virtually no growth in per capita income by 1986, 13 years after the coup.

See? Neoliberalism didn’t work either. It took until 11 years after Allende for real wages to reach the level they were under Allende. Then there was an economic crash. I believe it took until 1989 for wages to reach the level they were under Allende again. That’s just a complete failure of neoliberalism over 20 years.

Perhaps the paper’s most artful flourish is the cynical use of the impersonal, passive voice. Nixon directed a comprehensive program of economic sabotage literally bearing Secretary of State Kissinger’s signature. The U.S. funded all major anti-government strikes, the CIA penetrated all of Chile’s political parties, and it courted the military to foment a putsch.

From D and E:

Real wages dropped spectacularly, by -11.3% in 1972 and -38.6% in 1973. This last figure includes a 30% cut induced in the fourth quarter of 1973, after the military coup…[B]y the end of 1971 the signals of disequilibrium were clear for a dispassionate observer. Bottlenecks appeared in strength during 1972, and 1973 witnessed the collapse of the whole experiment. Political instability mounted, and a coup ultimately replaced the UP Government with a military junta [emphases mine].

It was all Allende’s fault. All of the economic sabotage and the economic war the US waged to make the economy scream? That did nothing at all! Seems like a very bad analysis.

Guys like D and E are still writing today:

Today, U.S. scholars carry on the dubious tradition of lambasting Latin American populism, whatever its prevailing definition. Due to South America’s general drift to the left in recent years, academics make increasingly strained attempts to “recognize” and discredit it. In an October 2011 paper entitled Decreasing Inequality Under Latin America’s ‘Social Democratic’ and ‘Populist’ Governments: Is the Difference Real?,”Juan Montecino of the Center for Economic and Policy Research highlights the “arbitrary and ill-defined nature” of this endeavor.

Montecino politely dismantles the findings of economists Darryl McLeod and Nora Lustig, who purport to show that “social democratic” regimes did better than “left-populist” ones in reducing inequality in recent years. He shows that their empirical results are reversed when one runs the same regressions using data from the Economic Commission for Latin America. The paper raises questions as to whether their categories capture “anything more than a general antipathy toward one group of governments.”

In other words, they faked the data.

Unsurprisingly, this antipathy is directed toward three of the four countries Ha-Joon Chang highlights for experiencing growth after rejecting neoliberal policies: Argentina, Ecuador, and Venezuela.

Their enemies now are those three countries. Simon Johnson attacks Latin American populism in the case of Argentina:

Johnson has referred to Argentina as “a country that struggles over many decades (and whose leaders frequently rail against the world) and for which episodes of reasonable prosperity and new economic models are punctuated by gut-wrenching crises.”

In the case of Argentina’s last gut-wrenching crisis in 2001, however, the “IMF’s fingerprints” were all over it, wrote macroeconomist Mark Weisbrot, CEPR’s co-director and Argentina expert, in late 2001. “It arranged massive amounts of loans – including $40 billion [in 2000] – to support the [overvalued] Argentine peso,” writes Weisbrot. Then it “made its loans conditional on a ‘zero-deficit’ policy for Argentine government.”

By doing so, the IMF was able to “convince most of the press that Argentina’s ‘profligate’ spending habits [were] the source of its troubles.” Finally, the IMF – an organization Tim Geithner recently considered essential for promoting U.S. foreign policy – implausibly claimed it had always been against the overvalued peso and that the loans were made in order to placate the Argentine government.

The IMF caused the problem with orthodox neoliberalism and then blamed the government for “profligate spending” because they ordered it to read zero-deficit, a goal which itself caused the crisis.

See? They’re making it up.

Second, Johnson seems to portray the country as wracked by serious, ongoing difficulties. But Weisbrot et al. demonstrate that since defaulting and devaluing, Argentina – widely considered ‘populist’ – expanded 94% from 2002–11 (the fastest growth in the hemisphere), reaching its pre-recession level of GDP in three years, tripling real social spending over seven years, reducing poverty and extreme poverty by two-thirds (using independent estimates of inflation), and achieving record levels of employment.

Their paper also demolishes the myth repeated by many economists – including McLeod and Lustig – that Argentina’s success was largely the effect of a serendipitous commodities boom.

See? Populism worked great in Argentina. It also worked great in Venezuela (before the economic war combined with the collapse in oil prices killed the economy), Ecuador, and Bolivia.

The devastating policies of the past in Latin America, as well as the more successful policies of vastly more independent governments over the past decade, are intimately tied up with Washington’s control over the hemisphere and the recent collapse of its influence – especially in South America. Roger Morris, a staffer at the National Security Council until mid-1970, clarified such considerations for Seymour Hersh:

“I don’t think anybody ever fully grasped that Henry [Kissinger] saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than Castro. If Latin America ever became unraveled, it never would happen with a Castro. Allende was a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America…Chile scared him.”

The devastating economics of the past in Latin America were caused by the US waging economic war on countries that practiced populist economics. This same populism has worked much better now because the influence of the US has greatly fallen in the continent.

The U.S. government has long imposed double standards on the permissibility of social reforms. While instrumental to Allende’s overthrow abroad, the Nixon administration could boast progressive domestic achievements, including the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, widely considered one of the most important anti-poverty programs in U.S. history.

Similarly, Lyndon Johnson enacted Great Society programs at home but sent thousands of troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to quell an uprising demanding the restitution of the deposed social democratic president, Juan Bosch. A liberal wishing to implement land reforms, Bosch was the subject of an FBI espionage and interception operation authorized by J. Edgar Hoover in the months preceding the rebellion, as Bosch sat exiled in Puerto Rico.

See? Liberalism at home. Fascism abroad. That’s the policy prescription of the US under Democrats and liberal Republicans. Also note the FBI overthrew him. The FBI was deeply involved in the lawfare against Brazil that resulted in the false charges being filed against Lula that put him in prison. See? The FBI literally overthrew Lula in Brazil. The FBI are not just pigs; they’re the worst pigs of them all – feds. And it is a deeply political and always reactionary organization. Fuck the FBI.

Perhaps unknowingly, Johnson is simply keeping within the permissible framework of an intellectual culture that has always accommodated and justified Washington’s hypocrisy. To my knowledge, Johnson has yet to apply his support for “standing up to the banks…proposing a more responsible course of action than that preferred by the banking elite,” and “greater transparency in financial transactions” to the IMF, which has conducted most of its deliberations, meetings, and consultations in secret.

Simon Johnson is pro-IMF, like the authors of that book.

On the The New York Times website, he offhandedly dismisses Latin American populism with a reference to an outdated, far-right, academically dishonest book – all in an article that challenges the U.S. elite by praising populism. This is a compelling example of the imperial double standard that keeps “pro-populist” commentators from seeing what is going on in developing countries.

The book you are praising is referred to an “outdated, far-right, academically dishonest book.” I believe that is correct.

But even if the Times’ readers never learn of Latin America’s protracted struggle for self-determination against U.S. power, the region is now a breeding ground for the most constructive values associated with populism. More than a decade of successful revolts has allowed for the elections of independent left governments in most of South America and has brought enormous gains to the poor majority through greater economic sovereignty and democratic social reform. Or as Kissinger might put it, Latin America has unraveled.

See? For the last 20 years, excellent populist economic policies in Latin America have brought enormous gains for the poor majority. According to E and D, it should have been catastrophic.

Alt Left: Capitalism Is Unsustainable: Capitalism Has An Inevitable Tendency to Move Towards Fascism

Rightwing dictatorships and fascists are good for US corporations and the US rich. So the capitalists of the world will always support fascism when it comes down to it. Every corporation in the US will support fascism if push comes to shove. For this reason, capitalism seems unsustainable because capitalists feel that the Left has no right to rule, and when it comes down to it, they will always support fascism, rightwing dictatorships, and fascist putschist oppositions to any existing leftwing governments.

It is for this reason that I feel that capitalism, which I do not necessarily oppose on moral grounds, is unsustainable and dangerous if not an out and out menace because of the tendency of all capitalist states when posed with a threat from the Left to install a fascist state. In other words, at some time or another in most capitalist countries, a threat will always cause a rightwing or fascist dictatorship to be installed.

Because of capitalism’s inevitable tendency towards rightwing dictatorship and fascism and its basic contempt for democracy, I feel that capitalism itself is a problem, and capitalism itself is a danger if not a menace to democratic society and people who wish to live free of dictatorships of the rich and fascism. In other words, yeah, capitalism in the long run is unsustainable.

Alt Left: Yes, There is Little Classism in Muslim Countries (Because It’s Against Islam)

James Schipper: Was it really very different (highly classist) in Islam?

Yes, Islamic countries are just not like that.

I can’t think of any Arab country that is like that.

No North African country is like that.

Neither Malaysia nor Afghanistan nor the Caucasus nor Xinjiang nor the Stans is not like that. However, Afghanistan was feudal or semi-feudal until recently. That’s why Communism was fairly popular there. An outsider went there in the 1950’s, and he saw groups of young men chanting with their fists in the air, “Kill the rich!” I suppose the Communist revolution did a land reform and got rid of this feudal land tenure system.

Communism was an easy sell in Bosnia and Albania, but Islam is weak there.

Corruption is a bad problem in the Arab World and a rich elite bled Lebanon dry for decades, but they are widely hated, and there is little to no class hatred in Lebanon.

I can’t see any class hatred in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Sudan, Somalia, Jordan, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or even in UAE.

I’ve never heard of any real classism in the Sahel, but no one there has any money anyway.

The only African countries with a history of classism were the apartheid states of Rhodesia and South Africa, but there it was racialized, and the classism was imported from Christian Europe. Classism among the Whites of these states themselves was not a problem.

Angola has become very unequal due to oil wealth, but the system is not popular, and most people are ending up poor. They had a successful Communist revolution that remained in power for a long time. The anti-Communist rebels didn’t even have much ideology. Jonas Savimbi of UNITA started out as a Maoist and switched to rightwing capitalist to get money from the West for his revolution.

Africa just doesn’t have a history of European classism. It was always a relatively egalitarian village society. Sure, the chiefs were rich, but they were supposed to provide for everyone.

All of the Gulf Arab states have such extensive social democracies that in a lot of cases, you hardly even have to work. Education and health care is free and housing may be subsidized. UAE is a very rich country and capitalism roars right along, but I don’t see a lot of class hatred. For one thing, everyone in the Gulf is well-off.

As I said, it was different before. Read Ghassan Khanafani (one of the founders of the PFLP) on the lives of fellahin or peasants in debt bondage in semi-feudal Palestine in the 1930’s. Nasser did a land reform in Egypt in the 50’s and he was a hero all over the Arab World. People said they went to Yemen in the 1960’s, and there were Nasser portraits everywhere in the homes of working class people. Nasser’s land reform set off a wave of land reforms in the Arab World. In Syria and Iraq, they were done by the socialist Baath Party. There was never much resistance to the Baath’s socialism. There were large state sectors and good social democracies. Even Saddam was basically a socialist.

Bangladesh is a problem. Pakistan has been discussed but it is Indianized and Hinduized. The same problem may be going on in Bangladesh. The class hatred is vicious in India, but it’s coded as caste hatred instead. So Pakistan and Bangladesh have a sort of Hinduized Islam. But the poverty and class hatred is not nearly as bad in those two states as it is in India and Nepal.

Bahrain and Indonesia are problems for whatever reasons but in Indonesia they had to kill 1 million Communists to get their crappy rightwing capitalist dictatorship. And in the last several years they have been led by a social democrat.

Turkey does have problems with its capitalist class in terms of exploitation of workers. After World War 2, there was a Communist revolution and the Commies almost won. However, there is a huge underground Leftist and Communist movement that regularly sets the factories and yachts of the rich on fire! They’re quite popular. The Kurdish PKK was also Left. Islam is rather weak in Turkey though, and Turkey is Europeanized. Erdogan is actually quite socialist. He’s more socialist than Biden. His brand is Islamism is heavy on the social justice end.

Alt Left: Christianity Is Anti-Capitalist?

Christianity Is Anti-Capitalist?

James Schipper: Still, theologically, Christianity is not a capitalism-friendly religion. There is nothing in the NT which encourages wealth accumulation or expresses admiration for the rich. In earlier times, there were very rich monasteries but also monastic orders which are committed to poverty, such as the Franciscans. These monasteries were rich for the same reason that Harvard and Yale are very rich. They became rich through donations and bequests.

Sure, theologically it may be so, but in practice, capitalism, extreme inequality, and class hatred have been accommodated in Christian countries quite easily.

You can say that Christianity is against capitalism all you want, but it hasn’t worked out that way in the West.

Social democracy was an easy sell in Europe, but the US is worse classwise than any European country. In the US we almost have a celebration of inequality and that’s somehow been accommodated with the Christianity, which seems weird. The Gospel of Wealth the Evangelicals practice here strikes me as downright heretical though. If Jesus was around, he’d reject it.

Feudalism lasted a long time in Europe, and early capitalism in England was horrible from the 1300’s-1800’s. England is terribly classist even today, but there’s a huge backlash. Thatcher was burned in effigy all over the UK when she died. Can you imagine that happening with Reagan in the US? The class hatred in the UK is pretty raw.

Classism in France was awful, but they killed their rich, and now it’s socialist.

Germany never had a vicious capitalist class. The Kaiser put in the first social democracy in the late 1800’s. It went over easily.

Italy’s never been all that classist, nor has Greece. After World War 2 in Italy, Communists were set to win local elections all over Italy but the US CIA got involved and there was massive election fraud that cheated them out of a victory. But Eurocommunists have been running states in Italy for decades, especially in the North. They’ve had a heavy emphasis on small business at the expense of big business and it’s worked great. I had a commenter on here who owned a small factory in a northern state and he loved the local Communist government. And he was a capitalist! In Greece, the Communists almost won a revolution.

I don’t think Eastern Europe has been classist. Communism went over easily there.

Communism went over easily in Yugoslavia too, though it was a modified form. It was also very popular. I know people who lived there, and they loved it. They almost won in Turkey too.

The Baltics are not classist and neither is Scandinavia. That area is all based on egalitarianism.

Spain and Portugal were classist, but there was a civil war in Spain, and it’s a pretty socialist country right now.

There was a Leftist Carnation Revolution in 1974 that overthrew Salazar’s fascism and a Leftist regime was nearly installed. It was very popular.

Alt Left: Right and Left in Islamic and Catholic Societies

If you’re not careful, the media will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and cheering the people doing the oppressing.

–Malcolm X

This is precisely the function of the media in a capitalist society. The Chinese media is not like this because, duh, China is not a capitalist country! Nor is the Iranian media because Iran is not a capitalist country. In fact, Iran is almost something like “Islamic Communism.” I’m not wild about Ayatollah Khomeini, but he did have a strong social justice streak.

The Revolution was populist, pro-independence, and anti-imperialist. Iran is almost based on a Muslim version of Liberation Theology or “the preferential option of the poor.” The social safety net is huge in Iran. Also, much of the economy is run by the state. It’s actually run by religious charities, often with ties to the military and the IRGC. I believe these religious charities do not operate at a profit. Small businesses are not bothered at all, as in all Muslim countries. I was reading Ayatollah Khameini’s tweets for a while on Twitter, and I could have been reading Che Guevara. Basically the same message.

Islam is just not friendly to neoliberal economics or radical individualism. It is a very collectivist religion in a very collectivist society.

Neoliberalism hasn’t caught on much of anywhere in the Muslim world other than Indonesia and the Southern Philippines, and they had to murder 1 million Communists in cold blood to get there in Indonesia and the Moros have always rejected Catholic rule in both a political and economic sense. it is notable that the Maoist NPA are also huge in Mindanao, home of the Moros.

Pakistan, too, has inherited the selfish economics and even feudalism in land tenure straight from Indian Hinduism. They even have caste, which would be considered an aberration in any decent Muslim society.

All of the Arab countries are basically socialist at least in name, and that was never a hard sell there. It’s true that 100 years ago, the Arab lands were mostly feudal in nature, with big landowners and peasants in debt bondage. They rich had co-opted the religious authorities like they always do, and the mullahs preached that Islamic feudalism was right and proper because the Prophet had said, “It is normal that some are rich and some are poor.” But it was always a hard sell, and it had a very weak foundation.

After independence, socialism was instituted in most if not all Arab countries at least in name. In particular, huge land reforms were done in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Palestine. I assume something like that was done in Algeria too. It was a very easy sell, and everyone went along with it without a hitch. The mullahs quickly changed from support for feudalism to support for socialism.

Hamas rules Gaza and I was shocked at how huge the social safety net is. The many religious charities run the safety net, which is distributed under the rubric of Islam. This is done instead of the state doling it out.

Mohammad himself didn’t have much to say about economics, but he wasn’t a neoliberal capitalist or a feudalist.

In Christian societies, the rich have utter contempt and hatred for the poor, who they regard as little more than human garbage. If you want to see this philosophy in action, look at the classism in Latin America. As all Muslims are part of the umma, and hence, as all are brothers and sisters, it is simply unconscionable that wealthy Muslims would be able to openly hate poor Muslims. You simply cannot treat your fellow Muslims like that. It’s not officially haram but it might as well be.

European Style Fascism in the Middle East

It is instructive that the only place in the Arab world where neoliberal economics and in particular Libertarianism took hold was in Lebanon, and even there, it was only among Catholic Maronites. Most Arab Christians look east to Antioch (and before that, Constantinople) to the Eastern Orthodox church, which is really just the eastern wing of Catholicism.

The Maronites, though, deride Antioch and instead look to Rome. They see themselves as European people instead of Arabs. Many deny that they are Arabs and instead refer to themselves as “Phoenicians.” It is interesting that the only real classical fascism in the Arab World took hold in the Lebanese Maronites, where the Gameyels imported it from Europe in the 1930’s.

The Jews of Israel also developed a very European form of fascism starting with Jabotinsky and his book The Iron Wall in 1921. This man was an open fascist. He is considered to be the spiritual father of the Likud Party. During the 1940’s, the armed Jewish rebels split into leftwingers who were almost Communists and rightwingers who were more or less fascists.

The Kahanists today look a lot like a European fascist party. And in fact, the entire Israeli rightwing around Likud, etc. looks pretty fascist in a European sense. So Israeli Jews are really Jewish fascists or fascist Jews. It has never been an easy ride for liberal and secular US Jews to support the Orthodox religious fanatics and rightwingers if not out and out fascists in the Likud, etc. in Israel. This was always completely unstable, and after that latest war, it’s finally starting to fall apart. But the seeds of destruction were already there.

But note that the Jews of Israel very much look to the West and see themselves as Europeans (which many are for all intents and purposes). They align themselves with the Judeo-Christian European society that many of them came from.

Half of Israeli Jews are Mizrachi Jews from the Arab World, and they have always had a Judeo-Islamic culture. However, when they moved to Israel, this was dismantled by perhaps not entirely. They rejected it due to the association of Arabs and Islam with the enemy, which is correct.

Economics and Catholicism

This radical classism and near-feudalism in Latin America was supported by the Catholic Church, which was always a very rightwing institution because they were always in bed with the rich. There were always Left splits in Catholicism like Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker. The Catholic clergy in the US has tended to be quite leftwing.

There is a long history of “Catholic Communism” in the Philippines, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, the Basque Country, France, Italy, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, Cuba, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay. The IRA was a leftwing Catholic armed group. A lot of priests were caught hiding IRA cadre. So was the ETA in the Basque Country of Spain.

Catholic Leftism never caught on in Poland and Lithuania due to hatred of Russia and the USSR. Nevertheless, both are more or less socialist countries.

Even today there is an active “Catholic Communist” movement in Cuba that is very lively. In Honduras and Colombia, Catholic priests actually led guerrilla bands. Liberation Theoloy is something like “Jesus Christ with an AK-47.” The Leftist who recently took power in Paraguay was a former Catholic priest.

The ELN was founded by a priest, Camilo Torres, and many Catholic clergy even supported the Shining Path! Edith Lagos, a 20 year old woman, was the leader of a very early Shining Path column in Peru. She was killed in 1980 and the entire town of Ayacucho, 30,0000 people, came out for her funeral which was held at midnight. The lines of mourners stretched through the whole city. All of the priests in town blessed her body, and she was given a proper Catholic funeral.

I believe that the PT or Workers Party of Brazil has a large Liberation Theology component. The Catholic clergy had an excellent relationship with the FARC in Colombia. Of course, the Catholic clergy played a big role in Venezeula, and Hugo Chavez himself was a practicing Catholic. The FMLN Salvadoran rebels were explicitly Catholic, as were the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. One of the Sandinists’ top leaders, Tomas Borge, was a Catholic priest. Jean-Paul Aristide in Haiti was a Catholic priest. Catholic believers are now allowed to join the Communist Party in Cuba, and near the end of his life, Fidel Castro said he was a “cultural Catholic.”

After Vatican 2 and Liberation Theology began to spread out via the seminal documents written by Gustavo Gutierrez in Brazil, “A Theology of Liberation,” otherwise known as “exercising the preferential option for the poor,” it began to spread in Latin America. It started with local priests and especially Catholic lay workers in impoverished areas and then slowly spread. Even today, Catholic layworkers and especially seminaries are very leftwing, while the Vatican itself is not. A lot of seminaries are hotbeds of homosexuality, and the gay priests and lay workers are quite open about it. It is estimated that 15% of Catholic priests are gay.

Alt Left: Francis Melville on the the Two Principal US Political Parties Views on Sexual Purity and Moral Sanctimoniousness

Absolutely superb comment from Francis Melville on this post.

Well, the Democrats used to be the Victorian prudish ones during the whole Nineteenth Century and through Wilson, and remained so wherever their voting base was Catholic up to 1965 when the Vatican II Council turned the Catholic Church into a liberal thing on most issues that had to ally with liberal forces to get heard in the political arena.

After all, the moral base of the Democratic Party was established under Jackson, and it formed under the influence of the most Calvinistic and sectarian part of the American public opinion.

Up through Wilson, the Democratic Party was more clearly rightwing than the Republican on most issues, while the Republicans took pride in being centre of the road. Even when they came to be the party of Big Business, their principle was clear: separation between church and state and even more between bedroom and state.

They believed you were entitled to a religious life, however wacko, provided you kept it for yourself and never planned to use government to promote it, and you were therefore entitled to any kind of sex life, however un-American, provided you did not involve the Party institutions nor aggressed any non-consenting victim.

Sexual virtue signalling was a Democratic thing as everything populist in general has always been. The alignment changed during the 20th century with Prohibition and consequently progressive thinkers of European origin aligning themselves systematically with the Democratic Party, in particular when the main presenters of these progressive currents happened to be Jews.

But even during the 1950’s as the Catholic church had remained the last bulwark of anti-sexual moralism on the backdrop of a Protestant world which had then succumbed to Utilitarianism, most regressive laws passed by the state in sexual affairs were passed under a Democratic banner. Worse, the Catholic world, like also the Muslim and Hindu world of that time, having little to do with higher morality, was more open to homosexuality and pederasty than to any heterosexual romance, as the latter was deemed a far greater danger to family life.

The McCarthy Era was driven by Irish Catholicism, and Irish Catholics loved to present themselves as the only true representatives and saviors of American values.

Meanwhile, the Republicans were gradually morphing into the party of absolute egoism and negation of public good. Swingers as had been produced by the Sexual Revolution of late Sixties and early Seventies proved to be egoists to a supreme degree and chose to be Republicans Ayn Rand style, most contrary to the hope entertained by Marcuse and others that Sexual Liberation would be the first stepping stone out of capitalistic Puritanism into the Long March towards a more just society.

In general, sexually speaking, dominant males’ dream is not sexual free choice for all but for themselves only as a tiny group on the backdrop of a puritanical society guaranteeing them an endless supply of innocent female prey that will make an exception to the Puritanism only under economic duress and due to the prohibition of them being pursued by impoverished males.

Reagan Republicans’ alliance with Moral Majority is to be seen in that perspective, both inside the non-believing wing of the Republican Party and inside the Evangelist sects also, where the main preachers always copy the great polygamous Biblical patriarchs, while imposing Puritanism on the masses of their attendants that haven’t studied the Bible deeply enough to know and realize the game.

The fake Protestant Republicans made their show in pure contradiction with what the Republicans, even the very right-wing ones, had been through. Eisenhower embraced religion in pure contradiction with that party’s stance of refusal of any reference to religion in the political sphere.

Meanwhile, the Democrats were quietly reverting, under corporate donor pressure and especially under Zionist Jewish pressure, to what they had been in Dixie times – there is no need to look further. The Democratic Party never stopped being multicultural, and that included necessarily that religious identities of all sorts had never ceased to be the party of confusion between the political and the religious spheres.

Traditionally, it was the Catholic Church as a provider of militants from Irish and Latino backgrounds, but now that since Vatican II the Roman Church no longer wanted to play the same role as it used to, a Virtual Catholic Church has formed.

It is made up of an alliance of Whites claiming progressivism but practicing astrology and other occult sciences as to cater for their own spiritual needs and more colored people practicing non-Christian ultra-conservative religions such as Islam and Hinduism, and calling for the unification of the world under this undefined-but-more-totalitarian-than-ever faith.

Celts who leave Catholicism and revert back to some sort Druidism are always puritanical to the highest degree, as they equate sexual energy with ultimate financial capital and as always being against of any form of social justice scheme, since they believe in karma, not divine grace.

It must be first well-understood that contrary to what a superficial cultural cliché teaches about Germanic conqueror tribes enslaving peaceful Celtic ones, Germanic cultures have always fallen for hippie (long hair, self-indulgence, social redistribution in favor of workers and artists) values when left alone to themselves in small nations, and Celtic cultures for skinhead or Hell’s Angels values (shaven heads, androgynous look, food fascism under various pretexts, indifference to misery).

Alt Left: Quit Worrying about Being Replaced by Some Stupid Machine

I laugh when people tell me these stupid machines are going to replace all of us humans. Every time I go to the bank readyteller, one of the two machines is literally down. Most of the time I try to do much of anything new on the Net, especially involving money, it simply doesn’t work, often giving me “Unknown error.” See that?

That machine is just intelligent enough to recognize that it screwed up (hence smarter than half of humans right there), but beyond that, it can’t even tell why or how it screwed up! Most humans can do that at least if they’ve got the balls to admit they’re not flawless, a tall order, admittedly.

The machine says, “I screwed up! I’m a dumbass machine! I’m as dumb as a rock! I only know whatever you humans told me to know! But can I figure out how or why I screwed up or even what sort of error I made? Well, of course not! What do you expect? I’m just a stupid machine!”

Anyway, I’m laffin’. These machines are literally failed 50% of the time, and they’re going to take over all of our jobs. Ha ha. How bout first of all, before you machines take over all our jobs, you figure out how to not break down half the time? Just a request.

Think about it. How many times have you gone to the store and asked a worker a question, and the worker tells you, “I’m sorry! This worker is out of order at the moment! Please come back later when one of our human repairmen come out to fix me!”

I know, a lot of store workers probably should say something like that if they were being honest, but when do they ever? Never.

The humans are never broken. They’re never malfunctioning as long as they’re not dead or hooked up to hospital tubes.

Humans are better than machines. Machines aren’t any threat to any of us except in the depraved fantasies of the capitalists who would replace us all with these infernal metal machine objects in a New York minute if they had our way.

Machines are crap. Machines are shit. LOL. They don’t even work more than half the time!

Alt Left: Trotsky on Fascism: One of the Best Analyses of Fascism Ever Written

Brian: Leon Trotsky, as far as I can tell, held the view that fascism is a capitalist phase that occurs when capitalism needs to be rescued from rising discontent among workers.

He wrote:

The Nazis call their overturn [of Social Democracy] by the usurped title of revolution. As a matter of fact, in Germany as well as in Italy, fascism leaves the social system untouched. Taken by itself, Hitler’s overturn has no right even to the name counterrevolution.

But it cannot be viewed as an isolated event; it is the conclusion of a cycle of shocks which began in Germany in 1918. The November Revolution, which gave the power to the workers’ and peasants’ soviets, was proletarian in its fundamental tendencies. But the party that stood at the head of the proletariat returned the power to the bourgeoisie. In this sense social democracy opened the era of counterrevolution before the revolution could bring its work to completion.

However, so long as the bourgeoisie depended upon social democracy and consequently upon the workers, the regime retained elements of compromise. All the same, the international and internal situation of German capitalism left no more room for concessions. As social democracy saved the bourgeoisie from the proletarian revolution, fascism came in its turn to liberate the bourgeoisie from social democracy. Hitler’s coup is only the final link in the chain of counterrevolutionary shifts.

In Trotsky’s view, social democracy overturned socialism after 1918, promising compromise between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and then Nazism overturned social democracy so as to end the need for compromise between the bourgeoisie and proletariat.

Nazism, in his analysis, and fascism in general is an expression of the petty bourgeoisie, which is hostile to economic and social development because such development in the current era necessarily favors either capitalists or workers.

So the petty bourgeois start making a commotion when economic and social conditions turn against them, and when the big bourgeoisie feels sufficiently threatened by the Left, they ally with the petty bourgeois elements and fascism begins. The primary objective is to throttle the workers so that both the big and petty bourgeoisie can be relatively comfortable in their socioeconomic positions.

However, the big capitalists prefer not to be in alliance with the petty bourgeoisie and to rule on their own, so such an alliance is merely convenient, and the big capitalists are not fully comfortable with it since it, like social democracy, limits their autonomy.

So during the capitalist stage of history, the upper class naturally prefers laissez faire capitalism or libertarianism, the middle class naturally prefers stasis and to hinder development so as to preserve themselves, and the working class naturally prefers socialism.

Perhaps it can be thought of like this: Fascism occurs when both the upper and middle Class agree that workers’ power threatens to grow too starkly, and they ally. Social democracy, perhaps, occurs when the middle and working class feel acutely threatened by the upper class, and they ally. Laissez faire capitalism occurs when the upper class is firmly in control. And socialism occurs when the working class is firmly in control.

Moreover, social democracy tends to pave the way for the upper class to regain much of its diminished power by maintaining the social system of the capitalist stage of history in general. This is why Trotsky thinks only a full proletarian revolution can safeguard against the return of an anti-worker regime, whether that regime is laissez faire or fascist.

Of course, Marxism in general holds that capitalism must reach a certain level of development before a true and lasting proletarian revolution can occur.

What do you think of all this?

Trotsky’s take on national socialism and fascism.

Thank you very much for this comment. Anyone want to argue against this or expand on it.

Yes, I read that essay. Written ~1930, right? It’s perfect. Trotsky is unjustly maligned, though his position on WW2 was unconscionable. His murder by Stalin was a serious crime. Need we remind ourselves that Leon Trotsky was the leader of the Red Army itself? That’s pretty impressive right there.

Trotsky’s essay, though written 90 years ago, remains one of the finest analyses ever of the phenomenon of fascism, which surprisingly is a very hard concept to figure out, mostly due to its chameleon-like and ever-mutating nature which tries to hide its fascist nature by saying a fascist project is not fascist. Fascism can and does call itself just about anything. In fact, there are fascist movements that have called themselves antifascists!

I recall there was this anti-Semite on the Jewish and Israeli newsgroups who often posed as an antifascist. He called actual antifascists fascists and called fascists antifascists. So he ended up railing against fascism while actually promoting it! He was pretty confusing for a while there until a I finally figured out his game after a few months. He sure was sneaky though, I’ll give him that.

The ever-mutating nature of fascism mirrors that of capitalism itself. Following Marx, I agree that capitalism is an amazing thing. I stand in awe at its capacity to continuously innovate and suit itself to most any material conditions. Think about this: A capitalist can literally print up t-shirts with Che Guevara’s face them and Revolution! written across the fronts, sell them and make a million dollars from them! That’s amazing. A capitalist making a bundle by selling anti-capitalist products. This is why capitalism is such a formidable foe.

Alt Left: Woke Militarism and US Imperialism, Liberal Democrat Variety

And you guys keep wondering why I’m a socialist. Well, I could always be a liberal, but then I would have to buy into the “woke imperialism” of the US Democratic Party. We may be slaughtering brown Venezuelans, Syrians, and Iranians by the hundreds of thousands, but as long as the trannies get to play high school girls’ track and field, it’s all good.

Seriously, how do US liberal Democrats sleep at night? I’ll never get it.

I guess it’s just capitalism though. The “social democrats” in Europe are just about the same as US liberal Democrats. There’s a limit to how leftwing a capitalist party can get. At the end of the day, it’s always about what’s good for the country’s corporations, and that’s always Western imperialism, every single time. I’m starting to think capitalism is unreformable. Of course that was the reluctant conclusion of Karl Marx himself, if you read him correctly, as almost no one does.

Scratch a liberal and a woke US exceptionalist/supremacist/imperialist bleeds.

— Nenad Lovric (@LovricNenad) April 24, 2021

Exactly. Rainbow colored phosphorus. Let’s make those smart bombs more inclusive, dammit!

The foreign policy of the Democratic Party of the United States: Woke Imperialism!

Woke imperialism FTW! I feel so much safer now that BLM bombs and LGBTIA bombs are blowing up brown people! If they don’t want gay rights or transsexual bathhouses for all ages, drop a bomb on their heads! It’s the liberal Democrat way!

Russian real soldiers versus US rainbow “soldiers.”

Ok, I get to take my pick between homophobic, Eastern Orthodox, male chauvinist, lifelong frat boy Russian soldiers or the US Marine Pride Corps with ready-made queer war criminals just waiting to be inducted into the Hall of Infamy, I think I’ll stick with backwardness, barbarism, and obscurantism, thank you very much. At least it’s tried and tested, unlike this Woke crap that doesn’t even work.

Alt Left: Why US Conservatism Fails – Social Conservatism/Support for Working Class Whites and Neoliberalism Are Always Incompatible

There Is No Society

Margaret Thatcher summed it up well when she said, “There is no society.” This is what all conservatives want. They want there to be no society at all. It’s odd because this white picket fence White America they all want to go back to was a society if there ever was one. So all rightwingers want to get rid of society (as it’s bad for business) but then the paradises they all want to go back to had deep societal structures.

Why US Conservatism Fails – Social Conservatism/Support for Working Class Whites and Neoliberalism Are Always Incompatible

Just as Keynesian economics, social liberalism, and even social democracy always inevitably pave the way for and give ground to neoliberalism in the future, social conservatism and neoliberalism are never really compatible, at least not in the US. Another problem for Republicans is selling their project to working class Whites while pushing a project – neoliberalism – that is designed by its very nature to devastate all workers but the working class first and foremost.

Hence the Republicans claim to speak for the White Working Class while pushing the very economics that is causing declining life expectancy, opioid addiction and overdose epidemics, complete social degeneration, and economic wreckage in White working class America. The Republicans have always done this by getting working class Whites to vote for them on social issues. But then the Republicans never really get around to fixing any of the social issues.

Abortion legal yet? Of course not.

Got a handle on illegal immigration?

Porn illegal? You kidding?

Social degeneration arrested? You must be joking.

Divorce and single parenthood? Pull the other one.

Drug abuse, sales, and use? Please.

For abortion, porn, and illegal immigration, the Republicans don’t want to fix any of these issues. They just want to say they will and then never do it. The daughters of the rich get abortions too. I’m sure the rich love their porn, depraved degenerates that they are. And Republicans will never fix illegal immigration because their corporate and small business supporters want to keep the illegal flow coming for the cheap wages and control over labor.

Divorce, single parenthood, social degeneration, drug use, sales, and abuse, including opioid use and overdose epidemics? Curiously, the neoliberal economics that Republicans push tend to directly cause all of these forms of cultural decay and degeneration.

US Conservatism Will Always Be Incoherent

As usual, conservatives are incoherent. The problem isn’t capitalism, it “state capitalism” or “state interference in the market.” This is the Libertarian idiocy. Yet every time there’s a crisis in the market – and under neoliberalism there will be more than ever – the capitalists all go running to the state with their hands out asking for the workers to bail them out. The only thank you the workers get is a giant IOW for trillions of dollars they have to pay back that they loaned to the capitalists.

I go to rightwing blogs all the time and I see them flailing about. Many are starting to figure out that neoliberalism is utterly corrosive of all of the socially conservative values that they wish to cultivate.

Neoliberalism will always support mass immigration and illegal immigration to keep wages down.

Neoliberalism will always oppose any moral structures in society because the more we let it all hang loose, the more consumers we have.

Neoliberalism will never be race realist because capitalists care absolutely nothing whatsoever about race. It means nothing to them. The only color capitalists have ever cared about is green.

I see them flailing around, searching for something, anything – that will give them their social conservatism while keeping their free markets. Huey Longism, “agrarian socialism”, distributism, antisemitic campaigns against “banksters” that leave the rest of the neoliberal economy alone, on and on.

They want the usual starvation of the state with low taxes and no social programs, but that always results in no society at all or something that looks more like Somalia than Norman Rockwell.

They decry the pain that neoliberalism has inflicted on the White working class while refusing to recognize that neoliberalism had anything to do with it.

They never have any solid proposals about anything because their love of neoliberalism, a small or near-zero state, no regulation, etc. always runs afoul of their desires to limit immigration, slow the decline of the White working class, arrest the decay of values and behavior, and adopt some sanity on race, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity because the two things are utterly incompatible.

You either have one or the other.

You can’t have both.

Category: Capitalism