The Breakup of the USSR as a Major Progressive Milestone

A commenter questions how I can say that the breakup of the USSR was a progressive moment in history. But it was…

Rob, you once wrote that the breakup of the USSR was a progressive moment in 20th century history? How can you call yourself a leftist after such a statement? You do realize what happened in Russia and around the world after 1990, don’t you? Gorbachev was a traitorous, cowardly, slimebag on the CIA payroll.

I don’t think so. The breakup was not a progressive event due to the abandonment of socialism, though many seem to think that the project was not working out very well, so maybe the abandonment of socialism was proper after all.

The real way that it was progressive was in terms of the liberation of the official nationalities of the republics of the USSR. After all, nations want liberation. This is a longstanding Left position and demand from the anti-colonial movement on.

From the very start, the USSR gave the nationalities the right to secession. That was way back around 1920 or so. How many other states allowed such a thing back then? None.

So when those Republics seceded, that was allowed under the Soviet Constitution. How many states will allow their minority regions the right to self-determination in that way? Almost none. Almost all states ban the self-determination of the nations amidst their borders. If these nations decide to secede and exercise that right, the states react with fascist aggression. So almost all states on Earth are fascist in that sense.

Only the USSR and a few other states are or were truly non-fascist or anti-fascist on this most important question.

Other antifa states: Great Britain, Canada, the former Czechoslovakia. That’s about it, right? Can you think of even one more?

It’s unfortunate that the new republics went in a capitalist direction, but that was their choice. Russia also went in a capitalist direction, apparently a choice of the people. This was right and proper, true people’s rule and popular decision-making.

East Germans Getting Nostalgic For Socialism

Repost from the old site.

Although there were reportedly some serious problems with East German socialism (the Trabant, the ubiquitous vehicle, was a piece of junk), with the recent chaos in world capitalism, many East Germans are now saying that they would rather have socialism than capitalism. A recent survey found that 5

Sales of Marx’s Das Kapital have tripled since last year and increased 100X since 1990, although sales as a whole remain low. The publisher expressed amazement and said that he never thought the book would sell well again. He said that even bankers and managers are reading it to try to figure out what’s going in with the turmoil in capitalist economics.

The switch from socialism to capitalism has not worked out very well in the East. Unemployment and poverty are very high. The outskirts of Berlin, Leipzig and the Baltic shore and doing well, but the rest of the region is doing poorly. It’s actually suffering depopulation.

One of the problems with East Germany was that the factories were really not competitive by Western standards. After reunification, they were bought by Western competitors and shut down. That seems devious. The Left Party, a genuine Leftist party, now has 3

One serious problem with Communism has been that, although in general it got rid of poverty, it was unable to provide more than a low standard of living. Nowadays, for better or worse, people want stuff. They don’t want empty stores, lines, shortages and crappy products. Social capital only goes so far with people. This is going to be a real challenge for modern socialists.

In addition, there was often great economic growth for decades, but then it all bogged down into bureaucracy. Another vexing problem to be dealt with.

The Role of Jews in the Left and Communism in the 20th Century

A commenter asks why there are so many Jews in the Communist Party USA. When I was getting their newspaper in 1998, it was stacked with Jews from top to bottom.

Don’t they know the the USSR effectively turned anti-Jewish starting from 1948? And being the most privileged elite group in America, what do they have to gain by being in the CPUSA?

Jews are very leftwing people. A lot of them are liberals, socialists, Leftists or out and out Communists. As far as why this is, much ink has been expended. You are urged to look into it yourself, and see what you can come up with. This is one of the Fascist Right’s main arguments against Jews – that they are a bunch of Commies. That’s why Hitler and the other fascists killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, to wipe out Judeo-Bolshevism.

The White nationalist Right and the Kevin MacDonald types continue to recycle this meme about Commie Jews who hate Whites and kill Whites. They go on and on about Bolshevik Jews who murdered 20-110 million Russian Christians, or some shit like that. This is the Czarist and fascist Solzhenitzen’s beef against Jews – they’re a bunch of Commies. Or they bring up Bela Kun. Or the German Communists in 1919-1920. Or the Polish Communists. Or on and on.

That’s one of the reasons I am a Judeophile. Jews are my comrades. They are one of the most Leftist ethnic groups that ever lived, and they played a great role in the development of the Left from 1850-on, a role that continues to this day.

There’s nothing great about Stalin turning anti-Jewish at the end, just more Stalinist paranoia and murder. The Jews built the Bolshevik state up from nothing. They created the state that Stalin ruled.

Most modern-day Stalinists and Communists are actually pro-Jewish, especially the ones in the Russia nowadays. Remember that Stalin made anti-Semitism illegal in 1926, and made the punishment the death penalty. I’m glad he did that! Plus he married some Jewish women and had some Jewish mistresses. He didn’t hate Jews at all; it’s a bunch of anti-Semitic wishful thinking shit.

Ilya Ehrenberg, a Jew, was Stalin’s chief propagandist in WW2. He wrote, “You’re either an anti-Semite or anti-Nazi, there is no middle ground.” He drew the line in the sand, and I still agree with that line.

The fascists still hate Ehrenberg with a passion so hot it could smelt iron. Go over to Stormfront and praise Ilya Ehrenberg, and they will probably try to lynch you on the spot.

Great Site On Ethnic Groups In China

Repost from the old site.

From the Chinese government.

That isn’t really the homepage; I can’t find the homepage, so just click to the left on any ethnic groups you want to read about.

Lists all of the official minorities, with a good anthropological background for them, along with a good history, a bit about the language, customs, religious beliefs, culture, etc., then onto recent history.

The history and recent history is written according to Marxist economic analysis, and shows how the coming of the Chinese Revolution really did improve things for many minorities.

I’ve been scared to read the part about the Tibetans and Uighurs.

I’m sure in the case of Tibet it will talk about how the revolution ended feudalism (Yes, there was real feudalism in Tibet.) in Tibet and made life better for most Tibetans. One thing no one tells you about the Free Tibet crowd was that the Dalai Lama presided over a particularly horrible modern form of feudalism, complete with castes and out and out slavery.

The site does provide a tremendous amount of evidence that the Chinese revolution has resulted in tremendous improvements in the lives of many Chinese minorities. Anti-Communists seem to be blind to that fact. Life in China in 1949 and the decades prior was no picnic!

It’s pretty cool to have an anthropological overview of lots of interesting ethnic groups written strictly from a Marxist perspective. More typical is this one, still very well-done, but written by hardline Estonian anti-Communists. It deals with the ethnic groups of the Former Soviet Union.

I wasn’t aware that the USSR had destroyed every single ethnic group in the country until these stalwart Balts informed me. I realize the Balts are pissed, but it needn’t taint your scholarship.

National Bolshevik Blog

Maury2K’s blog.

Worth a look. I hate to say it, but this is somewhat up my alley. I don’t like NB’s at all. They’re a bunch of racist and ultranationalist expansionist shits. Nonetheless, this Maury2K guy is one of the most reasonable I have found yet.* Good articles on how the Western Left has mega-fucked up.

I will vote Republican only over my dead body. You will literally have to kill me first. I can’t imagine any situation in which I would vote Republican. Bottom line is I end up voting Dem most of the time. Sometimes I vote Left, like Green or Socialist, just as a protest vote, if I think the election is a done deal.

Even though these National Bolsheviks are racist fucks, they are socialists and on the Left, and I would much rather ally with them than with these traitor invite the world, invade the world Democrats. The Western Left is hopeless and frankly, pure evil. It’s 10

Politics is the art of compromise, as my late father used to say. Your allies are typically the lesser of two evils.

*I have some worries on this site, such as his position on civil rights and what looks like some anti-Semitism, but I’ll swallow that pill over the Western Left Open Borders White race traitor horse pill any day.

Lenin on the Socialism of Fools

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDwigueNWjw&feature=related]

Lenin himself on the socialism of fools. Are you listening, fools? C’mon, listen closely, it’s The Man himself speaking.

Anti-Semites say he was Jewish himself. He was 1/4 Jewish on his father’s side. That’s not enough to be a Jew in either the Orthodox nor the more modern Reform tradition. He had a bit of Jewish ancestry. So what? A lot of us have ancestry of this or that, and it means nothing. At the time, Orthodox Judaism was the only real Judaism in Russia. So, Lenin was not seen as a Jew by anyone, neither Jews nor Russians. Lenin himself did not see himself as a Jew. Why should he, as Judaism at the time in Russia was defined religiously, not racially?

Karl Marx’s On the Jewish Question is brought up by many anti-Semites as evidence that Marx was an anti-Semite. Marx was fully Jewish and cared nothing for anti-Semitism. He renounced Judaism and condemned it as he condemned all religion.

In OTJQ, Marx attacks the Jews for demanding liberation for themselves only, when no one is Germany is free except for the rich. He saw this as self-centered. He also felt that Germany was still a feudal state, and was not going to give liberation to anyone anyway, Jews or not. That’s all the essay is all about, though admittedly it is very hard to understand. He also attacks Judaism as a religion, and says that anymore, the religion of Jews is simply capitalism itself, and that any real religion as since fallen by the wayside. This is an attack on Judaism as a religion.

The “JewSSR” folks need to explain why synagogues were closed all over the USSR the same way that churches were. The Jews were granted a state in Siberia to shut them up. Hebrew was forbidden there as the language of the Jewish religion, and Yiddish was promoted as the proper language of the Jewish people. It was an attempt to deal with the incessant demands of Jewish nationalists by giving them a state of their own. Still, I feel that giving them a piece of Siberia was a bit shitty.

The Judeo-Bolshevik crowd has some ‘splainin to do. The ethnic Latvians were just as prominent as Jews, in fact, more, from 1917 all the way through World War 2. Sure, many Latvians hated the USSR,  for some reason, lots of Latvians also joined the Red Army, NKVD, etc. No one quite knows why this is. I urge you to come up with a theory about Latvio-Bolshevism as quickly as possible.

The Socialism of Fools (Fools Please Read This)

The socialism of fools, or “socialist anti-Semitism,” is as stupid as any other variety. It relies on childish and immature thinking, with a lot of ill-thought out observations and conclusions along the way.

1. I hate capitalism. 2. Jews are capitalists. 3. Get rid of the Jews, get rid of capitalism. Doh! 4. Fail! Gentile capitalists take over for the Jews. 5. But the Gentile capitalists are different, they are “good capitalists.” 6. Yeah right!

Truly idiotic! It’s so retarded, I can’t believe that anyone falls for it. But taking it apart requires some real thinking, and especially a grounding in Marxist studies. Once you grasp the nature of class, class interests, and class struggle, all this crap about “Jews as capitalists” fades away. Jewish capitalists are bastards. Well, maybe so. But not because they are Jews, only because they are capitalists!

There is another “reformist” line that says that there is some real, pure capitalism, which is real nice. Tastes great, less filling, only 300 calories per serving! On sale today while it lasts!

But this really cool, nice, groovy capitalism got all fucked up by some “Jewed-up capitalism” like we have here in the West.

This relies on a faulty understanding of political economics. There is no nice Gentile capitalism. There is no Jewed-up evil capitalism that deviated from the true religion and caused the glorious true blue good capitalists to be tossed out of the garden, bringing death into the world, and all our woe.

Capitalism is capitalism, folks. It works the same way all over the world. The capitalists all work together. The Jews, the Gentiles, everyone. They pursue similar or even identical capitalist interests.

By the way, Jews don’t run the banks anymore either. Even David Dude admits that. They used to run the banks in Europe, but a little event in the 1940’s pretty much ended that matter.

Henry Ford, in The International Jew, documents how uber-tribal Jews in the US made a run on investment banking, which was partially penetrated, before Gentile solidarity stopped them. While the Jews are quite strong in US investment banking, to this day, they don’t control it, as there are probably more Italians than Jews on the floor of the NYSE.

They next made a run of commercial banking, which was stopped cold by Gentile solidarity.

When Jews act like this and make runs on industries (not sure if they do it anymore), only Gentile solidarity will stop them. For Gentile solidarity, read racism or discrimination. All the Gentiles get together and agree not to sell to any Jews and only sell to Gentiles. This strategy is necessary because the Jews are trying to buy the Gentiles out, then the Jews will only sell to other Jews.

Fight Jewish ethnic warfare with Gentile ethnic warfare. Don’t wage warfare any worse than the Jews do. Limit it to discrimination. Don’t harm the Jews in any way.

Problem is that once a society becomes “Jewified” as the US is now, it’s going to be hard for Gentiles to be racist enough to stop any future Jewish runs. But the Jews now are a lot more deracinated than they were in 1910. Yet the Russian Jews nowadays probably still act like 1910 Ellis Island Jews, so that’s a problem.

The solution to this, as with any aspects of the Jewish Question, is the assimilation of the Jews. Assimilated Jews won’t make runs on industries or institutions.

Thanks, fools, for reading this post. The unexamined life is not worth living. He who is not busy reading, is busy sleeping. Education lasts for a lifetime. Consider this a brief tutorial. Like good socialists, we didn’t even charge you!

Transcript of My Latest Interview July 7, 2010

Interview July 7, 2010 with Reason Radio Network. The comments at the end of the post are hostile, but the site’s audience and hosts tend to be some mixture of paleoconservatives, White nationalists and anti-Semites. That’s not exactly where I am coming from, but I will interview with anyone, and most of the Left won’t touch me with a 10-foot pole.

I’ve been looking over your blog, and we talked about these labels as in Left versus Right, and I know you were describing yourself as a liberal, but you’ve been getting people describing you as a Third Positionist. The 3rd Positionist movement is a nationalist movement, but it’s not necessarily ethnonationalism – it could just be putting your country first. But they reject both Communism and capitalism, but they could sometimes incorporate some Marxist ideas. What is your take on being described as a 3rd Positionist?

I don’t know, I’m totally confused about 3rd Positionism – I don’t really know what it is, I don’t know what they want. They’re Euros, but the 3rd Positionists of the past were fascists and Nazis. But clearly they are pretty sui generis, and they are hard to pigeonhole and understand.

It’s a difficult movement to define. They don’t have a figure like the Marxists have Karl Marx and the capitalists have Adam Smith. I know that the 3rd Positionists have been smeared by being described as fascists.

It isn’t necessarily fascism, but it is true that when the fascists came to power, they said that they were nationalists, and that they were against the Communists and the capitalists. But you could be a 3rd Positionist and you could be a civil libertarian or you could be very authoritarian. Even among 3rd Positionists, there are a lot of different nuances within the ideology.

3rd Positionism is about as hard to pin down as fascism. Fascism is hard to pin down too. The fascists said that they were against both capitalism and Communism, but they just said that to get people to go along with them. It’s always been a rightwing movement. It’s never been anti-capitalist. The Nazis had the Night of the Long Knives, and they killed all of the socialist and anti-capitalist Nazis. There was a Nazi guy who was a big 3rd Positionist hero, but I can’t remember his name (Note: Gregor Strasser).

Is it Godfrey Feder?

No.

He was their economist.

No, see, when Hitler first started out in 1921, they drafted this Set Of Principles, and they called themselves National Socialists, and they had a pretty socialist, anti-capitalist economic project. And they got a lot of support. There were people on the Left who were even going Nazi, and there people who were going back and forth between the Nazis and the Communists in the 1920’s during all of that turbulence.

And in the early 1930’s, the Nazis were getting funded by major German industrialists. They were getting funded by the corporations. This is what almost nobody knows. The German corporations were behind the Nazis all the way. That’s where they got their money.

But there were bankers funding Bolshevism too. Like Jacob Schiff helped finance the Bolshevik Revolution. So there definitely were industrialists financing both sides. But I think they just want to make a profit. War is one of the most profitable things.

Why would a banker finance Communism? The international bankers generally did not finance Communism. That’s simply not true. There’s no money in it for them! Communism is the biggest money loser in the whole world for capitalists.

But the government still needs to borrow money whether it’s Communist or capitalist. The other thing is that when the Czar was in power, he was more of an economic nationalist and he did not want to do business with these bankers, so the bankers did have some incentives for financing Bolshevism.

Those Jews like Schiff, they did not make any money at all off of Russia going Communist. It was a gigantic money loser. The whole thing with Schiff was all about Jewish ethnic politics.

Yes, because the Czar was anti-Jewish, so it was more an ethnic thing than an economic thing.

Believe me, that’s all it was – revenge on the Russians. And a lot of the Communists were Jews. It was just let’s get rid of these anti-Semites and put some pro-Jews in power. Schiff was not acting in his class interests by doing that. This whole idea of bankers funding Communism, well, hey, I’m kind of a Commie myself. I mean, I wish they would give us some money!

There weren’t any Gentile capitalists who financed Communism.

Why would they? There are a few rich people who are Communists, but that’s rare. If you study Marxism, then you understand class, and so many things that people do are based on their class interests. People have class interests. Why would a rich capitalist finance Communism? Why would I buy someone the guillotine that’s going to chop my head off? It’s totally operating against your class interests. There’s no point to it unless you’ve got some kind of ulterior motive.

They have an ulterior motive unless they are already in power. But there’s socialism in different forms. There is socialism that is directed against the rich and also it’s possible that the elites are using a form of socialism to keep down the middle class. That’s not true Marxism, but it’s selected socialism to target a different class.

I don’t agree with that sort of rightwing populism. That’s just crazy. The elites hate socialism period. But there are some elites who go against their class interests and ally with the poor because, well, maybe they grew up poor or maybe they’re just nice people. But they are basically supporting a project that is going to cut their income.

And why would they do that? I mean a few of them will, just because they’re good people or they are self-sacrificing. But in general, the rich pursue their class interests, which is to retain their wealth or increase it. And they certainly do not support projects that are going to decrease their wealth.

You don’t think that rich liberals have ulterior motives?

Rich liberals are just nice people. They’re just nice people who feel guilty, and they’re willing to give up their money and share it with others, and that’s all there is to it. They’re self-sacrificing people. They have no ulterior motives or any of that. The notion that they do is rightwing populism. It’s crazy.

But 3rd Positionism ties in with populism. You’ve heard of that label producerism is the idea, not so much Right or Left, that the middle class is being exploited on both ends by both big government and by big business, especially the banking elite.

Well…The middle class typically is exploited by the rich under capitalism. Studies have proven that under neoliberalism, which is radical capitalism, the bottom 8

A lot of the middle class people align with the rich, the capitalists and the corporations too, but they are not really acting in their class interests when they do that. The middle class does not understand their class interests. They want to be rich. They typically align with the rich. But it often doesn’t make much sense for them to do that.

But you said that the Left doesn’t really represent the middle class either mainly because the Left is for Open Borders. You wrote a recent article where you said both the Democrats and the Republicans, the Left and the Right, is one big Corporate Party.

In the US, that’s true because the Democratic Party isn’t really a Left party anymore. It’s sort of a rightwing party instead, and it’s all just corporate politics. They just represent the corporations, the rich and the upper middle class. The Democrats are sort of for the middle class to a greater extent than the Republicans are, but I don’t think either party is for the poor or low income people anymore. Supporting them is considered to be a total loser.

The Democrats used to be for the poor, the low income and the workers, but supposedly, that’s why they were losing elections, and that’s why they went to the DNC model. The corporate Democrats decided that this is the way to win elections – be pro-corporate, get the corporate money, beat the Republicans at their game. That’s the DNC – the Democratic National Committee, and that’s where they’re all coming out of now. Even Obama, he’s a DNC guy.

I noticed that you commented on the new American 3rd Position Party. We were discussing on our show about the pros and cons of explicit racial activism, but you mentioned on your site that the A3P is probably one of the most pro-worker and anti-corporate parties in the US.

I think that what’s interesting about that is it’s showing you that these labels about the Left and the Right don’t make a lot of sense because a lot of people might hear about the A3P and they might think of it as a rightwing party, but you were saying that you looked over their platform, and you agree with a lot of what they have to say.

Well…it’s just a sad statement on the state of affairs of the Western Left. It exemplifies the total failure of the Western Left to support the workers, especially White workers, or just workers period, the low income, the working class, the poor. Especially the Whites.

They are opposed to all of these people, and the Western Left pushes anti-White politics. They are pro-non-White. They’re pro-Hispanic, they’re pro-Black, and they’re anti-White. And when they are pushing mass immigration, that’s just a spear into the heart of the White worker…the low income, the poor and the working class Whites, who are my people…those are my people. It’s just a sad comment when these rightwingers, who are almost fascists…when the fascists are the only people who are standing up for workers anymore.

Hold on now, when you make a statement referring to them as fascists. Now you’re entitled to your opinion, but if you look at the platform, they say they’re for Constitutionalism. What specifically about the platform is fascist?

Well…I think they said something about encouraging non-White immigrants to go back to their countries. “We’ll even give them money to go home.” But there’s nothing much in there that’s specifically fascist. It’s a very moderated program. Yet they are calling themselves 3rd Positionists, and 3rd Positionist is fascist…And the A3P is explicitly pro-White in the US.

The leaders of the party are White Nationalists. Kevin MacDonald is a White Nationalist who is sympathetic to fascism and Nazism. The leader of the party (Note: William D. Johnson) is an explicit White Nationalist who called for throwing all non-Whites out of the country 20-30 years ago (Note: Book penned in 1985 under the pseudonym of James O. Pace). That’s where these people are coming from.

Those are their leaders – they are coming out of the White Supremacist movement, the White Nationalist movement, which is a pro-fascist movement in the United States. And that’s how they totally failed, because, in being pro-fascist, they have blown off the entire White racist, White supremacist – especially Southern White Supremacist – segment in the United States.

Most White racists and White Supremacists in the US of the old White Supremacist types – they hate fascism, they hate Nazism. They fought in WW2. The Southerners fought in WW2. They were slaughtered in WW2 by the Nazis.

Southerners are pro-British. Their roots are in the UK. Hitler attacked the UK. The pro-White movement in the US – the White nationalists, the White supremacists – they’re pro-Nazi, they’re pro-fascist! That is the biggest loser project! I know White people. Most White people want nothing to do with fascism or Nazism. Why does pro-White politics have to be fascist and Nazi? That’s no good. These people are losers. That’s the biggest failure in White politics right there.

The Left likes to link the Southern nationalist types with Nazism but most people don’t know this but along with Jews…White Southerners and Jews were the most gung-ho groups about fighting WW2.

My mother was present in that era and I asked her, “Well, those Southerners were racists. Wasn’t Hitler’s seen as a pro-White regime?” and she said, “Oh no! I lived during that era and everybody hated the Nazis.” There were more pro-Nazis in Pennsylvania than there were in the entire South! The only Americans who were pro-Nazi were ethnic Germans, and then after Pearl Harbor, they basically just disappeared or went underground or shut up. The Nazis had zero support in the South.

The Southern White Supremacists liked democracy. My Mom said that Americans hated the fascists because they were a dictatorship…and they were persecuting Jews. And Southerners didn’t really care anything about Jews back then. Who cares about Jews?

And the Nazis were not seen as pro-White at all. I mean every White person was pro-White back then. Why would you line up with Nazis? And the people that the Nazis were fighting were pro-White. France was pro-White. The UK was pro-White. Denmark, everyone in Europe was pro-White back in those days.

So being pro-White was the norm, but what happened was the Establishment took it up, and they tried to link being pro-White with being with Hitler. But it’s a psychological thing, because if your enemy is telling you that if you’re pro-White, you’re like Hitler, psychologically, you’re going to think, “Well, maybe Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy, and maybe I should be pro-Hitler.” Would you say that that’s the roots of it?

Well…I’m not sure, I don’t know why the pro-White movement has gotten into Nazis and fascists and all that, because I think that’s the biggest mistake they ever made. For instance, there are probably still a lot of White racists down in the South, but I don’t imagine that most of those people like Nazis or fascists.

I think it’s one faction of the White Nationalist movement that might be Nazi. But it’s a problem that it might be guilt by association because in the White Nationalist community, they are going to network together, and if one person is their friend…if they have a political associate who might say something pro-Hitler, it’s going to rub off. So you’re saying that that’s one of the biggest barriers, because groups like the ADL along with the media – they’re going to try to link anything that’s remotely pro-White with Nazism and fascism.

Well…that’s simply not true. The old White Supremacists in the South, the neo-Confederates, and there are still many, many, many Southerners who believe in this stuff, and there are even White racists all over the country who subscribe to that, and they don’t want anything to do with Nazism, and they don’t even like fascism either. So the White movement is simply insane. Why have they taken up Nazism and fascism? I don’t know.

But for 20 years after WW2, White Supremacism and White racism was going gung-ho all through 40’s, the 50’s and into the early 60’s the Civil Rights Movement. They weren’t waving Nazi flags or supporting fascism. They were pro-democracy, pro-American, pro-European, and they hated Nazis and fascists.

If you look at the A3P, they are pro-democracy and pro-Constitution, so I don’t want to smear that party because I agree with what they are doing, but you do make a legitimate point that through guilt by association…maybe someone is affiliated with someone who may have those views, but the party itself, the platform and agenda put out by the party, is a Constitutionalist party that’s for democracy and individual rights.

Yes, the A3P could hardly be called a fascist party. There’s not a whole lot of fascism around anymore. Even the European Right, the Hard Right in Europe, they’re not all that classically fascist anymore – the BNP, the British National Party – is not all that fascist, they’re democrats last time I checked. They support civil liberties. The old fascism of the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s – it isn’t really coming back.

You see, fascism mutates. Pinning down fascism is like pinning down a blob of mercury. Fascism is like a chameleon. It changes colors, it changes shapes, it can be anything. It will take on the forms of other things. Who’s that guy who wrote Babbitt? Sinclair Lewis?

He said that fascism, if it comes to the US, will be wrapped in a cross and an American flag.

Exactly. Fascism takes on whatever forms it needs to take on to get in. It’s this very weird movement that’s very, very difficult to study, to define. They’ve been studying it since the 1920’s, and there’s some really good literature coming out in recent years – a lot of it can be found on a blog called Orcinus. There are some excellent pieces there that talk about something called “pseudo-fascism.”

Some of the top research right now on fascism is coming out of Political Science departments. They are trying to exactly figure out…what it is! Because…nobody…really knows…what fascism is! And the fascists are experts are concealing their motives, at lying, at not calling themselves fascists, at calling themselves anti-fascists.

You talked about Sinclair Lewis, well, Huey Long, who was a popular political figure in the US in the 1930’s, he said that fascism will return to the US, but perhaps under the title of anti-fascism.

That’s what they do. I’ve seen fascists on the Net, and they called their enemies fascists! It’s really weird and confusing. If you hang around Usenet sites that have a lot of fascists, after a while, your mind starts spinning around, and you start wondering if you are a fascist yourself. And they try to convert you to their movement.

They are like these shape-shifting forms that change into these other things and say all this contradictory stuff, and they’re just all over the place. They’re sneaky, and they’re tricksters, and mainly they confuse you. They confuse people, and that’s how they get people to support their project because often people don’t really know what they are supporting. They’re not up front about their aims – that’s another aspect of fascism. It’s basically a popular movement against the Left.

And populism can be a good thing, but fascism, it is an ultra-authoritarian movement. So I don’t think that being a racist automatically makes you a fascist. Even if you are a White Supremacist, one aspect of fascism that is essential to it is a reliance on a totalitarian form of government.

Well…certainly that is true, and all of those old-style racists in the US, and especially in the South, they’re anti-fascists! They hate fascism, they hate Nazism, and this crazy pro-White movement has blown all these people off by cheering on fascists and Nazis. What’s the matter with them? I don’t get it. For some reason, Hitler is held up as a hero of the White race. No he wasn’t! Hitler probably killed more White people than anyone in the 20th Century. What kind of hero is that?

Hitler did kill millions of White people, possibly even more than Stalin. I don’t get it. I think it’s just psychological where the enemies of people who are pro-White, they keep labeling pro-Whites as Nazis, and then they end up taking that label. Because when someone keeps calling you something, psychologically, you take up that label.

Well…that might be part of it. You call a man a thief enough, and eventually he might start stealing. “Well, if you’re going to call me a thief anyway, I might as well just start stealing.” And with the White Supremacists, since the 60’s, there’s been a total war on White racism coming out of the anti-racist movement. And that’s one thing the anti-racists have done really well – we pathologized racism, in particular, White racism, because, well…White racism is nasty, it has a bad history, and most White people don’t want to be racists anymore!

I think most Whites are racist in minor ways, but hardcore White racism has been so pathologized that most Whites will not take extreme, explicit racist stances anymore. So the only people out there taking explicitly pro-White stances are people who are so crazy that they don’t even care.

So it further stigmatized it so there’s no room for a healthy or more moderate pro-White movement.

There are no moderate pro-White movements!

Well, Pat Buchanan, he seems to have the best model because he basically is pro-White. He writes in his book, Death to the West that he does have a strong preference for White culture, and he laments the demographic change. But he’s able to appeal to a lot of people that White Nationalists can’t, and he has a following among conservatives where even people who are not White can admire him.

Well…Buchanan is basically…White politics. White politics isn’t really White Nationalism. The Tea Parties are White politics. The Republican Party, increasingly, is White politics. But you know Buchanan is sort of pro-Nazi himself. That’s a real problem with him.

Well, he’s not really pro-Nazi. Instead, he takes the position that the conservatives around the time of WW2, they were not explicitly pro-Nazi, but instead, they took the position that the Communists were a lot worse than the Nazis, or that defeating the Nazis wasn’t really worth it because Eastern Europe fell to Communism and Western Europe fell to multiculturalism. So that’s sort of where Pat Buchanan is coming from.

Break

The conservative movement around WW2 was under a lot of pressure, and the conservatives later changed their position – some conservatives nowadays will say that the Nazis and Communists were equally evil – there are even some who go out of their way to say that the Nazis were worse. I saw Denis Prager speak several years ago, and he said that he thought that the Nazis were even worse than the Communists, and that’s usually the position that the Left took.

Isn’t he a Jew though?

Yes, he is, so that’s a logical position but part of it is this Jewish influence for the neoconservative movement that has had a huge impact on the conservative movement in the US.

Well…I’m coming out of the WW2 Left, and those are my heroes, my comrades. The fascists and the Nazis are my enemies. They killed my comrades. If they ever come back in power, they will kill me, and I have no sympathy at all for those guys. And it’s not even a question of overall who was worse. See, I don’t think Stalin killed 20, 40, 60 or 110 million. I think Stalin killed 2.5 million. I don’t agree with those figures. Those are Nazi lies as far as I’m concerned.

I don’t believe that that famine was a deliberate famine, you know, the Holodomor, that fake famine that the Ukrainians go on about? Do you know what that famine is? The Ukrainian famine, the Holodomor?

Yes, I know what you are talking about, but it’s important to note that there is definitely a double standard when it comes to Communist atrocities, there can be an open discussion. But if you debate the Nazi atrocities, if you’re in Germany, you can actually go to jail for that.

Well…you can still debate the Nazi atrocities. And the legitimate figures for how many Jews were killed ranges all the way down to 4.2 million. So you can say that there were no 6 million killed, there were only 4 million, and that doesn’t make you a Holocaust Denier. And there are people who say it was over 6 million.

Anyway, historians pretty much agree about the basics. The debate’s over about the Holocaust. They did kill anywhere from 4 million to over 6 million Jews. That’s just the bottom line. There’s no further discussion about it. And the Holocaust Revisionists and the Holocaust Deniers have an ulterior motive, which is to bring back Nazism and to do the Holocaust all over again, and this time do it right.

So you’re saying that people who try to downplay the Nazi atrocities, their goal is to bring back the Nazis.

That’s correct, exactly.

For European nationalism, the accusation of Nazism is used as a weapon to suppress that nationalism, to make it pathological. But the other argument with regard to Zionism, if you look at Norman Finkelstein. His parents were actually Holocaust survivors. He wrote that book, The Holocaust Industry. And Israel has long stood by that, and they’ve used as a shield to be immune from any criticism.

Well, yes, there’s a good argument about the Holocaust as a religion. And Finkelstein does a good job on that. Finkelstein is not a Denier or anything like that that he is accused of. That’s not true. The Dean of Holocaust Studies is a guy named Martin Gilbert. I think he’s dead by now, but he puts the figure at 5.1 million. I don’t think it was 6 million myself. I think it was 5.7 million. Just because you say there were no 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust doesn’t mean you’re a Denier. There is still a lot of debate on the issue. There’s no real debate on the basics.

But you think there are similarities…You were saying that Israel has been going in a fascist direction.

Right. Well, on the Left, we’ve always called Zionism fascism. We think it’s fascism for Jews. It’s been a fascist movement from Day One, from the very start. We on the Left don’t like any ethnonationalism.

The reason that the Left doesn’t like Zionism is because they see it as kind of a hyper ethnonationalist movement. But I think there is also an anti-Zionist Right. They see Zionism more as a form of internationalism.

Zionism? As a form of internationalism? See, that’s crazy though. That’s nuts. That’s just anti-Semitic whackery.

But they are occupying another people’s land.

It’s a colonial project. It’s a settler-colonial project. It’s an imperialist project. It’s an ethnonationalist project. It’s a fascist project. There’s nothing progressive or Left about it. Where’s the internationalism? Internationalists don’t persecute minorities in that fascist way like the Israelis do. That’s not what an internationalist does.

Well the thing is that the Israel Lobby is by far the most powerful lobby in the US.

It’s one of them. There’s actually another one that’s more powerful. I think that the Oil Lobby or the Military Lobby is bigger.

The Military-Industrial Complex.

They are the most powerful ethnic lobby, for sure. Our elections are all about Jewish money. And the whole pro-Israel thing is all about Jewish money. The Jews have the US Congress by the short hairs, and they control the US Congress and government on the Israel issue to a pretty significant extent.

I think that that is why the anti-Zionist Right says that Zionism is internationalist. Because they manage to simultaneously support things like multiculturalism and immigration and also Zionism. I think it’s this extreme double standard.

Well…They’re supporting fascism for Jews over there in their homeland. Fascism for Jews is good for Jews over in Israel, but on the other hand, there isn’t any fascism for Jews over here in the US. Fascism in the US, or anywhere else in the world, is bad for the Jews, always, and so is ethnonationalism, because it’s always going to turn on the Jews. So in the Diaspora, the Jews always promote multiculturalism and whatnot as a way of diluting their enemies and making the Diaspora societies more friendly to the Jews. It’s all about what’s good for the Jews.

That’s where you get that word “internationalist” that Henry Ford wrote about.

Henry Ford was a great man! I like Henry Ford. I think he’s unjustly maligned. The International Jew is a good book, and I like it. But he’s wrong about some things. See, the main thing is that back then, Jews were internationalists because they didn’t have roots to the land. They were internationalists in the sense that their only allegiance was to their international Jewish community.

They weren’t real true internationalists. It’s more that they weren’t nationalists. They were basically traitors! The Jews have always been traitors, and they still are to some extent nowadays because their primary loyalty is to their international Jewish community and not necessarily to their own homeland. And they will screw their own homeland if it’s good for the Jews. When it comes down to either supporting the homeland or supporting the Jews, they will support the Jews! And that’s the big problem with the Jews. That’s why the nationalists hate them.

Yes, it’s definitely the cause of anti-Semitism. You’re saying that you’re against anti-Semitism.

Right.

But you support rational criticism of the Jews.

Right.

But how do we deal with this? Because there is a flaw in anti-Semitism since the Jewish leadership relies on anti-Semitism to get their followers more radicalized and ethnocentric. But at the same time, I don’t want to give the Jews a free pass either. How do you propose that we deal with these issues?

Well…when you get into anti-Semitism, you are basically falling into the Jews’ trap because the Jews want you to be an anti-Semite! That’s the way I see it. Now, personally, I don’t think the Jews are very important!

The only people who think Jews are important are:

1. Jews. 2. Anti-Semites.

I don’t think that Jews deserve all this attention that we are giving them. They’re just this little pissant tribe, and I don’t think they are deserving of all this interest and obsession. When you go anti-Semite, you’re giving the Jews what they want. You’re telling the Jews that they are important, when they are not! And…anti-Semites created Israel!

You’re strengthening Zionism. Because the whole idea of anti-Zionism is that we anti-Zionists want the Jews to be able to live peacefully in the Diaspora. We don’t want them all running to Israel because of Diaspora anti-Semitism. If you’re an anti-Semite, you’re chasing them over to Israel!

It’s interesting because Helen Thomas was saying that Israel should be dismantled and they should all move here but if Israel was dismantled…I know some on the anti-Zionist Right who support returning that land to the Palestinians. But what would happen is that they would all move to Europe and the US. So I can sort of see what you are getting at.

Do the anti-Semites really want that? I know anti-Semites who support Israel. Their attitude is, “We sure as Hell don’t want the Jews in our country!”

I’m not sure if the BNP is anti-Semitic or not, but they support Israel.

The BNP has anti-Semitic roots, but they recently did a turnaround and now they are pro-Jewish, they are Judeophilic, they are pro-Israel, they are Zionists. And it’s all because they are anti-Islam. It’s all because they don’t like Muslims. The BNP doesn’t care that much about Jews. Jews are not that big of an issue in the UK anyway. The Jews in the UK are very well assimilated, and they don’t have a lot of power there.

The big problem in the UK is not the Jews, it’s the Muslims. They’re setting off bombs!

Well, with Europe and the US, we have to look at them differently because they do have very different issues. If you look at Europe, the Muslim issue is huge there. In the US, the Muslim community here is pretty small. With the Muslims, they try to stir up fears about Islam to get support for wars in the Middle East.

The Muslim community here is as big as the one in Britain! The ones in the UK are just not assimilated very well. They are Pakistanis from the former British possessions, and they are just not doing well. It’s more a question of assimilation rather than numbers. We are fortunate in the US to have such a well-behaved Muslim community…so far!

But you think there could be an issue here in the future.

Yes, definitely, definitely. I mean I would not want to allow millions more Muslims to flood into this country willy-nilly. No, not at all. And I think we need to be very careful about the Muslims that we let in here. We need to make them take things like loyalty tests. I don’t know, I don’t know. Muslim minorities in non-Muslim countries are not that great of a thing. They tend to get really agitated and radicalized. They tend to make demands for Sharia law.

They’re…they’re like the Jews! They’re not loyal! They have dual loyalty. Their primary loyalty is to the Ummah and barely, if at all, to the nation. They will actually set bombs against their own nation because the nation is fighting the Ummah. The Ummah is the Muslim community of the whole world. U-m-m-a-h.

You do think that they have an imperialist agenda too. We are being kind of imperialistic towards them in the Middle East, but they do want to spread their religion through demographics and move throughout the world and have as many kids as possible.

Islam is extremely imperialist! That’s a definite fact! One thing you can say about the Jews is they are not imperialist. They don’t want converts. They don’t want to take over. If you want to convert to Judaism, you go to a rabbi, and tell him you want to convert to Judaism, the first thing he’s going to ask you is, “Why? Why do you want to convert to Judaism? Why do you want to do that? What do you want to do that for?”

Do you think that is for racial purity reasons?

No…Jews just don’t convert. Religions either proselytize or they don’t. Jews used to proselytize and take a lot of converts, but they haven’t been doing it lately for some reason. Jews just don’t convert people. It’s not their thing. There are other religions like that too, especially in the Middle East. That philosophy has its roots in purity stuff, but it’s generally not a very good idea for your religion to not accept converts. It’s a way to make your religion go extinct – don’t accept converts.

I haven’t really studied Islam. I haven’t looked at the texts, so I don’t want to make claims about a religion if I haven’t studied it. But if you study the history of Islam, it’s definitely a pretty imperialist religion. With Europe, the Muslim leaders definitely have a goal to take over Europe.

Sure! And so do the ones in the US! If you read the statements of CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, it’s run by Islamists, and they say the same thing as the ones in Europe do – that their goal is a Muslim America. And that’s what’s scary about these people. I don’t think we should be letting a lot of them in. As long as they are only

What is the level of growth in that community in the US?

Not that much in the US. They have a few converts here and there. Actually, a much greater problem in the West in terms of Islam is that a lot of Muslims leave Islam. In the UK, 1

Has that happened in Europe at all?

In the UK, about 1

Do you think it’s a motivation for terrorism to come from a sexually repressed culture, and they see the West as being sexually immoral. You’ve heard that argument. How much of a role do you think that plays?

Hmm…I’m not sure. They kill women for violating Islam, but they also kill men. In Muslim-majority countries, they will kill guys for leaving Islam. The thing about Islam is that, from the very start, Islam has not accepted people leaving their religion. They do not accept apostates! They kill them! They’ve always done this, from Day One.

I was talking to my Mom about that, and she just acted like, “Well, that’s just the way they are. Muslims don’t like that. They’ll kill you if you leave.” She didn’t say it like they’re evil, but more that this is just the way that they are. They’ve been this way for about 1,300 years. It’s the nature of their religion. But that’s their imperialist nature right there! Because they accept lots of converts, but they won’t let anybody leave! It’s like a house that’s an Open House. Anybody in the neighborhood can come in, but once you’re in there, they lock the doors, and you can never get out.

It would be like a country that took in all these immigrants, but will not let anyone leave the country.

Yes! Especially with the goal of, “We’re going to be the biggest country in the world and take over all the other countries.” And they have emissaries all over all the other countries in the world trying to make their Muslims dual citizens. It’s true that Islam has a world conquest agenda, and Al Qaeda and folks like that are absolutely explicit in their goals of taking over the world. I’ve read Al Qaeda’s statements. And I’ve been interviewed by the FBI too about Al Qaeda. Because I did some research on them.

Yes?

Yes I know something about Al Qaeda. It was funny, I called the FBI back one time, and I asked for the Bin Laden Division, because they’ve got this Bin Laden Task Force. And it was Friday night and they said, “Oh, they’re gone for the weekend!” I thought that was lame. I think the Bin Laden Task Force should be working 24-7. This FBI guy called me back and they did an interview with me. I didn’t really like it too much because they always treat you like you’re a suspected terrorist.

Yes, they think you’re a suspected terrorist if you’re going to them with information.

Yes, I don’t like to be interviewed by cops either. They always treat you like you’re a suspected criminal. That’s just their nature.

I don’t think that’s intentional, but it’s just what they are used to doing as part of their job.

Well, he wanted to find out if I was a Muslim! He was like, “Are you a Muslim?” I was like, “No way!” And he was breathing easier. I told him I was a Leftist, a Left-winger, and he was like, “Oh well, we’re not worried about you.” The FBI is worried about American Muslims, especially converts. White guys like me convert. And quite a few of those guys go super-radical. Because converts are often crazy.

They’re more radical than the people who are born into it because they joined just for that purpose, to embrace that belief system.

In many religions, even the converted Jews…the Jewish converts often go really nuts.

I’ve met Christians who converted to Judaism. They started out as Christian Zionists and that was their motivation for joining Judaism.

The Jews say that the Jewish converts are simply nuts in many cases. They’re like these fanatical Jews. And it’s interesting too, because the Jewish converts often take on a lot of these supposed “Jewish genetic tendencies.” They become extremely ethnocentric, they become paranoid of the Gentiles. These are not genetic tendencies! The ethnocentrism, the paranoia of the Gentiles, the tribalism.

Some people think that those traits are genetic.

Yes! I don’t agree with that.

But who’s been saying that it’s genetic? I think it’s cultural. Who’s been saying that?

Well, the Nazi thing was that there was something wrong with their genes.

Well, I see what you are saying. I know that way of thinking.

Kevin MacDonald has suggested that too, and boy is he wrong.

He has brought it up. I read his blog a lot, and I think that MacDonald’s main view is that it’s a culture, a political ideology. Do you think that he has mentioned the genetic aspect?

I think he mentions something about that. If you read his Trilogy of books, he suggested that Jewish character traits might be genetic. I think that’s crazy. Supposedly the Jews are really aggressive verbally and in business, and they can be rude.

Well, I think that’s cultural too, because the Jews are verbally and in business, extremely aggressive. But physically, Jews are not aggressive at all. Jewish guys have a reputation for being wimps. Jews commit almost no physical violence or violent crime. Jews are bad at sports. So…what did they inherit? Some sort of gene that made him extremely verbally aggressive but at the same time extremely non-aggressive as far as physical aggression goes? That doesn’t make any kind of sense.

Well, Jewish behavior is definitely cultural, since it also depends on where they grew up. If they grew up in New York or if they grew up in a small town in the Midwest is going to make a huge difference. I was reading about this story. There was this rabbi, he went to Peru and he got these Peruvian Indians and he took them to Israel and they turned into these fanatics after about 5 years.

Yes, they probably started acting more Jewish than Jews in New York that are 500 years Kosher. That shows you that one can take on those psychological tendencies of the Jews. It’s simply a cultural thing. I could be like that. I could be like that if I converted to Judaism. I could get really paranoid of the Gentiles and really hyperethnocentric, I could get really acquisitive, really verbally aggressive…

You grow up in a culture like that…and those people from around the Mediterranean, they tend to be that way anyway. They tend to be verbally aggressive, really emotionally expressive…They’re really into business too. Jews act a lot like Arabs, that’s the thing. They get in your face, but they’re really warm too, they embrace you, and when they’re talking to you, they’re like two inches away.

Eric Hobsbawn on Capitalism and Socialism

Socialism Has Failed. Now Capitalism Is Bankrupt. So What Comes Next?

Great article by the venerable 93 year old Marxist historian. I agree with him that no sane person is looking to Soviet-type socialist systems, and he doesn’t even advocate them himself anymore. Yet he argues that the free market capitalism of the past 30 years has failed as badly as socialism, or even worse. The future, of course, must be some kind of a mixed economy. As Thatcher used to say, There Is No Alternative. Those who continue to drink the free market Koolaid against doctors’ orders will experience increasing pain, illness and debilitation.

Hobsbawn points out how badly the British Labour Party, in the form of New Labour, has failed in its attempts to mimic Thatcherism. That agenda is precisely why the global economic crisis is hitting the UK so much harder than much of the rest of Europe. The UK drank the free market Kool Aid a lot more and longer than some others like Germany and France did. For one thing, the UK gladly offshored all of its manufacturing in order to become a world center for global financial shenanigans and gimmickry. Great idea that was.

The Republican Party, unrepentant advocates of free market capitalism in this era when that is increasingly suicidal, has no role to play in the future of the US. To the extent that we keep electing them, we go down the tubes faster and faster. At this point, the Democrats are little more than a weak version of the Republicans. The mixed economy of the future is off the agenda for both parties, so both parties are scrolling our nation’s epitaph with every step they take.

The American people have not figured out the wisdom of Hobsbawn’s words, and possibly they never will. In that case, Americans deserve every future bad thing that will befall them.

Reading the idiotic comments at the end, many of them, appallingly, from British readers no less, who seem just as insane about free market capitalism as the average US teabagger, was very discouraging. I thought that the British were a bit more sane than we are. I guess not. Oh well, in that case, the Hell with the Brits then too. I have little sympathy suicidal idiots.

The future is not going to be good.

One Party, Two Wings

It’s simply nuts that the Obama Democrats are some sort of a socialist or Communist political party, as the lunatic reactionaries in the Republican Party insist. These people are out of their minds. As socialists and Communists, would we not be the first folks to be cheering on our savior Barack? And why would we not do so? We would pretend that he is just another pro-corporate, anti-worker politician, if he were a real Leftist, why?

We are not so devious. It is the Right that is devious.

The truth is that there is one political party in the US, the Corporate Party. It has two wings, both anti-people, anti-worker, anti-society and anti-nation. The liberal wing is called the Democratic Party. The conservative wing is called the Republican Party.

The Corporate Party always has a minority project of:

  1. The Rich
  2. The upper middle class
  3. The corporations

Their project is in favor of these folks and opposed to:

  1. Society at large
  2. The public interest
  3. Investors
  4. The national interest and the nation itself
  5. The environment
  6. The consumers
  7. The workers
  8. The middle and working classes
  9. The low-income and the poor

The Corporate Party project is always an eternally class project. The dilemma of the Corporate Party is how to get the majority of the 2nd group to oppose their interests and their class interests in order to support the first group and harm themselves in the process.

The Corporate Party do this via a stupefying array of nonstop lying, bullshit, dissembling, sophistry, code words, trickery, linguistic games, psychological warfare and brainwashing, nonsense, crap, religion, racism, homophobia, sexism, bigotry, jingoism, ultranationalism, and whatever other silliness they can dream up. To do this, they utilize the entire media, which they generally control under capitalism.

It takes a lot of thinking to figure out, first of all, that you are in the second group and that the first group is lying to you, and there’s almost no one around to help you put the jigsaw together, so most folks in the second group just fall for it.

Part of the problem is that the Corporate Party brainwash most folks in the 2nd group into believing that the 1st and 2nd groups do not even exist, hence there is no class struggle. If that fails, they try to convince the 2nd group that they are actually members of the 1st group! There’s no one around to help you wade through this tsunami or horseshit, so most in the 2nd group just fall for it.

In the midst of this, we have an interesting development called the American Third Position Party. It’s really the closest thing to a White nationalist party in the US today, although they do not have a separatist platform. That they advertise themselves as a party for White Americans means that they are willing to blow off 3

What’s frightening is that the American3P Party is probably one of the most pro-worker and anti-corporate parties in the US today. The Left parties can’t possibly be pro-worker as they are committed to Open Borders, which is de facto anti-worker.

It’s a pretty sorry state of affairs when, amidst a colossal economic downturn, the only parties with a pro-worker project are the fascists.

Thinking historically, remind of you of anything? Yikes.

National Bolsheviks of Russia

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37jA1EwVTx0&feature=player_embedded]

These are the National Bolsheviks. People keep telling me that I am one myself. Others keep trying to recruit me to them. I don’t know why they are doing this. Maybe because I reject the Western Left on race.

The Natbols are extremely confusing and hard to understand, as are most Third Positionist movements. Third Positionism is said to be “neither Right nor Left.” It’s also called Left Fascism. Goes by a lot of names. They are pretty socialist economically, but not on other things. Mostly they are just very hard to describe and make sense of. The group in this video is a radical split from the original National Bolsheviks under Eduard Limonov, who has since softened his stance. But I still don’t like Limonov, nor do I think much of his group or the split.

This stuff smells like fascism to me. I know there is Stalin worship in them, but Stalin has some fascist tendencies, so that’s not surprising.

Color me dubious.

Feel free to discuss in the comments section.

White American Decline: A Confession

I have a confession to make.

Part of me wants to retain White culture as the dominant American culture.

Problem is that US Whites are unspeakably rightwing. So with White decline in the US should come to the decline of this horrible White US conservatism. White decline should lead to a more liberal America, which I support in most ways.

The US non-Whites are very liberal. The young CA Hispanics are almost Communists or socialists. A non-White America could finally give us a shot at a socialist America, like the socialist states in much of the world. So my preferences for White culture clash with my politics. This crap could all be avoided if US Whites would just be sensible and vote liberal. But they won’t. As it is, it’s pretty much a wash, and a strong part of me wants White decline due to the political benefits.

I like White culture, but I hate this ridiculous conservatism, so out of step with civilized humanity. Non-Whites oppose this nonsense much more than Whites do. Looking for someone to blame because your Senator or Representative is a conservative dinosaur? Look no further than the White

I like liberalism and socialism, but I’m not wild about Black and Hispanic culture. But increasingly, non-White areas are just developing the “multiculture” instead of some explicitly Black, Hispanic or otherwise culture. The multicult is hard to describe, but it’s not White culture, at least politically, and it doesn’t dive into the depths of Black or Hispanic culture. It’s common among civilized Blacks and 2nd generation people of all ethnicities, not just Hispanics.

As you can see, I’m torn. At this point, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. I live in a non-White town in a non-White state, and it’s not exactly the end of the world. I figure we are going to transition towards a Latin American model with a White elite anyway. I’m White. What’s not to like?

Nostalgia For Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhAXtVRopaw&feature=related]

From the video, we see the following startling figures taken from recent surveys:

Slovakia, 2003 (Public Relation Institute, Bratislava): 6

Russia, 2005 (New Russia Barometer Survey): 4

East Germany, Nov. 2007 (Forsa Institute): 7

Bulgaria, Dec. 2007 (Mediana): 3

Romania, May 2007 (BERD): 5

Romania, Nov. 2007 (Soros Foundation): 4

Romania, Feb. 2008 (World Bank): Only 2

Hungary, June 2008 (Gfk Piackutato): 6

There are a lot of commenters on this site who oppose socialism and Communism for a variety of reasons. I am wondering how these folks can reconcile these figures with their views.

I imagine that most of these folks feel that Communism and socialism are failed ideologies that simply don’t work in practice, however noble they may be conceived. If it’s really true that they fail so miserably and obviously, why do so many of those who have lived in the same nation under both Communism and capitalism feel that Communism was better and capitalism was worse?

Are these people simply so insane that they can’t figure out that things are obviously so much better now than they were back then? If their views are not insane, how do you reconcile their opinions with your view that Communism has been a miserable failure?

A common line among anti-Communists is that Communism inevitably starves people and enslaves them. If this is true, and I say it’s not, then are these people simply masochists who enjoy being starved and enslaved? How can we account for their behavior?

Most of you feel that capitalism is obviously superior to Communism. If it is, then why do so few of those who lived in the same nation under both systems agree with you?

Is there any way for you folks to account for the opinions of these folks. Are they simply lazy people who don’t want to take risks and enjoy being coddled and taken care of by a cradle to grave welfare state?

Keep in mind that by 1989, the socialist systems of most of these states were highly heterodox, with lots of collective and even limited private enterprise alongside public property. Censorship laws had been relaxed in most states and there was considerable freedom of speech. In places like Hungary, Goulash Communism or market socialism had created a quite high standard of living.*

*However, in Romania, a terrible Secret Police had instituted a terror state, and this in addition to a ferocious austerity program was the main reason for the violent overthrow of Nicolae Ceauşescu. In the few years before the Revolution of 1989, Ceauşescu had instituted brutal austerity measures in order to try to pay off the nation’s foreign debt.

While this made him very unpopular, I don’t see why anti-Communists, deficit hawks all of them who never been an austerity program too savage for a capitalist state, should object to Ceauşescu putting Romanians on a diet, as Thomas Friedman and his globalist buddies like to quip. Ceauşescu had also created a ridiculous personality cult and blown huge amounts of money on lavish construction projects dedicated to himself.

Cuba Versus the Rest of the Region

Good article.

I should point out that death squads are back in El Salvador. They are not killing many, but they are killing a few.

And they are back in a big way in Honduras ever since the US-sponsored and promoted coup that removed the democratically elected President for the crime of raising the minimum wage. Death squads are killing people just about every day in Honduras lately. I wonder how much longer this can last before the Left takes up guns again.

And Haiti has always been run by death squads. After the US-sponsored coup which removed President Aristide (US mercenaries and Marines appeared at his mansion and ordered him to leave the country), death squads have rampaged through Haiti. At least 3,000 people have been killed. Those targeted were the supporters of Aristide. The US supports the death squads in Haiti and Honduras to the hilt, and probably supports them in Guatemala and El Salvador too (they always did in the past).

On this question, Obama is no socialist or Communist. He’s just another far rightwing US imperialist running interference for the reactionary cliques down South. There’s barely any light between Obama and Bush on Latin American policy. Democrats or Republicans, it’s always the Monroe Doctrine down there.

Anti-Communists like to say that no one ever flees to a Communist regime, but the eastern part of Cuba is full of Haitians and Jamaicans who have fled their countries. Cuba took them in, and they like it a Hell of a lot better in Cuba. Everything is relative, you know.

I Never Knew Hayek Was a Socialist

But there are two kinds of security: the certainty of a given minimum of sustenance for all and the security of a given standard of life, of the relative position which one person or group enjoys compared with others.

There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.

It is planning for security of the second kind which has such an insidious effect on liberty. It is planning designed to protect individuals or groups against diminutions of their incomes.

Let a uniform minimum be secured to everybody by all means; but let us admit at the same time that all claims for a privileged security of particular classes must lapse

[T]here is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.

There can be no question that adequate security against severe privation will have to be one of our main goals of policy (Hayek 1944).

Friedrich Hayek is the God of the “Austrian” Libertarians, the nuttiest of all, and The Road to Serfdom is his Bible. But if you actually read this monster book, it turns out that Hayek would be called a Communist by the teabaggers, Republicans, elites and corporations of today, since, anyone insisting on any minimum safety net is automatically a Communist. At the very least some kind of social democrat. Hayek was to the Left of Bill Clinton, who got rid of welfare. He’s to the Left of Barack Obama, who is busy trying to destroy Social Security.

It’s a sad day when they Hayeks are so reasonable that they’re nearly social democrats because the center has moved to the right of Hayek himself.

Of all of the Libertarian thinkers, the Austrians are considered the craziest and most dangerous of them all. Those lined up with the Austrians include the wildest of the Libertarians, including the fake anarchists known as anarcho-capitalists (I thought we had anarcho-capitalism already).

These people move beyond gutting all social spending and all normal government functions, selling off all roads, parks, forests, beaches, marine reserves, grasslands, etc. Supposedly, the gap in social spending will be taken up by charities, who will compete to see who can serve the poor better. LOL! Why would anyone get into the “business” of being a charity? For God’s sake, there’s no money to be made. It’s all just a money-loser. That right there just shows you how deranged Libertarians are.

Anyway, the Austrians go beyond. The want to get rid of state cops, fire departments and even courts. They will replace them with private cops and private firefighters. How these guys bill I will never figure out. Supposedly they will compete on how best they serve the public.

I guess the nice White suburbs can hardass Crack Down on Crime cops for their money, while the ghetto folks (How will they have the money to buy any cops?) will purchase the laid-back, Go Easy on the Criminals Cops, perfect for a criminal society. I assume at some point the private cop forces (Really warlordism) will inevitably shoot it out as private warlord cop armies and paramilitaries do all over the 3rd World. I suppose that’s all part of the anarcho-capitalism fun and games, dodging the bullets and all.

Fire departments? Competition once again? And how do they get paid? The perfect Republican way. Your house burns down, you not only over fork over for everything else you lost and buying everything new but you dish out another $20K for the bastards who fought your fire.

Of course, the longer the fire goes on, the more they make, so firefighters will drag out their battles with the flames. Since they get paid per fire fought, at some point, firefighters or the paramilitary gangs allied with them will go around torching places so they can get paid to fight the fires.

Courts? Why, we will have competition in the court system! Criminals will prefer the Get Out of Jail Free Court, while victims will prefer the Hang Em High Court. How they will sort this all out no one knows.

You buy and sell your leaders too. Kind like most capitalist societies already do, you know?

The environment will take care of itself, as it’s the evil state that wrecks the environment, not the naturophilic capitalist John Muir-Rachel Carson types.

Some advocate getting rid of all laws, which leaves it an open question why you would need cops. Some guy just shot your family? Take the bastard to court, dammit! Ruin his credit forever!

Others want laws to be bought and sold on the free market, but they already are anyway here in anarcho-capitalist US, so I don’t see how this is a reform.

I guess the military gets replaced by private militias, contractors and mercenaries, but there’s nothing new about that. It already operates that way in Russia and the 3rd World, where the rich and businesses have their own private armies, frequently assassinating their competitors.

The defense of those who could not afford cops or armies. Why, wonderful charity armies would spring up to lay it all on the line for your sorry impoverished ass for free. Yeah right.

Clearly, corporations would buy their own armies and would not only attack workers, communities, etc. like say the Colombian death squads of today, but they would even go further and in the US, where the private armies had the latest military hardware, surely they would attack other nations to drive out competitors, overthrow regimes bad for business, force open new markets, etc. All the stuff that imperialist militaries already do, but with the sociopathic ethics of capitalism to make it all even more shitty and evil than it already is.

A lot of racists, especially White Southern racists, support anarcho-capitalism because, well, Southern caste society has always been pretty anarcho-capitalistic anyway. What was the KKK but a private militia? Also, in the glorious anarcho-capitalist world, everyone can discriminate their asses off against anyone they want to, and that prospect makes racists go all google-eyed.

As you can see, the Austrians even distort the findings of their leader, Hayek.

They lie, like most neoliberals do.

Just like how the neoliberals lie about Adam Smith, who was adamant that the state had to manage the free market. The neoliberals just pick and choose the crap they want to believe even from the Biblical tomes of their Gods. Like rabbis arguing over the Talmud, it’s all a matter of interpretation to them.

References

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1944. The Road To Serfdom. University of Chicago Press, pp. 120-122

“The Truth About ‘Indian Socialism’,” by Peter Tobin

Via my colleague Peter Tobin, an explication of Indian socialism. I told him that commenters were saying that India had already tried socialism and it had failed, so Maoism was doomed from the start and had already been tried anyway. I doubted this and asked him for an explication of Indian socialism, how it differed from Maoism and why it failed, particularly even in a socialist sense.

Peter is very smart, and he’s also a very good writer.

Regarding the notion about India having already tried socialism – it depends on what you call ‘socialism.’

Congress India was a progressive nationalist party which had an, admittedly, sizable socialist faction. During the twenties and thirties it became dominant and at Independence could claim the adherence of the two leading figures in CI, Nehru and Menon.

Their socialism, however, was that of the Second International, which from the beginning of the 20th century became an openly reformist option, which accepted the constitutional niceties of bourgeois democracy.

It specifically rejected the path of Communist revolution in favour of Fabian strategy, which envisaged socialism coming through an evolutionary process, in which the free market dissolved before the logic of more intense collective measures brought about by the tendencies of all markets to monopolize and all industrial processes to become more collective.

This process would be aided by socialist/social democratic parties enacting progressive legislation through a parliamentary system, in which it would compete in the ‘market place of democracy’ with openly bourgeois parties.

The parties who successfully operated within these parameters were initially the Scandinavian countries before the second world war and fairly spectacularly by the post-war Labour party in Britain, which nationalized the commanding heights of the economy, rail, steel, coal, etc and initiated the Welfare State. Other European countries, to a greater or lesser degree, followed this path, among whom the most outstanding was West Germany.

These developments were made possible by Marshall Aid, granted by America, as a means of competing with the Soviet bloc at on level and containing it at another, (Viz Harriman, Kennan).

It is also a hard fact that large sections of the economy were left in private hands, and the principle of the mixed economy was accepted, with the proviso – and certainty – that they would inevitably wither (see above).

The SI came from Marxism (especially that of the German Social Democrats) but it abandoned Marx’s revolutionary side (vide; Kautsky) because it claimed that socialism was economically determined, as against Lenin and the Third International who argued for revolutionary political intervention and the involvement of the masses, under the leadership of a vanguard Communist party.

The progressive left of Congress India emerged under the influence of, and eventually joined, the SI. Mao, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, etc. followed the path of Lenin and the TI.

It is true that Congress India did try to follow a Western type of parliamentary democratic socialism in the post-Independence spirit of optimism, and a diluted form of socialism was promoted which stressed economic planning and welfare. There were also state investments where there were no private interests. There was a State Commission in 1950 which saw the first 5 year plan launched in 1951, which while nationalizing some of new, but still insignificant, modern industrial sectors, e.g, steel, mainly concentrated on raising agricultural output.

Initially there were some good GDP growth rates, but there was almost complete failure to provide decent, comprehensive welfare and to alleviate the plight of the overwhelming rural majority. But this socialism was a half dead thing in a half dead world because in did not involve a land to the tiller or cooperative element, leaving the landlords and the zamindars in ownership and control.

Crucially, while the Ambedkar Constitution outlawed casteism in theory, in practice it remained a decisive social and cultural force. How can expect to build socialism without the involvement, based on equality, of the broad masses?

Capitalist, Brahminical corruption remained and grew in strength, and with India’s humiliating defeat by the Chinese in 1962, Nehru’s attempt to, as he said in 1955 to establish “a socialist pattern of society,” was effectively over and India started the march towards Anglo-Saxon style capitalism.

The Chinese Communist Party did not fuck around; they seized all the commanding heights of the economy, especially agriculture, freed the peasants from the grip of the landlords and began their long march based upon collectivization, mass participation and cultural revolution. Ultimately, wherever they are at the moment, it was much more successful than the feeble Indian attempt.

It is Mao’s type of socialism that the Indian masses need, not Nehru’s (who was only picked by Gandhi to divert radicalism from Communism). That is what the comrades in the CPI (Maoist) are fighting for.

Please point to these people that therefore, socialism is not homogeneous, but takes different forms given different objective historical and ideological conditions. Also there are some who wave the red flag in order to oppose it.

India tried a form of democratic socialism that has since failed in the developed countries to a greater or lesser extent, as most of these SI parties are now more or less on board with the neoliberal form of free market capitalism that has dominated the last thirty years.

India gained its Independence in heroic circumstances and after bitter struggle, but it did not follow through with a thoroughgoing revolution that emancipated and unlocked the creativity and potential of its peoples.

But it is never too late, so let the corrupt, gangster, Brahminical, comprador class tremble. There is a broom moving that will sweep them in to the dustbin of history. They know this and that is why they have launched Operation Green Hunt, with American and Israeli aid – and generally replaced the ‘world’s biggest democracy’ with the world biggest fascist state.

Inquilab Zindabad!

Maoism in China: A Look at the Record

The current lie, or meme, in US, if not world, popular culture, is “Mao ruined China.” If they are being charitable, they say, “Mao nearly ruined China.”

People can and do say anything to further their cause, in this case, the cause of neoliberal capitalism and especially imperialism. Since Maoism is one of most potent enemies of both these days, it needs to be stamped out by any means necessary, lies, truth, whatever it takes, just take it out, who cares how you do it.

Let’s take a look at the real record here.

Keep in mind that the comparisons to India are because China and India were at the same level in 1949. The record below indicates how horribly India has failed compared to Maoist and even neo-Communist China. There’s no comparison. China kicked India’s ass. Indian capitalism has been nothing but 60 years of repetitive failure.

In 1949, the Chinese peasantry existed on the border of starvation and death. Life expectancy was 32 years. As if that was inevitable, note that in Russia in 1913, life expectancy was 32 years. By 1949, it was 63 years. A 32 year life expectancy for China in 1949 was not inevitable for any possible universe. More than anything else, that figure alone represents the utter and complete failure of Chinese semi-feudal capitalism.

If a peasant was ill, if he had money, he could go to a clinic in the city. If not, he would wait until he either got better or died. There were no medical facilities in the rural areas. People might add that this was inevitable in any possible China. But was it really? This was the situation in Russia in 1916. By 1949, there were clinics in every Russian village, and hardly a Russian lacked for medical care. Why was horrific lack of medical care inevitable?

By 1976, there was a polyclinic in every Chinese commune and a medical facility in every district.

Apologists, generally neoliberals who oppose all state spending on health care, since health care is a matter of private sector, say that this was inevitable. But was it really? Says who? China had not accomplished this in the decades before 1949, so why would they have accomplished it afterwards? Further, there are many nations where health care is still about as bad as 1949 China. The Maoist record on health care was so Earth-shatteringly great that even the UN’s World Health Organization complemented China on its achievement.

In 1949, China had serious problems with smallpox, leprosy, pestilence, cholera, malaria and tuberculosis. By 1976, they were nearly wiped out. Apologists say that this was inevitable? But why? The Chinese capitalists had failed, or not even tried to eliminate epidemic diseases before, why would they have suddenly changed their tune after 1949? Further, these diseases continue to be epidemic in many parts of the world, including India. India started out at the same place as China in 1949, so it’s a useful comparison.

Population growth was controlled, hunger was solved for the first time in Chinese history, and the principal fatal infectious diseases were controlled, in contrast to India, Indonesia and South America, where hunger and infectious diseases are still catastrophic problems. By comparing China to South America, India and Indonesia we can clearly see how disastrously capitalism has fared in those places and how totally Maoism has kicked capitalism’s butt.

Starvation, poverty and illiteracy were wiped out. China was self-sufficient in food for the first time ever. For the first time ever. For the first time ever. Repeat that as many times as you want to until it sinks in. So much for the lie that “Communism brings nothing but starvation.”

The industrial growth rate was double that of India. Keep in mind that China’s and India’s industrial growth rates were about the same in 1949. In industrial growth, Maoism has left India in the dust.

In 1949, China had about the same number of scientists per capita as India. In the meantime, China under Mao and his successors has completely devastated India in the number of scientists per capita. Communist China made huge efforts to increase the number of scientists in society through incredible increases in the availability of education and offering free education to the masses who only had private education for the rich before.

India’s education system is a catastrophe, and the nation places zero emphasis on producing scientists or educated people of any nature. The public education system is disastrously underfunded, and most Indians can’t afford to go to school. The rich send their kids to private schools, but that’s not good for society, as it does not produce the number of highly skilled people that a society needs to develop.

It will take India 150 years to catch up with China in the number of scientists per capita.

Most Indian scientists leave the country; most Chinese scientists stay in China and serve the nation. As you can see, the Communists have cultivated a love of service and of nation in their scientists.

Indian scientists are essentially traitors with purely capitalist values. They spout Hindutva nonsense and the Indian ultranationalist fascist mantras of the day, but they have no love of nation. Their only value is money, and they quickly hop the first plane out of India to hightail it to the UK or the US to cash in on the big bucks, leaving their catastrophe of a nation in the lurch.

From their new perches in the West, they preach contempt for the Whites that enabled them to earn these fat wads of cash while dishonestly singing jingoist praises for the glorious Jai Hind, Bharat India that they so unceremoniously dumped.

Consumption of electricity in agriculture went from 20m kilowatts/hour to 6,000m. Grain production rose

I am not sure why agriculture has failed so badly in India, but semi-feudal relations in the countryside and lack of land reform must have something to do with it. As long as India is under capitalist rule, there will never be the necessary land reform that this suffering land needs, as the feudal lords have always owned the Indian state and always will until revolution sweeps them away.

Many or most Indian farmers are actually sharecroppers in perpetual debt slavery to large semi-feudal landlords. Until this system is eliminated, India will never develop into a real nation.

Production of chemical fertilizers increased 32X, steel 4.2X, oil 63X. Those figures are amazing. Fertilizer increased by 32 times! Oil increased by 63 times! Wow.

Why was this inevitable? If it was inevitable, why had capitalist China so failed to develop these essential industries before 1949? Easy. Because capitalist China, ruled by feudal lords, placed absolutely zero emphasis on the development of a national economy. The feudal lords of capitalist China cared only about increasing their own wealth,the nation be damned. Today we see the same thing in Latin America and the same underdevelopment that results. Some people never learn.

One argument which makes no sense is that India already tried socialism, and it failed. But exactly what kind of socialism was that, anyway? It was a fake crony socialism with a small public sector in which almost all of the economy was in private hands, mostly in the hands of monopoly capital. There was no land reform in the countryside where  semi-feudal relations continued to rule. Sure, the Communists have been running West Bengal for 20 years. Who on the Left thinks there is any kind of real socialism or Communism in West Bengal?

If China and India were practicing the exact same kind of system (they were not) then why was China creaming India every step of the way, year and year out, even all through the Mao era? Answer. Indian socialism wasn’t any good, and it hardly deserved to be called socialism.

There was nothing good about Indian “socialism.” It left 5

The state sector was and is tiny. The state sector in India, including local, state and national levels combined, is about 5-1

In India, for all intents and purposes, in most places, the state is nearly nonexistent. It’s always been that way, a tiny, corrupt, crony capitalist state, even during the Indian Socialism era. The Indian state is a neoliberal dream, with a minimal government and the ruined society that always flows from that.

Industry grew by 1

Looking at these figures with a clear eye, you can see why so many Indians are getting behind Maoism. True, Maoism has a spotty record, but compared to India, Communist China looks like paradise.

Problems With Social Democracy and Progressive Taxation Under Capitalism

Commenter tulio notes, in favor of social democracy:

I’ll take capitalism any day, warts and all. I just think we need some elements of socialist safeguards and need progressive taxation to try and stop the rich from getting too rich.

The problem is that under capitalism it is very difficult to put in the socialist safeguards you discuss. The capitalists fight tooth and nail like insane wildcats every step of the way trying every trick in the book. Often they just say fuck it and sabotage the economy, throw a military coup or start a contra armed guerrilla movement. Then once the socialist safeguards are put in the capitalists fight to get rid of them like madmen year in and year out until they can dismantle them.

They try every trick in the book, deliberately bankrupting the state (like here in the US), capital flight, you name it. If your country owes debt to the IMF or World Bank, World Capitalism will force you to dismantle your entire socialist safeguard system, plus tons of other stuff, as a condition on getting more loans.

Furthermore, in most of the 3rd World, capitalists have so captured the state that it’s impossible to put in any socialist safeguards. Any new person who gets in and tries to do that gets threatened by the IMF and World Bank and the international investors. The lenders threaten to cut off new loans and the investors threaten to pull out all their money. So each new person who gets elected can’t put in any socialist safeguards, and they can’t do much of anything but neoliberal shit, as the international bankers and investors are calling the shots.

There are similar problems with progressive taxation or taxing business and corporations much at all. The nature of capitalism makes it very difficult to put this in, and once again, as soon as you do, the capitalists start fighting it and never quit until they get rid of progressive taxation, reduce or eliminate taxes on business and corporations and and consequently defund the state. By defunding the state, they end up wiping out all of the programs we discussed above.

This project is continuous under capitalism. So once you put in social democracy and reasonable taxation, you will have to fight the capitalists like mad every single year forever in order to keep it in. The capitalists will use every devious trick in the book to try to get rid of progressive taxation too. Further, once you wipe out sensible taxation, the only way to put it back is to “raise taxes,” which, at least here in the US, is a political death sentence.

As if all of this was not enough, consider another thing. Under capitalism, the capitalists capture almost the entire media. It’s not uncommon for reactionary pro-capitalist factions to control up to 9

These capitalist media machines are brilliant at “creating culture” and brainwashing workers, consumers, low income and middle income people into opposing their own interests and supporting the interests of their capitalist enemies. Sure, in some cases, you have a population savvy enough to figure out they’re being lied to with megaphones 24-7, everywhere they go, but it’s not easy to do.

Consider also that at the same time, capitalists everywhere on Earth attack state education. In the 3rd World, the idea is to keep the people stupid. An educated people is harder to brainwash. So in order to get a savvy population, first you need to educate them, but the capitalists will keep you from doing that. Now where do you start?

In addition to running the media, under capitalism, the capitalists actually create the culture. Marx noted this. In capitalist society, the culture of the nation is that of the ruling class. And in general it is. Your average poor or low income worker under capitalism has the mindset of a ruling class millionaire! Those are his values, political and otherwise. He’s living in a hovel, but he thinks like a corporate magnate. It’s magical brainwashing.

Gramsci called this cultural hegemony. The capitalists create a cultural hegemony in capitalist states. The only way to get anything progressive done is to create a progressive counter-hegemonic discourse and try to institute that to do battle with the cultural discourse of the ruling class.

Cultural hegemony is a serious problem. Look how many American workers, low income people, middle class folks and consumers oppose their own interests and talk like corporate boardroom types. Their minds have basically been colonized and taken over like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Many of these fools have invested decades in such foolish thinking and are not about to give it up anytime soon. It becomes an important part of their identity and even of entire communities and harder to get out than the worst weeds.

On top of that, in most capitalist countries, the ruling classes who oppose socialist safeguards and reasonable taxation just out and out buy the elections.

In much of the world, the same folks control the military. Even on the outside chance that someone decent gets in who can put in socialist safeguards and democratic taxation, typically there is quickly a military coup and the capitalists seize power again, undo all of the progressive changes, then to drive the point home, run death squads around the country for some time slaughtering people to set an example, as in, “Don’t try this again!”

In the future, people realize that if they elect a progressive person, there may be a coup afterward, which will be bad enough, but after that, death squads will run amok for years, and they may just get arrested, beaten, tortured or killed. It’s a warning to stay away from progressive politics for the rest of your life.

So, while I support social democracy and democratic taxation in theory, I’m well aware of the minefields that the capitalists have laid in the paths of doing these sensible and decent things.

The “Communism Starves the People” Bullshit

Commenter tulio notes on this post, complaining about Communism:

Seems like there’s always some famine that happens in communist countries that wipes out hundreds of thousands if not millions. Look at China’s great famines. Cambodians had to resort to eating spiders they dug up just to survive. I think these were man-made events. Capitalism has it’s flaws, but Communism is just fucked up to the core. There hasn’t been one example of a communist success.

At least not one that didn’t have to throttle back and incorporate capitalism into their economy, like China. And then that’s not even getting into all the other shit communist governments do like the censorship of the internet, lack of freedom to protest, etc.

I’ll take capitalism any day, warts and all. I just think we need some elements of socialist safeguards and need progressive taxation to try and stop the rich from getting too rich.

I’m no Orthodox Commie by any means, despite what everyone believes. I’m just a socialist. That said, I tend to support most forms of socialism that actually work well (I don’t support fake socialism that doesn’t work, and I don’t support all Communist states). As Communism is a form of socialism, I tend to look favorably on it, but then I also look favorably on European social democracy, since I consider that also a form of socialism.

I support state funding of education, medicine, food, shelter, corrections, telecommunications, military, infrastructure building, public health, libraries, parks and wildlife reserves, R & D, social safety nets, housing, utilities, and maybe even a few industries here or there. I’m basically a Big Government with a capital B type of guy.

That said, I would like to defend the Communist record against one of the worst slanders, that “Communism equals starvation.” Not true, it’s actually capitalism equals starvation.

There were continuous famines in China under capitalism. In 1949, life expectancy was only 32 years in capitalist China. The rural people lived on the edge of starvation and death all the time. Read The Good Earth by Pearl Buck to see what it was like. From 1949-1980, Mao increased life expectancy from 32 to 65. That’s the greatest increase in life expectancy that the world has ever seen.

Furthermore, the Communists built that country up from nothing. Same thing with Russia. Russia was a zero pre-Communism. Communists built that country into a 1st World country. Even now it’s a good place. The press here bitches about Soviet style housing, but it looks decent enough to me. Anyway, compare the East Bloc, the former USSR and China to Latin America, Africa, India, the Philippines or the rest of the capitalist shitholes.

None of those places have the type of horrific slums, cardboard shack shantytowns, or outrageous poverty that you see every day in those capitalist paradises. Imagine if Latin America, the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, Afghanistan and the rest of the shitholes had followed a Communist model of development. Sure, they would have run into problems and at some point, they may have moved in the direction of Eastern Europe, the former USSR and China. But let us look at housing alone. All of these places would have adequate housing. Now you can complain about Soviet bloc housing, but I’d rather see that in Brazil, Delhi, Manila and Lima than those horrifying slums and favelas. Medical care would be decent in all of those places – they would have good health figures, especially maternal mortality, infant mortality, and life expectancy. They would have enough to eat – malnutrition rates would be low.

The fact that capitalism everywhere seems to produce these horrific, nightmarish slums with no end or cure for them in sight is reason enough for me to feel that it’s a totally failed system.

There have been a few famines in the Communist countries, true, but you must realize that there’s a continuous famine in the capitalist world, mostly in the 3rd world. As I noted, capitalism starves 14 million a year, year in and year out. A couple years of that, and they’ve beaten everyone starved under Communism put together.

There was a famine in the USSR, true, at the beginning of collectivization. There was another in China around the same time. It seems like if they collectivize ag too quickly, ag collapses for a few years before the new system gets going. If they want to collectivize ag, they ought do so slowly.

It’s a big lie that Communism starves people. It’s capitalism that does that. In general, the Communist states like the USSR, the East Bloc, China, etc. have done a fantastic job of feeding the people, especially compared to the disastrous dietary conditions pre-Communism.

True, the diet is not top-notch, but it fills your stomach. There was a famine in the USSR in 1932, but there’s never been another. There was one in 1962 in China, but there’s never been another. Regular deadly famines spread through both places pre-Communism.

In 1980, Cubans had the highest dietary intake in Latin America. Right now, Cuba has the lowest rate of malnutrition in Latin America. It’s really hard to make this “Communism starves the people” argument. It’s generally not true. Communism is generally pretty good about putting adequate food in people’s stomachs.

And capitalism is not! One thing capitalism cannot ever seem to do is to feed its populations adequately. When I die in 30 years, capitalism still will be failing to feed its own populations. If there’s any indictment of capitalism, that’s it. WTF man? You call that a successful system? You can’t even feed your own people, give me a break.

I’m no fan of the Khmer Rogue, but realize that there was already mass starvation going on when they took over. Agriculture had collapsed in the countryside long since. I don’t agree with emptying the cities to the rural areas like they did, but the reason they did that was to try to get the ag system going again. Presently, capitalist Cambodia has a sky high malnutrition rate.

What happened with Communist economics is more a problem with chronic shortages of food and other basics and luxuries, long lines, housing shortages, etc. Also collectivized ag had poor productivity. The centrally planned economy doesn’t work very well because you have to figure out how much everyone is going to consume every year at the start of the year and plan for that. It’s almost impossible to do that, and that leads to economic deformations. Also, labor productivity was often poor.

The best system in a lot of cases seems to be some sort of mixed economy.

“Keeping America Safe,” by Alpha Unit

The First World War had its last gasp in 1971.

At least that’s one way to look at it, from the perspective of those whose job it is to defend and protect the United States from those who would aid the enemy in wartime. People like leftists, radicals, Communists, Socialists, and other subversives.

When the United States decided to enter World War I, President Wilson knew that he had to have the American people on his side. In fact, he insisted on it. So on April 13, 1917, with the stroke of a pen, he created the U.S. Committee on Public Information, for the express purpose of getting the people’s sentiment in line with their government’s.

George Creel, the newspaperman enlisted to head this operation, set about propagandizing. He was aided, among others, by journalist and commentator Walter Lippmann and by “the father of public relations” in America, Edward Bernays – the man who saw his job of shaping public opinion as “the engineering of consent.”

To say that this effort achieved its purpose would be an understatement.

This was during the same period that revolution and civil war swept Russia, producing a corollary fear in this country that some of those socialistic, communistic spores could drift across land mass and ocean to become embedded on American soil. It wasn’t a great time to be a Leftist in America. (Is wartime ever?)

Two groups stood above the rest – the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World, the latter also known as the “Wobblies.” Both groups came out strongly against U.S. involvement in World War I and were targeted almost at once by the government. And any activity that might even have the whiff of their involvement became suspect.

The Wobblies had been one of the first labor unions to admit women, Blacks, and immigrants – this was subversive enough in early twentieth-century America. During the war it was led by “Big Bill” Haywood, one of its original organizers. Eugene Debs, who ran for President several times as a Socialist, had also been one of its founders, as well as Mary Harris “Mother” Jones.

In spite of Haywood’s attempts to lower their profile in light of the group’s anti-war stance, the organization was targeted and made an example of under the recently enacted Espionage Act. Laws against espionage were not at all new, but this law expanded the definition of espionage to include openly expressing political opinions that could be construed as “helping” the enemy. Over 150 of the Wobblies’ leaders were rounded up, tried, and convicted. Haywood was among them.

A series of amendments to the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act of 1918 prohibited “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States, its flag, or armed forces during wartime. Included was any language that caused anyone to view the United States with contempt.

Both the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch were absolutely serious about shutting down dissent.

A series of strikes in the period right after the war continued to stoke fears of revolution and anarchy in various quarters. The first major strike took place in the shipyards of Seattle in 1919.

After two years of wage controls during the war, workers launched a strike in an attempt to get pay increases. The shipyard workers were joined by other unions, including the Wobblies. It wasn’t long before some in the press connected this incident to the Russian Revolution, since some of the union workers evidently supported it. A pamphlet entitled “Russia Did It” was being distributed during the strike. It read in part:

The Russians have shown you the way. What are you going to do about it? You are doomed to wage slavery till you die unless you wake up, realize that you and the boss have nothing in common, that the employing class must be overthrown, and that you, the workers, must take control of your jobs and through them, the control of your lives instead of offering yourself up to the master as a sacrifice six days a week, so that they may coin profits out of your sweat and toil.

The Seattle shipyard strike didn’t even last a week. There was no violence. But it was seen as the work of “Bolsheviks,” so there were reprisals. The Wobblies were targeted, predictably, as ringleaders; several dozen were arrested.

Subsequent strikes were blamed on “Reds,” including a strike by Boston police and a nationwide steelworkers strike.

The federal government was on a mission to unearth the Bolshevik menace in America. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer appointed J. Edgar Hoover as head of a new radical-hunting division in the Bureau of Investigation. Thousands of “radicals” were arrested; some were imprisoned and others were deported. At the same time, numerous state legislatures were smitten with anti-radical fever. Famously, the New York legislature expelled five Socialist members from its ranks.

Anti-radical sentiment was at its peak.

But by the spring of 1920 a pushback was underway in the country. As one writer summarized events:

In May twelve prominent attorneys (including Harvard professor Dean Pound, Zachariah Chaffee, and Felix Frankfurter, who later became a Supreme Court justice and a proponent of Sacco and Vanzetti’s innocence) issued a report detailing the Justice Department’s violations of civil liberties.

The New York Assembly’s decision to bar its Socialist members was met with disgust by national newspapers and leaders such as then-Senator Warren G. Harding, former Republican presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes and even Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer who felt it unfair to put Socialists and Communists in the same category.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes criticized proposed anti-sedition bills possibly because the proposed bills were viewed as censorship; most newspapers came out against the anti-sedition bills. Industry leaders, who were early proponents of anti-Communism, began to realize that deporting immigrants (as many of the Communists were alleged to be) drained a major source of labor, which would result in higher wages and decreased profits.

But what really made this Red Scare come undone was The Plot That Never Was.

J. Edgar Hoover’s agents told the Attorney General that radicals were planning an attempted overthrow of the U.S. government on May Day 1920. Palmer and Hoover tried to brace the nation for the terror to come. All kinds of preparations were made to thwart this overthrow.

May Day came. And nothing happened.

Newspapers across the country ridiculed the Attorney General. This was the beginning of the end of what is now known as the First Red Scare of America.

In December of 1920 the Sedition Act was repealed.

The Espionage Act, its parent, has never been repealed. One of its first victims was Eugene Debs, who was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison; after about 3 years he was pardoned by President Harding. Another famous victim was the poet e. e. cummings, who got in trouble while serving in an ambulance corps in France during the war. Supposedly he had been guilty of not being sufficiently hateful in discussing the Germans. He actually spent three and a half months in a military detention camp.

The last time the government applied the Espionage Act was in the case of New York Times Co. v. United States, otherwise known as the Pentagon Papers case. The government lost in its attempt to keep this information from going public, but the Espionage Act was not specifically ruled to be unconstitutional.

As I said at the outset, it was the final whimper of President Wilson’s quest to keep the world safe for democracy.

Why Franco Was As Big A Killer A Stalin

Here in the US, one never hears the end of the “Stalin the murderer” line. Stalin is simply equated with genocide. The more intrepid on the Far Right even say that Stalin killed more than Hitler, in doing so betraying exactly where their sympathies have lain along (with the Hitlerists).

What does one think when one thinks of Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain. Nothing much. Sure, he was a dictator, but he was a good guy. Anyway, the economy boomed under him. Sure, he was Hitler’s best buddy, but let’s not talk about that. Did he kill anyone? Who knows? Maybe a few?

We know or do not know these things here in the West because the Ruling Class political parties have embedded these memes into our brain. Stalin? Greatest Murderer of All Time. Franco? Huh? I don’t know what to think. Not too bad, maybe?

We will do the math below, but first of all, some background. Why was and is Franco the pal of the US media and political elite. Because he was one of them.

And how did he get started? From 1936-1939, there was a popular regime in power in Spain. They won a democratic election. As we mentioned in the previous post, the Ruling Class never tolerates this, and in this case, they started a war against the state. The state had almost no arms (1 gun for every three men) and Franco’s best friends Hitler and Mussolini rushed in to help him out.

Other than brave volunteers who flooded in from around the globe to help the beleaguered state, not one state in the “liberal to conservative” West would lift one finger to help the Republicans. As Churchill (hero of the West, as I was taught here in the US) a far rightwing British elitist, pointed out, there was fear in the “liberal to conservative” West that aims of the Spanish Republican state would “infect” the masses of the West. And what might be the symptoms of this infection, that is, what did the Republicans want?

1. They put in a land reform which was opposed by big landowners. In the 1930’s, land reform was apparently anathema in the “liberal to conservative” West.

2. They massively expanded public education, antagonizing the Catholic Church which controlled education. In the 1930’s, apparently a massive expansion of public education was regarded with terror in the “progressive West.”

3. They put in a public pension reform, antagonizing the bankers. In the 1930’s, the idea that people should be financially secure and able to survive in their retirement was opposed by the “civilized West,” even apparently Roosevelt, who just put in a Social Security program.

4. They removed many of the top military officers in the reactionary army. This reactionary army had been used the elite to consolidate Ruling Class rule in Spain. Reform of the Armed Forces, that is, making them democratic and not controlled by the Ruling Classes to use to repress the people or fight imperialist war on behalf of Capital, was regarded with terror in the “democratic West.”

5. They encouraged workers to join unions, antagonizing the employers. In the 1930’s, in the “democratic West,” the idea that workers should have democratic rights and equal bargaining power with the bosses in the workplace was clearly to be opposed.

Hitler and Mussolini, along with the Ruling Classes of the “democratic West,” opposed all of these popular measures, giving the lie to the notion that somehow Hitlerism or Mussolinism were “socialist” projects, as the Right is now trying to rewrite them. It also shows that the “democratic states” of the West were completely supportive of the aims of the German and Italian fascists, at least as far as Spain, and probably beyond.

Indeed, a few years hence, the West would turn against their erstwhile fascist allies in a war. But the fact that they were strong allies only a few years prior shows that the differences between the West and the fascists were not over Elite or Ruling Class rule in society. Both the “democratic West” and the fascist dictatorships believed in Elite or Ruling Class rule in society, and both were essentially controlled by conservatives to reactionaries.

It is interesting that “socialist” Roosevelt also lined up with his Hitlerist and Mussolinist buddies, but that’s the way it was back then. The fascists were good for business, and that’s all that mattered. And Roosevelt, while pursuing progressive initiatives at home, was utterly committed to a reactionary and imperialist foreign policy, as have all US “liberal” Presidents to one degree or another.

What’s little known is that after Franco won, he killed 514,266 people. I’ve lived in the West my whole life, and I just learned this today. And I’m a smart guy. Why did it take me 52 years to learn this? Because the US Political and Media Elite (the “free political system” and the “free press”) doesn’t want me to know that deadly little fact.

Indeed, Western support for the Francoists, even after the fact, is a dirty little secret, at least here in the US. There were 200,000 executions, 200,000 dead in prison camps, and 114,266 who simply disappeared. That’s over a 39 year period from 1939 to 1978. Franco died in 1975, but his regime continued for another three years until 1978.

From 1921-1953, under Lenin but mostly Stalin in the USSR, there were at least 2.5 million killed. There were 900,000 executions, 1.2 million died in prison camps, and 390,000 died in the population transfers out of the Ukraine during collectivization (the so-called Holodomor).

The figures do not include the natural famine that occurred in the Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR in the early 1930’s (the so-called Holodomor) because those were not deliberate killings, hence the Holodomor, or deliberate famine, never occurred. It also does not include deaths during population transfers during WW2 when Chechens, Ingush and Crimean Tatars were transferred to Siberia for collaborating with the Nazi invaders, and possibly other deaths during the war, such at the massacre at Katyn Forest in Poland.

The sources are in the archives, and I don’t feel like digging them up, but they come from the unveiling of the secret KGB archives by Gorbachev in 1990. They made a note of everyone they killed, name, date, the whole works. Since then, there has been a huge argument about the archives in the history journals, with Robert Conquest, etc. taking the tens of millions killed side and J. Arch Getty, etc. taking the side of the archives. Sources should be online; one reference is below.

That’s 2.49 million dead over a 32 year period.

So we see that the length of rule was about the same for both leaders, 39 years in one and 32 years in another.

Stalin still killed more.

Demographics of Spain, 1900-2005.

But who killed a greater percentage of the population?

Look at the graphic above, the demographics of Spain. In 1936, the population of Spain was ~26 million. In 1978, the population was ~36 million. The average population during the period was 31 million.

Demographics of the USSR, 1900-1995.

Now look at this graphic, the demographics of the USSR. In 1921, the population was ~140 million. In 1953, the population was ~180 million. Average for the period was 160 million.

Let us now divide the number killed by the average population in each nation:

USSR: 2.5 million / 160 million = 1.5

Spain: 514, 266 / 31.75 million = 1.6

I suppose to be fair I should average out the final figure by numbers of years the regime was in power, but I don’t know how to do that. From the comments, James Schipper helpfully does the math:

In the case of Spain, 514,266/(1978 – 1936) = 12,244 per year.

In the case of the Soviet Union, we get 2,490,000/(1953 – 1921) = 77,812 per year.

Dividing the yearly figures by the average population, we get 12,244/31 = 395* for Spain, and 77,812/160 = 486* for the Soviet Union.

*I’m not even sure what that figure means. Let’s just call it a “genocide factor.” It’s the number of killed per year in the country divided by the average population in number of millions.

As we can see, Franco was nearly as big a killer as Stalin.

Think the “free press” in the US will ever tell you that?

Keep in mind that the whole time Franco was in power, he had no bigger ally than the USA. The US government supported him to the hilt during his entire reign, and afterward until 1978. Richard Nixon lauded him as a hero.

US liberals like my folks always said, “Well, that was because of the Cold War. We supported fascists in the Cold War.” Well, in 1989, the Cold War ended, and the US has continued to support fascists and murderous rightwing regimes just as strongly as we did during the Cold War. Was this really all about US-Soviet conflict, or was it about something else? Like US imperialism?

One argument is that many or possibly most of the executions occurred during the war years. True, but many executions, disappearances and sentences to labor camps occurred after 1939.

Many former supporters of the Republicans went into hiding and were still in hiding 30 years after the war. Even on his death bed, Franco was still signing death warrants. To this very day, over 30 years after the transition to democracy, fear still rules the country.

In Asturias, where many killings took place and mass graves litter the land, most people simply refuse to talk about the killings under the dictatorship. The terror is still there. The only possible reason that people are still frightened is that the former supporters and officials of the regime must still retain vast power in Spanish society. People are afraid of a recrudescence.

References

Getty, J. Arch, Rittersporn, Gabor T. and Zemskov, V. N. October 1993. Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Prewar Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence. American Historical Review. [Getty, J. Arch, Rittersporn, Gabor T. and Zemskov, V. N. Les victimes de la repression pénale dans l’URSS d’avant-guerre. Revue des Etudes Slaves, 65:1, 199.]

China Turns Towards Maoism

This is an interesting article about a turn to the Left among some factions of the CCP in China, particularly a revival of Maoism. Though the article, as usual for Asia Times, has an anti-Mao bent, it’s nevertheless good news. Interestingly enough, much of the movement is coming from younger cadre. Another faction is the sons and daughters of the veterans of the Long March.

The turn towards Maoism takes many forms, and many are not necessarily economic. It’s interesting that in China now, privatization is working backwards. That is, state firms are swallowing up many private firms. And most of last year’s stimulus went to state firms.

What most people don’t realize is that much of China’s economic revival is being led by public firms of one type or another. These firms are often owned at least nominally by local municipalities, often smaller ones, and labor collectives.

The #3 manufacturer of televisions in the world, maker of TV’s for many multinational TV makers, is a publicly owned firm. At root is a Maoist practice whereby many or most public firms are actually formally owned by the workers, including this TV firm. Management is still relatively autonomous, but the profits from the firm go straight into the worker’s pockets as paychecks. However, my understanding is that they are required to reinvest 90-9

Firms run by small cities have been extremely successful. Cities compete with each other and build homes and other amenities for workers. The best firms make lots of money and the workers as formal owners get to take home a chunk of it. The most successful firms have long lists of workers wanting to move to these prosperous cities. Much of this manufactured material is also exported.

What’s funny is that that Made In China product you bought at the store may well have been made by a public firm. Oh, the horrors of socialism!

Although hardline Maoists decry China’s present economic project, saying that they have abandoned socialism for capitalism, that’s not really true.

If you go outside the cities into the rural areas, such as the wild areas, all of that land is owned by the state. Although the state has had problems in the environmental arena, in many cases the state stewards wildlands well. If that land were all privately owned, I assure you most of it would be developed with an eye towards profit or habitation. China’s wildlands and wild species would be in much worse shape than they are now, and on a worldwide scale, China is not a center of mass extinctions or endangered species.

It is capitalist countries, mostly rainforest ones, such as Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Philippines, Madagascar and Mexico that are leading the extinction and endangerment epidemic, not China.

The Nepalese Maoists have gone to China’s rural collectives and come back with smiles on their faces. Compared to Nepal, China seems like a socialist paradise. The same could be said for India. China’s people are much better off than India’s in a socialist manner of speaking.

Nevertheless, it is simply outrageous that in China, people are dying because they cannot afford healthcare. That’s really disgusting. The state has been trying to extend insurance to the masses, and state insurance is for sale that covers 8

Much of the progress in education that was made during the Cultural Revolution, especially in the rural areas (and incredible progress was made) has, incredibly, been in a process of reversal. Schools are being shut down in rural areas all over China. This is the damned economic miracle you capitalist-lovers are raving about. Tastes more like crow to me.

Furthermore, China continues to support North Korea, and North Korea is the source of most of Iran’s missiles. This blog supports the efforts of both North Korea and Iran to obtain nuclear weapons as deterrents, but hopefully not to use them.

North Korea’s nukes are the subject of a lot of misinformation. Yes they have a working nuclear device, but I think it is only a small one, maybe 1

People don’t understand nuclear missiles at all. First, it’s hard as Hell to make one. Next, it’s very hard to make good rockets that go 1000’s of miles with good accuracy. Third and most important, once you get the bomb, it is a whole matter altogether to figure out how to stick the thing onto a missile in such a way that it detonates on landing when firing the rocket. This is called weaponizing the warhead. It’s a whole new ballgame. Many states have had nuclear programs that have aborted or run aground at one or the other of these phases.

All in all, the movement towards Maoism in China is great news!

Death Tolls For Western Imperialism, Colonialism and 3rd World Capitalism

Repost from the old site.

Global Avoidable Mortality blog looks pretty interesting, and I have mucked around there a bit.

The part about 500 million dead Muslims post-1950 looks pretty interesting, but I haven’t looked into that yet.

More Polya here.

Total excess mortality per year as of 2004:

Iraq        122,000

Afghanistan 359,000

India       2.2 million

Pakistan    478,000

Bangladesh  288,000

In Iraq and Afghanistan, those are the excess deaths that are probably occurring due to Coalition activities (especially in Iraq). In Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, the excess deaths are probably due to the lack of socialism.

Does Welfare Cause Crime?

Repost from the old site.

In the comments, Uncle Milton says:

I have spent extensive time in third world countries. In general I found them much safer than the inner cities of the US which are filled with people who collect checks from the government and still feel strongly they are owned something and will take it out on each and anyone wandering into their midst.

 

The notion that “welfare causes crime” is very problematic. I don’t believe that the folks pushing this argument have ever proved their case. In Europe, there is a good model backed up with many studies that shows that the more socialism you have in the system, the less crime you have.

The more capitalism, the more crime. This is proven in the transition from socialism to capitalism in the FSU, Eastern Europe and China which were followed by tremendous crime waves.

If you cut all those folks in the ghetto off of all the welfare, would they be any less criminal?

There doesn’t seem to be any theoretical model for why welfare would cause crime. Why would giving someone stuff turn him into a criminal? According to Uncle Milton, it is because they “feel they are owed something.”

But aren’t people owed something under Communism? Basic needs were provided for everyone. Perhaps Communism was the ultimate welfare state. At least this is what conservatives say. How then did Communist states have the lowest levels of crime around?

Furthermore, I would point out that the 3rd World equivalent of our ghettos are often vastly more dangerous that US ghettos. I worked in the ghettos and barrios of Los Angeles for years and I lost one car battery in East LA and I had the wires cut on another car battery in Watts. Of course, I was usually out of there before dark.

I lived in Oakhurst, a town in the Sierra Nevada, for 16 years. I don’t know the figures, but word is that the welfare use rate was very high the whole time I was there. Girls got pregnant as soon as they got out of high school (18-20 or so) and the guy may or may not be around.

Many just became single Moms for various periods of time. I suppose there were guys floating in and out of their lives, but that’s how it goes with single Moms in general. In my apartment complex, there were two single Moms out of six tenants.

The guys support the kids in some cases and marry them in others, but in quite a few cases, they don’t marry the woman, and in other cases, they do not support them either.

Although the rate of this sort of thing among the Amerindians in town is insanely high, I would like to focus on the Whites. There is a very high rate of welfare use among Whites in this town. This includes all kinds of welfare – food stamps, Medicaid, welfare proper, etc. There was very little crime in this town.

The crime rate was so low that I often did not lock my car at home and often left the house without locking the door. I did that for years with no break-ins. Violent crime was nearly nonexistent. Gangs did not exist, and juvenile crime did not seem to be significant from my POV.

I had heard that it took a long time for a welfare culture to develop as kids come of age and become pathological due to being raised in a welfare family. I watched this scene for 16 years and no welfare culture develop. I assume that was enough time.

It’s an interesting question why high welfare use seems to be associated with mass pathology in some groups (Hispanics and Blacks) but not in others (Asians and Whites). Even in Oakhurst, relatively high levels of pathology coincided with extremely high welfare use among Amerindians. Nevertheless, with Amerindians about

So much for welfare causes crime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Shall Certainly Defeat the Government

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1947 INDIA SPRINGS FROM THE HEAD OF MARS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Muslims from a crowd into a nation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1950 INDIAN INTERVENTION IN NEPAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IRISH AND INDIAN NATIONALISM – A COMPARISON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patriots of Ireland , your cause is mine.

and in 1920 said that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although they achieved a growth in GDP of

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later, in 1962, he observed:

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

THE STRUGGLE FOR INDIA & NEPAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did this happen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE UML AND THE STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROGRAM

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

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

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

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

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

A prominent UML commentator summed up the results:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The principle driving this demand is that:

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

It also complains that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy and capitalism have been turned upside down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The desire of the UCPN(M) was:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bhattarai, B. Monarchy versus Democracy.

Chauduri, N.C. The Continent of Circe.

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

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

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

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

Maxwell, N. India’s China War.

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

Muni, S.D. Maoist Insurgency in Nepal.

Rimal, B. Challenging Globalization.

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

Thapa, D. A Kingdom Under Siege.

Yami, H. Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis.

PERIODICALS & JOURNALS

Himal – Southasian

Kantipur Times

Le Monde

Nepal Telegraph

Nepali Times

The Worker, Journal of the UCPN(M)

UML/GEFONT PUBLICATIONS

One Union

Study & Research

Trade Union Rights

World of Work

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Tobin September 2009

The Failure of the Neoliberal Model For Developing Countries

On the 60th Anniversary of Chinese Liberation post, James Schipper says that I should compare China to Taiwan and South Korea instead and see who did better. I pointed out that a book on China by the reactionary Time-Life Corporation in 1962 at the height of the Cold War noted that Taiwanese miracle was not reproducible in China. They wished it was, but there was no way to do it. For one thing, one thing that helped create the Taiwanese miracle was a flood of US aid. In order to China to receive a concomitant amount of aid, China would have to have received an unheard-of figure that was simply not possible to achieve at that time, or even now. Further, there was the problem of feeding the people and rural poverty. Taiwan solved this, mostly by doing a land reform, but Taiwan is a little island, and feeding the island was not an insurmountable task. The book pointed out that the main problem facing China was feeding the population. Only 2 Everywhere on Earth, US imperialism has always fought the imposition of any kind of national health care, state involvement in the economy and especially land reform. Many nations have been overthrown by the CIA and other agents of US imperialism for attempting even those most meager reforms. Indeed, all Hugo Chavez seems to be doing is trying to create some sort of social democracy in Venezuela. Yet in Taiwan and South Korea, the US agreed to national health care, massive land reform, trade barriers, heavy state involvement in the economy, the whole works. This is because I believe that the US knew that all of these were necessary to develop an economy. Taiwan and South Korea were intended by imperialism to be “showcases against Communism”, to be sparkling examples of what “capitalism” could do better than say North Korea or China. It’s really amazing how cynical imperialism is, but if imperialism has to do a bit of a socialist dance to fight Communism, then that’s what it will do. The sad thing is that if the North Korean, Soviet and Chinese “threats of a good example” did not exist, there would be no reason for imperialism to create these “anti-Commie showcases” and the model for those countries may well have been the Philippines, Thailand or Indonesia instead. I would like to point out a few other things, mainly that we are comparing one socialist country to another, since I consider Taiwan at least to be a socialist country and South Korea to be a partly socialist country. As I’ve said on this site, I support all kinds of socialism. The main thing is that we are not comparing a socialist China to a neoliberal capitalist South Korea or Taiwan. Taiwan at least is a very socialist country. They did a land reform, and they have universal health care that even includes dental care! I don’t know much about South Korea, but I know that they did a land reform. It’s important to note how essential that land reform was developing those two nations. Neoliberal dumbasses never seem to figure that out. You have to deal with the problem of feeding your people and take care of the problem of rural poverty by doing a land reform, and then you can think about becoming a developed country. Until then, the best you can hope for is some backwards clusterfuck wreck like Brazil or Equatorial Guinea. Also, neither Taiwan nor South Korea are examples of neoliberal capitalism. Both were very heavily state-directed, state-guided and even state-involved economies. The state was pretty much setting economic policy and telling the corporations what to do. The state and the business sector were very much tied together. It was almost a “national socialism.” Also both countries protected their budding industries with huge trade barriers until they got big enough to compete with the big guys. All developing countries need to protect their budding industries from competition with huge economies – otherwise you are never going to develop. Of course all of this – land reform, national health care (including dental!), heavy state involvement in the economy, trade barriers to protect budding industries until they are big enough to compete – are anathema to the neoliberal agenda that holds sway over the entire world, mostly due to US imperialism. Neoliberalism never developed one undeveloped country ever, and probably never will.

60th Anniversary of the Liberation of China

Very nice article sums up very well the great changes that occurred in China on October 1, 1949. The author finds that almost every Chinese woman he meets his joyous about the Chinese Revolution. Why? It was the greatest movement for he liberation of women that has ever occurred in the history of the world. On that day, for instance, Mao issued a decree forbidding forever the binding of feet, a practice that was rampant under Chiang’s Nationalist government. Arranged marriages were ended and women received 1/2 of their husband’s property. As Mao put it, “China stood up.” Indeed. Were the Revolution never to have taken place, surely Chinese women would still have bound feet, would get screwed (literally in marriage) and would suffer form arranged marriages. In the rural areas, education and health care would be rare to nonexistent, just as it is in India today. Mao also tried to stop wife-beating, an ancient tradition in China. His methods were ingenius. Mao ordered women all across China to order the men in the villages to stop beating women. If they did not stop, there would be consequences. Many men did not stop, so party cadres in the villages told Chinese women to gather up their farm implements and raid the houses of the beaters and beat them up with farm tools. So all across China, in 100’s of thousands of villages, women armed with hoes and shovels stormed into houses and beat up men who were beating their wives. Wife-beating quickly dropped to a low level, though unfortunately it still continues today. The Chinese government is said to be capitalist, but that is not really true. The latest government educational decree sent teachers to all villages with over 200 residents. In the 3rd World, capitalist countries don’t do things like that. The reigning neoliberal model says the less the state spends on education, the better, as it is regarded as a waste of society’s money that would be better spent by the public sector. Instead, private schools are encouraged. The US “liberal”mass media cheers the closing of schools in the Third World and government issuance of nonpayable school fees. When the Sandinistas were thrown out of office in 1990, the entire US media stood up and cheered. Nearly all legislators of both US parties (the “liberal” Democrats nearly more than the Republicans) roared their approval for the defeat of the Sandinistas. The ultra-reactionary Violeta Chamorro got down to business very quickly. One of the first things she did was to close health clinics all over Nicaragua. Next she issued a $30/year fee that parents had to pay for every student in the public schools. This was unpayable for huge numbers of parents, so swarms of students all over Nicaragua quickly dropped out of school. I assume that that’s still the case today. It is for such things that the entire US media cheers. Floods of students being thrown out of schools all over the land because they can’t pay the bills. Countless health clinics closing all over the land, leaving poor 3rd Worlders with no medical treatment. Both parties, “liberal” Democrats and Republicans, roar their approval of such atrocities. The World Bank and the IMF, both of which are controlled both by US imperialism and also by World Jewry, imposes similar conditions all through the 3rd World. In order to get a loan, government spending must be slashed to the bone, especially health and education spending. Subsidies to poor for anything, for food, transportation, utilities, anything, are ordered to be slashed or ended altogether. Prices for food, utilities, transportation, you name it, rocket upward and taxes are raised on the poorest of the poor. At the same time, taxes on business and the rich are gutted or eliminated and poor country must be opened up to economic colonization by corporations from the rich nations, often US corporations. Careful studies have shown that IMF/World Bank policies have resulted in declining education and health figures across the board. The best estimates show that these sanctions have killed millions over the past couple of decades, and possibly continue to kill millions every year. So US imperialism and World Jewry are probably deliberately killing millions every year in the 3rd World through structural adjustment alone. So any government that massively increases education to its people in these days must be a socialist nation, since capitalist countries by their nature do not do such things. In the US, on Wikipedia and among reactionaries everywhere, there’s a new line out: the Chinese Revolution failed. Next time someone tells you that, think again.

Why Was The Bankster-Destruction of the World Economy Necessary?

According to Libertarian (Libertardarian) theory, or neoliberal theory, the recent blowup of the US economy by the FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) sector was absolutely necessary, or at least was absolutely normal. Any attempts to regulate US capitalism to try to prevent such economic ruin in the first place would have been and would be catastrophic. It’s important to note that Libertardarian theory and neoliberalism are essentially the same thing. Neoliberalism rules the West, especially the US. It’s firmly in place in much of the Third World. And since Thatcher, it’s made major inroads even in socialist Europe. Almost all US Economics departments have been colonized by neoliberal crazies. If you go anywhere in the US to study Economics, you come out a wild-eyed neoliberal nutcase. Nearly the entire US mass media has been intellectually colonized by Neoliberal Madness, including all of the major US dailies, the major US newsweekly magazines, all major US network TV, and most of the paid intellectuals at US intellectual policy foundations. The Republicans have been a neoliberal party for decades now, but the Democrats are not far behind. The “socialist” Obama is no such thing. On the FIRE question, he’s as insane as George Bush or Milton Friedman. Obama’s administration is littered top to bottom with bankster and FIRE crooks, from Larry Summers to Robert Rubin to Tim Geithner to Robert Reich. Much of the blame for the horrific destruction to the US and world economy can be laid at the feet of the Clinton Administration, who tried to out-reactionary the Republicans in deregulating the FIRE sector. The recent G20 summit solved nothing, Obama’s braying aside. Despite a lot of loose Obama talk, little to nothing has been done to regulate the FIRE sector. The banks are back gambling again in the same way they did before, the same way that ruined the economy of the planet, and no one is going to stop them. The next blow-up is probably going to be even worse. Libertardarianism is ridiculous. It’s never been attempted anywhere, really, and the only places where it’s been de facto in place, such as the Third World and pre-civilized America, ended up or end up pretty well wrecked. The only people who have fun in these places are the rich people. Everyone else gets screwed. A lot of White Americans think that Libertardarianism is tres cool. What they really mean is it’s good for White people. A bunch of White nationalist retards recently got on board for supposedly the same reason when they supported the Ron Paul campaign. Libertardtarianism is behind the recent blowup of not just the US but the world economy. Qui bono? Almost no one. White people? Get real. Upper middle class or middle class Whites? Not really. Basically what happened is that the banks and FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector robbed the national economy blind. They had to be bailed out to $10 billion, which came out of our savings from our taxes, out of Social Security and Medicare. SS and Medicare are pretty well nuked now, but that was the project all along. The economy is screwed. Income has been flat since 2001, and wages have been flat since 1980. My friends in Europe are moaning. The economy there is ruined by the US bankster-crooks. It’s gone for all the rest of the year and all next year. My friends were White Europeans with good incomes living very well. Their incomes and lifes have been screwed hard, and so have the lives and incomes of millions of other European Whites. So you’re an upper middle class White in the US. You made out? Dubious. You probably lost your corporate job, you may have lost your house, your car, God knows what else. How many American Whites have been screwed like this by this Banker Ripoff? My Mom bought her house 4 years ago for $130K. It’s now worth $48K. She’s a normal, elderly White woman, who’s worked her whole life. Why did she need to get fucked like this for some lying Banksters? This blowup has screwed the US economy. A lot of companies are hurting bad or out of business altogether. How did this Bankster Ripoff Scam benefit US business, or US capitalism? It didn’t. All it did was blow a hole in the safe and make off with a ton of loot and leave us holding the bag. The Republicans won’t reform the FIRE criminals, and neither will the “socialist” Obama. Why not? He’s not a socialist! Both parties, even the “liberal” Democrats, are 10 Can anyone even give me a pro-capitalist, pro-business or pro-White argument about why this Greatest Bankster Robbery even needed to happen in the first place? I don’t get it. It was bad for business, bad for capitalism, bad for Whites. Yet Libertariantards not only justify but champion such Free Market Fundamentalist Mumbo-Jumbo.

Liberals Ruined American Blacks, and Other Republican Lies

This comment was posted on the Liberal Race Realism Starting To Grow post by a conservative who blames liberals for the problems of Black folks in the US:

As what passes for a conservative in Massachusetts, I have to find this article amusing. You think that now that you’ve applied rational thought to one issue, you know it all? There’s a lot more coming.The fact is, the whole mess was made by liberals, starting with Kennedy and LBJ. Liberals were the ones that concluded that blacks weren’t smart enough to be helped to stand on their own two feet, and so created affirmative action to get them results without effort. When Blacks took the philosophy behind affirmative action to heart, and themselves concluded they couldn’t make it on their own, liberals were the ones who set up a welfare system that perpetuated the Black cycle of poverty. And it’s liberals who set up a taxation system that provides major disincentives to work harder for Blacks who manage to break that cycle, just as it does for Whites and everyone else. Don’t blame the Blacks, blame yourself. If you ever understand what’s really going on, you’ll finally understand why the conservative agenda – the tough love of workfare and further limitations on welfare, lower taxation and uncapped child care deductions to let actual working people keep what they earn and have kids as easily as welfare families, and elimination of affirmative action and the racist prejudice that underlies it – is necessary if the problems of race in the U.S. are ever to be solved. But you’ll never be able to do anything about it by voting for Democrats. We’ll see if you are smart enough to allow your brain to vote, instead of your liberal reactions.

This bit of Republican nastiness is particularly vicious because it masquerades as anti-racism when in reality, it’s going to have some real bad effects for Blacks once it’s put into practice. In this reworking of the world, reality is turned on its head, anti-racist liberals like Johnson and Kennedy (and me) are now the Liberal KKK, and racist Republicans like Reagan are the Republican MLK. This allows Republicans to peddle an objectively anti-Black under the guise of anti-racists while painting the opponents of the project, who work for Black interests, to actually be nasty racists like Bull Connor. This is sort of the Starr Parker – Clarence Thomas line about Blacks. Many Whites have cynically latched onto this, and a few Black idiots have too. Parker and Thomas are two of those morons. Thomas and Parker are cynically used by frankly racist White conservatives to further the rightwing project which has nothing to do with helping Blacks and is all about conservative ideology and helping out the wealthier classes, which all conservatism is ever about really. Conservatives, even Republicans, are racists because every time a Republican President gets in office, he defunds the Civil Rights Department. Prosecutions for discrimination in housing and employment plummeted under Reagan and Bush Sr. There’s no reason for any self-respecting, non-masochistic  Black person who cares anything about their people to be a Republican. This won’t solve anything. It will just make things worse. Blacks do best under a socialist system. The more socialism, the better they do. The more free market pure capitalist with wide variables in wealth, the worse Blacks do. Lower taxes always hurts workers. It doesn’t help them. Because you have to cut services when you cut taxes, and workers are the ones who use all the services. The only people helped by lowering taxes are people who make lots of money and have no need for government services, so taxation is a ripoff for them. If you make that much money, taxes are no disincentive to having kids. In my entire life, I have never heard one family say, “We want kids, but we can’t afford it due to taxes.” As far as workfare, it’s Republicans who always killed that. Liberals wanted it. Republican “workfare” is some kind of a sick joke. Go find yourself a job, if you’re lucky with 9. OTOH, we liberals supported a workfare whereby you would get some government make-work type job (could be anything really) and then along with it, medical care for you and your kid and daycare for your kid. You can stay on it as long as you like, as long as you have dependent kids. As is, the jobs that welfare recipients are likely to find will not pay enough for daycare for the kids, and will not have medical care for the kids or for the Mom. It’s just a disaster. Welfare “reform” has completely failed. We need to get rid of it and put back in some real workfare proposition. Getting rid of “racist” affirmative action won’t help Blacks. What’s hilarious about Republicans characterizing AA as racism is that this is the only time they ever use the word “racism.” When it hurts White people. To Republicans, the only kind of racism that exists is anti-White racism. All the other kinds are illusions. This is the rightwing lie: affirmative action told Blacks that they were helpless and incompetent, so they acted the part. Yeah right! So, we get rid of affirmative action, and Blacks will no longer believe that they are lame and incompetent, and will rise to the top like baking yeast! I would laugh except so many rightwing idiots actually believe this idiocy. It’s sort of understandable that idiots would fall for this crap, since it does have a nice ring to it, that is, until you actually sit down and think. It’s true that affirmative action is at times unfair, but no way will getting rid of it help Blacks. Bottom line is getting rid of it is going to be bad for Blacks. How bad is a matter of debate. In this nasty Republican lie, we liberals who set up AA are racists because we think, in a racist manner, that Blacks can’t cut it, so they need quotas to compete. Well, the truth is that if you look at test scores in schools and on tests to get into various occupations, Blacks can’t cut it. They don’t do as well. So, getting rid of AA will mean not as many Blacks will get hired. Some will, sure, but many others won’t. I suspect that the Republican liars who made up this lie actually know this and know that Blacks can’t compete on a level playing field, but they just say this because it feels so good. All right-thinking people want to believe that Blacks really can compete. Problem is, they can’t. Level the playing field, and many fewer Blacks will get in. So…Blacks (in actuality, hardworking Blacks who have been enervated by liberalism) are just dying to get off welfare and get a real job and stand on their own two feet for once, but once they consult the local tax attorney and learn about the US tax code, they say, “Screw this! I’m staying on $400 a month welfare!”? Yeah! It’s so much more profitable than working for a living, what with the 1 This line is “Liberals made Black people poor!” LOL, come on man, please. Good God, conservatives are stupid. Either they are stupid, or they are just vicious cynical evil, and don’t believe a word of this obvious nonsense that they just feed to their Glen Beck cattle. Seriously, I don’t even think that Jared Taylor believes this crap, but I haven’t asked him yet. He may be conservative, but Jared’s not stupid.

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