Alt Left: Nazism in Ukraine – An Overview, Part 2 of a Four Part Series

NAZISM IN UKRAINE – AN OVERVIEW Part 2 of a Four Part Series

Forced collectivization in the early 30’s did result in famine, but it was not limited to Ukraine. Just as many died in the very pro-Stalin Donbass, in the Volga, and in Kazakhstan. 1 million died in Siberia. People died in Moscow. Many people died of famine in Poland. Did Stalin kill those Poles too? There was a wheat rust epidemic that spread through the area, and a famine harvest resulted in 1932, half of normal. This was the cause of the famine.

The Holodomor story of a record harvest followed by Jewish NKVD coming in and seizing it to starve Ukrainians is simply a Nazi lie, but that’s what Ukrainians believe. There was a class war in Ukraine. 7

The kulaks were the large landlords. They waged a war against collectivization. They piled their crops in fields and set fire to them. They piled them and let rains soak them, ruining them. The kulaks ruined their own crops! The kulaks also killed half the livestock in the USSR, including most of the horses. As plowing was horse-driven, this contributed to famine. The Ukrainians set their own crops on fire and left it in the rain to spoil, and then cried that they had no food! Chutzpah!

The kulaks also formed an insurgency against collective farms. 20 attacks a day were being launched in early 1932. Attacks were brutal, consisting of attacking collective farms, killing the men, and raping and murdering the women. A brutal counterinsurgency was launched which left 390,000 dead in Ukraine. If you want to talk about a Holodomor, talk about that.

Yes the death toll was worst in Ukraine, but that’s where the worst of the bad harvest was. Most people died of disease, mostly cholera; few died of actual starvation. Reporters driving through Ukraine saw orderly towns with no dead lying in the streets but with long lines outside health clinics. In part, the famine was also due to the USSR tearing down the old system too fast and not building the new one soon enough.

The lie about all the food of the record harvest being stolen by the Soviets is proven to be false in that records show they requisitioned much less and shipped back a lot more wheat to Ukraine in 1932 than they had in previous years. Basically, Stalin had to feed his cities. And it was this collectivization that allowed the rapid industrialization that enabled the USSR to win the war against Germany and defeat Nazism.

During the Civil War the Whites committed many pogroms, so of course the Jews flocked to the Red Army because they were saving them and cracking down on homicidal or genocidal antisemitism. So yes, by 1924 most Russian Jews supported the Communists, but so did most workers and especially most peasants. The new regime put in by Lenin, which dramatically expanded Ukraine’s territory to the east, raised standards of living by lot in Ukraine.

Alt Left: The Basic Culture of Ukraine Is Ukrainian Nationalism, Which Is a Form of Fascism and Sometimes Nazism

Francis Miville, “The Roots of Ukrainian Fascism/Nazism Go Back 200 Years to Catherine the Great

Each time they tout to the world that a maternity clinic has been bombed by any foe, be sure it’s a fake or a false flag. It is actually more used a signature word to the wise anointed than as propaganda to the plebs to be manipulated through emotions only. It is a kind of, “You who are on the good side of money, be reassured we are in charge, and no matter we lose or win, we run the show.” Anyway their purpose is to close as many maternity clinics throughout the world, and the best way to do it is through false-flag terror attacks.

This reminds me too much of any episode of the War Without End in the Middle East.

You speak of Ukraine having been lost by Russia? All countries targeted by the Neocon (most neocons are not Jews, though it is a clientele served and moderated — not really controlled — by many Jewish writers) Wars Without End, starting with Afghanistan and comprising also Iraq and Libya are now lost for America and for the West more generally forever.

Ukraine is essentially Nazi and was long before the German themselves first heard about Nazism. They have not grown Nazi out of spite from any ill-treatment by Soviet Union. If anything, the Soviet Union gave them an importance they should have been granted, mostly for gerrymandering reasons. Ukraine is to the rest of Russia what Dixieland is to the rest of America.

Will it or not, there is no such thing as a Dixieland culture apart from nostalgia for slavery and the desire to bring the bulk of humanity back into slavery or serfdom. It is home to the dark side of the American Dream. They lost the war but as often happens they won back the peace thereafter.

Ukraine or better said Little Russia is the same thing to the Russian space. The Union made a big mistake. The Dixieland had to be blotted out as a distinct entity from America after the War of Secession by any means, and they deserved no respect. They succeeded in blotting out Nazism relatively cleanly from Germany. The same thing could have been done in the South. But America failed at that task, with the results that the only kind of Democrats that are now heard of are Southern Democrats.

The net result is that wherever the US intervenes in foreign policy it is always on the side of the local “Southerners”: FDR had offered La Follette’s Progressives the following deal: we offer you in exchange for your merging with us what you have been dreaming of as for domestic policy if only you let us continuing our foreign policy as usual without you being bothered by any negative side-effect of it. You also let us doing our business as usual in the South which you shouldn’t be fearful of, since nobody of you wants to settle there.

Since at that time the American media’s strategy was to talk of domestic issues only as if foreign policy was a topic way too complicated and advanced for the bulk of the readership, that historical compromise worked.

My opinion is that La Follette was duped, though one cannot reproach him to have first considered the short-term effects of the Depression to be alleviated by any means. Had his Third Party refused to merge with the Democrats, America would have been part of the theater of WWII with Huey Long in the South and La Follette in the North resulting in a crushing victory of the North after a classical case of Marxian class war.

Ukraine posed the same problem. It is Russia’s own Dixieland. There was no Holodomor. There was first and foremost a class war that went on. This was the region of the early USSR where the Civil War of the 1918-21 had never stopped, where the Whites and the the haves had never given up the fight against the have-nots and the Reds. 7

The whole region along the Black Sea Coast had been developed since Catherine the Great by Great-Russian Navies and settlers brought in forcibly to open up to intensive agriculture a territory that had been up to then bushy, marshy and extremely malarial. These laborers were especially despised by the Ukrainians proper.

As serfdom was still the law of the land, they could be literally bought after their period of use by Ukrainian landowners, who purchased them to build among other places the streets and walls of Odessa. You see the picture? Everybody was convinced among the Ukrainian gentry that Great Russians were genetically subhuman and fit for brute labor only.

The USSR is accused of having been the early training ground for the first Nazi stormtroopers during the 1920’s. That happened in Ukraine only. Ukraine was the country where the Nazi doctrine together with its heavy-duty racism justifying class differences was first set up before being pressure-sold to Germans.

Everything now sold about Ukraine is LIES, including the threat of a worldwide famine due to the confiscation of grain by Russia. There maybe an organized food scarcity, but it has nothing to do with Ukraine. Ukraine is a backwater power in nearly every domain.

Among other things, Ukraine uses big agribusiness technology of long past ages, say Argentina in the 1930’s, of the kind that exhaust the topsoil rather than enriching it as more recent Asian middle-size farm-adapted technologies do. Ukraine is an “undeveloping” country like Argentina, and it is Europe’s experimental land for generalized GMO’s.

Russia prohibits GMO’s and wants its prohibitions to apply there. GMO’s even in brute productivity are disappointing at best. The slight gains are counterbalanced by much heavier dependence on fossil fuels and fertilizers.

About East European Nationalism

You see, in a number of these countries, they never really had an actual nation. They were always a part of some empire or duchy or whatever. The real nation-building process was quite recent. Since they never really had a history as a nation, they had to build a nationalist project more or less out of thin air or at least out of castles of sand.

Hence the national heroes of these places goes back to World War 2, when the Nazis promised the Baltics, Belorussians, and Ukrainians with independence from the USSR. The USSR had just recently taken over the Baltic states in order to have strategic depth against the Nazis. The Ukrainians had been independence-minded, at least in the west, since the Bolshevik Revolution. These nationalists claimed that the USSR and Russia have always dismissed the idea that they have separate countries. While in the USSR, nationalist aspirations were largely forbidden and played down.

After the USSR took the Balts away from the Nazis and incorporated them into the USSR, they lost the independence they had had during the interwar period. They claimed that the USSR did not allow them to develop their national languages but that does not seem correct. Anyway, the USSR and Russia were always seen as the thorn in the side of the national aspirations of these peoples.

Since they never had much of a recent history, most of the nationalist heroes of Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Ukraine end up being some nationalist Nazi collaborator from 1942 named Vyashlev the Jewslayer or something along those lines. There are statues and monuments to these guys all over these countries with the exception of Belarus. At the same time,  all of the Soviet era statues, including to heroes of the Great Patriotic War, have been torn down or vandalized.

The Litts (Lithuanians), Letts (Latvians), and Ukrainians were the biggest Nazi collaborators of all of the national groups in the region.

Poland and Finland are extreme Russia-haters for nationalist reasons, but the Poles don’t like Nazis, and I don’t think the Finns are all that Nazi. Poles hate Communism, in part for religious reasons of extreme Catholicism.

In Hungary, the right wing has Nazi tendencies. The Hungarians had a sort of nation long before the modern era. A fascist dictator named Horthy ruled Hungary in the interwar period and during WW2. I believe he was a Nazi collaborator.  The leader of Hungary, Victor Orban, has praised Horthy. The nationalists here are Nazis, but they are not a large movement. The party is called Fideliz and its origins are in the Red Arrow of WW2. They are Nazis.

Romanian nationalists are descendants of the Iron Cross of WW2, but they are not very popular for some reason. I believe Romania has been a national idea for some time. Also, they are Orthodox. Czechoslovakia is another national idea that has been around a long time. Nationalists are not popular in either country, as you can see in the amicable breakup they had into two separate states.

Belarussian nationalists are Nazis, but they are not popular. They only get 20-2

Croatian nationalists are absolutely Nazis, descendants of the Ustasha collaborationist regime. That’s why Communist Yugoslavia cracked down so hard on them. They are also Catholics. The recent president Franz Tudjman was absolutely a fascist, though I don’t think he was a Nazi. Over there, Croatian nationalism often just boils down to “Serb-hater.”

There is a racial aspect to Ukrainian nationalism. It holds that the true Ukrainians are a sort of Aryanized Germano-Scandinavian people, descendants of the Kievan Rus, which was after all settled by Swedes.

The others, the Slavs (Russians) are simply undermenscen to be destroyed. So they copied Nazi racial ideas and said that they were not Slavs to get away form Nazi anti-Slavic theory. The Slavs were hated by the Germans mostly because the Nazis saw all of them as Communists. They were also said to have a “slave (Slav) mentality” (see Nietzsche) which made them too weak to resist against Communism. The Ukrainian nationalists also saw Russians as Communists.

Ukrainian nationalists hated Jews because they saw the Jews as the leading edge of Soviet imperialism (anti-Ukrainian nationalism) and Bolshevism. In other words, they were following the Judeo-Bolshevik theory of the Nazis. It is true that Ukrainian Jews were passionate Communists at this time, in part because the USSR cracked down so heavily on antisemitism.

As I mentioned earlier, Ukraine or Malorussia (literally Small Russia but in this context Central Russia) has long been seen as a land of bandits and robbers, a lawless place. This tradition continues today with oligarchs robbing the place blind. An anarchist named Makho was a Ukrainian in the Russian Civil War. Originally allied with the Soviets, he turned on them during the war and led and anarchist rebellion. Makho is also seen by Russians as a typical Ukrainian. He was a bandit before he was an anarchist, and anarchism is associated with lawlessness and chaos, hence he’s an archetypal Ukrainian.

There is another culture war going on here, and that is the Roman Catholic West versus the Istanbul (or Antioch) Eastern Orthodox. Few people realize this but the Catholic Crusaders killed as many Orthodox Christians in Palestine as Muslims. They were seen as heathens. Afterwards, another sort of Catholic crusader in the form of German crusaders attacked the Orthodox communities to the northeast. And it looks like they converted them to Catholicism while they were at it. The German crusaders saw the people to the northeast as forest-dwelling barbarians and heathens.

Western Catholics again attacked the Orthodox in the East under Napoleon, and once again were beaten back. The result in part was two Russian borrowings in the French language – bistro and douche (the original French “water toilet”).

The Germans in World War 2 and their Roman Catholic collaborators were seen as another in the line of Western Catholic attacks on the Orthodox East.

In Ukraine, this also has a religious form as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church split from the Russian Orthodox Church at some point and became what some see as a heretical schismatics. They adopted a sort of “Greek Catholicism” (I’m not even sure what that is, but supposedly it’s a heretical schismatic split from the Orthodox) and allied themselves with Roman Catholicism and the West against the Russian and Russian Orthodox Church of the East. The Ukrainian Nazi nationalist battalions often attack Orthodox churches for some reason. I’m not entirely sure why they do that.

So as you can see, there is a lot of history going on here.

Liberals Are Almost Supporting Ukraine More than Conservatives

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: I’m surprised I don’t see liberals virtue-signaling with Ukraine-themed face coverings.

Liberals are some of the worst pro-Ukie Russia-hating maniacs out there. A lot of them are calling for no-fly zones and direct attacks on Russia and Moscow. This makes sense because liberals and Democrats are the ones who went crazy with the McCarthyite BS about “Russia interfered with our election” and “Russia stole the election for Trump” (LOL), “Trump and the Republicans are with Russia”, on and on. The worst insult any liberal dishes out is “You are a Russian”, “You are Putin’s mouthpiece,” “How much does Russia pay you?”

Keep in mind that anything that goes against the Democrats in any way is “Russian propaganda.” It’s totally embarrassing that liberals would do this, but liberals were always some of the worst Cold Warriors of all because Republicans were always calling them Communists and fellow travelers so the Democrats were always in a dick-measuring contest with the Republicans about who could be more anti-Communist. Chris Dodd and Alan Cranston, two of the most liberal members of Congress, were the strongest supporters of the Death Squad Government in El Salvador.

My liberal Democrat father supported every US foreign policy objective ever. He supported every rightwing fascist CIA coup we ever indulged in. He supported all of the death squad democracies we supported. His saving grace was opposition to the Vietnam War, but that war was the last time that liberal Democrats took a principled antiwar position.

And he only changed on this after the Tet Offensive in 1968, but at least he changed. Tet was the signal for opinion change in the US on the war. Believe it or not, before Tet, a majority of Americans supported the war in Vietnam! After Tet for the first time, Americans turned on the war. Walter Cronkite, a great journalist and one of the last real journalists in the US where most are now glorified stenographers, famously turned against the war on national TV! He was a hero to many Americans and I watched him on the news many times.

As I recall it, General Westmoreland kept lying and saying we were winning the war from 1964-68. We were always just turning the corner and the light was always appearing at the end of the tunnel.  Like the suckers they are today, the majority of Americans fell for it.

With the Tet Offensive, it become obvious that he had been lying all along. The enemy was not defeated; instead it was stronger than ever. I remember my mother’s frustration at being lied to. People had had enough. They’d been told for four years and they were steadily winning and victory was coming any day now, but then Tet came and it showed that the enemy was stronger than ever.

This split extended after the war and led to investigations into the CIA, CIA/FBI assassinations, etc. This lasted for a few years and led to a reluctance to get involved in any foreign adventures involving blood and treasure as most of them do. This was called “The Vietnam War Syndrome” and a major goal of hawk monsters like Donald Rumsfeld (the murderer of Patrice Lumumba) and Dick Cheney declared war on the Vietnam War Syndrome.

Rumsfeld is the murderer of Patrice Lumumba when he was a DIA officer in the Congo and Cheney personally had Minnesota progressive Paul Wellstone killed in a plane crash and deliberately failed to stop the 911 attack when he could have. One of the stated purposes of the fake Iraq War was to get rid of the Vietnam Syndrome. So it appears we did get rid of it for a while. Trump then threatened to bring back the Vietnam War Syndrome with his neo-isolationism and skepticism about what he called “the forever wars” (and I thank him very much for using that term).

This infuriated the Deep State, the National Security Establishment (same thing), and the neoconservatives. These factions jumped right back into power as soon as Biden came aboard. It was directly to their escalations that this war in Ukraine ever happened at all. Under Trump it might not have happened.

Alt Left: For the Hundredth Time, There Was No Holodomor

Igor: A couple of ‘Nazis’ in a town here or there doesn’t justify a full scale invasion of the whole country.

All Ukrainians hate Russians though. And rightly so. Remember the ‘Holdymor’? Or all the other bulking tactics Russia did on them?

Russia are a plague to their neighbors, and Ukraine wants nothing to do with ten and that is their right.

Luckily, the Russian army are getting flogged at time of writing.

Russia is a plague to its neighbors? It has an excellent relationship with Armenia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizstan, Mongolia, China and especially Belarus, which is right next door. It’s true that nationalists in Ukraine and the Baltics hate Russia because the USSR thwarted their drive for independence. They also moved a lot of Russians into the Baltics, or perhaps the Russians moved themselves into the Baltics.

The Baltics and Ukrainians complain that Russia suppressed their national languages but I do not think that is true. They got to go to K-12 school all in their native language, there were newspapers, magazines, journals, TV and radio stations and literarure in their national languages. They even had universities where the language was that of the republic. And the USSR did set all of them free at the end. How many other nations would have set them free? None! You see any other countries setting their separatist regions free elsewhere in the world? Of course not.

The Germans came in and promised the Baltics, Belarus, and Ukraine independence from the USSR, so they were popular with  the nationalists in these places, all of whom still love Nazis to this day. In the Baltics and Ukraine, all of the statues to the nationalist heroes were of Nazi collaborators. All four countries have a serious Nazi problem.

I’m not sure why Poles hate Russia. Poland has always been a football in between Poland and Russia. She has felt bullied by those two countries. Poland attacked Russia in 1919 for no good reason. Poles are also angry about Communism because it never went over well there. I think the Poles are just too Catholic for Communism to work well.

Stalin himself said that trying to impose Communism on the Poles was like “trying to put a saddle on a horse.” The Russia-hatred in these places is due to nationalism and the drive for independence, which they saw as thwarted by the USSR. Finns hate Russia too. The USSR attacked Finland and annexed some of their land in the Winter War in 1940. I’m not sure why the USSR did that.

The Fake Holodomor That Never Happened

Holodomor was fake. It never even happened! There was a famine but there was no terror famine. 2-3 million people died in Ukraine but they were concentrated in Eastern Ukraine where they were Russian and loved Stalin. It was even worse in the Volga region where Stalin was very popular. In addition, 1 million people died in Siberia. People died in Moscow. And lots of people died in Kazakhstan. And plenty of people died in the parts of Poland next to Ukraine.

In order to believe the crazy Holodomor myth, you have to believe

  1. Stalin deliberately starved Ukraine because he hated Ukrainians. But why? Why did he hate Ukrainians?

And why did his terror famine focus on Eastern Ukraine where they supported him. If he only wanted to starve Ukrainians, why did he starve people in the Volga too where they supported him. Stalin also had a lot of support in Kazakhstan. Why did he starve people there” That was almost as bad as Ukraine. Did he hate them too? How come they get left out of this debate? Why did he starve 1 million people in Siberia? Did he hated Siberians? Why did he starve people in Moscow? Did he hate Moscovites?

Wow, it looks like Stalin hated everyone because he starved the whole damn country! Why did people starve in Poland? Were the Poles in bed with Stalin in a plot to starve Ukrainians? Then why did they starve themselves? Are they retards?

None of that makes sense!

Or…

2. Maybe the terror famine story of a bumper harvest crop that was confiscated by Stalin just to starve Ukrainians is fake?

Which is more likely, one or two?

The whole story of a bumper harvest confiscated by Stalin just to kill Ukrainians has now been proven wrong. 1932 was a famine harvest. It was only 5

There was also a long insurgency versus the kulaks which centered in Ukraine. 390,000 people died in the anti-kulak campaign, which was a very vicious war.

In early 1932, Ukrainian kulaks were raiding collective farms up to 20 times a day, murdering the men and raping and then murdering the women and then destroying the crops and killing the livestock. The Ukies were piling their crops in the fields to get rained on or setting them on fire!

The Ukie morons destroyed their own crops and then said, “Duh, whoa we have a famine, dudes! Maybe we shouldn’t have set our own crops on fire!”

The moron kulaks killed half the livestock in the USSR! “Duh, we killed all the farm animals. Now we don’t have any meat to eat!” Fields were plowed with horses back then, and they killed so many horses that this contributed to the famine harvest.

The famine occurred for a variety of reasons. In part it was stupidity on the part of the USSR. They shut down the old system before they were able to get the new one going very well, and this contributed to a bad crop. But most of it was natural. There was a wheat rust epidemic that swept through the entire region from Poland to Kazakhstan. True, Ukies suffered the worst losses, but that was where the epidemic was worst and the harvest collapsed the most.

Most people died of disease, not starvation. The USSR still had rudimentary sanitation at the time, and many people died of cholera. You can often survive this disease, but in their malnourished weakened condition, it proved fatal. A reporter drove through Ukraine during the famine but he saw little out of place. There were long but orderly lines outside some clinics. There were no dead people lying in the streets. All of the Holodomor photos you see of starved people lying in the streets were put out by Ukies. Those are photos from another famine that occurred during the Russian Civil War.

The next year though, 1933, was a bumper harvest so it was just one year. The USSR never had another famine. In the days of the Czar, famines used to sweep through feudal Ukraine on a regular basis. The USSR ended the regular tradition of frequent famines in Russia.

Support for Nazism among East European Nationalists

Yes, the Nazis had a lot of support in Hungary, Romania, the Baltics, Finland, Croatia, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Belarus. They played the nationalism card and went into those parts of the USSR promising those peoples independence. Of those, four are Orthodox, four are Catholic, and two are Protestant.

In Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece and Albania, the Nazis had little support and often much opposition. The first three are Catholic and the last three are Orthodox.

I’m not seeing any particular tendency of any particular religion to be more Nazi-supporting than any other.

In Poland, they probably just killed too many Poles. How many Poles would go along with that? Protestants never went over to Nazis too much for whatever reason. Maybe they’re too individualistic. Also Protestants have never been very antisemitic. That’s been more of a Catholic and Orthodox thing.

Many Ukrainians sided with the Nazis. In every country they went into, the Nazis recruited homicidal antisemites for the SS. They found no more than moderate support in most places, but in Ukraine, they were overwhelmed with volunteers.

Ukrainian SS units fought all the way over in Northern France, where they hatched a famous rebellion against the Nazis in 1944.

You see, to the Nazis, even the SS Ukrainians were just inferior Slavs, and the Germans treated them terribly. The Ukrainians didn’t appreciate it. They rebelled in Northern France and killed the 50 Germans leading their unit, only losing four men. Then they all went over to the French Resistance. The Resistance happily took them in even though they were former SS. Pretty weird. SS guys joining the resistance!

The Ukrainian SS in France didn’t work very well. A German officer said, “It’s hard to motivate Ukrainians to kill Americans for Germans in France.” They were simply not part of the fight over there.

A lot of Ukrainians became concentration camp guards. The famous guard Ivan the Terrible, Ivan Demjanjuk, was one of them. They even had a special name for the Ukrainians who worked in the camps named after the camp where they were trained.

Ukrainian nationalists also committed a number of massacres in Slovakia and Poland.

Villagers under their rule said they were worse than Germans. They said German soldiers at least had a basic civilized politeness about them. They were mostly just doing a job, and they seemed a bit bored a lot of the time. They didn’t tend to go in for gratuitous unnecessary violence. The Ukrainians seemed to enjoy being cruel for the fun of it.

Keep in mind that the German Army itself often did not commit ethnic massacres. That was usually left to the SS. The German troops didn’t really have the stomach for lining civilians up and slaughtering them. Originally, the Nazis had ordinary soldiers massacring civilians, but the soldiers were outraged at what they had done and wrote letters back home about how awful it was. There were a lot of PTSD cases and desertions.

That’s why they created the SS in the first place – because the ordinary soldiers were not capable of massacres like that. Soldiers may be killers but they’re not necessarily murderers.

A German general in Warsaw saved 3,000 Jews. The Nazis had captured 3,000 Jews and put them to work in a factory for a general. The idea was to work them for a few weeks until they could transfer them to camps. The general got wind that the SS were coming, and he called his Jewish workers around. He got up and simply said, “The SS will be coming in two days.” The workers got the message and they all took off. He didn’t stop them.

Later in the war the same general tried to save another few thousand Jews. This time he was caught and executed. I have a lot of respect for that man.

Understand that your average German soldier or officer was just a soldier first and foremost, a fighting man. They were not necessarily any more antisemitic than any other German. A lot didn’t have passionate feelings about Jews one way or the other.

Some of those Nazi nationalists in those other countries were worse than the Germans! The Germans were so outraged by the behavior of the Ukrainian UNO under Stepan Bandera that they put him in prison in Germany! The Romanian nationalists outraged the Germans when they hung Jews on meathooks in slaughterhouses. That was too much for the German Army. Germans, you know, they do have certain standards!

I saw an interview with a Belorussian man. He was talking about the Belorussian nationalist Nazi collaborators, whose heirs are now the Belorussian opposition that the US supports. He was alive in World War 2. He said that the Belorussian nationalists were going to come to their village of 10,000 people and kill everyone in it. The villagers went to the local Nazi commander and told him about it, and he was outraged. He stationed a unit inside the village to protect the villagers. I respect that man too.  When you’re worse than Nazis, that’s pretty bad!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: The Fascists in Israel, Ukraine, and Lebanon

The Nazi Fascists in Ukraine

The Jews in Ukraine are particularly evil. They’re out and out neo-Nazis, but it’s this weird Nazism that substitutes Russians for Jews. However, the spiritual father of these Nazis was an independence movement supported by Stepan Bandera in World War 2 Ukraine who supported Hitler and murdered 200,000 Jews and 40,000 Poles on their own. So the Jewish Nazis in Ukraine are supporting a movement that helped in the Holocaust of their own people!

In addition, the governments of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia and the opposition in Belarus are all pro-Nazi because the independence movements in all of these places were pro-Nazi in World War 2 in part because the Nazis conquered these places and promised them independence.

The local Nazis in some of these places were almost worse than the real thing. A Belarussian recently told about how the Belarussian local Nazi militia were going to wipe out his entire village for whatever reason, and the village heads went to the local German Nazi Army commander and told him of their plans. The Nazi officer was so appalled that he halted their plans and stationed soldiers in the village to protect the people. The local Nazi militias in Romania hung local Jews on meathooks in slaughterhouses. Photos of these murders leaked out, and even the local German Nazi military officers were outraged by this.

The truth is a number of German military officers were not interested in or even opposed to the Jew-killing.

A German general reportedly saved 3,000 Jews in Warsaw from imminent extermination by the SS. They were working in a factory the Nazis had set up as a sort of slave labor force, but the general tried to treat them as well as he could. He heard that the SS was coming to raid the factory and he knew what that meant. So he gave a talk to his Jewish workers and told that them that the SS was coming to the factory in a few days. He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to. All 3,000 workers had fled by the time the SS showed up. The general said they broke out while his men were sleeping. The Jews escaped to safety, at least for a while anyway. He later tried protect another few thousand Jews and was caught and executed.

Not everyone in the Army was a raving antisemite. In the beginning the Nazis had assigned the task of Jew-killing to ordinary soldiers. Famous letters from German soldiers expressed disgust and outrage over the gruesome murder by bayonet of a couple of dozen Jews that their unit had participated in in Eastern Europe. The soldiers had so many breakdowns and traumatic reactions afterwards that a special Jew- and other civilian-killing force, the SS, had to be created.

Before the Nazi Party went after the Jews, they had a lot of supporters among German Jews, many of whom were ready to go fascist themselves. They only reason they didn’t was because Hitler turned on them. If not they would have been with him to the end. By the way, guess who else supports those (((Nazis in Ukraine)))? You got it. Israel.

Jewish Fascists in Israel

The Jewish would-be fascists of the 1930’s have since vacated to Israel where they have resurrected a native Israeli fascism derived from the literal Jewish fascist Jabotinsky, who wrote The Iron Wall in 1921. All of the Likud and other rightwing governments since the early 1980’s have been literally heirs to Jabotinskyism. In fact, Jabotinsky is considered to be the spiritual father of the Likud Party, and everyone who came after him is one of his children. Jabotinsky supported all of the nascent fascist movements in Europe at the time.

Israel has now made alliances with fascist-like parties in Hungary, Poland, (((Ukraine))), India, and the Philippines, which should not be surprising because fascist states form alliances with other fascist states, and Israel is a fascist state made up of Jewish fascists.

Falange Fascists in Lebanon

Israel has long supported the fascist Falangists in Lebanon, a strongly-Christian native fascist movement. About half of Lebanese Christians are with these fascists and the other half are with Christian President Aoun and hence are supporters of Hezbollah because he is with Hezbollah. So half of Lebanese Christians are with Hezbollah and the other half basically want to exterminate Hezbollah. By the way, the fascist Lebanese Christians hate the Palestinians too.

They are also one of the only groups in the Arab World to support actual rightwing economics, which goes against basic Arab culture and Islam itself. This is because while most Middle Eastern Christians (Catholics) look East to the pro-socialist Eastern Orthodox Church, especially the leadership in Russia. The Lebanese, who are also Catholics, are Western Catholics who look to Rome and Europe. Hence the support for Western neoliberalism and libertarianism, two things which have never caught on in the Orthodox East and probably will not within the foreseeable future. Neoliberalism literally goes against their very culture.

The forefather of that movement, a man named Gemayal, emerged in Lebanon early on. In the 1930’s, he also supported fascist movements in Europe. He literally had pictures of Hitler pasted to his high school locker. The US also supports these Lebanese fascists, and in fact they are the principal US ally in that government. The Saudis also support them, but the Saudis are Far Right themselves, so it should not shock us when they support non-Islamic fascist, in this case, Christian ones.

The Israeli government is Far Right, and Far Right parties are often fascist-like. And as I noted above, the Far Right in Israel literally has fascist roots.

Repost: Alt Left: The Indian Personality: Superiority and Inferiority Complexes Intertwined

Another old post getting posted around the Net:

A fine new Indian Hindu commenter named Janardhan has appeared on our blog, and he repeats some of the same things that other insightful Hindus such as ILOR, Rahul, and Pranav have said. This shows us that not all Indian Hindus are bad people and that some of them are capable of looking inwards and trying to better their society. I consider both Rahul and Pranav at least to be strong Indian patriots who simply want the best for their country. As they see it, getting the best for India is going to require some massive changes, hence their critical patriotism.

Hindus have a strange mix of superiority and inferiority complexes. Deep down they massage their ego about how their civilization was ‘da greatest’ with a total ignorance about other civilizations and their achievements.

According to Hindus, Ancient India compared to the rest of the world is equivalent to comparing the city of Vienna during Mozart with highlanders in Papua New Guinea. As if Ancient India was like this huge Vienna while the rest of the world was primitive.

But during the last centuries they were first enslaved by Muslims from Central Asia/Persia (whom they consider savage bloodthirsty barbarians, ignoring the intellectual side of Islamic civilization, which itself was plagiarized to a good extent from Greek learning) and then by Europeans.

One difference was that in the case of Islamic invaders they could hide under the carpet the invaders’ intellectual side, and they are thus dehumanized as savage bloodthirsty monsters (this label is justified though, as the Islamic rulers were quite brutal). But when the Europeans, especially the British, came they could not ignore their obvious technological superiority with their steam engines and telegraphs.

Thus the conflicting superiority/inferiority complex feelings.

They were as per their myth Numero Uno Civilization in the world, but now they are nearly at the bottom. White people with their strange but seeming superior looks and behavior give us an inferiority complex.

Besides, even the Japanese/ Koreans are way ahead of us, and now the Chinese are racing ahead. Mainland Indians just cannot accept the rise of China:

“Those Chinkis like the Chinkis of Nepal and North Eastern Indians going ahead of us, not possible,” we say.

Thus the desire to prove ancient India being as technologically advanced as the modern world, since the modern technological world is 9

I think this is same with the Arabs with their Islam. Islam, the last word of God and having an Arab as its last and greatest prophet, has fallen behind the White nonbelievers. Oh, the horror.

Blacks? Well, most Indians consider Blacks as some savage monkey people anyway.

I would say we Indians are some of the most racist people in the world, but our racism is very subtle.

As someone who works in mental health, I would like to point out the obvious. A person with both a massive superiority and inferiority complex going at the same time is a common creature.

This is typical for Cluster B personality types: especially Narcissistic and Borderline Personality Disorders. But it associated more with narcissism than anything else. In fact, all proper analyses of narcissism begin with the supposition that what is going on in narcissism is often a huge inferiority complex which is apparently being compensated for by its opposite, a huge superiority complex.

My view is that the worse the narcissist’s inferiority complex, the greater their superiority complex must be to compensate for it. Whereas if one feels only a bit inferior, one has only to feel a bit superior to compensate, as all human beings are trying to equalize things and get at what I call the “zero state” of perfect equilibrium where everything is ok.

Many analyses of the Indian personality on this site have noted the profound narcissism apparent in most Indian Hindus. In many cases, this also looks like solipsism, but then narcissism and solipsism tend to go together anyway (Look at the Jews, the most solipsistic people on Earth).

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

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

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

She also said something interesting about mutual intelligibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So next, language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: What Are the Causes of Antisemitism?

Jews Out-compete Gentiles, Probably Due to Superior Genetics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shoah and Other Genocides

My understanding is that Hitler’s “extermination and mass murder campaigns” took the lives of 15 million people. 6 million of those were Jews. Super-Jews (Jewish tribal activists, otherwise known as stereotypical “loudmouth Jews”) angrily reject the 15 million and even Wiesenthal’s 11 million. I actually like this man, while I don’t like Elie “The Weasel” Wiesel. Wiesenthal’s a mensch, a human first and a Jew second. The Weasel is of the course the opposite type, a Jew first and a human second, if at all.

Also, although this man suffered horrendously, and I’m very sorry that happened to him, in his books, he made up a bunch of lies about what happened in the concentration camps. You would think that just reporting the facts of horrific Nazi behavior would be bad enough. But no. The Weasel had to go and make a bunch up a bunch of BS stories that never happened. This is bad for another reason because it’s bad for the Jews.

The antisemites see some of the stories Jewish Holocaust survivors reveal as made-up lies, and of course they use it as fodder for their sleazy Holocaust Denial project, the goal of which is to deny the Holocaust so they can do it again, and do it right this time! The Holocaust Deniers are playing a dirty game. Thanks for playing into the hands of Holocaust Deniers, Weasel.

Jews have a bad attitude towards the Shoah, as these other 9 million victims of Hitler’s extermination campaigns are not to be mentioned, and in fact it is even “antisemitic” to bring them up! Because to bring up non-Jewish victims of Hitler’s murder campaign would take the focus away from the “special” mass murder campaign directed against the Jews.

Granted the campaign against the Jews (the Holocaust) was genocidal in nature, while the death of the other 9 million was not, but still, Jews are notorious for not caring about these other victims. They also hate bringing up any other genocides such as the Armenian Genocide and the anti-Christian genocides of the Young Turks. They say it is “antisemitic” to bring this mass murder campaign up because it detracts from the “special” mass murder campaign directed at the Jews. You see this theme of Jewish “specialness” over and over? And they wonder why people don’t like them.

But those of us who are Jew-wise knew they would do that.

The Jews also turned Holocaust into an industry and a money-making franchise. A famous Jew said, “There’s no business like Shoah business.”

But we knew they would do that too.

They can’t help themselves. Of course they’re going to make a buck off of it. That’s how they roll.

A Super-Jew wrote: Funny how there are no other organized denial societies.

There is Turkish Denial of the Armenian and other Christian Genocides of the Young Turks. For a while there, Japanese would not own up to their killings. Muslims killed 50 million Hindus in India, and they attempt to wash that away.

Genocide denial is probably nothing new. It fits in with human psychology in a lot of ways. Furthermore, I am convinced that we humans are a genocidal lot from the start, so it’s a baken-in tendency, sadly.

What Could European Jews Have Done in the 1920’s to Stave Off the Holocaust?

From a discussion I am in on Academia: If the 1920s European Jewish Community had listened to suggestions similar to mine then one hopes the Holocaust would not have happened.

I’m trying hard to think of what European Jews could have done in the 1920’s to stave off the wave of antisemitism that occurred 10-20 years later, the causes of which continue to mystify me to this very day.

It’s not wealth. Polish Jews were poor as dirt, and Jews in the USSR hadn’t much. On the other hand, in 1932, Jews had

It wasn’t Zionism. Most European Jews rejected Zionism at that time.

Granted, Jews were prominent in the depravity of Weimar, but they were only

It wasn’t Jewish (((standoffishness, general assholery, and being unfriendly to mean towards Gentiles))). The German Jews were the most assimilated Jews in history, and the above behavior tends to be associated with the Orthodox.

It wasn’t Communism. Jews were

Also, there had been a short-lived Communist revolution in the south of Germany in 1920. Yes, it was led by some Jews, but they needed a lot of Gentile support to seize power. Well, they lost. And after that, the German middle class became very worried about Communism spreading to Germany, as the middle classes always worry about this, seeing that they stand to lose property, income, and prestige with the advent of Communism. Hence, Jews were scapegoated as Communists. Hitler’s war was explicitly against “Jewish Bolshevism.” They were one and the same and he was out to destroy both of them.

The Jews were scapegoated as having “stabbed Germany in the back in WW1.” It’s not true. As the war wore on, the German public, like the Russian one, got more and more tired of war and wanted to just end the war by any means. A lot of anti-war liberal types started writing columns and issuing statements. A few Jewish show biz types also called out to end the war. The Germans were losing anyway. And the antiwar crowd was overwhelmingly Gentile. However, some prominent Jews did stick out.

The truth is that Germany was defeated on the battlefield, not at home. War only hastened the inevitable. Instead of admitting they lost, many, including the war veterans in the reactionary Freikorps, blamed the antiwar crowd at home for “stabbing Germany in the back” and causing its defeat. It’s a bad argument like the similar rightwing argument against the Vietnam War protestors regarding the Vietnam War.

Instead of scapegoating the antiwar crowd, Jews were scapegoated. However, at this time Germany, the general population was wildly anti-Semitic. I remember Goering was the only Gentile at his university who would even converse with Jewish students. God knows why they were hated. But widely despised minorities make easy scapegoats whenever something bad happens. I hate to say the Jews were scapegoated because that is the typical Jewish (((“We Dindu Nuffin”))) line, but in that case, clearly the German Gentiles scapegoated the German Jews.

Letter from India

Absolutely superb comment from a Hindu Brahmin on a very old post of mine. India and sadly Hinduism is simply antithetical to all Left and progressive values. I suppose Republicans would like them. After all, Republicans believe in rule by aristocracy.

I have long said that there are two philosophies, conservatism and liberalism, or the Right and the Left.

Conservatism or the Right believes in aristocratic rule. Worse – that aristocrats must rule, and there can be no exceptions to this clause. It’s the Divine Right of Kings all over again. Or, the Ancien Regime. Same thing. This thinking didn’t start with Hobbes’ Leviathan and its first opposition was not Locke. The contradiction between rulers and ruled, oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited, rich and poor is as old as civilization itself. Conservatism believes that the Left has no right to rule. None, zero. Why do you think they steal elections and have coups every time the people take power and rule over the rich?

The opposite of conservatism is liberalism or the Left. Although it differs, liberalism believes in democratic rule, rule by the people, not the aristocrats. This is true all the way from US social liberalism to Communism.

India has conservatism and aristocratic rule baked right into its veins. It can literally never be a progressive country until they have a complete Cultural Revolution. And they may need to get rid of Hinduism, as it seems to be beyond reform.

Me being a Hindu Brahmin following extreme Orthodox beliefs, I can answer your question honestly. You may dislike Brahmins, seems we deserve this for the decadent beliefs we have produced in the Subcontinent which has destroyed the entire fabric of the region. Not all Brahmins practice priesthood; only a subsection of them do it.

I can tell you the reason that the Indian is such a hideous creature – Indian society itself operates in a hideous manner, and it’s the root of all filth that exists in India from corruption to hypocritical behavior. Indian culture boils down to religion. I perceive of religion and culture as different things, but most Indians have never had any cultural lineage. Nor do most Indians have any knowledge of any of their religious books. Almost every one of them was bought up watching religious movies portraying religious deities as pious and most godly.

That’s where most Indians get their religious education from. I can guarantee you pretty much 95 percent of them have never read even one Upanishads or Veda in their life. The reason is simple – education is limited to certain classes, and other classes were not simply allowed into Gurukuls.

After independence, the Hindu majority became bed partners with the British and formed their mythical nation of India. This needs to be emphasized: THERE WAS NO INDIA BEFORE 1947. It was a bunch of princely states always at war with each other. India is a British creation. It never existed prior to that. Never in the subcontinent’s history had Hindus had such power; they never controlled such a vast proportion of land that they control today. But they had a problem – most backward castes in India were simply illiterate and were separated by tribe and language – they even had their own tribal Gods.

Since 1947, Hinduism for the first time became the doctrine of the state – previously only Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vyshas were considered Hindu. Brahmins secretly believed that they were the only followers of Hinduism and had authority to enforce their dogma onto the other two varnas. But after Independence, they realized that the vast majority of Dalits and backward castes were simply too isolated from their dogma, and in a nation with many tribes, castes, tribal gods, and languages, it became impossible for Hindus to unite all of them under one umbrella.

Thus Hinduism was used as a state doctrine, and the state used its propaganda techniques to brainwash the nation with the Hindu Doctrine. After Independence most Indians were illiterate and had never seen the world outside. Hinduism was never a conquering force; it has always operated in treacherous ways since the Gupta period.

Whenever Hindus stretched themselves, their neighbors disliked them and resisted their ways of governance, so basically Hinduism and Hindus have brainwashed other castes with bullshit such as…“Crossing a river is a deadly sin as per the Upanishads,” which means moving to other lands is a sin, and every religious Hindu and caste must not cross the river and explore the world – most Indians were in a cocoon for almost 2,500 years. None of them explored other nations, trade was minimal, and India was colonized repeatedly by other conquering forces since ancient Hellenic times.

Even after independence, for 40 years India was a backwards agrarian society mostly following a culture of “honor.” But in early 1990’s, something remarkable happened to India. For the first time the average Indian moved out of his filthy nation and saw the glory of other civilizations. But Indians are living in a paradox; they can’t understand why they are being taught that their culture is supreme since childhood and yet they are such a backward dirty nation. Having seen other great civilizations and their societies, most if not all of them have realized one fundamental thing – that they are the most degenerate people of all.

Now even the state and religious classes have apprehended the reality that other cultures and civilizations have created more productive societies than they have. The ruling class is aware that they have destroyed the nation; they are fully aware that they have fiddled for the past 50 years for some frivolous pride. But they have realized that it’s easy to keep all these different tribes under their control as long as they remain in impoverished and  ignorant. Few may make their way out, but for our caste-based society which has lived for past 1,500 years feeding on others like a parasite, it’s hard to swallow the new liberation that young Indians are experiencing.

The Brahmin does not want the Dalit to read. The Brahmin does not want the Shudra to prosper. And this has become encoded in the genetics of the masses here. So it’s essential to create a sense of pride again, pride that must not be oriented towards social ethics but instead must be channeled into useless things which have no logical or rational nature. Like most Indians are proud to be Indians, but no one can even answer in few words what exactly they take “pride” in. Most are proud to be Hindus; they created one shallow story after another to rationalize their pride. Most Indian schools are distributing Mein Kampf for college kids to create pride.

There is a reason for all these things, and there is a rationale behind the hideousness of the Hindutvas who spout their nonsense across Internet forums. The reasons are inherent insecurity, lack of creative ability, and most importantly, fear. Exactly, fear of colonization. It has happened repeatedly for past 1,500 years. That’s the reason why India is the largest importer of weapons. It will not even hesitate to use weapons on its own people, such the “Tribal adivasis” who are resisting the mining of their lands. India wants to show to the world that they are not insecure, at least outwardly. There must be a bandwagon of pride and chest thumping among Indians.

Most Indians are like beaten-down losers who have lost every game that they played but never learned to do better or tried to practice more. But we have learnt how to corrupt and progress. Now the only thing that matters to most of Hindutva Indians (most of whom are not Brahmins but call center operators who just copy/paste useless Hindu propaganda) is to show to this world that they are something or at least stand that they stand for something. It’s a pride stemming from insecurity, suspicion, a deep-seated inferiority complex, and ignorance. A kind of pride generated by continuous propaganda from movies, books, school curricula, and most importantly, the economic progress that occurred in the last 12-15 years.

This gave us a chance to migrate and look at industrious civilizations in West and apprehend their great cultures and values. But it also exposed Indians’ own filthy morality and hypocrisy. What to do? More propaganda. The recipe? Add Hindu mythology + economic progress + everyday propaganda in movies and soap operas + hatred towards neighboring countries and peoples (Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Muslims in general) + superpower myth articles in every tabloid. This has created the myopic view that most Indians have today.

Most of them don’t know anything they speak about. The clowns on Quora and YouTube are sending low IQ missiles stemming from an ill-seated inferiority complex and a desire to be involved on the world stage which never happens. We expats are fortunate in that we can still send money home to India while residing as long as possible in the progressive West, all the while continuously ridiculing Western women and their degenerate values while secretly fantasizing about the same Western women. This our new way of life. Call it parasitism or degeneracy but most of us have never had any culture, nor most of us have ever dreamt that there exists any place on Earth with equitable social values.

We have lived for the past 1,500 years by backstabbing and cheating each other. We preached hypocrisy and superstition and practiced the same. Our society only cared about personal glory – the more glorious you were, the more Godly you become in our eyes. And the only possible attribute  that glorious person could have was the wealth he has amassed, and whether it came via business or cricket games matters not.

Wealth is all it counts in our society. It’s been this way for a very long time, but we don’t say it openly. For many centuries we have preached and practiced duplicity in life, family, relations, business, and love. And the result is before your eyes – a hypocritical duplicitous society which prides itself on morality, virtue, spirituality, and sympathy. But underneath the rug, we all know that we stink, are duplicitous and treacherous, and sometimes excel at nothing other than stabbing each other in the back.

Alt Left: The French Revolution: When the Battle Lines of the Modern Right and Left Were Drawn

Transformer: Hey Robert, I want to know what is the truth about the French Revolution? Conservatives criticize it for being a Communist, but did they have legitimate concerns? I sometimes read rightwing websites to get a feel of their point of view. I would like your response.

https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1344928/

I haven’t read that piece, but I am certain that the fascists at Stormfront think of the French Revolution as the beginning of the Apocalypse. And in a lot of ways, the Revolution is seen as “apocalyptic” in terms of setting the stage for modern politics.

It was absolutely not a Communist revolution, but in a lot of ways, the Modern Western Left was born with Robespierre and all modern Western Leftists are his children. The Modern Western Right sees the French Revolution as their bete noire. It was much more extreme than the American Revolution.

The Left opinion is that it was a good idea until it got bloody and started murdering people like crazy. Then it got bad.

Conservatives starting with Edmund Burke himself have condemned the French Revolution as the ultimate in evil. Burke wrote a famous tract on the French Revolution. It’s considered a classic of conservatism. Burke may be seen as the father of modern conservatism, and all Western, particularly American, conservatives consider themselves the Children of Burke. One of the forefathers of modern fascism, De Maistre, also cut his teeth on tracts condemning the French Revolution.

The conservative movement sees the French Revolution as “when it all started going down hill.”

From the Left, the alternative is to twofold, one either supports (critically) French Revolution or you support the “ancien regime.” Clearly, modern conservatism is all about resurrecting the ancien regime that was overthrown in 1798. And the modern Left in part has been all about overthrowing the various forms of “ancien regime” that exist the world over.

Both the modern Left and Right in the West think of the French Revolution as “when the battle lines of the modern Right and Left were first drawn.”

Interview with an Anarchist in Haifa about the Palestinian Resistance against Israeli Occupation

From an interesting anarchist site here.

During the last couple of months, the situation in Palestine has escalated into a generalized uprising against Zionism, colonialism and apartheid. All of Israel’s and the local far-right’s attempts to crush the spirit of the Palestinian people have resulted in a unified mass resistance, for the first time in decades. The following text is a ground level report from an occupied land, discussing the course of the insurrection, as well as the counter-insurgency tactics, and Hamas’ role in the events.

For starters, could we have some info about you? As it would help us to better understand from what position you are talking.

I’m an anarchist based in Haifa, Occupied Palestine, so-called Israel. I live in an historical Palestinian city that faced a massive attack and terrorist aggression by Zionist militias in 1948 aimed at expelling the local indigenous population and colonizing the land. Since then, the Palestinians that remain live under an ethnic supremacist and apartheid system, and the refugees abroad are still aspiring to return. I come from a settler Jewish family, arriving on this land during the ’80s, and once I got the facts straight, I knew which position I should take.

Once again, bad news spread around the world from the Palestinian and Israeli territories. In a few words, what happened there?

We had a rough few months here. Not sure exactly where to start, but it’s good to concentrate on Jerusalem/Al-Quds that, as in many other uprisings, was the trigger. During April, settlers and cops provoked people in East Jerusalem, the Palestinian part of town, especially in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the Al-Aqsa compound.

In order to get the background you need, know that from the Zionist occupation of 1948 to 1967, East Jerusalem was under the control of Jordan. Some of the neighborhoods were populated by Palestinian refugees escaping the Zionist invasion and Nakba of 1948. Sheikh Jarrah is one of them.

After the occupation of 1967, the Zionist state celebrated the “reunification” of Jerusalem each year, now a national holiday. Meanwhile, Jewish settlers arrived at the neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, much like the rest of the occupied West Bank, with clear plans of colonization and Judaization of the area.

In Sheikh Jarrah, an old Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, settler organizations engaged in legal battles against local residents in the Israeli apartheid court system in efforts to evict local Palestinians and replace them with Jewish settlers, claiming the property used to be owned by Jews. A few families had already been evicted during 2008, 2009, and 2017, and now, a new court ruling puts an additional eight families under a threat of eviction, which is roughly 500 people. Jewish settlements exist in other neighborhoods in East Jerusalem as well, such as Silwan and Abu Tor.

In the Al-Aqsa compound, one of the holiest places to Islam, Israel placed barriers in Bab Al-‘Amud, one of the entrances to the mosque, in the beginning on the month of Ramadan in an effort to limit the number of worshipers and restrict movement. This act provoked outrage and days of rioting ensued in Bab Al-‘Amud and the main streets in East Jerusalem. The barriers were eventually removed.

Meanwhile, tensions in the city had escalated. Some Palestinian youth posted TikTok videos of them attacking Jews around the city, and Jewish far-right gangs mobilized to attack people suspected of being Arabs in the city center. Lehava, a far-right organization, led a racist ‘Death to Arabs’ march from the city center to Bab Al-‘Amud during the riots and were blocked by police on their way.

On May 10, during “Jerusalem Day”, the national holiday celebrating the occupation of the eastern part of the city in 1967, the annual ‘flag parade’ took place in the city, and right-wing participants were expected to enter the Muslim quarter in the old city and shout racist slurs under police protection as they do every year.

Israeli police invaded the Al-Aqsa mosque, and in the intense riots, dozens of cops and hundreds of protestors were injured. Around 5 pm, Hamas announced that Israel has 1 hour to evict all of its police forces from Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Aqsa compound. As this deadline passed, Hamas launched rockets into Israel, reaching Jerusalem. Israel in response announced a military operation in Gaza, and began to bombard the Gaza Strip with airstrikes in a massacre and destruction that lasted 12 days, until a ceasefire was reached on May 21.

Meanwhile, a generalized uprising took place amongst the Palestinians, including ’48 Palestinians living in the territories occupied in 1948 (i.e., so-called “Israel”), ’67 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, and refugee communities abroad. A united insurrection, with days of riots in Palestinian, Israeli, and mixed cities and villages, refugee camps in nearby countries, and Israeli embassies and consulates everywhere. A general strike was also announced on May 18 involving all of the Palestinians for the first time in decades.

What are the important facts or basics we need to know about the history of this conflict? Should we call it a conflict, actually?

It is a conflict as much as an attack by a nuclear superpower with one of the most advanced armies in the world backed by the strongest state on earth against a poor occupied civilian population without an army could be characterized as a “conflict”. This is an aggression, the ‘two sides’ are the oppressor and the oppressed, the colonizer and the colonized.

The asymmetrical nature of the situation is so inherent, it’s completely ridiculous in my opinion that people struggle with ‘complexities’ while entire neighborhoods are being erased in Gaza by Israeli military airstrikes, killing 250 people in less than two weeks while Gazans have primitive rockets, most of them falling in open fields or being neutralized by Iron Dome- Israel’s defense system. The 12 people killed on the Israeli side came from mostly from the lower classes of society – mainly migrant workers and even Palestinians, as was the case in the village of Dahamash, near Ramle.

To really understand the true nature of this ‘conflict’ one must understand the inherently racist and colonialist nature of Zionism. As the Zionist occupation armies invaded this land in 1948, it was rich with culture. In what’s known as the Nakba, literally ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic, entire villages were erased, massacres were committed, and hundreds of thousands of refugees driven away off their land. In the conquest for the Jewish homeland, a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing was committed. The indigenous population abroad in refugee camps in nearby countries and all over the world are still aspiring to return.

Those that managed to stay were subjected to realities of colonialism, racism, and discrimination. Laws such as the Absentee Property Act ruled that land and property of refugees fleeing Zionist aggression is now state property. The newly arrived Jewish immigrants were housed in those empty neighborhoods and towns. Military rule was imposed on the Palestinians who remained in Israel from 1948 to 1966 that imposed land restrictions, caused their expulsion from villages, and subjected them to curfews, detentions, and various other discriminatory actions, all with one aim: to increase the Jewish presence and cleanse the land of Palestinians as much as possible.

After the occupation of 1967, unlike the one of 1948, Israel decided not to annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip to its official territory but to keep it in an unclear ‘temporary status’. Even though the Israeli military control basically every facet of the Palestinians’ life there, they are not Israeli citizens, are under military law, and have no rights. The Jewish settlers living in settlements nearby are full Israeli citizens and are under civilian law. Israeli settlements divide the West Bank into small cantons, and the separation wall since 2003 is another tool of land theft. The wall does not go through the 1967 “Green Line” border, but goes inside villages, in many cases annexing land in favor of nearby Jewish settlements.

Since 2007, the Gaza Strip has been under siege as a tool of collective punishment for Hamas’ rule over the area. Despite Israel’s claim of withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, it still controls its borders, water, and airspace. Gaza, one of the densest populated areas in the world with a population of over 2 million, has already been bombed numerous times in military operations (massacres) in recent years, leading to thousands of casualties and a deteriorating humanitarian catastrophe.

Israel is the leading front of settler-colonialism currently in the world, one of the ugliest examples of nation building as a way of solving the problems of minorities within the boundaries of the state. There won’t be an end in sight without decolonization, return of the refugees, and a truly shared and equal existence without Zionism and apartheid. The time to start building the basis for such a future is now.

How do the Palestinian people live and/or survive? Is this apartheid taking the scale of an ethnic cleansing or a genocide? What is HAMAS’ role?

Hundreds of people are facing eviction in East Jerusalem. Gaza is in ruins, is still under a siege, and is the largest open prison in the world. Total devastation and human tragedy. 250 were killed during the latest Israeli aggression. Clean water is scarce. Health facilities were damaged, including the only lab in Gaza for testing Covid-19 cases. The pandemic is on the rise. Electricity hours are limited. Tens of thousands are displaced with no home to come back to. Unemployment and poverty are exploding.

Inside so-called Israel, Palestinians are facing an intense state terror campaign, aimed at repressing any dissent and punishing those willing to resist. About 2,000 were arrested so far in the protests this month, with more arrests expected. In the West Bank, settlements and a racist separation wall continues to divide the land into small cantons, annex lands from Palestinian villages, and make life unbearable. The refugees are still unable to return.

Palestine has been experiencing an ongoing, uninterrupted ethnic cleansing campaign since 1948. The Nakba never ended. One settler in the Eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan made it very clear: “We won’t stop until East Jerusalem becomes like West Jerusalem. Jewish. The Palestinians have no place in this vision.”

But despite all of the hardship, people are still resisting. The Palestinians stood fast during the last uprising, proved their unity, and fought the Zionist state bravely, despite all the attempts to divide them and crush their spirit. The revolt proved to be courageous and uncontrollable. None of the youth fighting the police in Palestinian and mixed cities by erecting barricades and defending against fascist invasion were obedient to any party or political faction. The new generation of fighters on the street are immune to the pacification efforts from the regular collaborator’s forces, in the form of political parties, NGOs, and respectable community and religious ‘leaders’.

Hamas’ role in the story is exactly what the “Palestinian leadership” did during every wave of popular uprising: take over the situation and kill the  appeal of mass insurrection. Just like the P.L.O. (Palestine Liberation Organization) during the first Intifada, once the militarist militias took over, the ‘professional revolutionaries’, the people became passive spectators of their own ‘liberation’. During the insurrection, the focus turned quickly to rockets launched in Gaza flying over Israeli cities, and the riots and protests largely died out. One can’t help but feel that Hamas interrupted the birth of a popular mass movement in the inner cities of the occupation that wasssssssssssssssssssssssssssss capable of creating real damage.

What about the Israelis? How do they react in this condition? Is there any far-right movement in society? Had Netanyahu the support of the people?

During the last uprising, there was a big far-right anti-Palestinian mobilization with fascist lynch mobs attacking Palestinians. In a now-infamous incident in Bat Yam, racist lynch mobs that tried to reach Jaffa rioted, smashed windows of businesses owned by Arabs, and attacked an Arab driver, all caught on live television. The police were not present. In Haifa, they stormed Palestinian neighborhoods, attacked passengers, damaged cars, threw stones at houses, and shouted racist slurs.

In Lydda, extremist settlers from the West Bank came to the city armed with guns despite the police announcing curfew in the city in the early days of the uprising and shot people, threw stones, set stores on fire, and attacked mosques and cemeteries. In a few cases the police stood by and did nothing. There is even documentation of them throwing stones at Palestinians from police lines. Those pogroms are well documented, but there are significantly more Palestinians arrested than far-right Jewish fascists.

To get into Israeli fascism and the local far-right movement would be quite a lengthy endeavor, let me just say the working class here is generally very right-wing and that Zionism has created a monster I’m not sure it can control. They are allowed to freely attack Palestinians to suppress generalized uprisings but have to disappear and go underground once exposed.

They are the direct consequence of Zionism, and it’s important for me to state that people use the far-right extremists as a way to avoid dealing with mainstream Zionism. It’s easy for liberal Israelis to get disgusted by right-wing assholes shouting death to Arabs in Jerusalem and then support IDF soldiers attacking Gaza during airstrikes, actually putting ‘death to Arabs’ into practice. In a state founded on ethnic cleansing backed by an inherently racist and colonialist ideology, one should not be surprised at the existence of racist pogromists and lynch mobs.

Netanyahu is quite a polarizing figure, but I’ll say he has the support of a huge chunk of Israeli society. But not everyone of course. During last summer, Jerusalem held some very big anti-Netanyahu demonstrations.

The “Anti-Bibi (Netanyahu’s nickname in Israel) Movement” got its momentum after corruption allegations were made public and a police investigation around these allegations is ongoing. Israel is currently in an electoral crisis after 4 elections in the last 2 years, and despite Bibi winning the largest number of votes in all of them, he was time and again unable to form a government due to Israel’s electoral system, and new elections were announced.

In the last elections held in March, Netanyahu once again got the largest number of votes, but again was unable to form a government, and the mandate went to his opponents – the rightwing Naftali Bennet and the centrist Yair Lapid, who would apparently share the government for two years each.

So for now, if things don’t change, it seems as though the anti-Bibi movement reached its goal. But things are not expected to go smoothly. Protests for and against the new government are polarizing the country, and things can go anywhere from here. There are even talks in the media about the possibility of political assassination, as the pro-Bibi camp is very unhappy about the course of events.

What about the persecuted and imprisoned people in so-called Israel? Who are they and what have they tried to do? Are there any movements against the state and the capital?

There was actually quite a long tradition of Israeli Jewish working class communities that calling for an end of the occupation. The Israeli Black Panthers, a group of young Mizrahi Jewish immigrants active in Jerusalem during the 70’s, were critical of Zionism and combined calls for an end to  military rule of Palestinians in their demands for economic and social justice. Here in Haifa, there was also a famous Mizrahi revolt in the 50’s in the Wadi Salib neighborhood – by the way, an historical Palestinian neighborhood whose population got evicted during the Nakba.

After a police officer shot and injured a person in a local café, the residents rioted for days, demanding an end to police brutality and discrimination against Mizrahi Jews by the Ashkenazi elite. An end to military rule over the Arabs was one of the demands. There was a time in which solidarity with the Palestinians was part of the radical Mizrahi working class conscience. But this tradition is long gone. The “Mizrahi discourse” today has deteriorated into liberal “identity politics” nonsense, with demands like ‘representation’ of politicians in Parliament, more Mizrahi police officers, and putting the faces of famous Mizrahi people on currency bills.

It’s hard to explain how right wing the Israeli working class is. But people are still revolting.

During the last few years, there were some incidents of police officers shooting and killing Ethiopian Jewish youth. People went out to the streets and rioted all over the country, in many cases connecting it with the Black Lives Matter movement in the so-called US. There weren’t any clear solidarity messages with the Palestinians, but a pretty significant movement against army conscription grew out of the Ethiopian-Jewish protests, under the banner “Our blood is good only for wars”. That’s a big deal in a militaristic state like Israel in which the army is above all.

Also, connections are being made, and it’s hard to predict where social processes will take us. During the anti-Netanyahu protests last summer in Jerusalem, proletariat youth met each other on the street, with Ethiopians, Palestinians, Mizrahi, feminists, environmentalists etc. protesting side by side for the same interests. Despite how liberal the overall demonstrations were, on its far edges, communities that don’t usually get to see each other face to face and are ignorant of their shared interests finally got the chance to do so.

People are now making the connections between the deaths of Ethiopian Jewish youth like Salomon Teka and Yehuda Biagda with the deaths of Palestinians like Iyad Al-Halak and Munis Anabtawi, all of whom were murdered by police. It took a long time for this to happen. But of course I don’t want to paint the picture in more romantic colors than it actually is. It’s too early to discuss any movement that is willing to give up the state and capital amongst Israelis, and I doubt it will happen any time soon. The Palestinian resistance will remain the only truly revolutionary movement in the region.

The conversation about antisemitism and anti-Zionism is starting every time this crisis is arising. Do you accept these terms and if so, what is your opinion on them? Is there anything problematic in the use of these terms? Is the state of Israel using them in its blame-game and, on the other hand, is there such hate from any part of the Palestinians?

Just talked about it with some German comrades lately! I’m going to be completely honest with y’all here: I’m sick and tired of antisemitism being brought up every time the issue of Palestine is being raised. I doubt the honesty and integrity of anyone who, while entire neighborhoods are being erased with airstrikes and people are being evicted from their homes to be replaced by settlers, all he has to say is “Yes, but the Jews”.

We need to really focus right now. People are dying. Ethnic cleansing and colonization campaigns are ongoing. State repression and terror is at an all-time high. Gaza is a Hell on earth and the situation is unbearable. This is a human catastrophe. We don’t have the time to deal with false accusations. Don’t take the bait.

I’m not going to get into how anti-Zionism is different from antisemitism. It’s so old and well known that it’s boring and cliché at this point. Most people already know these things, and many of those who don’t won’t listen anyway. The Left goes around in circles about this because it’s apparently easier to deal with false ‘complexities’ and theoretical debates than to notice what’s happening in front of your eyes. Jewish people have been opposing Zionism since the very beginning, way before the state of Israel existed.

The nation-state form is a project of reinventing the mechanism needed to ‘purify’ and simplify the land of any diversity and complexity until nothing is left but a monolithic state identity. Just notice the language they use – “Israel has the right to defend itself.” States don’t have rights. They only have “rights” insofar as they protect their citizens, and we all know states don’t do that.

I honestly think that Israel is one of the worst things that has happened to Jewish people. It’s an extension of their historical ethnic cleansing from Europe, and a step backwards in many respects. By looking at Netanyahu’s relationship with figures like Trump and Bolsonaro, and the Israeli Right’s warm relationship with its European and American counterparts, you can clearly see that Zionism and antisemitism not only do not oppose each other, they go very well together. They complement each other.

Anyway, as for antisemitism in the solidarity movement, it exists and of course needs to be dealt with. Jewish and Palestinian comrades are aware of it and have been fighting it for decades. The BDS movement for example is strictly against any kind of racism including antisemitism and has been enforcing this policy against any bigots abusing their platform.

People need to gatekeep the solidarity movement against any kind of fascist bullshit like I saw comrades in Germany confronting Turkish fascists infiltrating a pro-Palestinian demonstration. That’s good and needs to happen more. It’s different from simply labeling the whole movement antisemitic. Fascists will take a hold in any platform they feel they can use to propagate their hate, and they infiltrate social movements constantly. It’s our job as antifascists to deny that to them.

As far as the Middle East goes, could we have a “political map” on the converging and conflicting state forces? Some Palestinians, for example, were requesting on social media the help of Pakistan. On the other hand, the state of Israel has the support of the U.S.A. What is your perspective on the world’s response concerning the never-ending violence and massacre in the area?

Geopolitics of course play a big part in inflaming the so-called “conflict”. After the so-called US became a superpower in the 1940’s, and Britain drew its forces out of the Middle East, there was a strong need for a new ‘regional cop’, a Western ally to keep local interests in check. Arab nationalism was a strong force at that time, and a pro-Western power was the logical “security” needed to keep “stability”, meaning American influence and control, over the resources of the region.

Israel impressed the US during the Nakba, with the American military describing it as “the strongest military force in the region after Turkey.” This perception received further confirmation in 1967 after Israel destroyed Nasser’s Egypt and eliminated Arab nationalism as a dominant power in the region.

Even further confirmation came in 1970 when Israel protected Jordan from a Syrian invasion, probably in order to protect oil fields. This tendency grew over the years. Today, Israel receives billions of dollars in military aid from the US annually, more aid than the US gives the entire African continent. To keep a strong Israel is a significant US strategic goal, which is another reason why the US repeatedly vetoes and blocks UN decisions concerning the Palestinians.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, are completely alone and constantly betrayed by their so-called ‘allies’. The Arab countries have long ago abandoned ‘Arab nationalism’ in favor of a neocolonial order of puppet dictators and Western influence. The “Arab Spring” might have given hope for a second, but generally speaking, new dictators replaced the old ones. The latest ‘peace agreement’ between Israel and the UAE shows the lengths neoliberal monarchies in the Middle East will go in normalizing Israel’s presence as long as business and free trade are protected and promoted.

Other state powers are completely opportunistic: The Soviets gave their support during the Cold War whenever it suited their interests. The Palestinians can’t even count on their own “leadership”, as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are themselves corrupted dictators and opportunistic bureaucracies acting against their own people. The only real ally left is the people on the ground with the international solidarity movement willing to raise its voice and act against modern forms of apartheid, colonialism, and state terror.

Is there any message you want to send to the anarchists and antifascists around the world? How can we all show our solidarity to the Palestinians or the peace and freedom fighters in so-called Israel?

The Palestinians need help and support. They need action and solidarity. Comrades loving freedom from all over the world need to raise their voice for them. Target Israeli interests in your region. Join your local BDS chapter and call for a boycott. Organize direct action. Do anything you can to get the message across. Internationalist revolutionary solidarity is our strongest weapon against state terror and repression. “Comrades” who are silent – your silence is deafening.

Anything about the future?

Fuck “co-existence.” We need co-resistance. We need a joint insurrection of Israelis and Palestinians on the ground and refugees and their supporters abroad against colonialist Zionism and the apartheid regime. We need to create the basis of a new culture, of people capable of creating an autonomy in which people could meet each other on the streets and reinvent living together. We need to share this land as equals, to smash the visible and invisible borders of fear and control, and imagine politics beyond state terror. We need all of this to not be a fantasy but a reality of struggle, courage, and forming brave connections. May we see the day.

You can check the report I wrote to Crime, Inc. concerning the last uprising, in which I dive to some of the topics I mentioned here in details.

Latest Update (End of June): As the last Flag March was interrupted by Hamas rockets, the settlers decided to hold another one. After the riots and the last escalation, there was a big controversy, but the new government held by the new prime minister Naftali Bennet eventually allowed the march to take place on June 15, with thousands of settlers and right-wing activists raiding Jerusalem yelling racist slurs against Arabs and Muslims, all under full police protection as usual.

Numerous shouts of “Death to Arabs,” calls for burning of villages and a second Nakba, and slurs against the Muslim prophet Muhammad were recorded during the march. Small groups of Palestinian resistance on the outskirts of the route of the march were brutally suppressed by riot police. Hamas once again threatened Israel, and in response to the march launched explosive balloons to towns and agricultural fields near the Gaza border, causing fires. Israel in response attacked Gaza once again, this time under the new government, which is obviously the same as the old.

From: https://radiofragmata.org/2021/07/03/fuck-co-existence-we-need-co-resistance-an-interview-with-an-anarchist-in-haifa-about-the-palestinian-resistance-against-the-israeli-occupation/

A Requiem for Arabia’s Jews

A Requiem for Arabia’s Jews

I wish I could tell you who wrote this. It was written by a young Palestinian Lebanese man and posted on Academia. Once anything is posted there, it’s pretty much community property and in the public domain, so I grabbed it and am republishing it here. It required a pretty heavy-duty edit which I just finished. People writing English as a second language are often very hard to edit because their English is being translated from their native tongue.

What sounds fine in our language ends up sounding strange, odd, awkward, or weird in our language. And it’s not always easy to figure out how to fix it up! In a number of cases, the meaning of some particular sentence simply cannot be discerned, and one has to guess at the best possible approximation.

As I was editing this, I came close to closing out the application a number of times, especially towards the end. Each paragraph near the end had its own monstrosities that appeared daunting to say the least. In this edit, I took it upon myself to rephrase some of the less well-constructed phrases with my own style, so you are also reading a bit of Robert Lindsay at the same time you are reading the unknown author.

There is actually a social science that deals with all of this called Translation Studies. It’s not Linguistics per se. I think it’s an off-growth of English and Literature Departments. I haven’t read much of this material, but I imagine they go over everything I wrote above and then some.

Famous books that have been translated multiple times, like The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky and especially Remembrance of Things Past by Proust have been the subject of long articles comparing the various translations and trying to figure out which are better and which worse. A similar enterprise has gone on for much longer with the translations of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey because English speakers have been translating these for a lot longer than the former two. It’s amazing how hard it is to translate good prose from one language to another. It’s an art form.

The author has a point. The expulsion of the Arab Jews was a tragedy not nearly on the level of the expulsion of the Palestinians, but it is still a potent enough crime. The Jews are hypocrites about this, but they’re that way about everything, so no surprise there. They yell about the  expulsion of the Jews, in numbers about the same as the number of Palestinians expelled. Of course, being Jews, they want ample (((compensation))) for their losses, (((with interest))) if you can believe it. The gall of them. What chutzpah. But it figures. Of course they want (((interest))), right?

But the real problem here is the usual (((hypocrisy))). (((Pay))) us for our losses, scream the Jews. Fair enough, perhaps they deserve it, but only in the dollars of the day, not the inflated dollars of today. They lost the value of 1948 dollars, not 2021 dollars, no matter what  they would be worth if they held onto them.

But how about fair play. Oh yeah, Jews don’t play that game! How about paying the Palestinians for all of their losses in 1948 at the hands of the Jews. While there have been proposals to pay off the Palestinians in return for renouncing their beefs, right to return and resist oppression and the crimes committed against them; in other words, pay them off to make the problem go away, these will never fly because of all those nasty strings attached, like giving up your basic human rights. But generally speaking, with the Jews, it’s “Give us back all the stuff you took from us! Oh, about the stuff we took from you? Sorry, pal, you’re SOL!” The usual Jewish bullshit, in other words. For this reason, all the yelling about paying back the poor Mizrachi Jews leaves me a bit cold.

But there is another much more important question and it hinges on the notion that the expulsion of the Arab Jews was such a huge tragedy after all. Because almost 10

It’s another matter for the Palestinians. The Palestinians were also thrown off their lands and got all their stuff taken. But many if not most Palestinians, at least many of those in Gaza and the West Bank anyway, have a desire to go back to the homes they were thrown out of. “I threw you off your land, you went away angry, you’re miserable where  you are now, and you’re desperate to get your land back” is a tragedy of a much greater magnitude than the one of the Arab Jews above.

Of course, bring this up to Jews and you get the usual (((barrage of lawyerly diversion, bluster, threats, and accusations of anti-Semitism))). As far as the latter goes, natch.

“They threaten to beat us to death,” said Yahya Ya’ish and repeated the sentence while he leaned forward to look deep into my eyes. I do not know whether he did so to see if I believed him or to see whether I was credible. I recoiled imperceptibly. I did it to escape his forceful, inquisitive stare as well as his smell – a smell of fear.

We sat in the office of the director of the Yemen Observatory for Human Rights, a leading human rights organization. Yahya Ya’ish brought a joint letter from the few remaining Jews in Rayda, the last Yemeni town with an indigenous Jewish population. The Jews of Rayda requested the human rights center to assist them in obtaining protection against the repeated assaults, harassment, and threats that they have been suffering under for almost a year.

I must admit, now with shame, that I did not quite believe Ya’ish’s story, credible as it sounds. He aroused all my Arab anti-Jewish stereotypes. He looked exactly as a Jew looks in Arabic caricature. He had unkempt black hair with long curly sideburns, dark skin with black unruly beard, a prominent nose, and black, skewed, penetrating eyes.

I do not know if my suspicion was due to deep-seated prejudices derived from a childhood in which Israelis and Jews were one and same in my father’s Palestinian family or whether it was due to some experiences in my school where wild young classmates celebrated the days when the news reported that Israelis were killed.

I know not whether it was also due to deep-seated hatred for all those times when I and my family lived through the Israeli bombings, which often struck indiscriminately at my birth country, Lebanon. My distrust of Yai’sh’s credible report could also have been because I had lost my credulity having heard through the years my share of exaggerated stories of persecution; first from refugees and asylum seekers when I worked as interpreter and later as a human rights activist from Arab dissidents.

Yahya Ya’ish is a descendant of Yemen’s legendary chief rabbi, Ya’ish Bin Yihya, who died two years ago at the age of 81 years and left one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities without spiritual guidance. Along with a few families, he is among the last Jews in Yemen, once a home to one of the Arab world’s oldest and most populous Jewish communities. Now there are only 300 to 400 Jews left in the country.

In 1948 there were 60,000 Jews among the approximately 2.5 million Yemenis. Nearly 48,000 Jews ‘went away’ to Israel in the years just after the establishment of Israel. Today there are approximately 400 Jews out of a population of approximately 22 million Yemenis. Ya’ish told me that he and his family, but especially a cousin, has been subjected to systematic persecution by their fellow citizens in Rayda.

He reported that Rayda’s Jews were being harassed on the streets and threatened with death if they did not convert to Islam or leave the city. Many of the Jews’ neighbors refuse to do commerce with them. Ya’ish’s voice became especially anxious when in his sad tale of the daily humiliation, he recounted his greatest fear -“‘They threaten us to intrude upon our women (yet’aradu li-sharafina).”

During an earlier trip to Rayda in 2007, I noted that Jewish women wore the black abaya covering their bodies from head to toe and were secluded, while the men who sat and chewed qat, an addictive narcotic plant, claimed that according to Jewish law they were allowed, like their Muslim neighbors, to several women at once.

In this traditional culture to molest somebody’s woman is the worst calamity a man can be exposed to. Ya’ish feared,

If they molest our women, we will not be able to control the reactions of the young among us. They know it is not helpful to turn to the authorities. We have tried for years. Instead of providing us protection, they defended their own clansmen. If our young men hit back, it will be the end with us. This will give the Muslims an excuse to beat us all to death.

What Ya’ish feared happened the 11th of December 2008, just a few days after I met him. Moshe Ya’ish bin Yahya, brother of the Rabbi Ya’ish Yahya bin Yahya and a relative of Ya’ish, was murdered in cold blood in bright daylight in the middle of the street (Amnesty International, 19.12.2008).

The perpetrator of the heinous crime was a pilot in the army. In the court, which was filled with members of his tribe, he admitted without repentance to his action and added,

I had written and warned the Jews in Rayda several times before. I have warned them that they must either convert to Islam, leave the country, or I kill them.  (Daily Star, 23.12.2008).

He refused to accept the claim made by his advocates appointed the state that he is insane. He cried in court, “You are helping the Jews against me’.

The Rayda attack in itself does constitute something unique. Racist violence occurs everywhere. What makes the incident special is the Yemeni government’s response. In the wake of the attacks, President Ali Abdallah Saleh, the ruler of the country since 1978, declared in a magnanimous gesture designed to impress Yemen’s Western donors that he will take Rayda’s Jews under his personal protection but in the capital Sanaa, not in their city.

President Saleh’s apparent rescue of the Jews is anything but an expression of the Arab leader’s generosity. When Rayda’s Jews endured systematic harassment which occurred with the authorities’ knowledge and participation and refused to travel to Sanaa or out of the country to the United States and Israel like most other Jews have felt compelled to do in the last 50 years, it was not because they were patriotic heroes more connected than others to their Yemeni homeland.

Rayda’s Jews held out because they wanted to keep their houses, land, and other possessions. Apart from their own possessions, many of the remaining Jews purchased, acquired, or inherited the property of those Jews who had left. The Jews, who ‘went away’, nourished a hope that the remaining family members might be able to sell their possessions without a huge loss of their value, as usually happens when a population is driven away. This means that the remaining Jews, as Ya’ish informed me, are making a stand for the land and houses belonging to the rest of the Jewish community.

The persecution of the Jews of Rayda is also motivated to some extent, according Ya’ish’s report, by their neighbors’ hope to ‘inherit’ their property once they flee the country. It is a known phenomenon from similar cleansings of Jews in both Europe and the Arab world and for that matter from Israel’s expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. Ya’ish reported clearly, “If the state or anyone else buys our lands and houses at a reasonable price, we will not stay a single day longer in Yemen.”

By ordering the Jews moved under his own direct protection to Sana’a, President Saleh made himself guilty of the Jews’ persecution and not their rescue. President Saleh was aware of it. He made the same grandiose gesture when in 2005 another Jewish community was driven away from their home town in Sa’ada, located in the northern part of Yemen’s mountains.

Sa’ada had been ravaged by a civil war between a Shiite splinter group inspired by Iran and Hezbollah, called the Houthi, who let their rebellious anger transfer to Saada’s unarmed Jews. The Houthi rebels claimed that the Jews committed fornication and alcoholic orgies in Sa’ada, the most backward and traditionalist region of the country! Sa’ada’s Jews were moved into a ‘tourist town’ in the capital. Of the several hundred Jews who were moved from Sa’ada to Sana’a to become the President’s special guests, there are now fewer than 250 Jews left.

When President Saleh allowed the Sa’ada Jews to be driven away from their home town which they inhabited in 3000 years, he caused them to be driven from their houses, land, and trades without a guarantee of return and when his only gesture was to house them in of a fenced residential camp two miles from Sana’a Airport, it was an indirect way of throwing them out of the country.

Rayda’s Jews will face in the same dilemma as the tourist town’s Jews. Should they choose to continue to live in a fenced housing for soldiers, which requires a special permit from the Interior Department for foreign visitors to enter at the only entrance, without a glimmer of hope of returning to their homes or receiving compensation from the state for their lost property, or should they instead join their compatriots in the U.S. and Israel and emigrate forever from Yemen?

The result either way will be to exorcise the Yemeni Jews in all practical respects. The few Jewish families left soon found will soon find their way to the airport. With only a few Jews left as in Lebanon, Iraq, or Egypt, there will no longer be any real Jewish life left in Yemen. It will be a sad, unnoticed, and unrecognized end of a thousand-year-old residence that created a wealth of culture such that Yemen became one of the major lands in Jewish history in terms of importance.

With the exorcism of Yemen’s Jews will come the sad end of one of the Arab World’s most shameful chapters: the tacit, planned, and decades-long ethnic cleansing of the Arab Jews. This particular end of the chapter is particularly shameful because it did not happen under the exceptional conditions of war and sectarian conflict that characterized the previous expulsions. These conditions were used by Arab governments to show how they could not prevent the expulsions for fear of stoking the wrath of the enraged population.

The exorcism of the Arab Jews was not caused only by the wars between Israel and the Arab states. Ask around the Arab World about what happened to the Jews of that country. “The Jews went away,” they will say vaguely. True enough, many Arab Jews left due to Zionist propaganda and many were driven out by terrorism committed by Israel such as the grenade attacks on Jews in Iraq and the bombing of Jewish targets by Israel in Egypt in 1949-1950.

In part, Jews left because for centuries they were treated as dhimmis, second class people under Sharia, or Islamic law, for centuries, although this ended for the most par a century ago with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Most left as a direct result of the wars, when mass hysteria and suspicion of the Jews as an Israeli fifth column swept the Arab lands. Sadly, this view of Jews as traitors to the homeland was stirred up by Arab rulers to distract the population from their humiliating defeat by the Jews in the newborn Jewish state of Israel that arose from the ruins of Arab Palestine.

Palestinians were driven away by the Jews too. 700,000 Christian and Muslim Palestinians were driven away by the Israeli forces in 1947-48. The Israeli exorcism of the Palestinians was matched by a concurrent exorcism of almost as many Jews from the Arab lands, with the proviso that the Jewish exodus occurred more gradually over a period of 50 years.

The Jewish communities of the Arab World, which for had developed complex and fascinating cultures in the lands of their birth in Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, were were for the most part dissolved. By driving away the Jews, the Arabs not only hurt their own communities, but they also played into the propaganda of Zionism that said that Jews could only be safe in Israel. Israel needed mass Arab Jewish immigration to achieve universal legitimacy, in part to rid the land of its reputation as a homeland for European Ashkenazim only.

But what about the exorcism that continued after the 1948 war? What about the Arab governments’ passive or active involvement in this exodus to drive the Jews from their lands? And perhaps worst of all, what of the silence of Arab historians and intellectuals about the tragic loss of a millennia-old Jewish residence in their lands, where a huge population of 900,000 Arab Jews lost over 9

How can I as a Palestinian reconcile the expulsion of my parents during Israel’s ethnic cleansing when one million Palestinians remain peacefully in Israel with the expulsion of 900,000 Arab Jews, where only 6,500 Jews are left to live among 300 million Arabs?

In Israel, there arose a school history that obfuscated if not outright denied the Zionists’ exorcism of Palestinians in 1948, and there have always been brave Israeli intellectuals who have spoken in favor of the Palestinian cause and condemned the Israeli government’s crimes against human rights. But how is it that Arab intellectuals can pour so much condemnation on Palestinian exorcism in poetry, prose, and film, while allowing the concomitant tragedy of the exorcism of the Arab World’s Jews – a wound to the the heart of the Arab psyche and the world’s consciousness – to pass with nary a mention?

What do they expressions of solidarity that Arab intellectuals and masses have been trained practitioners of when it they are only practiced in solidarity with themselves? Is there only one possible solidarity for the Arabs, that of the aggression by the Satans, the U.S. and Israel? Strange how mention of the two unites so many Arabs and gets them shouting spiritually superior cries against the residue left and sets off so much flag burning by angry gangs of Arabs in the streets of the Middle East.

Why should massive protests against U.S. and Israeli aggression close London and Tehran, Paris and Cairo, Rome and and Istanbul, while not a word is heard about genocide in Darfur or starvation in Zimbabwe?

When were there were more than a few pre-cooled saved souls protesting in European cities against Burma’s inhuman regime, systematic persecution of gays in Iran, and the systematic oppression of women in Saudi Arabia? Or Arab compassion selective, as in: “My pain is the greatest, my enemy the worst, and my crime the least”

Ancient Arabs believed that poets should celebrate their own particular culture, whether their people were “ashamed or proud, peaceful or aggressive, radical or conformist,” and they should also celebrate the surrounding cultures, even if they were neither noble nor courageous. Arab spokesmen of old performed their role well and produced some of the world’s most beautiful poems.

But modern Arab spokesmen have a different responsibility than celebrating their own strains and opponents. They should in their books, articles, and movies hold up a mirror which reflects both the good and bad in Arab life and history. With few exceptions, such as Hazem Saghieh, Wadah Sherara, George Tarabishi and Sadek al-Azem, most Arab intellectuals fail at this brave task.

But even these courageous intellectuals never commented on the tragedy of the exorcism of the Arab Jews. Until the Arabs get their Orhan Pamuk or their Avi Shlaim, one who tells the hard truths, convenient or not, they will continue to reside in the dishonest half of the universe.

A showdown with the Arabs’ most shameful aspects of their history will help to reconcile them with themselves and possibly with their neighbors, and may help to preserve what is left of religious and ethnic diversity in their countries. Only by coming to terms with their own expulsion of the Jews from the Arab lands will the Arabs avoid reliving the failure, oppression and and resulting revenge on the innocent to correct their own errors. Until then they must live with the shame of silence.

Alt Left: Russian Thinking on Black-White Versus Grey Areas

Commenter Siberiancat, who is a Russian, left this comment a while back:

Russians are pretty good with gray areas.

An illustration:

A Russian emigrant mathematician and psychologist Vladimir Lefevre was an adviser to Reagan on how to conduct negotiations with Gorbachev. He had a theory that Western and Eastern European (in this case, Soviet) ethics were completely different.

In Western thinking, there is a clear difference between Good and Evil. One should confront evil, yet compromise with an enemy is a good thing

In the Eastern approach, there is no Good and Evil. Everything is gray. The ends justify the means, and one should not compromise with an enemy.

The advice was to conduct negotiations in such a way that the Soviets would not look like compromising to the domestic constituency. Make negotiations mostly informal. Avoid formal deals that might be seen as defeats by the ordinary Russians.

I would not say that Russians are Easterners, having nothing in common with the Chinese or Indians, yet the ethical systems between them and the West are obviously different.

Oh, and Lefevre was the guy who coined the term Evil Empire.

I find it interesting that he ties Eastern European (as in Slavic?) thinking with Russian thinking. What about in the Baltic states? They’re so Westernized. And the Czechs are so Western they are barely even Slavs. And what do we do with the Romanians? The culture and religion of the East, yet the language of the West? I suspect they are more Eastern than we think. The Balkans, Greece, …Hell, even Bulgaria, are more Southern European or better yet, Southeastern European.

I know everyone over there hates the Turks and I don’t blame them, but I’m afraid that they’re more Turkified than they think, especially the Greeks. Or perhaps the entire region is Southeast Europanified, Southeast European being different from both Eastern and Southern Europe. The Turks like to delude themselves that they are part of general Southeastern Europe, but that is just more Muslim arrogance. They’re so much closer to the Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and Kurds that they hate so much than they will ever admit. Religion isn’t as big a part of human culture as everyone thinks. In a lot of areas, it’s almost a cultural “add-on.”

I do like this part though:

In the Eastern approach, there is no Good and Evil. Everything is gray.

Reminds me of the great line from Rumi:

Over there In that field Beyond good and evil I will meet you there

– Rumi

That is just so perfect, I am sorry. And it’s so…Eastern…Hell, it’s almost downright Chinese for Chrissake. Rumi was an Iranian Shia Sufi poet. I wonder to what extent Iranian thinking is “Eastern?” I hate to say like Chinese, but I sense a deep vibe of Chinese philosophy in that bit of terse poetry.

Alt Left: Rural Land Reforms: An Overview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A land reform was definitely done in Iran.

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

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The land reform was incomplete in Venezuela.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: The Worst People on Earth – A Contest

I am not sure there is anything worse than a Gulf Sunni Arab. They’re runners up for the worst people on Earth award along with Turks, Azeris, Indian Hindus, and Jews. Thing is Jews have many positive attributes and it’s more a matter of if you think the positive outweighs the negative. The listed peoples above have all of the negative qualities of Jews and about zero positive attributes (although I do exaggerate a lot here, sorry).

Turks and Azeris are simply vicious fascists who retain the precisely same genocidal instincts of the Young Turks who genocided 2.5 million Armenians, 700,000 Greeks, and 1.75 million Assyrians, mostly from 1915-1923. That adds up to a Turkish genocide of 5 million people, all not coincidentally Christians. It was one of the worst Muslim jihads ever, and the anti-Christian aspect of it has been little noted. That’s getting close to 6 million Jews Holocaust level, so Turks are literally about as evil as Nazis.

Indian Hindus are also fascists, in this case religious fascists.

I almost want to call Gulf Arabs fascists, perhaps clerical fascists. They are simply genocidal religious bigots against the Shia and to a lesser extent the Iranian boogeyman. Furthermore, they are 10

Compared to these maniacs, even the Israeli fascists are not so bad, though of course they are horrible. But they’re not literally genocidal. That charge gets tossed around, but it’s nonsense. Jews lie, cheat, and steal par excellance, but the groups mentioned are actually worse than Jews in that regard, and that’s saying something.

Of course, I should throw in the West in general, led by the US and the Anglosphere and their terrorist organization of fascists called NATO, but Western imperialism pales in comparison to he abject depravity of the groups above.

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

Absolutely superb comment from Francis Melville on this post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jews in Nazi Germany before and after the War

Polar Bear: Many Jews even assimilated to NS Germany.

They couldn’t assimilate completely because Nazi antisemitism was racial. Racial antisemitism is particularly cruel because there’s no escape for the Jew. There’s nothing he can do. He can’t change his genes. So he’s screwed.

With religious antisemitism it is based on religion, so there is always an out for the Jews in conversion, especially to Christianity. And a few Jews do convert to Islam, even in modern times. Supposedly many Saudis, including princes, are descended from families of converted Jews. An Israeli Jew converted to Islam several years back and became a radical Islamist. He moved to the West Bank and lives there to this day. He hates Israel and supports Hamas! Hamas and the Palestinians have accepted him utterly. They have no racial beef with Jews. To them, if you convert to Islam, you’re just not a Jew anymore. You’re also not an enemy. You’ve become one of them.

In the very early years it is correct that some Jews assimilated to supporting the Party. The Jews in some cities had good relations with the Gentiles. There was even a Jewish chapter of the Party in one city in 1936! It was officially sanctioned by Party leadership! After Kristallnacht in 1938 though, you would be hard-pressed to find a Jew who supported the regime.

However, many half-Jews (Jewish father) were allowed to serve in the Army. I believe there were over 100,000 half-Jews in the SS! Which is very strange if you think about it because the SS was absolutely committed to the extermination of Europe’s Jews. And here were a huge number of half-Jews participating in the project!

The Germans had a real problem. There’s an old saying, “There’s a little Jew in every German.” There’s more truth to it than you think. And indeed this was part of the problem for the Nazis. If they got too serious about Jewish ancestry, they’d end up killing off their whole population! So they made some very strict rules about who exactly was Jewish and who was not, while making the pool of Jews as small as they could. The fact that so many Germans had a bit of Jewish blood meant in a way, oddly enough the Nazis were massacring themselves, at least in Germany anyway. Isn’t that a strange idea?

There were 400,000 Jews in German at the start of the war, and there were 200,000 left at the end of the war. Half of them had survived. They had a lot of money, so most of them took off before the war even started. I saw a report on a plane leaving Vienna before the war, and it was full of Jews fleeing Austria. The Nazis had figured that most of the German Jews had taken off, and they didn’t even look very hard for Jews in Germany proper. And somehow many of them simply hid enough to survive. Don’t ask me how they did it. It’s an odd fact.

There are many, many odd facts about that genocide.

“Oranges and Lemons,” by Alpha Unit

Humans are among the few mammal species unable to synthesize Vitamin C from glucose. All of our Vitamin C has to come from our diets. If you were somehow to end up with no Vitamin C in your diet whatsoever for a prolonged time – say, three or four months and counting, indefinitely – it is no exaggeration to say that the repercussions could be dire.

Without Vitamin C we can’t make collagen, and without collagen your body can’t repair your skin, bone, cartilage, ligaments and tendons, blood vessel walls, and teeth. You need fresh food in your diet, either from plant or animal sources, to get this done.

Wherever you find people going without fresh food for long periods, you’ll find Vitamin C deficiency, or scurvy.

Scurvy has been prevalent throughout much of human history. It likely began to occur in humans during the development of agriculture. According to biologist Thomas Jukes, once people in temperate zones adopted an agrarian lifestyle they were able to store grains for use during winter. They were also able to spread into other temperate regions previously uninhabitable due to the lack of food supply during winters.

But because stored grains are extremely low in Vitamin C, it is likely that these ancient peoples developed scurvy during the long winter months because grain dominated their diets.

During long journeys or overland campaigns, such as the Crusades, scurvy inevitably appeared.

The first written account of a disease likely to be scurvy comes from the Eber Papyrus of ancient Egypt, dated to 1550 BC. The Papyrus not only diagnosed scurvy but prescribed that its victims be given onions, which contain Vitamin C.

Throughout maritime history, people had to figure out not only how to transport themselves across seas and oceans but how to stay healthy along the way. They were clearly relatively successful at both. Millennia ago, Austronesians were the first humans to invent oceangoing vessels; they colonized a large part of the Indo-Pacific region. Early Polynesians were superb seafarers and traveled thousands of miles exploring and settling the region we know as the Polynesian Triangle (drawn by connecting the points of Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island).

Somali seafarers developed extensive trade networks, and Somali merchants at one time led commerce between Asia and Africa. Chinese merchants sailed the Indian Ocean and traded throughout Southeast Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and East Africa.

How did ancient seafaring peoples deal with scurvy?

Stefan Slater writes that Polynesian seafarers relied on freshly caught fish, crustaceans, and octopi, and would sometimes slaughter some of the animals they were transporting for breeding stock. Jin Ding, Chaojan Shi, and Adam Weintrit report that the diet on Chinese sailing ships included green tea, which contains more Vitamin C than black tea. They also say that Chinese ships began to carry gardens with them, growing soybean sprouts, which are high in Vitamin C.

So there is some evidence that ancient seafarers knew the importance of keeping fresh vegetables and meat in their diets on long voyages.

For Europeans, it wasn’t until the Age of Sail that the problem of scurvy truly came into focus. Wealth and national interest were at stake in ways they hadn’t been before.

Advances in naval technology and a rush for exploration and conquest brought Europeans the “plague of the sea.” Scurvy was the main occupational disease of what historians call the European Age of Exploration. More sailors died of scurvy than all other causes combined, including battles, storms, and other diseases.

Jason A. Mayberry makes the case that a unique confluence of conditions made scurvy and seafaring a deadly combination for Europeans. In his essay “Scurvy and Vitamin C,” he draws upon the work of Stephen Bown, author of Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail.

First, countries had difficulty maintaining sufficient crews for their naval vessels, so they relied on impressment: the taking of men into the military by compulsion, with or without notice. It had been legally sanctioned in Britain since the time of Edward I.

It was basically kidnapping. Gangs of men would go into port towns looking for “recruits.” They would club a man and drag him back to the ship. The man’s family might have no idea what happened to him, and many of the men never made it back home.

Some had experience at sea, some didn’t. Some were in poor health to begin with, being homeless, convicts, or elderly. On average a third of a ship’s crew was made up of impressed men.

Even the men who volunteered for naval service were often in poor health. Many would volunteer in order to secure a place to sleep and get regular meals. Sometimes boys who were orphans or runaways would join.

A second reason that Vitamin C deficiency was hastened during this period were the working conditions on ships. Discipline was harsh and included flogging, keelhauling, and starvation. The body needs more Vitamin C when it is under stress, and sailors had heightened stress in the form of physical exertion, exposure to the elements, fear of battle, and sleep deprivation.

The third and main factor in the development of scurvy was clearly the diet onboard ships. What mattered most for food supplies was that the food be storable for long periods without spoiling. The nutritional content of the food was of little concern for those in charge. What was most important to them was to maintain a suitable labor force at the least possible cost.

A typical weekly ration for a sailor, according to Bown:

  • 1 lb. hardtack (biscuit) daily
  • 2 lbs. salted beef twice weekly
  • 1 lb. salted pork twice weekly
  • 2 oz. salted fish 3 times weekly
  • 2 oz. butter 3 times weekly
  • 4 oz. cheese 3 times weekly
  • 8 oz. dried peas 4 times weekly
  • 1 gal. beer daily

Sometimes the rations included dried fruit or barley meal. But the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables left the diet almost completely devoid of Vitamin C.

Compounding this problem was that even the food sailors had access to wasn’t always fit to eat. Spoilage was a huge problem on ships. Ships were a dark, damp, and sometimes waterlogged environment for sailors and their food, and this led to moldy, worm-eaten bread, or other dried foods. Meat would begin spoiling almost as soon as it left port, no matter how salt-laden it was.

European navies did provide surgeons and surgeon’s mates on ships, but most of a surgeon’s time was spent caring for battle wounds instead of focusing on the treatment and prevention of disease.

All of these factors made scurvy the leading cause of death during the Age of Sail.

The onset of scurvy is a slow progression, Bown and others inform us, usually appearing after 60 to 90 days of a Vitamin C-deficient diet. This is when the body’s lingering stores of Vitamin C are depleted. The initial symptoms are fatigue and muscle aches. Upon waking, a scurvy victim’s joints will ache.

During the second stage, his gums begin to swell and will bleed with slight pressure. The teeth become loose at the roots. He also feels pain throughout his joints and muscles.

During the third stage, the gums begin to rot. They also bleed profusely. The victim’s flesh becomes gangrenous and will spontaneously hemorrhage. His skin, especially on the legs and feet, develop ulcers that turn gangrenous. As connective tissue fails, long-healed broken bones begin to refracture, and long-healed wounds begin to reopen. The legs cramp so severely that the person cannot walk.

At this point the person is in excruciating pain.

In the final stage of scurvy, the person gets a high fever. His skin develops black spots and he begins having tremors. He will drift in and out of consciousness for a while, and then he dies.

An estimated two million sailors died of scurvy between the 15th and 18th centuries. The science at the time was of very little use in treating them – even though various people throughout European history had made the connection between citrus fruits and the prevention of scurvy.

On July 8, 1497, Vasco da Gama set sail from Lisbon, Portugal, in search of a passage to India. On January 11, 1498, the fleet anchored off Mozambique. After five weeks at sea, the crew began showing the symptoms of scurvy.

Fortunately, some weeks later, they arrived at Mombasa, on the coast of Kenya, where they met local traders who traded them oranges. Within six days of eating them, the crew recovered. Da Gama left Africa and began his voyage across the Indian Ocean to Kozhikode (or Calicut to Westerners).

After staying in India for four months, da Gama left for a three-month journey at sea in which scurvy killed many of his sailors. On January 7, 1499, the ships anchored at Malindi, Kenya, where the sailors, remembering their previous cure in Mombasa, asked for oranges. Still, more sailors died of the disease “which started in the mouth.” Six months later the survivors made it back to Lisbon.

Did Vasco da Gama alert any ship owners or controlling authorities of what he had discovered about treating scurvy? No one knows.

Sir Richard Hawkins had discovered a cure for scurvy in 1593 when it appeared in his crew in southern Brazil. He reported that oranges and lemons had been a remedy for his men. To whom did he report this? What did they do with the information?

The Dutch had known about the value of citrus fruits since at least the late 16th century. According to J. Burnby and A. Bierman, who wrote “The Incidence of Scurvy at Sea and Its Treatment,” the Dutch East India Company bartered for lemons in Africa and also established vegetable gardens and orchards in their colonies to provide fresh citrus to their ships. How did the Dutch manage to keep this knowledge to themselves? Was that their intention?

Burnby and Bierman also write about an Elizabethan merchant, Sir Hugh Plat, who had an interest in botany and gave bottled lemon juice to the commander of the first fleet of the English East India Company. It was only the crew of the flagship, Red Dragon, which received a daily allowance of lemon juice. It was also the only crew that remained relatively free of scurvy. What did the English East India Company do with this information?

In the early 1600s John Woodall, a surgeon for the same East India Company, described the symptoms of scurvy and recommended that ships’ surgeons inform Governors of “all places they touch in the Indies” that the juices of oranges, lemons, limes, and tamarinds be used as medicine for scurvy.

The East India Company actually supplied “lemon water,” as it was called, for its ships until 1625, when the Company chose not to provide it because “the woman supplying it wanted 12d. a gallon above the usual price.” The return voyage of 1626 was badly afflicted with scurvy because they had bought tamarinds in the East Indies which they presumed to be as effective as lemons. All sour fruits and even acids such as vinegar were erroneously thought to be cures for scurvy.

J. F. Bachstrom, a Lutheran theologian and physician, wrote in 1734 that there was only one cause of scurvy – the absence of fresh fruits and vegetables for a long period. No drugs would help, nor would mineral acids. Were any companies or government entities aware of his findings? If so, did they take them seriously?

Europe was slowly making headway against this problem nevertheless. In 1739 James Lind, a former physician’s apprentice, volunteered for the Royal Navy and was designated a surgeon’s mate. After seven years in that position, he was promoted to surgeon on HMS Salisbury. It was on this ship that he performed his famous scurvy experiment.

Lind showed an insight ahead of his time by understanding that, to develop a cure, treatments must be compared simultaneously in similar patients. He had envisioned the concept of clinical trials, as rudimentary as his idea might have been.

After eight weeks at sea, and when scurvy was beginning to take its toll on the crew, Lind decided to test his idea that the putrefaction of the body caused by the disease could be prevented with acids. He divided 12 sick patients into six pairs, and provided each pair with a different supplement to their diet: cider, vitriolic acid (diluted sulfuric acid), vinegar, sea water, two oranges and one lemon, or a purgative mixture.

Only the pair who took the oranges and lemons improved.

You would think that Lind had established a clear connection between citrus and scurvy and that the Navy would have taken immediate action. But neither happened.

Lind continued to believe that there were multiple causes of scurvy. He also advocated a method of preserving the virtues of oranges and lemons that involved boiling the juices. Unbeknownst to Lind, boiling destroyed the active ingredient in citrus juices – Vitamin C. When the boiled juice was tried on ships as a preventative measure and found lacking, people began to dismiss the whole idea that citrus fruits were effective against scurvy!

In 1753 Lind published his Treatise on the Scurvy, considered a classic of medical science. But it took the Royal Navy over 40 years to adopt Lind’s recommendations. This happened under the direction of Sir Gilbert Blane, who had been appointed Physician to the Fleet.

Blane was familiar with Lind’s work and had the power and initiative to bring about change, Mayberry states. He organized an experiment on HMS Suffolk on a 23-week trip to India. The sailors were given a mixture of rum, water, sugar, and lemon juice. A few sailors developed a slight case of scurvy. They were given additional rations of lemon juice and the scurvy was quickly cured.

With the results from the HMS Suffolk and the power of his position, Blane was able to ensure that fresh citrus juice became a staple in the British Navy. For the British, scurvy had finally been conquered.

The question remains: why did it take so long, when so many had found the cure time and time again?

Burnby and Bierman note that there was the view among ship owners and government authorities that seamen were expendable. They also suggest that seamen themselves might have been reluctant to take part in experiments that might have settled the issue. But they mention other considerations, mainly the problem of “sheer impracticability.”

How does one store many thousands of oranges and lemons on an overcrowded man-of-war laden with guns, gunpowder, and shot? Using the juice of citrus fruits was certainly a space saver but it readily became moldy, especially under poor storage conditions, which were usually the case.

Speaking of practical considerations, how long can it be practical to treat your work force as if they are expendable? There were no sailors’ advocates at the time to make it impractical for businessmen and governments to do so. Nothing stopped or even slowed Europe’s exploration and colonization, so losing sailors to scurvy was just one of the costs of doing business.

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