Category: Modern

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 20-25% of the vote. This is because Belarus is rather new in terms of national ideas.

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.

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 50% that year. The harvest simply collapsed that year. See Mark Tauber’s latest writing where he proves that. See Davies and Wheatcroft’s extensive book which is now the last word on the subject. The truth is that in the journals, this debate ended a while back. Even the worst Russia-haters and Holodomor-mongers like Timothy Snyder and Richard Pipes have now admitted that there was no terror famine in their publications. What they say on TV is another matter.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russian Jews and probably Ukrainian Jews too are some of the worst Jews out there. A lot of them are just criminals. The “Russian” Mafia was 1/3 Jewish. Jews are 3% of the population. And due to the long infighting between Jews and Russians, there is a lot of bad blood. Russian Jews probably hate Gentiles more than any other Jews. Russian Jews make bloody Marys out of vodka and say they are drinking the blood of Russian Gentiles!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bolshevik Revolution was not really a Jewish revolution. There were only a few Bolshevkis. Yes, there were a number of Jews, but there were even more Latvians! Furthermore, most Russian Jews did not support the Bolsheviks. Only a few did. In the election of 1917, 70% of Russian Jews voted for the Zionist Party, not the Bolsheviks. They were more tribal than Communist, as usual. They say that maybe one Jew in ten is a radical, but maybe five out of ten radicals are Jews. People see that and think “Jews are Communists” while forgetting that 90% of them are not radicals at all.

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

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

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

Alt Left: What Are the Causes of Antisemitism?

Jews Out-compete Gentiles, Probably Due to Superior Genetics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: 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 100% of Arab Jews have absolutely no wish to return to their former lands. Sure, they were driven out, but they’re happy to be gone, and they don’t want to come back. I threw you off your land, but you went away peacefully, are happy where you are now, and don’t want your land back” doesn’t seem so tragic to me. Sounds like the victims are where they wish to be.

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 99% of its population to the point where there are now fewer than 6,500 left?

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: Rural Land Reforms: An Overview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A land reform was definitely done in Iran.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The land reform was incomplete in Venezuela.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: 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.

Alt Left: Victory Day, May 9, 2021

Victory Day, May 9, was an official holiday in the USSR and it still is in Russia. We had a V-E Day, but it never became a national holiday like it did in the USSR.

Alt Left: Happy Victory Day 2021: Thank You, USSR!

Victory Day is an official Russian holiday celebrating the defeat of Nazism in 1945.

Alt Left: Happy Victory Day Everyone!

May 9 is Victory Day in Russia, the day that Nazism was defeated in Europe. No country lost more men fighting Nazism than the USSR. Furthermore, 89% of German war casualties were inflicted by the Red Army. On the other hand, on our end, we didn’t do a whole lot, though we did lose quite a few men. We couldn’t have done it without the Soviet Union.

 

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

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

He wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think of all this?

Trotsky’s take on national socialism and fascism.

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Alt Left: The Rind Et Al Study on Long-term Effects of Child Abuse: Its History and Ramifications

A famous study on childhood sexual abuse was done 20 years ago by Rind et al. I think I still have a copy of it on my desktop here.

It provoked wild outrage. Even the idiotic American Psychological Association denounced it, notable as one of the most anti-scientific statements this anti-scientific organization has ever issued. Even the US Congress got in on the act. The Congress passed a resolution condemning the study! Congressmen, mostly Republicans, stood up and denounced it forcefully.

The problem? The study came up with the wrong answer. In other words, the truth was wrong and society preferred to believe pleasant lies over unpleasant truths, so the paper was condemned for discovering the wrong facts.

Usually when theory and facts do not match up, we say that the theory was wrong and go back to the drawing board.

However, in this case and with all ideological arguments by ideologues and politics types, when the theory and the facts don’t match up, the facts are wrong, and the facts are not the facts! Why? Because the theory is said to be automatically a priori true. The theory must be true. It cannot be false. So the facts must be wrong and we need to change the facts, wipe out the truth, and say that reality isn’t real, instead, what is real is some fantasy world that doesn’t  exist.

A number of fake “studies” were undertaken by other behavioral “scientists” taking about the Rind findings and finding fault with this or that conclusion. None of the fake studies denouncing it were worth a hill of beans. That they made it into the journals at all shows that pathetic anti-scientific nature of the social sciences, sadly also including Psychology, which has been trying to become more of a science for a long time now.

But by the very fact that it is a social science means that Psychology will always be a fake science in some ways because its findings have to do with people, and the science of people will always be twisted by politics, ideology, bias, and mostly emotional reaction.

It’s hard to get emotional about a new finding in math or physics. Who cares! But findings in the social sciences are inherently emotional because we are always emotional about ourselves and our fellow humans, and anything people are strongly emotional about will always be tainted by bias, propaganda, politics, and ideology. In other words, lies. This is why the social sciences will always be doomed to the charge of being fake sciences and will always carry the guilty burden of physics envy.

Ritter et al conducted a meta-analysis of a huge number of studies on the effects of childhood sexual abuse on children as adults. Child abuse was mostly defined as sexual abuse below age 13, so sex with teenage girls and boys, a massive minefield, was left out.

The available evidence shows that consensual sex with teenage girls and boys and adults causes little if any damage to teenagers. This behavior is illegal not because it is harmful to the teens, as I doubt that it is. Instead it is outlawed because society’s morals say that members of society do not wish to live in a society where adults are free to have sex with teenagers of various ages.

It’s seen as unsavory, unpleasant, disgusting or revolting, and often morally wrong. But this behavior is not psychologically disordered in any way. This is a moral and legal problem, not a psychological one.

Unfortunately we are now in the midst of a truly insane mass hysteria around the sexuality of teenage girls in which 90% of the population has thrown reason out the window and gone batshit insane, out and out lies are widely believed, and science and facts are no where to be seen.

In fact, the people who quote the science and the facts about this question are attacked as pedophiles! Because I guess only pedophiles believe in science and truth when it comes to this sort of thing. If you don’t want to be called a pedophile, just spout the usual lies about this subject. As long as you keep lying and don’t ever resort to facts, you’re in the clear!

Fact: nothing published in an academic journal has ever produced evidence suggesting that teen/adult relationships are harmful or predatory. Literally not even one. Anthropological and historical studies all over the world have found that such relationships are common in many societies and no harm was reported in any society ever studied.

How do I know this? I’ve studied them. A particularly large one was done out of Germany in the 1950’s. You can find this evil science of banned truths on the Net, though I can’t tell you where to look. The pedo advocate sites have links to it, but I don’t want to send you there. I suspect the motives of those who wrote this study, but the science seems good.

Furthermore, historically speaking, I’ve learned from the Psychohistorian sites that teen/adult relations were normal in most of the world including the West up until 1900. Zero harm was reported.

Sadly, mass molestation of children was also reported in the West from Roman and Greek times until 1900. Under the crowded urban conditions that arose with the onset of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, where families were packed together in tiny spaces, a great deal of molestation went on. I’m not happy about this at all, but it’s notable that no ill effects were observed in Greece and Rome until the pre-1900 West.

Perhaps the reason for this was that molestation of children was simply an expected fact of life. If you grow up as a female and get molested and all of your woman friends also got molested, it’s seen as a normal thing. There’s usually nothing inherently wrong with this behavior absent physical damage. Things that are normalized in any society tend to cause little if any damage.

I disagree here with some folks like psychohistorians who argue that all sexual abuse of children under any circumstances, normalized or condemned, results in inevitable terrible lifetime damage to the person. They also believe that many other things experienced in childhood cannot but cause horrible lifelong damage.

I doubt if that is true. If you grow up in a society that normalizes this or that behavior, outside of extreme perversion, aggression, and sadism, it’s probably seen as normalized and shrugged off. In other words, the damage of most of these things is relative and depends on the degree to which your society condemns or pathologizes the behavior.

However, for small children, the true victims of child molestation, it is quite different.

Granted, the victims were interviewed when in college so the abuse was a long ways away. Conceivably if they had interviewed them earlier as minors, they would manifested more damage. The findings were shocking:

Rind et al found that the long-term effects of child sexual abuse were typically neither pervasive nor intense, and men reacted much less negatively than women. Ritter et al also found that less than 10% of victims were traumatized. The most common effects were shame, blame, and confusion.

To explicate that further, the effects were shame about having been abused, blame for themselves for allowing it to happen to them, and confusion about the abuse itself.

The confusion may manifest in various ways. A female friend of mine from 10 years ago was molested. Of course she absolutely hates my guts now, but that’s not an unusual reaction for women who get involved with me in some way or another. I’m used to it.

She told me that she was molested by a pedophile in her church group when she was 8 years old. The molester was a young man and he does appear to have been a pedophilic or preferential molester. She told me, “It’s confusing because it feels good but it’s wrong.” This is part of the thinking behind the confusion that kids experience after being abused.

She also told me that she had completely gotten over it by age 50, but she seemed to have gotten over it much before then. I knew two other women (I actually got involved with these two whereas with the other one it was more email and hot phone conversations) of the same age who were sexually abused as girls, one by a probable pedophile and the other by her opportunistic teenage older brother. They both told me that they had gotten over it by age 50 but implied that they had gotten over it much before then.

The shame, blame, and confusion are apparently short-term effects in most victims, and at the very least have dissipated by college age.

The implication is that children or minors may experience those effects for some time in their youth, but these effects mostly go away by adulthood, and there is no lasting damage in almost all (90%) of cases. The study also found that where the molestation was consensual or non-coerced, there was little if any long-term damage. However, when coercion was involved, damage was much more likely and could easily last into adulthood or perhaps an entire lifeftime.

Unfortunately, pedophiles have gotten a hold of the Rind et al study and like to wave it around to try to push for legalization of child/adult sexual relations.

That’s not my intention here. I don’t care if most victims get over it. Good for them. I’m happy that they are not damaged in the long term.

Nevertheless, this behavior still needs to be outlawed because I don’t want to live in a society where adults are allowed to have sex with young children below age 13. I don’t have to have a reason. I just don’t like it. That’s all the reason I need.

Even the Worst People on Earth May Have a Bit of a Moral Compass

Rambo: From the very beginning of the Delphi case, a lot of people had sneaking suspicions that there was a better than average chance that the person or persons involved in this knew beforehand that the day of the crimes would be a school off-day for the girls. A lot of people’s first thought was someone connected with the girls’ school.

Yes, of course. It’s worse than that. He actually stalked Libby for four months beforehand. And the idea that this was a last minute decision has been proven wrong. The girls were discussing it as early as Friday because people who knew the girls were talking about their upcoming trip in local bars that night. And it looks like Libby posted on her Instagram at some point that she was going to the bridge.

I suppose he must have known Abby was going to be there too, so he may have targeted her in a sense too. Instagram is the site that he was catfishing Libby on with that young man’s photo.

This whole idea that he went to that crowded bridge that afternoon with his full-blown murder kit just to haphazardly see if he could find female or two to kill is insane. Others say he was just there to kill anyone, even a man. That’s even more insane. Further, I’m wondering if he’s into killing women. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. He’s not a pedophile, but he could be a hebephile, a very common sexual orientation. After all, 26% of all men could be classified as hebephiles or pedophiles!

13 and 14 is a bit young to be targeting females, but a number of serials have killed young teenage girls and women too because after all, teenage girls look like women! Face facts. Ted Bundy killed a 12 year old girl, but 12 year old girls are on the cusp of puberty and while they don’t look like women, they look enough like women that a lot of men are starting to find them “interesting.”

I believe Bundy also killed an 8 year old girl when he was 14, but he would never admit to that. He even implied in interviews that he had done some things that he would never admit to. Even for Ted Bundy, killing a little 8 year old girl was too low. Maybe not too low but just shameful. Bundy was a narcissist, a malignant narcissist. Perhaps he thought it was shameful to his reputation as the Greatest Serial Killer of All Time if he would admit to killing a little girl. It was a bridge too far.

This is fascinating because it implies that even the worst people of all think there are some things that are just beyond the pale.

Hitler was appalled by the mistreatment of animals. I guess he thought Jews and Slavs were below animals. And one of the worst Nazis of all, Goebbels, has a bit of a moral compass. In the early days of the Holocaust, they were just lining Jews up and shooting them with firing squads. Goebbels witnessed one of these shootings and he completely freaked out. He broke down in front of everyone, started crying, just carried on. And he decreed that there was to be no more of this or they needed to get away from that as quickly as possible.

The next step was not the gas chambers as everyone thinks. Instead it was “gas vans.” Jews were killed in these vans for a while before the Final Solution was agreed upon at the Wansee Conference in 1942 and they moved to the chambers in the name of efficiency but also because they wanted to kill people in as sterile of clean way as possible, in an almost antiseptic was hidden way the same way your cat is kindly quickly, efficiently and cruelly when it is taken to the vet for the last time.

Murder is murder but when you do it as cleanly as possible, it’s easier to rationalize it. If you murder in a cold and cruel way, it seems horrible as disgust sets in and it seems like you really did kill them. If you do it clean, in your mind you can make it seem that you didn’t really “kill” them in the same way as if you chopped them to pieces. Of course it makes no sense, but we are emotional creatures so we are not purely logical and our conscious and especially subconscious mind is “irrational” that can only be understood if we are using “emotional logic” instead of “pure logic” or the logic of Spock on Star Trek.

So they went to the gas chambers. But at first they were not burning the bodies. They were burying them in mass graves, especially at a few little known camps that were truly extermination camps such as Sobibor and Theresienstat.  All of these were in Poland. It is odd that Auschwitz is more famous than these extermination camps while Auschwitz was less exterminationist than these others. 15% of the inmates at Auschwitz survived.

After all, it was first and foremost a labor camp.  It sounds awful that 85% of them were killed of course, but at some of those Polish extermination camps it was even worse. There was one that killed 900,000 people. There were perhaps 30 survivors who ran for it into the local woods at the very end as the Allies were closing in. Even most of these escapees were killed. Only .0003 percent survived. 15% is a Hell of a lot more than .0003%.

Anyway, Goebbels was at one of those extermination camps and he saw the mass graves where they had buried maybe 10,000’s on inmates. It had been raining and the bloating from the decaying corpses was so extreme owing to the rain and sheer number of the dead that the ground beneath them was literally rising up and falling as they were standing on it. The Earth was alive but in a terrible way.

Once again, Goebbels completely flipped out, got hysterical, started yelling and crying and said no more mass graves. This is how the ovens were added to the gas chambers. To eliminate dead bodies in a more efficient and especially less disgusting way. Once again if you put them in ovens, you can almost rationalize it away. All that’s left are ashes and it’s hard to see those are former humans. Your mind can always tell you, “Oh those are just ashes, that’s all. Not formerly human corpses.” Again this is not logical, but according to emotional logic, it makes complete sense.

It’s interesting that three of the most evil men of the 20th Century actually had a moral compass. A very tiny and meager one for sure, but some things were beyond the pale even for them. One wonders if there has ever been a human with no moral compass at all if one such a human is even possible. Even wild animals have moral compasses. A female mountain lion won’t kill her cubs. A male mountain lion won’t kill his mate.

It’s also interesting that if the kill people and get rid of bodies in as cold, efficient, sterile and maybe democratic way as possible, the mind can rationalize that you’re not “really” killing people and disappearing bodies.

Alt Left: Keynesianism, Social Liberalism, and Even Social Democracy Will Always Give Way to Neoliberalism

Keynesianism, Social Liberalism and Even Social Democracy Will Always Give Way to Neoliberalism

Keynesianism isn’t sustainable because the inevitable reactions against it will always swing neoliberal. So Keynesianism simply gives way to neoliberalism. Not to mention that they entire corporate class despises Keynesianism so they wage war against it the whole time it’s in. The corporate class wants neoliberalism and only neoliberalism all over the world. They have since the 1500’s. My brother had to read various tracts for his political science degree. One was by a businessman in Italy in the 1500’s.

He could have been Donald Trump or Ronald Reagan. He had no use for the state at all and preferred it to exist at as low a level as possible. He wanted absolutely nothing out of the state and mostly just wanted it to get the Hell out of the way and leave him alone as much as possible. He had no use for society either, as he felt it didn’t even exist. All that existed was money and the things you could buy and sell with it. So you see, capitalists haven’t changed since their birth in nascent form in Italy 500 years ago. They’ve always been the same and they’ll always be the same. It has to do with a Marxist notion called “the laws of economics.”

Alt Left: The “Stab in the Back” and the Balfour Declaration: Anatomy of an Antisemitic Myth

Polar Bear: I thought the stab in the back was real. The British offered Jews Israel to turn on Germany and the scorpion stung the frog.

The British offered which Jews Israel if they turned on Germany? You mean the Balfour Declaration?

This is not correct.

Balfour had no effect on German Jews, most of whom disliked Zionism. You must realize that Zionism was unpopular among European Jews at that time and all through the 1920’s. As James Schipper notes in the comments,  Zionism was not popular among West European Jews. However, it was popular among East European Jews, especially the less religious ones.

As James Schipper notes in the comments, the notion that the British gave the Jews Palestine if they would get the Americans into the war does not appear to be correct. The US entered WW1 in April 1917. The Balfour Declaration was signed in November 1917. Unless someone makes a good argument otherwise, the timelines don’t line up.

However, I have seen this theory written up on the Internet – that the British promised the Jews Palestine and US Jews said, “If you give us Palestine, we will get the Americans into the war.” And then the Jews used money and media power to brainwash Americans into joining the war. As Schipper notes, this may well not be true as the timelines don’t add up.

In lieu of verification of this theory, this would have to be listed as a possibly antisemitic argument accusing US Jews of tricking the US into war against Germany in WW1 in response to the Jews getting Israel.

Although many of them had come from Germany, German Jews and US Jews nevertheless had very tenuous connections.

Alt Left: Repost: Mao Messed Up

I think an assessment of Mao ought to be made on a scientific basis, beyond politics. Anti-Communists and rightwingers have an extremely poor record as far documenting this sort of thing, so I almost want to dismiss everything they say.

Probably the best sources would be leftwingers or even Communists who also happen to be some sort of China scholars. To the detriment of Mao, a number of Leftists, socialists and Communists who are also China scholars are starting to contribute some very negative things about Mao.

The good side is quite clear. Life expectancy doubled under Mao, from 35 to 70, from 1949 to 1976, in only 27 years. Supporters of fascism and Hitler are challenged to provide evidence that Hitler’s rule benefited anyone. Nazism was at core a death cult. Life expectancy collapsed in Germany under Hitler and in all of the regions that were occupied by Nazis. Nazism wasn’t about improving life for the common man at all; it was about war and endless war and endless extermination of the less fit.

Communism, with the exception of Pol Pot’s rule, where life expectancy collapsed in Cambodia and 1.7 million died, has been quite a bit different. Most Communist regimes have killed people, but at the same time seem to have saved many lives, often millions of lives. So it gets hard to tally things up.

I suppose pro-Communists would say that the many deaths were necessary in order to save so many lives. That’s an interesting argument and ought to be taken up. Was there a way to save so many lives without killing millions of people? I hope there would be, but I’m not sure.

Pre-China Mao was vastly deadlier than China under Mao. The life expectancy figures make this clear. Czarist Russia was 3 times deadlier than the USSR under Lenin and Stalin. This is where this “greatest killers of all time” crap runs into the mud. If the death rate was 3 times higher per year under the Czar than under Stalin, just how was Stalin the worst killer of all time?

Same with Mao. I don’t have good figures, but once again, it looks like Nationalist China in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s was 3 times deadlier per year, or maybe more, than Maoist China. If the death rate collapsed under Mao, how was he the worst killer ever?
The truth is there are plenty of ways to kill a man. You can kill him with a bullet or by sending him to a camp, or you can kill him by disease and lack of food, the silent and uncounted method that the capitalists prefer.

Nevertheless, an accounting of deaths under Mao needs to be done. Just glancing at the data here, it’s already looking like Mao was way worse than Stalin. Way worse.

The initial consolidation of power in China was brutal. Whether the landlords were killed by the party or by the peasants is not that relevant. Mao said that 700,000 landlords were killed, and even he thought that was too many. China scholars think it is higher, from 1-4 million. I would dismiss the 4 million figure, but anywhere from 700,000-3 million is possible. Further research is needed here.

The Anti-Counterrevolutionary Drive of 1950 followed, an attempt to uncover supporters of the Nationalists and counterrevolutionaries. Tens of thousands were killed, or possibly up to a million, let’s call it 20,000-1 million. Further research is needed.

Anti-Christian Campaigns of the 1950’s. These were launched against mostly Christians, but also other religions. “Many thousands” are said to have died. Definitely some further work is necessary here.

Anti-Counterrevolutionary Campaign of 1953. Mao said, “95% of the people are good.” The Party assumed that this meant 5% were bad. Hundreds of thousands died.

The Great Leap Forward Famine happened between 1959-1961. Unlike the fake Holodomor of 1932-33, it’s looking more and more like most of the blame for this horrible catastrophe can be laid at the feet of Mao himself. The man was a fanatic. He was told that there was a famine, and in early 1959, he backtracked on some of his crazy ideas, while he blamed subordinates for the famine.

Then there was the Lushan Conference in May 1959. Mao accused Peng Dehuai, a critic of the Great Leap, of conspiring against him. Peng was purged, and the Great Leap went was ordered to go ahead full speed. If there had been no Lushan Conference, there would have been no famine. There followed two years of catastrophe, in which there was overprovisioning of grain from the peasants which was then stored in warehouses in cities, where it rotted or was exported for scarce foreign currency.

Much of the problem was that local officials were wildly exaggerating harvests, hence the overprovisioning at the state level. They thought that with bumper harvests, they could take grain from the countryside to the cities without problems. But there were no bumper harvests. Harvests had collapsed.
Finally in 1961, the state figured out that it had screwed up royally and started mass importing grain. Caravans of grain trucks flowed to the countryside, and the famine was over. But many were too weak to even walk to the trucks to get the food.

Mao is blamed for an atmosphere of terror that led underlings to fake bumper crops where none had occurred. With no democracy in the party, no one wanted to contradict Mao. Mao himself had some utterly idiotic ideas, which he was allowed to implement due to lack of party democracy. After the Great Leap, the party realized it had screwed up bad. Even Mao knew that. The Cultural Revolution was in a lot of ways Mao’s attempt to regain face after getting egg on his face in the Great Leap.

As far as deaths during the Great Leap, this is still up in the air. Even Maoists admit that there were 15 million excess deaths in the period. Some of the higher figures use preposterous accounting techniques whereby people who had never even been born were counted as “deaths.” Tell me how that works. Nevertheless, the figure may be higher than 15 million. At any rate, it’s the worst famine in modern world history, and it’s a permanent blot on Mao’s record.

The Cultural Revolution was sheer insanity. Many received poor educations as schools were shut down. Many cultural relics and buildings were destroyed, and a good part of China’s cultural heritage was smashed up.

People were killed and hounded all over China for little or no reason. Red Guards rampaged all over China, torturing, humiliating, imprisoning and murdering all sorts of people, including local party officials, teachers and even university professors. When someone was hounded, the humiliation went on every day and there was no escape. No one would dare to come to your side, not even your spouse. Deng Xiaoping’s son was tossed out of a window and paralyzed from the waist down.

Red Guard factions battled each other in cities across China with weapons looted from local Army depots. Sometimes Army units joined in. Red Guards in one city would attack Red Guards in another city. Women and children were murdered and kids were even buried alive. Enemies were cannibalized in one area. Ridiculous, insane and anarchic, right? Sure.

In some parts of China, victims of the Red Guards are still angry. The Red Guards are still around, older now, but still living in the villages alongside their victims. Their former victims hate them. Lawsuits have been brought against former Red Guards, but the courts have thrown them out.

From a Communist POV, one of the most tragic things about all of these persecutions and killings, when one reads the details of the individual cases, is that many of the victims were not even counterrevolutionaries. Many were dedicated, hard-working Communists and revolutionaries, often devoted Maoists. Lord knows why they were purged and victimized.

The insanity and anarchy of the Cultural Revolution is one reason why the Party wants to keep a tight reign on power. China descends pretty quickly into wild and deadly anarchy.

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Chinese Communist Party publications and the theses and dissertations by students at Chinese universities, which tend to toe the party line. As a rule, the Cultural Revolution is regarded as a big mistake by ultra-Left forces, and the Party definitely wants to avoid such messes in the future. I’ve even some some Party critiques of the Great Leap, though not much is said about that. It’s clear that the high ranks of the Party regard the Great Leap as a disaster.

There continue to be some very serious human rights abuses in China, as this 89 page report from Human Rights Watch reports. Even from the POV of a Communist, some of the abuses of these petitioners seem just flat out wrong. There doesn’t seem to be any legitimate Communist reason to be attacking a lot of these poor petitioners.

Surely in a Communist system, petitioners should have the right to protest uranium pollution of rivers, corrupt officials abusing their posts and stealing land, etc. In what way are these folks counterrevolutionaries?

But it’s not true that everyone who protests in China goes to jail. There are around 100 public protests every single day in China, often involving large groups. Only a few of them get arrested, harassed, beaten, tortured or jailed. But I guess you never know when your card will come up.

The fact that some of the harshest critiques of Mao’s crimes, excesses and stupidities are coming out of the Chinese Communist Party itself shows that slamming Mao can be done within a socialist, Leftist or Communist framework.

Can it be done in a Maoist framework? This I’m not so sure of.
The Party will not come out and make public its findings on Mao as the USSR did with Stalin because the party continues to wave the banner of Mao and practically rules under his name and visage. It’s possible that slamming Mao would so delegitimize the party that it might be fatal for the CCP. It’s a tough call.
For the anti-Semites, I have a homework assignment for you. Since Mao was a Communist and Communism is Jewish, obviously Mao was a Jew. Please uncover the secret Jewish connections of Mao and his closest supporters in the CCP.

Alt Left: The Capitalist Mindset: The Left Has No Right to Rule

Trouser Snake: So what’s the endgame? Just access to more markets to continue the capitalist Ponzi scheme?

Pretty much. Some people never learn. And the people on Earth least likely to learn are capitalists. It’s like they’re drug addicts, hooked on a crack or heroin drug called capitalism. They’re as blinded as an addict.

And they’re incapable of being peaceful. They are actually mandated to destroy any form of socialism on Earth, and as far as the social democracies, well, they’ll get to those later. They simply refuse to compromise with the Left at all, and their view in general is that the Left has no right to rule.

It is this raw, pure Latin American model of ultra-capitalism or pure neoliberalism that is presently dominant in the US in the Republican Party. As this form of capitalism leads to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer at a rapid and profound pace, it also inevitably leads to a left revolutionary reaction of some sort. This is so predictable as to almost be a law of politics along the lines of some of our physical laws like gravity.

However, this basic capitalist mindset has been subdued in most places:

  • In Europe by a social contract to ward off Communism, now fading.
  • In Canada, Australia, and New Zealand by similar social contracts, now possibly also fading.
  • In Africa by African nationalism, a local capitalism that is intertwined with such, a strong resistance to the exploitative, rape and ruin policies of colonialism, by the Marxist roots of some of the early post-colonial leaders and some independence struggles, by extreme poverty which lends itself to socialist movements, and possibly by what was probably a very collectivist tribal culture pre-colonization.
  • In the Middle East and North Africa by Islam in general, which is very hostile to extreme capitalism as anti-Islamic and an attack on the notion that all Muslims are brothers and are mandated to help each other, and also by Arab nationalism in particular, with its strong anti-colonial bent and roots in Marxism.
  • In Turkey by Islam, oddly enough. Erdogan is actually a social democrat along the lines of most Islamists (see the explanation under the Middle East and North Africa entry above).
  • In Russia and much of the former USSR by the Soviet experience which was much more popular with the people than you are told here, by and nationalism, in particular, Russian and Armenian nationalism, and by a longstanding collectivist culture with roots in a long-lasting feudalism and the underdog mindset of the masses that resulted.
  • In Japan, where corporations took over the role of the social democratic state as per Japanese ethics, nationalism, and in-group preference – our people are the best people on Earth, so we must show solidarity with each other and not let each other starve. Which model is presently falling apart. There is also a basic, possibly ancient, Asian collectivist mindset, which had been previously opposed by feudalism. However, it is easy for a collectivist culture to toss feudalism aside as feudalism is so anti-collectivist. Feudalism was a poor fit in Asia – note the experience in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos- similar to how it never worked well in the collectivist Arab world and was easily overthrown in Russia.
  • In India, where a long-standing anti-colonial ethic and independence struggle with socialist roots goes along with a long with long-standing leadership of the non-aligned countries.
  • In Central Asia, by Islam (see above) and in Iran by the Iranian revolution.

As you can see above, the capitalist morons in most of the world weren’t thinking straight, but then when are they ever? They think about as well as any addict of anything. In the Arab World, Russia, and Asia, they set up feudalism, the worst form of pre-capitalism, which generates such hatred that when it is overthrown, most former serfs go socialist or Communist.

Further, they tried to wedge feudalism into collectivist cultures, which never works, as they are the opposite of each other. This feudalism where it was longstanding led obviously to extreme forms of socialism or sometimes Communism because feudalism is so brutal and extreme that it leads, logically, to brutal and extreme counter-reactions.

This is along the lines of the theory that the more brutal and extreme the system, the more brutal and extreme the counter-reaction to that system is.

You could hardly find a country where ultra-feudalism was more ingrained in the modern era than Cambodia, along with extreme hatred between the urban and rural people. The reaction? The Khmer Rogue.

The vicious slaver regime in Haiti was overthrown by the Haitian Revolution, where all 25,000 Whites on the island were murdered in cold blood.

In the Chmielnicki Rebellion in Poland in the 1500’s, a vicious peasant rebellion took place in which not only were half the Jews killed for being allied with the feudal lords, but 1/3 of the population of the entire country was killed. Of course, all you hear about here in the West is those 25,000 Jews who were killed. I guess all those dead Gentiles didn’t count. Gee, I wonder why that is.

There were various peasant or anti-feudal serf revolts in the Inca Empire. From what little we learn of these revolts, the serfs rebelled, seized power, and killed all of the Inca feudal elite. Peasant rebellions are not only murderous, but they tend to be exterminationist.

I could go on but you get the picture.

Elsewhere, foolish capitalists imposed their capitalism via an ultra-exploitative colonial model which is guaranteed to generate extreme hatred, rebellion, and underdog views among the colonized (if not exterminationist anti-colonial rebellions – see the Haitian example above), which leads to inevitable independence struggles usually premised on underdog philosophies like socialism and Communism. By colonizing most of the world, capitalist morons insured a post-colonial world with socialist tendencies and hostility to highly exploitative neoliberalism.

Places in the World Where Extreme Capitalism (Hyper-Neoliberalism) Holds Out

Latin America is one of the few places in the world that capitalism is so extreme as to oppose even social democracy, and this is all due to the proximity and overwhelming presence of a colonial ethic under the presence of the US.

Of course, we have long had such a model here in the US, but its  savage nature has been masked by a ferocious war on Communism cleverly turned into a war on socialism, social democracy, and even petty liberalism. The great wealth of the country has also masked the brutal features of this system, as there was so much money that even the losers in the system were able to eek out a piece of the pie, although this aspect is fading  fast – look at the homeless swarming our streets.

Further, a system of social liberalism (not social democracy but headed down the road) was installed in the New Deal (as an anti-Communist social contract along the lines of the European social contracts) and further entrenched by the Great Society, here driven in part by powerful new anti-racism on the part of the state. These band-aids over the cruel neoliberal model in the US successfully kept the inevitable “peasant rebellion,” or left revolution to be more precise, postponed for a very long time.

Of course, as ultra-neoliberalism moved along its standard path of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer (greatly increased economic inequality), an inevitable left revolution started to take form. This can be seen in the Bernie Sanders insurgency in the Democratic Party, Operation Wall Street demonstrations, and even the misdirected but Communist-led BLM and anarchist-led antifa riots this summer. Once again this violence is a form of peasant rebellion and is absolutely inevitable as wealth inequality reaches a certain point.

There are a few other places outside Latin America:

  • In the Philippines, though the new president calls himself a socialist and had good relations with the Maoist NPA guerrillas.
  • In Indonesia, which however recently elected a social democrat.
  • In Thailand, where long-standing military rule tamped down class struggle, which now rages uncontrolled in a very confusing way.
  • In South Africa, where a racist White ruling class did not want to share anything with the Black underclass, and Communism, socialism, and the Left period was associated with the Black struggle for self-rule and the guerrilla war which followed. However, the ANC government is full of former Communists and people with Marxist roots.

Alt Left: The Assassination of Politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Colombia in 1948

This is the information contained in the huge update I just made in this post. I just updated the post with a lot of information about the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 which led to the massive riots called The Bogotazo, after which a decade of mass killings called La Violencia took place. The assassination of Gaitan, even more than the banana workers strike, jump-started the movement of the armed Colombian Left in the form of the Colombian guerrillas.

In 1948 in Colombia, a very popular presidential candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán of the Liberal Party, was assassinated for the same reason that given for the overthrow of Arbenz of Guatemala seven years later. The Liberal Party was one of two fascist parties of the oligarchy, along with the Conservative Party. See below for more on them.

The Liberal Party was anything but. Yet Gaitán was an interesting figure, part of a socialist movement in the party who advocated very popular candidate who promised major changes in Colombian society a battle against social, political, and economic inequality. He was also a feminist who advocated the uplift of the status of Colombian woman in society. In addition, he broached the subject of land reform, a hot button issue in Colombia.

In fact, as in so many other places in Latin America such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, the endless Leftist guerrilla war against the government is more of a fight over land than anything else. To this day, the Colombian oligarchy has refused to do a land reform, in part because this is where most of their money comes from.

Even Venezuela has had only partial success at a land reform, as it has proven too difficult to break up the big estates or latifundias. Instead, since much of the land lies idle and fallow, peasants have conducted land invasions of fallowed land in the latifundias, which has resulted in a lot of conflict.

Death squads funded by the latifundia oligarchs have murdered over 150 peasant leaders since Chavez came in over the last 20 years. Parts of the Chavista Movement have been aligned with the rural rich for whatever reason, and they have been involved in repressing these peasant movements also.

He was murdered by the Colombian oligarchy or ruling class, which has stayed in power by mass murder for 75 years now. They were even massacring people earlier, as there was a mass slaughter of striking workers at banana plantations in the northwest in a place called La Magdalena in 1928.

Even this early, the US was waging a Cold War against the USSR. The US became very alarmed by the strike, as the plantations were owned by the US United Fruit Company. United Fruit and the US government described the strikers as subversives and Communists. The US threatened to invade if the strike was not put down by the Colombian government.

Under orders from United Fruit, the Colombian military attacked the workers. Many striking workers were killed. The event was memorialized by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his famous novel 100 Years of Solitude. The event was a watershed in Colombian politics, as an actual Colombian Left was formed around this time.

Gaitan was an excellent speaker and his rallies drew large crowds of union members and poor people. He was characterized as a demagogue, like Juan Peron, who was already rising to power in Argentina. He was also a budding nationalist. He was criticized by the Conservative Party, the right wing of the Liberal Party, and even the Communist Party, which regarded him as a competitor for the interests of the workers.

In 1933, he split with the Liberal Party and formed the Unión Nacional Izquierdista Revolucionaria (National Leftist Revolutionary Union). In 1946, he proposed a Gaitanista Program. It advocated many things:

Development agencies for the advancement of the social, political, and economic advancement of peasants in the countryside. Policies to redistribute wealth in Colombia. Nationalization of public services, a progressive income tax, and the development of a national economy. A land reform and new pro-labor laws.

In terms of foreign policy, it advocated an economic union of Latin American countries so they could serve the interests of their people instead of that of the oligarchies and foreign carpetbagging corporations. His project could be best described as anti-plutocratic and anti-imperialist.

He was assassinated in 1948 by a “lone gunman,” Juan Roa Sierra, along the lines of Lee Harvey Oswald. Two ex-CIA agents have confessed that it was really the CIA that was behind the operation. The assassin took orders from two named CIA agents and the assassination plan was called Operation Pantomime.

This was probably one of the first of countless assassinations of liberal and leftwing figures the world over by the CIA undertaken as part of the Cold War. Sierra visited Gaitan in his office in  the morning and at 1 PM, he shot Gaitan dead.

An enraged mob then set upon Sierra, who was protected by an Army colonel. He was chased to a store where  he holed up. The mob smashed into the store and dragged him outside. He was beaten and stabbed so many times that his corpse was unrecognizable.

At the time of his assassination, a meeting of the Pan-American Conference led by US Secretary of State George Marshall. At this meeting, all members of the group agreed that fighting Communism was their number one concern.

The despicable Organization of American States or OAS, a fake organization of Latin American countries that is actually run by the US and serves to promote the interests of the US and its neo-colonies in Latin America.

At the same time, the Latin American Youth Congress was taking place. It been organized by Fidel Castro of Cuba and was funded by Juan Peron of Argentina. A young Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a law student at the time and was eating lunch at the time  Gaitan was killed. He rushed to the scene and arrived just in time to see Sierra lynched by the mob. He memorialized the event in his book, Living to Tell the Tale.

It is possible that Gaitan, like Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, was a patsy for an assassination carried out by the US Deep State in the case of the former and by the FBI itself in the case of Ray. Gaitan suffered from schizophrenia, could not fire a gun properly, the gun in his hand was not capable of firing accurately, and he was standing quite a distance away from Gaitan while the murder occurred at a short distance. Further, Sierra was not seen anywhere near the assassination. The first time  he was spotted, he was in between two police officers.

The Colombian government quickly blamed the USSR and the Colombian Communist Party for the murder. They also tied in the young Fidel Castro with the plot. This version seems very unlikely.

Notice that this CIA assassination took place under “liberal Democrat” Harry Truman.

The murder of this candidate was followed by a wild  riot known as the Bogotazo. Many of the rioters were armed and the riots left much of downtown Bogota in ruins. The riots left 1,800 people dead. This was part of a larger reign of violence in the countryside which had started in 1930. By 1948, Bogota was full of peasants fleeing the violence in the countryside.

Alt Left: Updated: How the Armed Colombian Left (the FARC and the ELN) Came to Be

I just updated this post with a lot of information about the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 which led to the massive riots called The Bogotazo, after which a decade of mass killings called La Violencia took place. The assassination of Gaitan, even more than the banana workers strike, jump-started the movement of the armed Colombian Left in the form of the Colombian guerrillas.

In 1948 in Colombia, a very popular presidential candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán of the Liberal Party, was assassinated for the same reason that given for the overthrow of Arbenz of Guatemala seven years later. The Liberal Party was one of two fascist parties of the oligarchy, along with the Conservative Party. See below for more on them.

The Liberal Party was anything but. Yet Gaitán was an interesting figure, part of a socialist movement in the party who advocated very popular candidate who promised major changes in Colombian society a battle against social, political, and economic inequality. He was also a feminist who advocated the uplift of the status of Colombian woman in society. In addition, he broached the subject of land reform, a hot button issue in Colombia.

In fact, as in so many other places in Latin America such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, the endless Leftist guerrilla war against the government is more of a fight over land than anything else. To this day, the Colombian oligarchy has refused to do a land reform, in part because this is where most of their money comes from.

Even Venezuela has had only partial success at a land reform, as it has proven too difficult to break up the big estates or latifundias. Instead, since much of the land lies idle and fallow, peasants have conducted land invasions of fallowed land in the latifundias, which has resulted in a lot of conflict.

Death squads funded by the latifundia oligarchs have murdered over 150 peasant leaders since Chavez came in over the last 20 years. Parts of the Chavista Movement have been aligned with the rural rich for whatever reason, and they have been involved in repressing these peasant movements also.

He was murdered by the Colombian oligarchy or ruling class, which has stayed in power by mass murder for 75 years now. They were even massacring people earlier, as there was a mass slaughter of striking workers at banana plantations in the northwest in a place called La Magdalena in 1928.

Even this early, the US was waging a Cold War against the USSR. The US became very alarmed by the strike, as the plantations were owned by the US United Fruit Company. United Fruit and the US government described the strikers as subversives and Communists. The US threatened to invade if the strike was not put down by the Colombian government.

Under orders from United Fruit, the Colombian military attacked the workers. Many striking workers were killed. The event was memorialized by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his famous novel 100 Years of Solitude. The event was a watershed in Colombian politics, as an actual Colombian Left was formed around this time.

Gaitan was an excellent speaker and his rallies drew large crowds of union members and poor people. He was characterized as a demagogue, like Juan Peron, who was already rising to power in Argentina. He was also a budding nationalist. He was criticized by the Conservative Party, the right wing of the Liberal Party, and even the Communist Party, which regarded him as a competitor for the interests of the workers.

In 1933, he split with the Liberal Party and formed the Unión Nacional Izquierdista Revolucionaria (National Leftist Revolutionary Union). In 1946, he proposed a Gaitanista Program. It advocated many things:

Development agencies for the advancement of the social, political, and economic advancement of peasants in the countryside. Policies to redistribute wealth in Colombia. Nationalization of public services, a progressive income tax, and the development of a national economy. A land reform and new pro-labor laws.

In terms of foreign policy, it advocated an economic union of Latin American countries so they could serve the interests of their people instead of that of the oligarchies and foreign carpetbagging corporations. His project could be best described as anti-plutocratic and anti-imperialist.

He was assassinated in 1948 by a “lone gunman,” Juan Roa Sierra, along the lines of Lee Harvey Oswald. Two ex-CIA agents have confessed that it was really the CIA that was behind the operation. The assassin took orders from two named CIA agents and the assassination plan was called Operation Pantomime.

This was probably one of the first of countless assassinations of liberal and leftwing figures the world over by the CIA undertaken as part of the Cold War. Sierra visited Gaitan in his office in  the morning and at 1 PM, he shot Gaitan dead.

An enraged mob then set upon Sierra, who was protected by an Army colonel. He was chased to a store where  he holed up. The mob smashed into the store and dragged him outside. He was beaten and stabbed so many times that his corpse was unrecognizable.

At the time of his assassination, a meeting of the Pan-American Conference led by US Secretary of State George Marshall. At this meeting, all members of the group agreed that fighting Communism was their number one concern.

The despicable Organization of American States or OAS, a fake organization of Latin American countries that is actually run by the US and serves to promote the interests of the US and its neo-colonies in Latin America.

At the same time, the Latin American Youth Congress was taking place. It been organized by Fidel Castro of Cuba and was funded by Juan Peron of Argentina. A young Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a law student at the time and was eating lunch at the time  Gaitan was killed. He rushed to the scene and arrived just in time to see Sierra lynched by the mob. He memorialized the event in his book, Living to Tell the Tale.

It is possible that Gaitan, like Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, was a patsy for an assassination carried out by the US Deep State in the case of the former and by the FBI itself in the case of Ray.

Gaitan suffered from schizophrenia, could not fire a gun properly, the gun in his hand was not capable of firing accurately, and he was standing quite a distance away from Gaitan while the murder occurred at a short distance. Further, Sierra was not seen anywhere near the assassination. The first time  he was spotted, he was in between two police officers.

The Colombian government quickly blamed the USSR and the Colombian Communist Party for the murder. They also tied in the young Fidel Castro with the plot. This version seems very unlikely.

Notice that this CIA assassination took place under “liberal Democrat” Harry Truman.

The murder of this candidate was followed by a wild  riot known as the Bogotazo. Many of the rioters were armed and the riots left much of downtown Bogota in ruins. The riots left 1,800 people dead. This was part of a larger reign of violence in the countryside which had started in 1930. By 1948, Bogota was full of peasants fleeing the violence in the countryside.

The Bogotazo led eventually to La Violencia, a truly crazy 10 year period from 1954-1964 in which Liberals and Conservatives, which ideologically are both simply fascist parties, with the Liberals masquerading as social democrats to the extent that they are even members of the Socialist International, massacred each other in huge numbers for no particular reason at all.

The Liberals and Conservatives typically trade off running the country. Although they hated each other to the point of slaughtering hundreds of thousands of each other, the odd thing is that despite their names, ideologically and in governance, there is little difference between. They are both far rightwing parties of the oligarchy.

The armed Left in the form of the ELN, which was created in 1964, theorizes that La Violencia was simply a way for the elite to slaughter the politically active working class.

After La Violencia ended in 1964, a small group of people tired of being massacred settled in some property in West-Central Colombia and declared themselves a semi-autonomous republic. They were also heavily armed. They said that and armed themselves mostly to keep from being massacred. And they did set it up as a “Communist republic” but it was only a small patch of land of no particular consequence and the group’s numbers never numbered greater than 200.

They named this place Marquetalia. Manuel “Sure Shot” Marulanda, the leader of the FARC for the next 40 years, was one of the founders of this commune. The Colombian government became very alarmed that 200 people had called themselves Communists and settled some lands that they freaked out and called for Uncle Sam to come help.

This was under the “liberal Democrat” Johnson Administration. The US also became very alarmed and we sent several generals and a troop of Green Berets down there.

At this time, the Green Berets were advising the Guatemalan government in putting down a Left insurgency that began there in 1960. They put it down via massacres of the civilian population. There’s nothing noble about the Green Berets. They’re simply the US government version of a Latin American death squad.

Anyway, a significant army detachment was mobilized and Marquetalia was attacked with US advisors by their side. There are suggestions that the US and Colombia even used chemical weapons against the commune.

The Marquetalians fought back but were defeated, suffering many casualties. The survivors retreated into the mountains of Colombia. These are really mountain jungles as the mountains are covered in a jungle-like near-rainforest and it’s impossible to find anyone or anything in there.

There they decided that all peaceful attempts at change, including setting up a semi-autonomous commune, were impossible, so they could either sit in the villages and wait for the government to come murder them or they could take up arms so they could at least fight back when the army and death squads came.

The group was called the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and they are still active to this day, 56 years later. At one time around 2000, they controlled ~50% of Colombia and formed an actual threat to the regime.

The ELN (National Liberation Army) was formed at the same time, in 1964, in Eastern Colombia under obscure circumstances that I’m not aware of.

The original philosophy was Liberation Theology and their leader was Camilo Torres, the original “priest with a machine gun.” Liberation theology can be thought of as “Jesus with a machine gun” and in fact there are murals in Latin America showing exactly this. The idea is that Jesus supported “the preferential option for the poor” and that even armed struggle to achieve this goal was not only valid but very Christian.

One of the original theorists was an educator named Paulo Friere in Brazil who published a famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed – also published in the same year that the ELN and the FARC were formed in 1964 -along these lines, advocating a liberation theology component to be the focus of the curriculum in Latin America. Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez could be considered the father of Liberation Theology. He wrote a book called The Theology of Liberation around this same time.

To this day, although the ELN are Leftists, they are still officially a Christian organization and they have many supporters among the Catholic clergy in Colombia, as does the officially atheist FARC.

Alt Left: The US Has Always Supported Fascism Except for a Few Years in the 1940’s

America loves fascists, that’s the bottom line. And it’s worse America loves fascists, that’s the bottom line.

And it’s worse than that. Capitalists love fascism. Capitalists have never opposed any fascist state or rightwing dictatorship. Nor have any conservatives ever opposed a single fascist state or rightwing dictatorship.

Now that does not mean that the US is a fascist country, at least in its domestic policies.

Its foreign policy is a lot harder to figure. The US been supporting fascism overseas ever since US corporations started migrating overseas, first in Latin America, in search of greater profits, as capitalism demands that they must do. We may well be a fascist country at the moment. Trump is a fascist and the Republican Party is now a full-fledged fascist party, whereas before this aspect of itself was somewhat submerged, hidden, or put on the back-burner.

But the US has always been a pro-fascist country. We supported fascism from 1910 all the way through the 1930’s. The New York Times praised Hitler when he took power. Corporations in the UK felt the same way. He was killing and imprisoning the Left, and making the country safe for wealth and capital. Which is all any capitalist ever wants.

It is only when fascism became racialized, expansionist, and colonial in part due to rage at not being invited to the party when the European powers were racialized and expansionist as part of the divvying up, enslavement, and looting of the word outside of Europe by the European powers.

Japan and Germany were left out of this block party, so they decided, “Hey it’s our turn now. You guys have your colonialism, now we will have ours.” As the West continued to hold all of its colonies, the Axis powers were correct. Indeed we had to be forced into the war by the Japanese attack that we literally provoked and forced them into.

World War 2 was the only time in history that the US has ever used its military might to attack fascism, mostly because fascism had been getting rather out of hand, uncontrolled, chaotic, and destructive.

Right before the war, the US was pro-fascist, and no sooner was the ink dry on the surrender papers when the US started recruiting former Nazis, Mussolinists, and fascist Axis collaborators in Eastern Europe, but also in Italy, Greece, and Turkey. We immediately hired these Nazis to be our army for the dirty war we declared on the Soviet Union probably a day after the Yalta Agreement.

And no sooner were the Japanese fascists defeated that we started funding and training the Japanese fascist collaborators in South Korea to fight communism. The truth is that no one hates Communists more than fascists. Fascists think they should be killed on sight. More non-fascists are a bit more squeamish or at least not as extremist. So we recruited this brutal and amoral fascists to be dirty-fighting (Nazi-like) soldiers in our war against Communism. The first fascist armies funded by the West started operations in the Baltics and Ukraine only a few months after the Armistice.

So we only fought fascism for four years, from 1941-1945. Before that until 1910, we had supported it. And from 1945-on, the US supported any and all fascist countries or guerrillas everywhere on Earth.

After 1989, US liberal Democrats said this fascist dirty war was the lamentable but sadly necessary policy of the Cold War. Now that the Cold War was over, we didn’t need to be so evil anymore, and now we could go back to being the shining city on the hill.

Except the fascist Cold War didn’t end in 1989. It’s still going on to this day in the sense that it has reverted to the pre-World War 2 policy of supporting rightwing authoritarians and attacking any and all manifestations of the Left. All of the Left countries that were targeted in the Cold War remained targets after Gorbachev.

So the Cold War was never about fighting the evils of Communism in the form of the USSR. The Cold War was simply another phase of the fascist war on the Left everywhere on Earth that the US has waged since 1910. The enemy was never the USSR. The enemy was always socialism, or in many places, even social democracy or social liberalism.

So while we have traditionally not been a fascist country, we have always been a pro-fascist country. We didn’t practice it, but we supported itself everywhere it appeared on Earth.

Alt Left: It’s Up to 6,000,001 Now

I’m not necessarily against the 6 million figure for the Jewish dead in the Holocaust, one of the most evil crimes in modern history. Actually, I think 5.7 million is a better figure, but even some estimates that exceed 6 million are on decent grounds. Reasonable figures start at the great, late Raul Hilberg’s 4.1 million and go up from there. Any less than that? Sorry, you’re a Holocaust Denier. And shame on you.

Anyway, looks like it’s up to 6 million and one now with the addition of our latest Holocaust victim, George Floyd! Hey, come on up to the stage, George, and get your special victim prize! Whoops. I forgot. You’re dead. Hey George, think on the bright side. On November 25, a mere eight days ago, you had been drug free for five months! When was the last time that happened, George? When you were five years old? Probably.

Speaking of which, what the Hell is career criminal and drug addict Saint George Floyd doing in a goddamned Holocaust museum. And speaking of Holocaust museums, I’m not against them on principle, but can someone tell me why we need a damned (((Holocaust Museum))) on every corner!? Ever get the feeling that (((someone))) is sleazily using this horrendous tragedy for less than noble purposes?

Like legitimizing the crimes of (((that shitty little country)))?

Like (((making money)))? Guess there’s no business like Shoah business, right, guys?

Geez. Some people have no shame at all, huh?

And yeah. Shame on you too. I’m trying to figure out whose worse, the appalling deniers of a criminal genocide, or these (((profiteers and sleazy brainwashers))).

Alt Left: The Machinations of the CIA, with Special Focus on the Kennedy Assassination

The CIA uses drug smuggling, theft, and other criminal activity to finance its black budget. Right now, the US military is leading convoys of oil tankers out of Syria to Iraq full of the oil that Trump is stealing from Syria in the east of the country.

The oil goes to a US controlled entity in Iraq. Rumor is it is being used to fund the CIA’s black budget. The black budget is the CIA’s underground budget that is not accounted for. It’s used for all manner of dirty deeds, not necessarily done dirt cheap. False flags, fake attacks, provocations, you name it, if it’s dirty and scummy, the CIA will do it. There’s almost no limit to how low the CIA will go to achieve their aims. You name it and they’re probably capable of it.

By the way, the CIA killed John F. Kennedy. Probably working with Texas oilmen, the Mafia, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Lyndon Johnson, and even Castro himself, who may have smuggled the assassins out of the country via Mexico. No one quite knows Oswald’s role except that he may indeed have been a patsy. Jack Ruby’s role is also very mysterious. He was sent to prison and refused to talk. He said he was put up to the homicide by powerful people. He was terrified that if he talked, they would kill him. He was probably right.

See Mr. Epstein. By the way, Epstein didn’t commit suicide. See how fast they covered that up? The people who run this country are very dirty indeed! I feel that Epstein was killed on orders of Bill Barr.

A friend of mine had lunch a while back with Lyndon Johnson’s former personal attorney. He says that Johnson was in on the Kennedy assassination. My friend asked him who killed JFK and the man said, “The foreign policy establishment of the United States.” For those of you who don’t know, shorthand for that term is nothing less than the Deep State. That’s all the Deep State is: the foreign policy establishment of the United States.

Alt Left: A Bit about the Weathermen and the Black Liberation Army

I remember watching the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. That was pretty impressive. Saw the whole thing on TV at age 10. I was already quite interested in politics and foreign affairs at that age. Mayor Daly, a Democrat, hauled his cop goons out and they set about busting heads. Not long after that was the Days of Rage, and that’s when the peaceful antiwar movement petered out. Now the antiwar movement had a violent wing.

Out of this wing grew the Weathermen. The Weathermen and others set off 50,000 bombs in US in the early 1970’s. The almost always phoned them in ahead of time so people could be evacuated and they usually went off in the middle of the night.

They did kill one man, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, staying late in the lab when a Weathermen bomb went off at 3 AM. Everyone screams about that, but the Weathermen were trying to stop the war. That’s what all the bombs were about. They killed one guy. How many did Nixon kill? Who killed more? The Weathermen were trying to end the war and save lives. Was Nixon? Hardly.

I still support the bombing campaign of the Weathermen to this day. In fact, in the 1980’s, I was on the mailing list of their aboveground organization, the John Brown Book Club out of the Bay Area. I got their bimonthly, Breakthrough. They were already pretty insane by them. Hell they were insane back in the day.

Remember that lunatic Bernadine Dohrn’s crazy rants praising the Manson murders? These idiots were already on the “White people are evil” thing. Dohrn would give speeches telling young White women to kill their White babies after they were born so as not to create more evil White people.

Ten years later, in 1981, they hooked up with some crazies called the Black Liberation Army. I believe the BLA was a radical split from the Black Panthers. In the early 1970’s, debate swirled around the Panthers. The war was still on. The Panthers had not achieved their goals.  But they were still ostensibly committed to more or less peaceful change. At least they were not committed to open armed struggle.

The bomb-throwers called the peaceful change types sellouts. They felt, as usual, that peaceful change would get them nowhere and the only way to achieve their revolutionary goals was armed struggle. Most of this group split off from the Panthers and  the Panthers said good riddance. Attempts to link the Black Panthers to the BLA radical armed revolutionaries are false and sleazy. Don’t fall for it. The Panthers were ok.

Joanne Chesimard (Assata Shakur) was one of their most famous guerrillas. They were completely insane of course, like all the armed groups back then, but I have to admit she was one badass bitch. She’s in Cuba now.

She’s wanted for the shooting death of a police officer who was killed in a shootout with BLA members they pulled over in a car. She’s innocent. She got shot and was badly hurt. Hell, she was in the back seat and didn’t even have a gun. The driver, a man, fired most of the shots including the bullet that killed the cop. He himself was killed.

Incredibly, Chesimard escaped after that shootout (!). She was later imprisoned in a federal prison but the her comrades in the BLA actually broke her out of a federal prison in Florida by disguising themselves as workers delivering linen to the prison. They broke her out in a wild scene and even managed to escape. Chesimard then vanished off the face of the Earth for 2 years.

Actually she was underground, but you have to realize that the Weathermen, etc. were being helped by a huge network of maybe 1 million people, the vast majority of whom have never been caught and have never even been suspected of a crime. 2 years later, Chesimard mysteriously popped up in Cuba!

In 1981, the remains of the Weathermen had taken up the radical Black cause of the BLA, who were Black separatists who wanted to set up a Black state. The remaining Weathermen apparently felt that Blacks were the leading edge of the revolution.

See the parallels nowadays with BLM? The similarities don’t end there. The leadership of BLM itself and its associated organizations includes the remains of the old Weathermen, now reorganized as the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, still Communists but now apparently pursuing the peaceful road to power.

Another group called the Freedom Road Socialist Organization is also behind a lot of the BLM protests, especially the violent aspects. These are also Communists. I hate to give credit to wild rightwing accusations, but I assure you that the leadership of BLM and its associated organizations are literally Marxists and Communists.

The Weathermen and the BLA robbed a Brinks truck in September 1981 and a wild shootout ensued. Some guards were killed along with a some BLA men. It looks like the BLA were the ones who shot the guards. They were pulled over on the freeway and BLA fighters burst out of the back of the van, guns blazing. More people died. The survivors got away again but were quickly caught. So there ended the saga of the Weathermen.

The FBI conducted raids of activists associated with the Weathermen and the BLA soon afterwards but they came up empty-handed. Everyone had been tipped off and fled ahead of the feds. In one case, the suspects had left so quickly that the coffee kettle was literally still heating on the stove when the FBI burst in. I’m wondering if the Weathermen and BLA had people inside federal law enforcement who tipped them off.

The Weathermen who were arrested in the Brinks robbery, including a few women, are still in prison. One, (((Kathy Boudin))) died in prison of cancer recently. Incredibly, her son, who is probably quite radical himself, recently won the election for District Attorney for the city of San Francisco!

Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers went underground and stayed there for ~20 years (I told you they had a good support network), but were captured after decades on the lam. They were given very short sentences and pretty much let off the hook. I heard Ayers on the radio recently and he was completely unrepentant, defending every bomb the Weathermen ever set off.

They are both now professors in the Education Department of the University of Chicago. They are in deep with the Democratic Party in the area the Democratic city government in Chicago and are pretty much political fixtures in Chicago. Yes, Barack Obama appeared at a couple of roundtables where they were present. Much was made of this by the Retard Right, but there’s less there than their seems. Everyone who is anyone in Democratic politics in Chicago knows Ayers and Dohrn.

They’re cleaned up now anyway and for all intents and purposes, they’re respectable citizens. What’s wrong with this stupid country anyway? In Latin America, former armed Leftist guerrillas lay down arms and then get elected to top posts in the government. The Presidents of Uruguay and Brazil in recent years were both former armed guerrillas from long ago. Why are we so hung up and weird? Let me know when we join the rest of the continent of the Americas, as is our inevitable destiny .

Alt Left: Sadism and Creativity in Society Are Related to Economic and Societal Structure

Another interesting post from commenter Brian. He ties societal sadism and Social Darwinism into economic changes and ties societal creativity into societal structure, in particular its degree of flexibility.

I completely agree that there is a sadistic tendency in people that is expressed toward those deemed socially inferior. I’ve seen it and, having been in foster homes for a time growing up, experienced it.

I’ve often wondered at what seems to be a mean-spiritedness of the culture in general during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and if this mean-spirited character was linked to industrialization and to the growth of severe inequalities in society, both class and race based.

Those inequalities existed before the industrial revolution, but industrialization marked a new level of complexity in social organization, and the rise of many “new men” as elites. In the transformation of a society toward a new economic system and set of social relations, old inequalities are exacerbated, and the new elites who have risen to the top seem eager to shore up their position by waging a reactionary crackdown on dissent and calls to moderate their avarice.

The Social Darwinist, let-the-undeserving-poor-rot, bootstrap mentality of the upper class was encouraged in the general population by those who had risen to the top as a way to justify their behavior, and it had the effect of drawing out the worst tendencies in human nature in society at large. It was a bully’s ideology and encouraged ordinary people to let out their inner sadism, which ordinarily – without authoritative encouragement – would have been more repressed.

This is how you get gleeful lynchings, the hanging of elephants from a giant chain, the proliferation of freak shows where people can satisfy their inner monster by laughing at folks with severe genetic deformities.

I wonder if this witches’ brew of inhumanity cooked up by the propagandists of the new robber baron class was a factor precipitating World War I. Indeed the displacements of industrialization along with repression of the working class by disconnected and haughty elites and the whole toxic culture this gave rise to poisoned Europe just as badly as it had the United States.

The periods of the cruelest treatment of ordinary people tend to coincide with episodes of great economic expansion, the rise of new men and new families to positions nearer the top of society, and the complexification of society in general.

Another example is a century earlier in Britain, around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was the very beginning of the industrial revolution – or the first industrial revolution, as opposed to the second which I was referring to above – and began with the Enclosure Acts that forced peasants off the common lands so they could become the new urban class of industrial laborers.

During this time the Bloody Code reached its bloodiest extreme and more than two hundred crimes could be punished by death, even as a number of minors were executed for rather petty crimes. These were the classic Dickensian times, and they are marked by great new opportunities for moneymaking that attracted a class of people willing to subject other humans to appalling degradations for their own profit.

When we think of the medieval period, we often think of brutal tortures. But in fact such tortures, while they occurred in the medieval period, were used far more extensively in the Renaissance and early modern times than in the medieval period as was the death penalty in general.

Once again, what we find at that time is a transformation in the socioeconomic system, specifically moving away from feudalism in Western Europe and the rise of a new middle merchant class across much of Europe, starting in Italy. Perhaps the use of such punishments is meant to break the spirits of those who suffer most during such transitional periods so they are less of a threat to the elites, especially the new and very insecure/paranoid elites.

I suspect that what we see today, with the mean-spirited attitude of the neoliberal age – the expansions of the prison system going back to the 70s and 80s (the very dawn of the neoliberal age) and the electronics and digital boom – is another such period of social complexification, economic transformation, dispossession of whole sections of society and even of regions in general like the rust belt, and the rise of many new men (and women now) into the ranks of the ruling class.

For around forty years I’ve been seeing among the upper middle classes and above is an increase in callousness, selfishness towards and even dehumanization of various groups of people, from Blacks to working class (now often poor) Whites and anyone who isn’t at least upper middle class.

To address the idea that such periods help to breed out criminal genes from a population, I do not doubt this is true. These phases of societal transformation seem to yield a more docile population on the other end of them. But I think this process will eventually eliminate the spark of genius in our population and in the West in general.

It largely has eliminated this spark already. At least in the realm of the social sciences of fundamental thought like philosophy, modern European philosophy having seen its best days some two to three centuries ago. Other fields that are downstream of basic thought have been able to flourish since then, but they will stagnate, and some are stagnating already.

Going back to civilizational and race theory, the difference between White civilization and Asian seems to be that White civilization has been far more creative for centuries now, despite Asians having higher average IQ’s. The spark of genius requires a high IQ but also creativity and originality, which mostly comes from people who are off-kilter and don’t easily fit into a very conventional, static society that looks down on new ideas or unusual behavior.

You, Robert, have mentioned before that many very intelligent and interesting people work in odd jobs and have little to show for their talents. I think such people have struggled in any society, but they struggle more as society becomes more closed-minded and starts distrusting anyone who isn’t stable, conventional, and predictable; in other words, someone who fits ready social expectations.

A lot of academics are very bright, but few have that special spark of brilliance in them, and if anything, having that is a detriment for someone in academia today.

As our society stiffens we will likely become less creative, whereas in the past few centuries, we’ve seemed to be able to accept originality even if many geniuses are not exactly paragons of stability. I am not saying that Asians are without creativity or the spark of genius, just that as their populations became more controlled and regimented, they exhibited fewer instances of real inspiration.

We are moving towards greater control and the consequent heavy formalization of life which sucks the naturalness out of life. We should probably expect relative cultural stagnation, at least compared to what we’ve been experiencing for centuries in the West.

The problem with African peoples and societies is an excess of naturalness or primal behavior, which, while it is energetic and creative, lacks the mental and social channels to develop it.

Higher intelligence on the other hand takes that same primal energy the Africans have in excess and focus that energy into socially accepted interests and goals. The problem with Asian societies is there is a serious lack of primal behavior, though I suspect some genetic potential for creativity remains in their populations and could be freed up if they loosened up a bit.

As to our current period of neoliberalism in the West, I think whatever good it did in juicing the development of the new electronic and digital economy is already finished and have been since probably 2008. At this point neoliberalism’s effects on society are very detrimental and could even touch off serious convulsions across Western society if it isn’t moderated.

Continuing on this path can only benefit a small handful of elites and only if they are able to maintain control. But they are gamblers, so they will try, and they seem unlikely to concede much to the population for the sake of reconciliation.

Alt Left: An Interesting Note from an Irish Nationalist

I was on a discussion on Academia.edu recently about Ireland with a reference to the War of Independence  days, and an Irishman left this note in reference to someone saying that both  sides were equally bad:

Yes, sides are fruitless. Unless taking the side of right over that of wrong.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty was ratified under threat of an out and out war from Britain, with the partition of Ireland, with the command of the Oath of Allegiance to the English Monarch , etc. Deviation from truth multiplies later a thousand fold. In neocolonial duplicity, the Treaty was neither and both at the  same time  and has since become even more dissimulated in an ever-thickening fog of commentary amidst the perceived failure to complete a successful national revolution.

Without an understanding of her history and her defeat, Ireland will not collide with what she has become. Since the Good Friday Agreement, more disenfranchised people, mostly young men, have died from suicide in the North than in ‘The Troubles’.

A birthright was stolen. Ireland is animated by foreign and hidden marionettists, the attachment of the strings according to their purpose. Ireland is a likeness, as in a memory, where and when something happened and did not un-happen. Perhaps there is still truth in the Irish proverb that after the foul act, the grandchild should never trust a reconciled adversary.

Other than the superb prose, there are some interesting notes here. I had no idea that the Easter Agreement that divided Ireland was signed under threat of British invasion! My God. Of course “Northern” Ireland is a fiction, a fantasy. Of course it’s a British colony. There is no “Northern Ireland” and “Ireland.” It’s all just Ireland. Come on.

And he is correct. Ireland’s birth scar is exactly this: the frustration over an aborted and uncompleted national revolution. Since the act was never consummated, the wound was never bandaged and hence will never heal. It will always feel like a frustrated project that demands completion. As he points out, “a birthright was stolen.”

And yes, Ireland was defeated. She got her independence but she was defeated nonetheless. A wound that the British have never bothered to try to heal.

The “grandchild” in the last sentence refers to Ireland today, the grandfather of the child being the Ireland of 1916. The “foul act” was the aborted national revolution. The “reconciled adversary” would be the UK.

I’ve always supported the IRA, but that’s a bit much for an Alt Left demand. Instead we should support the reuniting of Ireland and decolonization of one of the world’s last colonies, Northern Ireland.

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