"Time of Monsters," by Peter Tobin

Peter Tobin is a Marxist activist and author who is an experiment on the recent goings in in Nepal especially with regard to the Maoist revolutionaries who recently fought a brutal civil war there and are now part of the government. Turns out that with disarmament, a lot of the Maoists sold out completely on almost all of their revolutionary principles, become rightwingers and in the process become millionaires with huge mansions. In addition, as you might have guessed, all and I mean all of the Maoist leaders were Brahmins. And this was an anti-caste revolution. In this part of the world, caste is like dirt. No matter how many times try wash the dirt off, there’s always some on your skin. And no matter how many attempts are made by South Asians to cleanse the body politic of caste, there’s always some of it remaining on the skin of their culture. you can’t take enough showers to wash all the dirt off and you can’t do enough reforms to wash caste out of the culture. It’s looking like caste in now an integral part of South Asian culture like curry, saris or gurus. Warning: This work is very long. If it was a book, it would be 60 pages, long enough for a novella if it was fiction.

Time of Monsters

by Peter Tobin

The cartoon above reflects a widespread perception among many Nepalese that the four parliamentary parties are servants – in varying degrees – of New Delhi. It appeared in the 2013, August edition of Nepal – a popular monthly – showing Prachanda (UCPN(M), Nepal (UML), Sitaula (NC) and Gaddachhar (MJN), (Brahmins all!) blubbing uncontrollably as Nepal against history and the odds beat India 2-1 in the South Asia Football Championships in July 2013.

Nepal’s Brahminical State and Problems of Legitimacy

From Machiavelli:

What’s more, you can’t in good faith give the nobles what they want without doing harm to others; but you can with the people. Because the people’s aspirations are more honorable than those of the nobles: the nobles want to oppress the people, while the people want to be free from oppression. Machiavelli, The Prince, 1516, p.39. Penguin 2009.

To the present day:

How can people trust them to run the state? Our boycott is therefore a political act to expose the failure of this parliamentary system. To build a new democracy and renew the revolutionary process we must go in a different direction. – Mohan Baidya, ‘Kiran’, Chairman, CPN-Maoist, October, 2013

Introduction

Political parties in all societies reflect specific histories and display the balance of social and political forces at any point in their narratives. Nepal is no exception to this truism; the classes and strata arising from the socio-economic conditions obtaining in the country’s history gave rise to caste, party and faction. The aim of this article is to provide detail of their historical gestation as a means of examining and explaining the present impasse in Nepalese society. This is presently evidenced by argument as to whether a Consultative Assembly, elected in November 2013 in a disputed ballot, has authority to promulgate a new constitution and is another issue of serious division that pervades every sphere of Nepalese society – political, cultural, social and economic – that cumulatively call into question the legitimacy of the essentially unreconstructed state founded by Prithvi Nararyan Shah in 1769. The article will argue that discord has been inherent since the state’s inception in the mid-18th century, with the campaign of unification driven by a minority elite imposing a nationality upon a multi-ethnic majority and which despite changing modalities of state power in the succeeding two-hundred and fifty years, remains the dominant power in Nepalese society, surviving monarchical absolutism, feudal clan autocracy, constitutional monarchy and multiparty democracy, successively appearing as contrasting if not antagonistic systems. It is certainly the case that internecine power struggles among ruling Nepalese elites, regarding modalities of power, are crucial to understanding the forces shaping the present. However, evident systemic discontinuity should not obscure persistence of upper caste, particularly Brahmin ascendancy, surmounting every upheaval, and turning every change of polity into a vehicle for retention of power and privilege. Responding to the pressures of the modern world, and with long experience in judging the vagaries of historic authority, these same castes have melded seamlessly into the local bourgeoisie – domestically hegemonic but internationally subservient. Not every ancien regime is oblivious or impervious to demands for change from formerly subaltern classes. Note the nationalist leader Tancredi’s maxim, in di Lampedusa’s epic novel The Leopard about the 19th century Risorgimento (Italian unification):

“Things have to change so that everything can stay the same.” (“Tutto deve cambiar perche tutto reste uguale.”) (Il Gattopardo, G. di Lampedusa, 1958)

The Nepalese ruling castes are exemplars of this paradox, having survived successive changes in polity, a point underlined in contemporary Nepal where the major constitutional parties and organs of state are dominated by the same higher caste/class, as supreme in the new democratic republic as they were under the preceding Hindu God-Kingdom created through war and conquest by their Brahmin/Rajput ancestors in the 18th century. Unification was more empire than nation building, pitting a warlike Indo-Aryan warrior caste against a rural majority comprised of over sixty Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups, each with its own languages and specific Buddhist/pantheist/shamanist cultures. Over time this may not have precluded the forging of national identity: consider the example of Britain, which emerged from English subjugation and colonization of the tribal Celtic peoples that flourished on the periphery of the later named, with breast-beating triumphalism, British Isles. Similarly the English had emerged as a distinct people following military invasion and occupation by French Normans over Anglo-Saxon natives. Christianity in the form of Roman Catholicism already provided a common ideology for conqueror and conquered. In the centuries following, the former lost both their French language and territories with the European feudal system they imposed upon Anglo-Saxon England taking root and dominating until the emergence of bourgeois capitalism in the Late Middle Ages. Nepal has never overcome the contradictions engendered by its violent birth which was compromised by its Hindu ruling castes retaining political, cultural and economic ties with caste peers governing India the sub-continental empire, and who, since Bhimsen Thapa, Jonge Bahadur and the Ranas, have, unlike the nation-builders of medieval Europe, proved unable or unwilling to act with national impunity. The notion of the present ruling caste elite representing the national interest is presently even more unlikely as their growing cosmopolitan class interests political, ideological and economic necessitate the country continuing as neo-colony of Brahminical India, subject to the ubiquitous, all-conquering global market and the multinational institutions established by US and other First World powers after 1945. The last serious threat to centralized caste power was the People’s War from 1996-2006, which saw a 12-point peace agreement between parliamentarians and revolutionaries, following the success of these two former bitter enemies allying to overthrow King Gyenendra in the 2006 second Thulo Jana Andolan (Great People’s Uprising/Revolution). It did not, as promised, lead to a ‘New Nepal’, instead seeing the elites of ‘Old Nepal’ regrouping, and remaining ensconced in power. This had also happened after the 1990 Jana Andolan, when the Brahmin leaders of the democratic movement summoned the Janjatis (ethnic minorities) and oppressed castes and classes to join the struggle for democracy against King Birendra and the feudal Panchayat system. Promises made, offering cultural and political autonomy to redress historical injustices, were later reneged on, with the subsequent constitution drawn up by the victorious New Delhi-backed political parties even retaining Nepal’s status as a divine Hindu Kingdom. It was not until 2008, with the declaration of a republic, that the monarchial system was finally abolished. However, that was the only tangible political gain from ten years of People’s War, while the major socioeconomic and cultural inequities that had provoked it were left in place, with attempts to ameliorate them blocked or sabotaged by a resurgent rightist bloc that seized the political and military initiative in the years following the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Nepal’s political parties are defined by which side they take in relation to this history; whether they want to either preserve the existing system, albeit with minor tweaks and modest reform, or completely replace it with a new dispensation. Conservatives and revolutionaries are adversaries in the struggle for the body and soul of the nation. First, some empirical details about the country that provide the inescapable, epidemiological conclusion that the socio-economic antagonisms fermenting in Nepalese society point inevitably to further eruption.

Economy and Society

Nepal is an aid-dependent, landlocked country, accessed principally from India, with a population of approximately 28 million. It has over sixty ethnic groups or Janjatis (called Adivasis in India) reflecting a rich linguistic and cultural diversity. Over 8 The CIA World Factbook estimates its labor force at 16 million: 7 As its contribution to GDP shows, the manufacturing sector is small, with carpet weaving dominating its light industrial sector and the rest made up of skilled handcraft production in metal, stone and wood. Since the decline of the jute industry based in Biratnagar, heavy industry is negligible, and Nepal has to import everything from cars to computers – necessities of modern life – which add to its trade deficit. Nepal has always faced the difficult situation of being a small economic power next to a big one that is denied economies of scale that accrue from size, thus insuring that Nepali companies could not compete with bigger Indian ones in the home market. This problem has, for example, caused the virtual collapse of its cotton and garment industry. Exports are inhibited because India imposes high import duties to protect its own industries. The pan-Indian Marwari Corporation/Clan dominate the domestic industrial and commercial sector in collusion with the traditional caste elites of Ranas/Shahs. A further aspect of its neocolonial status is that Nepal is forced to concede an open border with India and must endure a ‘take or leave it’ in terms of trade with India, a market that accounts for nearly 7 Nepal’s manufacturing base was further weakened by the global march of neoliberal capitalism (4) that saw, for example, Structural Adjustment Programs introduced in Nepal from the mid-1980s’. SAP’s are loans to aid-dependent, underdeveloped or economically unstable countries that have strong conditional clauses requiring adoption of rigorous free market policies, including privatization, trade and finance-sector liberalization, prices determined by the market and precluding and retreating from state intervention in any form. They were implemented by the IMF and World Bank, acting in a ‘bad cop/bad cop’ scenario and affected all sections of Nepalese society; the removal of subsidies on such items as cooking gas hit many homes, while those on fertilizers reduced agricultural production. Privatization programs ended public enterprises, many of which had been initiated by a dirigiste Rana regime in the 1930’s in a desperate attempt to modernize. There was, for example, sustained pressure from multilateral development financial institutions – the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank in particular – forcing a sale of water utilities, resulting in their complete privatization by 2006. Tariffs protecting indigenous industries were also removed and the penetration of multinational capital was facilitated across all sectors.

Inequality and Poverty

This regime, which does not even manufacture a needle in the name of a self-reliant and national economy, has handed the whole economy to a dozen families of foreign compradors and bureaucratic capitalists. This handful of plunderers has become billionaires, whereas the real owners of this country and the national property – the toiling masses of Nepal – are forced to eke out a meager existence of deprivation and poverty. – (CPN(M) leaflet, distributed on the eve of the start of the People’s War, 13th February, 1996.

The UN Human Development Report 2014 listed Nepal as the 31st poorest country in the world and among those classified low in Human Development indices with glaring inequalities in incomes and lifestyles that has the top 1 Government Household Survey statistics for 2010/11, by contrast, estimated deprivation at 2 While the majority of Nepalese are rural dwellers, the agriculture sector is weak and inefficient; hilly and mountainous topography with subsequent scarcity of arable soil apart from the southern Terai plains allows mostly for only subsistence farming. A poor infrastructure of roads and communications inhibits movement of produce. The continuing failure to reform land ownership sees huge, growing numbers of landless Dalits, Muslims and other minorities, especially in feudal and populous Terai. The failures to implement scientific management and introduce modern technology combine to render Nepal dependent on importing foodstuffs from or through India. The failure of the present system to provide necessary conditions of existence for an expanding demographic adds greater urgency to the antagonisms between the Establishment Right and Radical Left. These will be further accentuated given that India’s newly elected BJP administration has signaled the intention of pursuing more aggressively expansionist policies and is fully committed to the neoliberal economic project. The latter is being promoted as ‘shock therapy’ necessary for economic lift-off that will rescue the Indian people from poverty and deprivation. It is it problematic because it is set out as an ideological as opposed to an economically rational project deliberately masking the aim of increasing the penetration of Western monopoly capitalism into the Indian economy through the mediation of the Brahmin/Banyia oligarchy. One of the new regime’s first acts was to increase hikes in diesel prices, allowing the state subsidy to shrivel, while signaling an intention to do the same to fertilizer subsidies. It has since announced that the health budget is to be slashed in a country that already has one of world’s lowest expenditures in this sector. When all such state aid is rolled back, if wealth ‘trickles down’ perhaps by the conspicuous consumption of luxury commodities and lifestyle of a privileged cosmopolitan caste elite or charity (not a noted Brahmin characteristic) and alleviates some poverty – so be it, but it will be serendipitous. Such an outcome is not what drives au courant ‘capitalism with its coat off’ mutation, (4) so eagerly embraced by India’s caste elite as greed is a noted Brahmin characteristic. However, for all the Hindutva histrionics and bravura posturing of the demagogue Modi, his BJP regime is in fact morphing effortlessly from Mohan Singh’s Congress Party Administration’s line of march. This became apparent in 2005 US/India Memos of Understanding (MOU) which, inter alia, initiated opening up India’s agricultural research establishments to American monopolies and activated policies of ‘rapid commercialization’ of already hard-pressed Indian farmers. One commentator noted at the time:

The treaty is a partnership between two unequal partners. American agriculture is highly mechanized and organized, energy-intensive and market-centric. Indian agriculture, by contrast, has been for millennia the way of life for the vast majority of the population. (8)

The present Nepalese establishment invariably marches in step with New Delhi and accordingly rolled out the red carpet for the newly-elected PM Modi’s August 2014 official visit to Kathmandu. Addressing the Nepalese Parliament, he emphasized his government’s neoliberal economic priorities and the benefit Nepal would derive from deepening existing bilateral links by “…taking our relationship to an entirely new level.” Nepal’s establishment parties were receptive, as the post-1990 administrations had closely shadowed India’s descent into neoliberal policies, and Modi’s regime was seen as continuation of this course. The August visit was also marked by concluding agreements that increased Indian access to Nepal’s vast untapped water resources, which the revolutionary opposition denounced as a blatant example of neocolonial subservience to Indian expansionists and betrayal of the national interest. The argument over this abundant but as yet untapped natural resource constitutes a longstanding fault line in Nepalese politics that bears examination; it concentrates many existing socioeconomic and political contradictions in one issue.

The Politics of Water and Unequal Treaties

On September 6th 2014 the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist announced its intention to publicly burn copies of the Power Trade Agreement (PTA) recently negotiated between India and Nepal which allows for the construction of hydropower projects by Indian companies so as to facilitate energy trading, cross-border transmission lines and grid connections between the two countries. (9) The coalition government concluded a further agreement with the Indian company GMR to construct a 900MW hydropower project on the Upper Karnali. It was claimed that combining these two accords would enable Nepal to utilize its hydropower resources to produce enough surplus to permit the already agreed export of electricity to India and help reduce the country’s trade deficit. The extraction of Nepal’s water resources began in 1920 when the Indian Raj signed the 1920 Treaty of Sarda that secured access to the Mahakali. After independence, India’s Nehru’s Administration continued in a similar manner with the 1954 Koshi and 1959 Gandak Treaties that saw dams constructed solely to irrigate the thirsty Gangetic Plains of North India. There was outrage at these one-sided deals from Nepalese nationalists and communists, which led to greater caution by successive regimes faced with India’s insatiable water demands paralleled with failed attempts in securing international aid or a loan from the World Bank to develop the country’s hydropower resources independently. After the 1990 upheaval that ostensibly reduced Birendra to constitutional status, the fledgling democracy experienced renewed pressure from New Delhi that led to the 1996 Mahakali Treaty which was described as revealing:

“…the larger neighbor as bulldozer and the smaller one as hapless and internally divided.” (10).

While this treaty was supported by the both the constitutional communist party, the Unified Marxist-Leninist Communist Party which turned full circle from the anti-Indian position of its mother party in the 1950’s, and the always reliable pro-Delhi Congress Party (NC), it was denounced by CPN (Maoist) spokespersons who pointed out that Nepal would only get 7 out of the projected 125 megawatts output. (11) The symbolic burning of the present PTA as ‘against the national interest’ by the new Maoist party was manifestation of an ongoing campaign for retaining Nepalese jurisdiction over its water resources, resisting New Delhi’s strategy to monopolize them. This is underscored by observation that Nepal has huge hydropower potential estimated at 40,000 MW but is presently realizing only 600 MW. All of this is happening against a backdrop of daily power cuts and the fact that 6 Lenin famously stated that for USSR: ‘Communism was Soviet power plus electrification’ to which Nepal’s unreconstructed Marxist-Leninists paraphrase the end as: ‘plus hydropower’; reflecting the importance of this power source for realizing an independent socialist Nepal. The PTA is described by patriots of left and right as yet another unequal treaty among the many that began with the 1816 Treaty of Sugauli imposed by the East India Company. This is now seen a British land grab that resulted in Nepal ceding one-third of its territory to the Company, including Sikkim and what is now called Uttarakhand. The reduction of ‘Greater Nepal’ to its present territory resulted from military invasion and defeat. Treaties covering trade and resources have been facilitated by the Nepalese ruling caste/class acting in collusion with first imperial Britain then Brahminical India . The Brahmin/upper caste supporters of the power deal tend either to not recognize or to remain oblivious to the idea that any treaty agreed with brother India has ever been ‘unequal’. The same political class once again faced a 2011 furor over by the ‘Bilateral’ Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (BIPPA) which allowed for greater penetration and increased security for Indian capital in Nepal. This sellout document earned the parliamentary apparatchiks, parties and the Bhatterai Administration who negotiated and agreed to it epithets from the stooges and hirelings of the extra-parliamentary Maoist opposition and royalist factions. The definition of unequal agreement is where an imbalance of power, political, military or economic, exists between the parties to the agreement. Chinese nationalists and communists in the 20th century used the term to describe all treaties extracted from China in its ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of Western imperialists in the 19th century. These treaties between Nepal and India involved loss of Nepalese sovereignty over territory and domestic markets and facilitated imports of commodities, including, notoriously, opium produced by East India Company, accompanied by the threat or use of superior military force. The period also saw the emergence of indigenous merchants acting as East India Company agents/intermediaries described as ‘compradors’. Nepalese patriots use the term “unequal treaties” to describe a history that began with Sugauli, was carried over from the East India Company to the Raj and continued in postcolonial India with the 1950 Peace and Friendship Treaty formalizing Nepal’s neocolonial status by allowing India increased access and control of the Nepalese economy and veto over Nepal’s foreign relations with third parties. It guaranteed Nepal as a captive market for Indian commodities and along with further revisions and succeeding agreements allowed exploitation of Nepal’s natural resources, principally water as described above, and access to cheap Nepalese migrant labor. New Delhi was driven as much by geopolitical considerations; Nehru saw Himalayan Nepal as a bulwark on India’s northern frontier against Communist China, and serving along with Bhutan and Sikkim as part of a “chain of protectorates,” so described by Curzon, a particularly bellicose, expansionist Raj Viceroy at the turn of the 20th century. Nehru was a ruthless autocrat and saved his fine words regarding nonintervention and non-aggression for the Pansheel Principles set out as a stratagem to bamboozle Mao’s Communists, burnishing India’s Gandhian credentials and non-aligned status in 1954 Treaty with the PRC. Nehru accordingly extracted the 1950 Treaty from the last Rana PM three months before he authorized an invasion of Nepal from India by a joint royalist/ democratic army which signaled the beginning of the end for Rana rule. Independent India under the imperious Pandit owed more to the martial warrior spirit of the Maharbarata than it ever did to the myth of Hinduism’s essential ahimsa (pacifism) peddled by the casteist charlatan Gandhi. Recent information shows that Nehru may have slaughtered even more Muslims in Manipur in 1947 than Modi managed in Gujarat in 2001.

Constitution or Revolution?

The new Maoist party, the CPN-M, is extra-parliamentary and does not accord legitimacy to the present institutions of state, distinguishing it from the three major parties in the Constituent Assembly, who supported and negotiated the PTA. In descending order of electoral strength, they are: Nepali Congress, Unified Marxist-Leninist CPN; and Unified CPN (Maoist). The first two are in coalition government, with the NC leader GP Koirala as Prime Minister. Koirala’s family is a Nepalese political dynasty akin to India’s Gandhis. A split in the third biggest party, the UCPN(M), in 2012 led to the launch of the CPN-M by cadre led by veteran Maoist leader, Mohan Baidya (‘Kiran’) (12), increasingly disillusioned with perceived growing revisionism of the UCPN(M) under the leadership of Prachanda and Bhatterai. They concluded that following the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the UCPN(M)’s political practice had degraded into reformism, conforming to Lenin’s bitter reasoning for the ultimate treachery of the German SPD’s voting for war credits in 1914:

…by making a fetish of the necessary utilization of bourgeois parliamentarianism and bourgeois legality.

In the view of many cadre, the party had lost its revolutionary edge and has been remade to suit New Delhi’s requirements. The party was guided by two leaders, Dahal (Prachanda) and Bhatterai, reconnecting with their Brahminical caste roots. The final betrayal was the surrender by Bhatterai’s ostensibly Maoist-led administration of the People’s Liberation Army and its weapons to the Nepalese Army in 2011 after being laagered in UN cantonments following the 2006 CPA. In reaction to this and policies such as handing back expropriated land to the feudal landlords, the new CPN-M declared a return to revolutionary first principles and building on the foundation of the principle of People’s War as a precondition for future political work. A fourth political bloc represented in the Constituent Assembly (the National Assembly – an upper house created in 1990, was abolished in 2007, and Nepal now has a unicameral system) is the United Democratic Madeshi Front representing landed property class parties from the Terai, a region of flatlands in southern Nepal and topographically an extension of the Gangetic Plains of North India. Ethnically and culturally the Terai’s upper castes are closer to India, so this group’s political support for increasing bonds between the countries is guaranteed. The Terai was formally a NC fiefdom, but party membership collapsed when leaders and activists principally drawn from the Bhadraloks (Terai upper castes) deserted the party which they believed had become dominated by the Brahmins of the Kathmandu and the Central Hill regions referred to as Pahadis (Hill People). This political bloc, following the 2006 Peace Agreement, appeared to upper caste Madeshis to be too weak to stand up to the Maoists, perceived as all-powerful after ten years of People’s War and a real threat to feudal and zamindar (landlord) interests in the Terai. Madeshi parties subsequently emerged seeking either regional autonomy or direct integration with India. The more militant among them advocated armed struggle and were instrumental in driving the 2006/7 murderous conflict with the Maobaadi (Nepali for Maoists) in order to defend the status quo in the region. Indian security services were rumored to have been heavily involved in arming and funding these groups, signaling New Delhi’s growing alarm at the threat to Indian interests posed by the Nepalese Maoists as they stood on the verge of a takeover. There are 22 other parties represented in the CA, the largest two being royalist – the Rastriya Prajantra Party (Nepal) and the Rastriya Prajantra Party – representing the ancient regime and seeking in one form or another a return to divine Hindu monarchy abolished when the Prachanda’s 2008 UCPN(M)/UML coalition government declared the republic. However, many monarchists are patriots with a deep distrust of India to the extent that some prefer China in all circumstances. After the RRP(N) and the RPP, there are many small socialist, communist and peasant parties reflecting the patchwork and multirepresentational nature of Nepalese politics. This plethora of parties is also apparent among the forces outside the CA led by CPN-M in a 33-party alliance. The CPN-M (13) and its allies – other communist, socialist and social democratic parties along with Janjati (ethnic) organizations – came together in 2013 to boycott the November election for a second Constituent Assembly. They argued it was a ‘phony, rigged election’, promoted by the same forces that had blocked a progressive federal constitution in the first CA. Now the parliamentary ‘Four Party Syndicate’ was seeking a mandate to forge an anti-people constitution ensuring that power was retained by upper castes and that in any event, asserted the boycotters, would be written in New Delhi. Among the international supporters of the second CA election were the US, China, EU, India, the UN, NGOs like the Carter Center, ANFREL etc. 70,000 police, army and paramilitaries along with 50,000 temporary police personnel were mobilized to counter the campaign organized by the CPN-M, leading a 33 party alliance around the slogan:

Boycott this corrupt/so-called election (Kathit nirbaachan bahiskaar gare).

The election duly took place, pre-weighted through the creation of a High Level Commission that excluded all other parties, ensuring the ‘Four Party Syndicate’s unchallenged control of proceedings. Rs 30 billion was allocated to pay for it, a staggering amount considering only Rs 2.8 billion was spent on the 2008 election. The election was further tainted as turnout figures were disputed, with nearly five million voters disappearing from the 2008 election rolls. There was also no postal vote provision for the estimated two million émigré workers scattered through the Gulf States and South East Asia. Each side claimed higher or lower percentage turnouts, but the significant result was the major setback for Prachanda and Bhatterai’s revisionist UCPN (M). The party lost its place as the biggest party gained by a shock victory in 2008 election, where it garnered 4 In any event, the CPN-Maoist ‘Dashists’ did not halt the election, but held their nerve in spite of powerful domestic and international enemies, a sustained hate campaign from the Brahmin/bourgeois controlled media sequestered in Kathmandu led by the Kantipur Corporation, Nepal’s largest media house, and internal party tensions. Notwithstanding the final number of votes cast, the election showed that the boycotters represented a critical mass of the citizenry. Whatever the outcome of the charade, Kiran said emphatically, they would burn any constitutional declaration emerging from the new CA and “write one in the streets.”

The Caste System & Democratic Deficit

However, it may also be stated that most Dalit leaders are right when they blame the ‘Brahminical’ order of society for the grievous discrimination practiced against them…the reification of the caste system, even to this date, depends for its authority on the socioreligious observances of Brahmins, the high priests of Hinduism. – V. Rajan “Dalits” and the Caste System in India, p 3, 2010)

As in India, it is formally illegal under the Nepalese Constitution to discriminate on grounds of caste, and the education system is also nominally open to all. In reality though, the caste system remains pervasive with the upper castes constituting 70-8 The Kathmandu Valley Newaris, for example, form A more recent study in 2004 showed little change. Brahmins, while forming 1 Nepalese Brahmins in politics, culture and business defer easily to fellow Brahmins ascendant in India, claiming a realism similar to the pragmatism of a small boy before a bigger sibling. This assumes that Nepal and India are ‘family’, albeit one where might confirms right. They also note admiringly that Indian Brahmins have since Independence retained power and privilege in alliance with the Kshatriyas, the military caste, and the Banyias, the commercial and merchant caste, making a mockery of the great Dalit scholar/statesman Ambedkar’s 1947 Constitution prohibiting discrimination on grounds of caste and guaranteeing equality for all citizens. Words were also cheap in the 1972 Amendment to the Indian Constitution that added the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ to the original declaration of ‘sovereign, democratic republic’. Against the evidence and from the beginning India was also touted in the capitalist West as rival to Red China’s ‘totalitarian ant heap’ and gushingly described as the ‘World’s Biggest Democracy’. Yet caste and democracy are mutually exclusive; caste rule is anti-egalitarian, and democracy requires equality. India and Nepal are clear examples, still controlled by the same caste configuration that in the political sphere refracts into parties and factions with acquired skills, resources and enough cohesion to collectively jump through regular electoral hoops. Effective democratic camouflage disguises elective oligarchy. A lesson well learned from the White Sahib’s mastery over and increasing sophistication in the dark arts of electoral manipulation and illusion, important because the popular mandate confers legitimacy to uninterrupted ascendancy of the bourgeois capitalism. The Dashists and their allies program the end of the upper caste monopoly of state power by establishing a New Federal People’s Democracy that represents the hitherto excluded Janjatis, Dalits, minorities, working classes and urban underclasses. Federalism is crucial to New Democracy as it means breaking up the centralized Brahminical state by devolving power to previously oppressed national minorities. It will correct the historic wrong that began with the autocracy founded by Narayan Shah and extended by the Ranas through King Mahendra’s Panchayaat and continued since 1990 with elective dictatorship coalescing around establishment parties as they cartelized political and state power. It was significant that one of the organized manifestations that followed victory in the 2006 Andolan was the mocking of Prithvi Narayan Shah’s statue in Kathmandu by Janjatis, indicating both that there is continuing antipathy to the oppressive central power he founded and that this historical wound remains very much open. The event was complemented by royalist outrage at such desecration, further testament to the irreconcilability of contending forces in Nepalese society.

Maoist “New Nepal”

From Marx:

…the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalist regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation… Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 73

To the present day:

Gender, Dalit and regional issues are important, and they are tied into the class struggle. But working to solve just these issues will not bring a full solution. This can only be reached by completing the class struggle. – KB Bishwokarma, Prakanda.

The CPN-M Dashists affirm their wish to break with global capitalism and establish economic autarky featuring tariff walls to protect infant industries along with land reform and infrastructural development, all through socialist state planning and ownership. Nepal, they argue, has failed to straddle the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and its traditional ruling classes have been incapable and unwilling to provide effective governance to tackle deprivation, poverty and inequality. Since 1990 it has increasingly aped India’s development, a huckster capitalism overseen by wholly corrupt caste elites dressed in “emperor’s new clothes” of bourgeois Western multiparty democracy. Maoists maintain that socialist transformation will improve conditions for the people and ensure genuine national sovereignty. Kiran, citing Mao and Stalin, argues that the national question in the case of Third World countries like Nepal is a class question. These weaker states have become subject to the interests of a dominant First World requiring them to be maintained in various stages of underdevelopment and to enable open markets for imported goods and foreign investment and to increase the plunder of their natural resources to feed insatiable Western consumer societies. Third World countries are further valuable sources of low-paid indigenous labor for production of cheap commodities intended for the Western market, dramatically highlighted by the 2013 Rana Plaza clothing factory tragedy in Dhaka. These nations also provide a reservoir of migrant labor for international capital projects, graphically exposed by the slave-like conditions endured by émigré workers, many of them Nepalese, on the notorious Qatar World Cup project. Even if not dramatically affected as migrant workers, neoliberalism, through international institutions led by IMF and World Bank, impacts on the Nepalese masses by shackling its government along with those in other impoverished, underdeveloped Third World countries to market-based austerity policies and denying whole populations benefits of modernity, decent infrastructure, modern schools, basic health care, access to clean water and sanitation, decent housing &c. Measuring everything by market criteria also blocked welfare programs, food subsidies and all state intervention aimed at reduction of poverty or stimulating domestic growth. In Nepal it has led to growing numbers of Sukumbasi (squatters), increasing, persistent mass unemployment, landlessness, rural flight to towns/cities, especially Kathmandu, exacerbating already high urban poverty, bonded, émigré and child labor; all salient features of a failed state, where a traditional elite continue to flourish, retaining social and economic privilege. This elite increasingly lives in ‘forts of gold’, while the world and the city outside crumbles over the head of the excluded and increasingly impoverished majority. Kathmandu is symptomatic, where, as in many Third World urban centers, the spectacle of private affluence for the few contrasts starkly with increasing public squalor for the many. Hope for a more egalitarian Nepal following the 1990 transition from monarchical absolutism to multiparty democracy was quickly dashed in the years of corruption and reaction that followed, when a newly empowered political elite proved even more venal than the Panchas they had supplanted. Ideologically colonized, like the Brahmins of Congress India, they were transfixed by western liberal democracy, whose representative institutions and personal freedoms, they were conditioned to believe, enshrined universally applicable and superior European Enlightenment values. Whereas imperialists once hawked a Christian Bible, their contemporaries now peddle the snake oil of capitalist democracy as salvation for, in Kipling’s infamous phrase from the poem Recessional, “lesser breeds without the Law”. Just as missionary societies once flourished, now Human Rights industries thrive and NGO’s promoting Western values and practices proliferate, employing some indigenous educated and enlisting them into the comprador class while sustaining patchwork schemes in a parody of development. From the beginning the conditioning of native elites through education invariably inculcated western values and ideologies which, on one hand informed and articulated claims to national independence and produced the leadership for anticolonial struggle, while one the other, ensured the same leadership was sufficiently psychologically colonized to slavishly adopt after independence the parliamentary model, including the flummery. An exotic plant in wholly unsuitable conditions. (16) As Franz Fanon caustically opined:

 The colonialist bourgeoisie, in its narcissistic dialogue, expounded by the members of its universities, had in fact deeply implanted in the minds of the colonized intellectual that the essential qualities remain eternal in spite of all the blunders men may make: the essential qualities of the West, of course.(17)

Bourgeois parliamentary institutions emerged in the Europe of the Late Middle Ages as a revolutionary and contingent challenge to residual feudal control by divinely mandated monarchs scattered across the kingdoms of Europe. Increasingly, with bourgeois power assured, they became functional requirements for regulation of class interests and instruments of chauvinist aggression against other nations, initially in Europe. In their early gestation they provided an arena for systemic compromise where differences could be aired and reconciled by parties representing old and new forms of propertied ruling classes in given historical transitions. This occurred in England following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, establishing a constitutional rapport between Whigs, the nascent bourgeoisie, and Tories, the old landowning class, but significantly this same transformation did not emerge from Les Etats Generaux of Bourbon France, making inevitable the 1789 Revolution and bloody, bourgeois victory over L’Ancien Regime. However, modern First World states, despite the potential democratic threat of universal suffrage, increasingly stabilized, and bourgeois capitalism established unchallenged supremacy. Parties are now even less class-based, representing sectional interests within the ruling class competing for control of the state apparatus, with elections determining which of the intraclass rivals accedes to government, enabling exercise of executive power and policy implementation until the next poll. Among the mature Western democracies this increasing homogenization of parties barely masks elective bourgeois dictatorship, now tricked out in ballot box ritualism, steeped in what Marx derided as ‘parliamentary cretinism’ and nailed by Engels as:

…an incurable disease, an ailment whose unfortunate victims are permeated by the lofty conviction that the whole world, its history and its future are directed and determined by a majority of votes in just that very representative institution that has the honor of having them in the capacity of its members. – Frederick Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, 1852, ME Selected Works, Vol 1, p. 370)

Yet this system was adopted by the ex-colonies of the British Empire in Asia and Africa, all of which have signally failed. India is the worst example, especially after the collapse of Nehru’s dreams of socialist democracy involving state ownership, five year plans, and deficit spending within integument of a mixed economy, etc. all evaporated in the early 1960’s, following the disastrous defeat in the war of aggression launched against China in the Kashmir Aksai Chin. Nehru had always allowed for a degree of corruption, but after him it was unchecked; reflected in the Lok Sabha which degenerated into the kleptocracy presently extant. In Nepal, similarly, after 1990, the new democratic state institutions quickly became synonymous with cronyism, nepotism and carpetbagging. A pervasive corruption disfigured Nepalese society and subsequently Nepal scored 2.2 on the 2011 World Corruption Perception Index, where 10 is ‘very clean’ and 0 is ‘highly corrupt’. (18) The economist Arun Kumar further estimated that the Nepalese black economy, in 2006, accounted for $4 billion in contrast to an official GDP of $7 billion, an even higher percentage than India where the same phenomenon accounts for a still eye-watering 5 Like a fish stinking from the head, the godfathers or Thulo Hakimharu of NC and UML contributed to this state of affairs by pursuing a brazen policy of enrichessez-vous as vigorously as the state campaign of terror and foreign-funded mayhem they unleashed before and during People’s War against the Left and rural agitators who challenged the new corruption. Nevertheless, communists are not anarchists, grasping that participation in bourgeois elections is often a tactical necessity, so that if on occasion normative bourgeois control of electoral process as a result of political, economic or military crises is problematic, then communist parties should participate, particularly if it offers them the possibility of advancing proletarian interests. It was on such practical eventualities as well as principles that Marx and Engels campaigned for universal suffrage in the Communist Manifesto. They saw communists using the extended franchise to subvert the elective dictatorship of the bourgeoisie:

Transforme, de moyen de duperie qu’il a ete jusqu’ici, en instrument d’emancipation. (Changed by them from the usual means of deception, into one of transformation.) (K. Marx, Manifesto for French Workers’ Party, 1880. ME Selected Works, Vol 1, p. 546)

It was in this spirit that the  CPN (M) following the CPA entered the 2008 election campaign for a Constituent Assembly from which it emerged as the biggest party with 4 The Maoists were aware that they had considerable support in towns and cities but could not connect with it as People’s War had reached military stalemate, with the PLA controlling the countryside and the RNA and Armed Police Force (APF) paramilitaries the urban centers, particularly Kathmandu. It was a logjam that had to be broken if the Prachanda Path strategy, the fusion of Maoist protracted rural struggle and Leninist urban insurrection, was to succeed and the revolution carried through. In any event, the CPN (M) formed an administration in alliance with the UML with Prachanda as Prime Minister. The administration’s first act was to abolish the monarchy and declare a republic, but an attempt by Prachanda to bring the army under civilian control by sacking the insubordinate CoS, Katawal and the royalist generals around him for refusing to integrate PLA ex-combatants en corps into the NA as per the CPA provoked a virtual coup openly orchestrated from New Delhi involving its Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) foreign intelligence service acting in collusion with NA officers and apparatchiks from NC, UML and UDMF. This resulted in Yadhev, Nepal’s first President, significantly one of the few remaining prominent NC Terai Madeshis, exceeding his constitutional authority and reinstating the insubordinate Katawal. The UML, following instructions from New Delhi, pulled out of the coalition, and with the Maoists now unable to secure a majority in the CA, Nepal’s first Maoist-led government collapsed after only eight months in office. What provoked New Delhi to act with such speed and malice was triggered by Prachanda’s challenge to India’s right of veto over Nepal’s foreign policy by ‘playing the China card’, repeating Birendra’s ‘mistake’ with an attempted arms purchase from the PRC. Any hint of a China/Nepal alliance was anathema also to the Nepalese officer class and high command, who were historically close to India, and had, post-9/11, forged a deep relationship with Washington and the Pentagon, based on dollars, weaponry and training in return for allowing Nepal to become another link in the US chain surrounding the People’s Republic. When Biplav (Netra Bikram Chand) was asked during the 2013 boycott campaign why he opposed elections, he replied that Maoists were not opposed to them per se as they were a ‘relative matter’. He opposed this specific one as political and financial larceny on a grand scale, attesting: “It is a criminal conspiracy against the Nepalese working class.” The 2009 coup showed that electoral results as democratic expressions of the popular will are also, when the occasion demands, a ‘relative matter’ even for those who peddle democracy as a universal panacea at least when it serves class interest but are as quick to ignore or subvert it when it doesn’t.

Class and Patriotism

It would not be incorrect, if very insulting, to say that Nepal’s top leadership vis-à-vis India, has been morally bankrupt, greedy, hypocritical and have served as no more than errand boys. People are tired of these slick, fast-talking politicians. In fact their reputation has gone down the drain. In a culture aimed above all at seizing power, with material motivations, political democracy and thereby sustained peace is unlikely. – G. Thapa, Republica, Nepalese daily newspaper, September 30, 2013.

Marxist-Leninists argue that nation and class are linked in Third World countries. In these countries, traditional ruling elites and the emerging bourgeoisie have been suborned by transnational capitalism and accept neocolonial status as preferable to revolutionary change and national independence. It is therefore not in their increasingly cosmopolitan class interests to seek genuine self-determination; only the exploited working and marginalized classes have a genuine interest in such an outcome. (19) The symbiosis of communism and patriotism is therefore contingent to the epoch of imperialism. The lack of concern of the present ruling elite for its people is shown in the case of Nepali migrant workers in Qatar, cited above, because their remittances contribute over 2 Aside from BOP advantages, the money sent back also reduces governmental responsibility for the alleviation of poverty, especially in rural areas. Consequently there has been little or no representation from successive governments for the rights and well-being of the estimated 2.2 million émigré Nepalese presently working in India, Malaysia and the Middle East. (20) This echoes an early initiative of Jonge Bahadur, who established Rana power after 1846 Red Kot Massacre by reducing the monarchy to titular status. He negotiated a payment per head for every Ghurkha recruited into the British Army. (21) This was one aspect of a new strategic alliance with the East India Company through which the new rulers began to draw material benefit from trading their subjects as commodities in the form of mercenaries, while being left unchallenged in Nepal to establish Rana monopoly control over all trade and to plunder state coffers and lands with impunity. The arc that connects the establishment of Gurkha mercenaries with migrant labor is one where benefit accrues to the same high castes exercising state power, albeit under superficially different political systems by different means of extraction in different epochs. Kiran’s Maoists, in this sense, expand the concept of patriotism beyond concern for territory and existing culture into one that includes the justice and welfare of the people. This criterion goes beyond but does not ignore traditional concerns: the defense of borders against constant Indian encroachments, ending the shameless political obedience to Delhi, the rolling back of foreign ownership in vital economic sectors, and protecting Nepal’s largely untapped vast hydro resources from continued Indian predation. The CPN-M Dashists are equally quick to point out that they are only anti-Indian to the extent that they oppose the Indian government’s neocolonialist meddling in Nepal. The hatred of Brahminical expansionist policies does not extend to the Indian people, who they argue have and are beginning to make their own revolution against the same enemy. This internationalist perspective is axiomatic for the patriotism of national liberation struggles in countries oppressed by imperialism and distinguishes it from bourgeois chauvinist nationalism that breeds racist hatred and jingoist aggression. This was the ideology that fueled rivalry between the nascent European states and then mutated into the racial superiority engendered by the subsequent colonization and subjugation of native peoples in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Imperialism no longer requires direct colonial occupation but operates in neo- or semi-colonial form. Exploitation of peoples and resources continue, and even intensify, but are now fronted by local ruling elites, comprador upper castes and classes, conditioned and rewarded to front for and spare imperialist powers from the obloquy and resistance engendered by 19th century European colonial empires. Mao described the modus operandi:

When imperialism carries on its oppression not by war but by milder means – political, economic and cultural – the ruling classes in semi-colonial countries capitulate to imperialism, and the two form an alliance for the joint oppression of the masses of the people. – Mao Zedong, On Contradiction, Selected Works, Vol 1, p.331

The present Nepalese ruling class, in this respect, cannot represent the national interest, Maoists aver, as they constitute an anti-patriotic bloc sustained by and servant to international capital and great power geopolitics. Kiran concluded:

Both the King and the Nepali Congress Party represent the feudal, bureaucratic and comprador bourgeoisie.

Patriotism in Nepal and similar Third World countries, is not, argue the Maoists, ‘a refuge for the scoundrel’, but rather a home for the homeless and the hope of the hopeless. In this regard Pushpa Lal, when founding the Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) in 1949, absorbed Mao’s definition of patriotism and learned how the Koumintang degenerated from the patriots of Sun Yat Sen into the quislings of Chiang Kai Chek. He also derived lessons from the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War against Germany’s virulent, fascist imperialism. Patriotism in the modern age was, by these examples, anti-imperialist by definition. Therefore, in the epoch of imperialism, the mantle of patriotism falls upon the shoulders of the proletariat in the oppressed Third World. The bourgeoisie in the metropolitan heartlands invoke it to mask imperial aggression and aggrandizement, while the big bourgeoisie of monopoly financial and industrial capital have transcended the nation-state and its parochial ideology, instead pledging allegiance to the ascending global megalopolis of money.

Communist Politics: 1949-2014

Inspired by China’s liberation in 1949, the newly founded Communist Party of Nepal took up arms against the Rana regime, which was in power via an alliance with NC led by the Koirala brothers and royalist forces under King Tribhuvan (Nepal’s Ivan the Terrible to the Ranas’ Boyars) Together they forged a Mukti Senaa (Liberation Army) which invaded from India in 1950/51. These activities were supported, with arms, funds and facilities and funded by Nehru’s Congress government, and even included providing officer staff from Bose’s recently demobilized Indian National Army. Nehru had already godfathered the creation of Nepali Congress in 1948 from progressive Nepalese democrats exiled in India, and wanted to settle accounts with the pro-British Ranas. In the final event India limited their support to the NC, forcing it into a three-way peace agreement with the Ranas and the King. There followed a short-lived NC/Rana coalition government, the collapse of which signaled a decade of political struggle between the NC and the King, followed by thirty years of monarchial executive government, with New Delhi steering a seemingly contradictory ‘Two-Pillar’ policy of supporting the monarchy and the aspiring democrats of Nepali Congress. Lal, who, in 1949 first translated the Communist Manifesto into Nepalese, linked armed struggle to a domestic program, principally advocating a ‘Land to the Tiller’ policy in tandem with breaking up big feudal estates and following the example of China’s ‘New Democracy’ also proclaimed the intention of promoting state-sponsored national capitalism. The party also advocated a Constitutional Assembly, which was agreed among all the parties, foreign and domestic, but reneged on by Tribhuvan’s successor, Mahendra, who, following the 1960 coup, replaced the parliamentary system with a feudal Panchayat, a series of interlocked consultative committees, starting at village level and ending with the King as final arbiter. It was in these conditions of a Shah/Brahmin autocracy and the international US-led post-1945 onslaught to roll back Communism that saw the Communist Party and movement grow, recruiting from the intelligentsia, disillusioned radical NC members, urban workers, Dalits and oppressed rural minorities. However, aside from having to operate underground, it faced the same problem as that of succeeding communist parties and cadre in maintaining a united revolutionary line. Lal’s CPN split in the early 1960’s between pro-Moscow reformists such as Tulsi Lal Amatya and pro-Beijing revolutionaries. There was a parallel split between the Rayamajhi faction which scuttled off to serve the Panchayat system and Puspha Lal, who remained committed to proletarian revolution against domestic reaction and international US imperialism, supported by Mao’s communist China,  at least until Deng Xiaoping’s 1976 Rightist coup left the proletariat at home and abroad to its own devices. After the Japha Uprising in 1971, Nepal’s first communist armed struggle, the UML emerged. But by 1990, it was fully committed to multiparty democracy and conciliation with Delhi, following the lead set by its homologues in Communist Party of India (Marxist). Its transformation into a comprador bourgeois parliamentary party epitomized when the short-lived 1994 UML Adhikary administration instigated the Integrated Mahakali Treaty, which, under its NC successor, signed after an orgy of corruption, ceded sovereignty of the river to India. The UCPN (Maoist) path from People’s War into parliamentary politics and accommodation with Delhi has already been noted. However, Nepalese communism, while disputatious, has shown great vigor, and unlike the post-1945 Western communist parties has never surrendered intellectual or political hegemony to the bourgeoisie. Schisms and splits followed deviations, but the result always ensured that the torch of patriotic, anti-imperialist revolution was passed to a new generation and party. The CPN-M is the latest manifestation of this cycle of action and reaction and may not be the last, but it has inherited the legacy of Puspha Lal Shrestha at a time when Luxemburg’s historical option of ‘Socialism or barbarism?’ confronts with even greater urgency, a century after she coined her prophetic question.

Jo Chor Usko Thulo Sor (Proverb: ‘He Who Steals Shouts Aloud’)

The feudal system was by no means brought complete from Germany, but had its origin, as far as the conquerors were concerned, in the martial organization of the army during the actual conquest, and this evolved after the conquest into the feudal system proper through the action of the productive forces found in the conquered countries. – K Marx, Feuerbach – Opposition of Materialist and Idealist Outlook, Selected Works, Vol 1, p.72)

Nepal was unified in 1769 when the Gorkhali warrior state subdued the three kingdoms in the Kathmandu Valley and created a myriad of fifty or more smaller principalities under the leadership of Prithi Narayan, who became its first Shah and centralized royal power in Kathmandu. It was not an organic process with common national identity evolving from a shared history, economy, language or culture but one of force majeure that involved conquest and subjugation over many indigenous ethnicities, each with their own language and customs. Narayan Shah’s ruthless empire building was partly driven by desire to forestall the inexorable northeastern expansion of the East Indian Company, then easily colonizing small kingdoms in its path. The creation of a martial Greater Nepal did indeed halt the feringhees (foreigners) advance, which appeared unstoppable following Clive’s decisive victory at Palashi (Plassey) over the Nawab of Bengal in 1757. This battle secured Company rule over India until the precise centennial challenge of the first War of Independence in 1857, denigrated by the British using the euphemism, ‘The Indian Mutiny’. However, a decade after Plassey, in 1767, Narayan Shah’s Gurkhali army routed a British expeditionary force under Captain Kinloch at Sindhulighadi and kept the greedy, expansionist British in the guise of the East India Company out of Nepal until the second decade of the 19th century and, many claim, helped ensure that the country was never formally colonized. It necessitated creating a domestic power imbalance with a minority ruling a majority that, apart from some cosmetic modification, exists to the present day and for a century was marked by Rana regimes so servile to British interests that invasion and colonization were rendered unnecessary.

1769 – The Dawn of the Hindu Kingdom

The extent of dominion had been acquired entirely during the last fifty years, by the systematic prosecution of a policy likened by the Goorkhas themselves, and not inaptly so, to that which had gained for us the empire of Hindoostan. – HT Prinsep, The Goorkha War, p 9, 1825)

Prithvi Narayan Shah established a state in Nepal that in many way was analogous with those of European feudalism that emerged from the collapse of the Roman Empire and lasted until the rise of capitalism in the late Middle Ages. It also was an agricultural society presided over by a divinely ordained monarch, nobility and priesthood existing on the labor and produce of a mass of serfs. Even the manner of its inception by force of arms echoes Marx’s comments on the origins of feudalism in Northern Europe as a response to anarchy and decay of the times:

From these conditions and the mode of organization determined by them, feudal property developed under the influence of the Germanic military constitution. (Marx-Engels, Feuerbach – Opposition of Materialist & Idealist Outlook, p.23. ME Selected Works, Vol. 1)

In this respect, Narayan Shah’s unification of Nepal was similar to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, where advanced military forces involving disciplined infantry and cavalry in integrated battle tactics was decisive in sweeping aside patchy and ill-coordinated Anglo-Saxon resistance. In terms of comparative logistics and technical support, it was complemented by Narayan Shah’s adoption of modern weaponry and training of a third of his army along British lines that proved crucial to eventual success in a grueling twenty-year campaign culminating in the declaration of Nepal as a Hindu Kingdom in 1769. Gorkhalis and Normans conquered foreign lands and peoples, and Kings William and Narayan used countrywide grants of confiscated lands to their warrior and clerical castes as both reward for past service and to secure the future of the central regime. In each case repression was used to entrench the system and reduce respective populations to serf/Shudra servility. The speed and ruthless nature of Norman expropriations was such that by the end of William’s reign in 1087, 2 It was a more attenuated process in Nepal, but by the time of the Ranas in mid-19th century, similar patterns in ownership and access to land were firmly established that, despite some fragmentation and formal abolition of feudal land titles, remain into the 21st century for want of serious reform. A 2004 Human Development Report, UNDP, reported the top From the birth of the new state, each of the subjugated peoples were subject to feudal rent in labor, goods or money in the case of Nepal where a sizable portion took immediate monetary form, while in Europe such remittance mode emerged gradually, attenuated by feudal society fragmenting under the impact of a growing urban society of flourishing markets and small-scale commodity production. In this situation money’s use-value as means of facilitating commodity exchange enriched and accelerated the rise of an increasingly prosperous merchant burger class that finally burst the constraints of European feudalism.

Land Tenure Post-1769

Should the direct producers not be confronted by a private landlord, but rather, as in Asia under direct subordination to a state which stands over them as their landlord and simultaneously as sovereign, then rent and taxes coincide, or rather, there exists no tax which differs from this form of ground-rent. Under such circumstances there need exist no stronger political or economic pressure than that common to all subjection to that state. The state is then the supreme lord. Sovereignty here consists in the ownership of land concentrated on a national scale. – Marx, Capital Vol 3, p 791, New World edition)

Aside from the geopolitical considerations of blocking the feringhees, the Gorkha state was driven by hunger for land, and Narayan Shah particularly desired the fertile Kathmandu Valley. Brahmins and Rajputs who had settled across Nepal, having being uprooted from North India by Mughal invasion and settlement, were also instrumental in securing the new system established by Narayan Shah from the Kathmandu center. They were particularly enthusiastic participants in the abolition of tribal land rights and the creation of a royal monopoly over all land under the Raikar Law. This allowed for individual/family use and transfer as long as taxes were paid to the King’s state treasury. Private ownership of land eventually mutated from this private use, creating a largely Brahmin landlord class. When Raikar was abolished in 1950, the system accounted for 5 The Guthi system further allowed for state or private grants of land to religious institutions and was free from tax and repossession by the donor. This continues to the present time but accounts for only A specific subset of Birta was Jagir tenure, which was land in lieu of pay to army personnel, both officers and privates, which intensified expropriations of a scarce resource and entrenched the new order by, as one historian notes:

…granting of Jagir lands to such of them as received appointments in the government and army was an important factor contributing to the stability and organization of the newly established regime. Without the Jagir system it would have been virtually impossible for the government to distribute rewards to its nobility and military personnel. – Land Ownership in Nepal, p 74, MC Regmi).

Certain ethnic groups in Eastern Nepal had traditional rights to common land under the Kipat system. The Limbus in particular had these rights as quid pro quo for their agreement in 1774 to accept merger with Nepal under Narayan Shah’s sovereignty, which extracted a pledge that Kipat land would remain outside the Raikar system in perpetuity. This was never honored by succeeding shahs and particularly the later Rana regimes that relentlessly encroached upon these lands during the 19th and 20th centuries. The Limbus suffered especially as literate and legally informed Brahmins exploited their skills to dispossess them of their traditional lands. It was comparable to the enclosures of Tudor and Georgian England, where the gentry used Acts of Parliaments to dispossess an equally unwitting rural people of their common lands. Rai Kipat land was largely untouched, reflecting the uneven development in the extension of royal autocratic hegemony mingled with deliberate divide et impera strategy. It shows how oppression was relative, with some national minorities eventually binding to and serving Narayan’s state, even applying stratification by caste among their own peoples, acquiescent in their deities’ acceptance as avatars of the Hindu God, &c.

Caste and the Feudal State

When born in the same way – all are one. None superior –none inferior. What is the use of caste that discriminates between human beings? – From Basavanna’s Vachanas, written by a 12th century Indian philosopher/statesman.

The modalities of tenure imposed by the first Shah were pivotal in creating the economic and political sinews of a strong central state and went hand-in-hand with the imposition of the Hindu caste system throughout the country. This showed that feudalism in Nepal, while it shared features with the European variety, was deeply rooted in the culture of Indian tributary societies which flourished in the Middle Kingdoms between the first and thirteenth centuries. The caste system originated as a means for a colonizing group of light-skinned Indo-Aryans to distinguish themselves from the indigenous dark aboriginal peoples (Adivhasis) they were colonizing by establishing three Varnas (Varna denotes color) – Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishaya in order of superiority. However, according to scholars, by the time of Gupta Dynasty around 100 AD, this structure was recast as a socioeconomic hierarchy after large grants of land were given to the Brahmin priests, administrators, astrologers, temples and monastic institutions. This largesse had earlier been declared a sacred duty in the Dharmashastra, Hinduism’s foundational scripts where Brahmins are declared Pratigraha, the one caste entitled to receive gifts. There are further references along these lines in the epic poem Mahabharata. The fourth caste, Shudras, were called forth during this period as an agricultural labor force in servile symbiosis with a rapidly expanding landlord class. Slaves at worst, chattel at best; a Shudra could be killed by a Brahmin with impunity. They were untouchables, subject to enforced endogamy and exclusion. The peasantry of contemporary village India are their descendants. Eventually a fifth category evolved, Dalits (Hindi for oppressed) which took over menial tasks connected with bodily waste, pollution and dirt – they and other tribal subgroups became the ‘Untouchables’. This essentially was the system that Narayan Shah and his Gorkha warriors imposed upon Nepal, notwithstanding the Shah’s attempt at inclusivity by describing his Kingdom as ‘a garden of four castes and thirty-six subcastes’. No rosy description could, however, mask the reality of a ruthless struggle for land (intensified by salient, topographical fact that only 2 Janjatis were accorded the same status as Shudras and Dalits, and aside from extractions of surplus and rent, had to provide free labor for specified periods and military service as necessary, under the Jhara Code, comparable to Corvee Labor in European feudalism. Hindu patriarchal law deprived Janjati village and farmstead women of property rights. This was accompanied by a sustained campaign to ban ethnic languages and culture that culminated in the Panchayat slogan: ‘One nation, one king, one language.’

Religion in Tributary/Feudal Society

In Kalikot, Hinduism has incurred into disfavor after the Maoist uprising, temples have been abandoned or even demolished. There was no use for them after the upper castes lost their land and moved to the city. In this place we had a temple of Dedhedu, and we were not allowed to enter the temple from this area onward. If we are not allowed to worship the idols that we ourselves made, then there is no point. We came to understand this and stopped maintaining the place.” – Interview with Dalit Kalikot resident.

The Panchas did not add ‘One God’ to the attributes of the Khas nation as this was axiomatic to the state’s divine Hindu conception where religion was integral, functioning as means of ideological control over the laboring masses. It is strikingly similar to the role played by the pre-Reformation, Roman Catholic Church in European feudalism. The Church of Rome preached that serfs were chattel, a property category introduced into the world as divine retribution for the original sin of Adam and Eve and carried from birth by their descendants. However, by virtuously accepting his/her lot and offering it up as penance in this life, a serf could attain a ‘state of grace’, ensuring admittance in the next life to Heaven at Dies Irae (Judgment Day). The Church was also a great land and serf owner and had a vested material interest in the temporal status quo. As is so often with organized religion, the basest of motives were tricked out as divinely inspired credo by ferocious, proselytizing clergy. Their Hindu Brahmin homologues achieved the same end by teaching Shudras, Dalits, and other lower castes that their reward for accepting low caste in this life and creating good karma would be reincarnation into a higher one in the next. There is a potentially endless cycle of life, death and rebirth expressed in the concept of Samsara until the totality of Karma, achieved by soul’s migration through various physical manifestations is sufficient to achieve final mukti (liberation). There are, of course, significant differences between Catholicism and Hinduism – one a transnational, centralized, corporate entity, the other a syncretic, subcontinental, decentralized network, but in credal terms of ‘justifying the ways of God to Man’ as mechanisms for strict hierarchical control, they were equally prescriptive. The Brahmins are as fanatical about  prohibiting intercaste marriage or upholding Sati as Catholic clerics were about burning heretics for denying the Trinity or Transubstantiation doctrines. Each presented priestly castes functioning to reconcile the exploited and submerged masses to their inferior position by rationalizing the respective socioeconomic systems as ‘divinely ordained’ and eternal. The historian Kosambhi’s assessment below on role of caste in Hinduism could be equally applied to that of the Catholic Church in medieval Europe.

Caste is class at a primitive level of production, a religious method of forming a social consciousness in such a manner that the primary producer is deprived of his surplus with the minimum of coercion. – D. D. Kosambhi, Combined Methods in Indology, p 59.

Consensus and Conquest

Whatever the arguments concerning the urban genesis of Indian feudalism (25) in the Gupta period (300-600 AD), there is no doubt that in Nepal it was driven from a central urban power in Kathmandu. Whereas towns and cities in Europe rose in opposition to the feudal countryside, in Nepal the city of Kathmandu was instrumental in superimposing a unified feudal system in a region, and the process was marked by an uneven impact upon urban and rural populations. For the former it was consolidation or even preservation, for the latter – a ’Big Bang’ whose reverberations, like the cosmic microwave background, are still detectable. In this regard, the unification of the petty principalities, city states and major kingdoms within the Gandaki Basin of Central Nepal ranging from Pokhara to Kathmandu was facilitated by shared Indo-Aryan ethnicity, religion and language among the various protagonists. The regional ubiquity of Hindu upper castes – Brahmins, Chetris, Newaris, Thakuris and Rajputs – in various independent micropolities, petty principalities and kingdoms thus enabled Narayan Shah to develop a strategy that allowed for guile, diplomacy or force of arms to be juggled as necessary on a shared terrain as predominantly a manageable political or dynastic problem. Most of the town and city statelets absorbed were, nolens volens, either feudal or proto-feudal, with rural lower castes and untouchables producing the agricultural surplus appropriated by urban higher castes. Devout Hindus obviously welcomed the extension of the caste system that underpinned their privileged conditions of existence but were also roused by the Gorkhali King’s call to defend Hinduism against the Christian feringhees’ inexorable advance – Bible in one hand, rifle in the other. The warrior castes, forged in the wars against Buddhism and the later Mughal incursion, responded with particular fervor, ensuring them an influential position in the ruling elite thereafter. For the Janjati Tibeto-Burman (26) peoples it was a military conquest by Indo-Aryans subjecting them to economic exploitation and cultural coercion. It created multifaceted oppression based on ethnicity, caste and gender that intensified under the Ranas who, led by Jonge Bahadur Rana, seized power in 1846. The Ranas were Rajput warriors (the name means, ‘field of battle’) raised originally by Narayan Shah, and their century-long rule was marked by persecution, corruption, and debauchery. In return for being left alone to plunder the country, a succession of mostly Shamsher Ranas developed a neocolonial relationship with the British that began seriously starting with the 1857 War of Independence. Domestically, they used the Birta system extensively in order to seize more land, which increased rural deprivation and landlessness. Birta was particularly applied to award large tracts of the fertile Terai Plains to the Rana clan and other upper castes such as Thakhuris, Brahmins, Chhetris and Rajputs. The 1854 Muluki Ain (Country/Civil Law) was essential to the process of freezing Nepal in the Middle Age. This set of laws derived from orthodox the Hindu sanctions and laws of the Dharmashastras, giving legal validation to the caste system by, inter alia, prohibiting intercaste mixing, regulating submission of peasants before landlords, and generally preserving the sociocultural and economic status quo. It also continued the tradition of Brahmins being exempt in law from capital or corporal punishment. There was always resistance in some form to Rana autocracy – for example, the Gurung and Magar Risings in the 19th century and the mass movement inspired by a young widow, Yog Maya, a campaign for rural justice and against caste discrimination which lasted for two decades until the early 1930s. The response to any challenge to the existing order, whether socioeconomic or political, was always repression. In 1940 activists from the Prajaa Parisad (Citizens’ Council) Party were hung for daring to advocate a constitutional monarchy. While the Ranas’ political grip was loosened after 1950, it has maintained military influence in the officer class and high command of the Nepalese Army, with the present Chief of Army Staff, J. B. Rana, one of the seven Ranas out of eleven occupants of the post since 1974.

Failure of Post-1950 Land Reforms

Towards the end of the uncertain 1950s’, Nehru’s duplicitous Delhi Compromise disintegrated, with the Ranas retiring from political, but not military, power. Nepali Congress and King Mahendra entered a struggle to determine ascendancy, as the democratically elected 1959 Koirala government tentatively began land reform with the twin aims of raising agricultural productivity and alleviating rural poverty. This was undermined in 1960 by Mahendra’s military coup, proroguing parliament, banning political parties and trade unions, and beginning direct monarchical rule through a Panchayat system of ‘managed democracy’, and in 1962 implementing a pro-landlord program. This provoked the American agronomist who had helped draft the previous NC administration’s progressive legislation complaining, in a 1963 letter,that landlords were an obstacle to reform because:

They opposed any attempt to improve the situation of tenants. They were content with low productivity because it generated enough surplus that would be at risk from reform. They were pursuing narrow caste/class sectional interests at the expense of national prosperity and advancing the forces of agricultural production. (27) Garibiko Bahas. Discussion on Poverty

However, by this time Mahendra had consolidated power with help of a ruling elite that included a significant tranche of landlords and therefore substantial reforms such as setting upper limits on land ownership, increasing access to land for marginalized groups, and greater legal protection for poorer tenants were rejected. Subsequently, his successors, kings and democrats alike, emulated this approach, paying lip service to land reform and radical transformation of the agricultural sector. Probing Mahendra’s support for the landlords encapsulates the premise of this essay, limning a ruling elite that established its caste predominance by force majeure in 1769 and was still clinging to political power and economic privilege. Looking at the composition of the landlord class extant at Mahendra’s accession provides a microcosm of Nepalese history, with soldiers and high civil servants from established Brahmin and Chetri castes forming a core of absentee landlords. This was leavened by in situ landlords who became the activists and officers (Panchas) of the Panchayat system and were instrumental in implementing the 1967 ‘Back to the Village’ campaign and generally eliminating rural opposition to the absolutist regime. From 1964 on there were a succession of five Land Acts, none of which led to any perceptible change to the basic inequities suffered by the rural masses. Hopes for restructuring the sector were dashed when both NC and UML’s ‘Land to the Tiller’ policies failed to survive the transition from underground to legality, following the 1990 Andolan that humbled King Birendra and established for New Delhi a more amenable multiparty system. The short-lived 1996 Adikhari UML-led coalition administration tried to pick up the pieces and set up the Badal Commission which recommended measures to increase access to land by hitherto marginalized rural peoples. Its recommendations fell with the government that commissioned it, and reform was off the agenda, as successive administrations preferred stasis to reform. The NC-led Deuba regime, in 2002, did propose a program of radical change, ostensibly to aid poor farmers and tenants but which in reality turned out to be a political stratagem rather than a serious reform initiative, the purpose of which was to neutralize and outbid support for the Maoists’ truly radical rural agenda at the height of People’s War. The only changes attempted by the many governments from 1990-2006 were guided by neoliberal policies enforced on loan-dependent Nepal by the IMF and World Bank. Permitting only market mechanisms, they enabled the landlord-moneyed class to acquire even more land through a Land Bank. Furthermore, land registration and government improvement grants were designed to benefit big Hindu landlords. Meanwhile, the governments resisted ceilings on land ownership aimed at sharing land more equably by creating tenancies among the hitherto landless and marginalized rural populations and also rejected improving rights and security of tenure for existing small and single family tenancies.

Failure of Post-1990 Land Reform

It was significant that the landlord class, following the collapse of the Panchayat system in 1990, flocked into the ranks of Nepali Congress, entrenching it further as a formidable conservative bloc, winning the 1991 election that, after a hiccup, saw the ferocious anti-communist GP Koirala installed as Prime Minister. He needed little urging to launch a harsh campaign of state repression against the urban Left and their Janjati allies in the countryside. This commenced in April 1992 with police shooting demonstrators in Kathmandu and led remorselessly to the notorious 1995 Operation Romeo which subjected the western district of Rolpa to sustained police terror, lasting weeks and featuring arbitrary killing, rape and mass arrests, followed by detention and often torture. This insensate, brutal operation was decisive in swelling the ranks of a nascent Maobaadi (Maoist) PLA, and provided the spark that ignited a prairie fire of rural revolution marking the decade following 1996. Dr. Bhatterai provided an overview:

The most disadvantaged regions within the country include those inhabited by indigenous people since time immemorial. These regions, which were independent tribal states prior to the formation of the unified state in the latter half of the 18th century, have been reduced to the most backward and oppressed condition due to internal feudal exploitation and external semi-colonial oppression. They have been left behind in the historical development process because of the blockade of their path to independent development and the imposition of sociocultural oppression along with economic oppression with the backing of the state, by forces that came from outside. B. Bhatterai, Political Economy of People’s War, 1997, from PW in Nepal, Seddon-Karki, p 153)

It was no accident therefore, that the Maoists in 1996 chose to launch People’s War from rural West Nepal, beginning with the ransacking of an Agricultural Development Bank office located, with appropriate historical symmetry, in Gorkha District. Loan agreements lodged there, which extracted rent from tenant farmers by usurious repayments, were seized and torched, while ownership documents, held as collateral against the loans, were carefully retrieved and returned to respective titleholders. It was no accident that land reform was a key element in 2006 negotiations for CPA, where Maoists wanted further confiscation of land from the big landlords without compensation and the application of ‘scientific management’ to agriculture. In so doing they were echoing longstanding communist aims of land reform, highlighted in the 40 demands promulgated in 1996 by CPN (M) and whose anticipated rejection was the trigger for People’s War. Communists and anti-imperialists argue land reform is crucial for underdeveloped Third World countries if they are to gestate into modern genuinely independent societies. Forgetting the propaganda about it being the ‘world’s biggest democracy’, India is presently the world’s greatest failed state, with staggering levels of poverty and deprivation. This stems from the failure to transform its inefficient feudal land system after independence, because, prior to it, Gandhi and Nehru had made an alliance with the feudal landlords and guaranteed their property and privilege. The much vaunted ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1960’s came and went without altering the systemic depressing reality noted by a leading economist:

Famines in India were very frequent during the period 1940’s to 1970’s. Due to faulty distribution of food and because farmers did not receive the true value of their labors, the majority of the population did not get enough food. Malnutrition and starvation were a huge problem. Sen, A. Poverty and Famine, 1981

In 2008 the World Bank estimated the global poor at 1.29 billion, of whom 400 million were in India. Communist China by contrast expropriated its landlord class and created over 70,000 communes that overcame residual difficulties and not only eliminated famines by 1970, but also, against the background of the mid-1960’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, provided the springboard for Deng Xiaoping’s launching China in the direction of state capitalism (28) after 1976. Other socialist countries have followed this path: DPRK, Vietnam, and Cuba. Even Japan, post-1945, under MacArthur’s US imperium – initiated land reform clearing away feudalism as precondition for a capitalist future and a bastion against the march of communism in Asia. In all cases it was intended as precursor to industrial development and national autonomy. It is the only way for semi-feudal (29) and feudal societies to advance beyond  subsistence agriculture – by planning, collectivization and ‘scientific management’ in order to expand reproduction and accumulate the surplus necessary to feed the urban populations. It is especially crucial in supporting a growing working class engaged on infrastructural projects or in domestic industries that hopefully flourish when protected behind tariff walls. The nature of the society shapes its revolution’s priorities; as Dr Bhatterai, then in camp of revolution, detailed:

In a semi-feudal agriculture based economy like Nepal, the New Democratic revolution means basically an agrarian revolution. Revolutionary land reform, is, therefore, the biggest and the most important economic program of the New Democratic revolution. (B Bhatterai, ibid, p 158)

Summary – Historical Constituents of Discord

The imposition of a feudal system from the urban center created unresolved contradictions in Nepalese society. These contradictions are intensifying under pressurized conditions effected by the modern global capitalist market, but their provenance lies in Narayan Shah’s successful, ruthless unification campaign. More conquest than consensus, it seeded the antagonisms that continue to flourish in a divided, heterogeneous society and are recapitulated below. 1). The urban and rural paradox, which saw an urban center dominating the countryside as was touched on earlier, was an inversion of European feudal experience where towns and cities grew in dynamic opposition to the stagnant nature of rustic society. This caused Marx to remark in the Communist Manifesto that the one thing you could thank the bourgeoisie for, was that they built cities and rescued the mass of the people from ‘rural idiocy’. On the contrary in Nepal, unification and comprehensive extension of Hindu feudalism/Brahminism was driven by an autocratic, central state that remains largely intact and unreformed. As with many capital cities in the developing world, Kathmandu has also come to epitomize uneven development, with the city growing into a First World citadel, in a Third World society, a progression expedited because its ruling elites in politics, the civil service, the armed forces, business and, increasingly, the media have been suborned by global and regional imperialism, manifested in mixtures of military, economic and cultural Soft Power. In today’s Nepal, continuing resentment of central power, even dressed up as ‘democracy’, is revealed in dissension between those defending it against federalists seeking to liberate national minorities in the regions. The CPN (M) placed decentralization among its 40 demands in 1996, and it has since provided detailed policy necessary to establish a federal state. The major parliamentary parties are opposed, wanting to either retain power in the Kathmandu center or gerrymander a federal state that ensures continuing upper caste/class hegemony. 2). Narayan Shah’s triumph is echoed in the confrontation between Hindu Khas chauvinists and Janjati national minorities, with the former from the outset dressing up socioeconomic oppression of the latter in religious and linguist garb. The Rana record of attempting to stamp out the many ethnic languages and cultures is attested, but successive Shahs and soi disant democratic politicians were no better. As late as 1994, the Adhikari UML administration launched a Sanskrit radio station and tried to make its teaching compulsory in schools. Something to note – Sanskrit, the root of all Indo-Aryan languages as Latin for the European ‘Romantics’, has no linguistic connection with any ethnic minority language in Nepal, and the strategy of its imposition was another cultural humiliation, provoking an anti-Sanskrit campaign led by Janjatis. This event was a particularly salutary example of the gulf between the UML’s communist appellation and its political practice, which in this case was distinguished by arrogant, implicit Hindutvaism. Reflecting back to the 1066 conquest of England, Marx, quoted earlier, noted that the Norman system was grafted onto a pre-existing embryonic form of Anglo-Saxon feudalism. It could also be said that the two peoples shared the Catholic faith, perhaps offset by the Papal blessing given to William, rewarding his Ultramontanist credentials and the Church’s temporal interest in extending this more efficient and proven pious Norman feudalism and its own theological-political hegemony. However, even points of concurrence did not disguise a brutal invasion followed by a century of military oppression at the hands of a French-speaking army and a new nobility ensconced in castle, on expropriated land. The evolution of feudalism into the more benign form of manorialism and the consolidation of Royal and Papal power in England was greatly facilitated by fact that within four generations, the hitherto alien invaders, kings and nobles alike, had abandoned the French language for an evolving English one. This linguistic event was crucial to the formation of the modern English language and vital in establishing a cohesive national identity. It was not, therefore, unification by force-of-arms at the behest of foreign invaders that has precluded a similar Nepalese national identity from appearing; rather it is the failure to heal the original divisions created between vaunting conqueror and resentful conquered. 3). Landlord and tenant antipathy is rooted in the appropriation and expropriation of land that continued until the second half of the 20th century. The abolition of feudal land tenure and its subsequent mutation from private use to private ownership under market conditions benefited upper caste landlords by enabling them to consolidate their lands, with access to capital giving them immediate preference in acquiring released former royal/state lands. As shown previously, the pattern of land ownership has scarcely changed since the covetous Ranas and upper castes used the state and its repressive apparatus to monopolize swathes of it. Reforms such as setting ceilings on land holdings were either resisted or circumvented. Small tenants were given few protections, and they either fell prey to usurers or were driven into sharecropping and landlessness. This last group have swollen to include almost 3 4) The crucial component defining the relations of production in the tributary system established by Prithvi Narayan Shah was the rigorous application of the Hindu caste system and the enforcement of it on Buddhist, pantheist, or shamanist Janjatis. The ideas of the ruling class, as Marx observed, tend to constitute the dominant ideas in any society, and in the subcontinent, caste was the Brahmin elite’s mechanism for maintaining and rationalizing oppression and exploitation. It expressed a fusion of ideological and economic function in a society characterized by the rigid hierarchy of caste and rendered immutable by divine genesis and command:

The rich man in his castle The poor man at his gate God made them high and low And ordered their estate

This Christian hymn’s maxims are paralleled in the precepts of Hindu casteism as set forth, among other sources, by the God Krishna in the Bhavagad Gita:

“The caste system has been created by me…According to the differentiation of…Karma” Ch 4, Verse 13 “…of (the castes) the duties are distributed according to the qualities born of their nature” Ch 18, Verse 41

The continuing grip of this system, however informal, is evidence of residual feudal mindset and practice. A contemporary Brahmin is just as likely today to be a newspaper editor, political boss, professional, or civil servant, as a Pujaari (priest) or Jyotisi (astrologer), but this has not diluted the influence of the caste; rather it has equipped it to expand into the many crevices of power in contemporary civil societies. In all events, the secular opinion-former or the Thulo Hakim (party godfather/boss), laagered in Kathmandu, is no less the arrogant, prescriptive Brahmin, than is the cleric, functioning as interlocutor between humanity and God, under the gold roof of Pashupatinath Temple, on the banks of the Bagmati River that flows through Kathmandu and from where Dalits, as with all temples, are barred from entering. Caste in Nepal often overlaps with class, with Brahmins and Kshatriya morphing into bourgeoisie, and Dalits in their designated laboring and semi-skilled occupations recalibrating as workers and forming unions. Whatever the taxonomy, caste discrimination remains deeply ingrained in a society dominated by upper caste Hindus, despite the advent of multiparty democracy. Dalits and their organizations and unions have consistently supported the Maoists, seeing the revolution as the means of consigning the system into the dustbin of history. In this respect the CPN (M) were decisive in purging caste-discriminatory practices in liberated base areas, setting an example that stills cries out for general application. 5). The creation of Nepal under the auspices of deeply patriarchal culture was a qualitative setback for gender equality as post-pubertal females under Hinduism were regarded as domestic chattel to serve and gratify male needs and reproduce the species. This conflicted with the more liberated mores of Janjati societies based the villages and valleys of the hinterland. They represented the close-knit, gemeinschaft ideal, where survival in a harsh, unforgiving environment, was problematic for both sexes, precluding prejudice and requiring cooperation and mutual respect. Consequently women were influential in the community and could obtain and inherit property. This was prohibited under Hindu religion and law; women were also stopped from working in the fields under this rubric and generally subject to humiliation and constraints that marked their low status. They suffered the twin oppressions of class and gender, expressed in economic, social and political forms. The Maobaadi slogan was:

Working Women of the World, Unite. You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Double Chains!!

There is also significant empirical evidence that discrimination has deleterious health effects, especially to lower-caste women. Nepal is unique because female life expectancy has always lagged a few years behind that of males, an inversion of the normative death rate gender differential obtaining in most societies. Up to 2000, the country had one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world – 875 per 100,000, and it is little better now. Lower caste women suffer further sexual oppression, are subject to rape with impunity by high caste males and are forced into sex slavery and prostitution. Hindu women, especially in urban centers, are made to observe Teej (husband worship), and the fifth day Tihar (Nepal’s Deepawali) is set aside for Hindu sisters’ Bhai Tikka (brother worship). However, People’s War raised a challenge to the subordination of women in Nepal; the CPN (M) was committed to female liberation, from Marx to Mao a consistent communist principle, and proved this in the red base areas. There were dramatic effects on women in these zones, both indirect and direct. In the first place the conflict caused male displacement into PLA and militia and accelerated the increasing flight of men into migrant work, leaving the work traditionally assigned to them, from plowing the fields to repairing roofs, to be carried on by females. That many women enthusiastically took up these challenges and supported the revolutionary cause is further demonstrated by the fact that by the time of CPA, one-third of the 30,000 PLA ranks were women serving alongside men in the front line. As with caste, the Maoists promoted and enforced equality, in stark contrast to the patriarchal and chauvinist Hindu culture of towns and cities. Even these urban centers were affected, as there was an increase in women’s’ organizations and agitation which owed as much to the impact of cosmopolitan petit bourgeois feminism as it did to urban Maoist women engaging in those legal or semi-legal campaigns for women’s rights that were open to them. However, there remains a long struggle for full equality between the sexes on the subcontinent. The appalling treatment of many, especially Dalit, women in India, highlights the worst effects of Hindu male chauvinism. It is also apparent in culture with the Soft Power of Bollywood and in politics with the election of a Hindutva BJP government showing that patriarchalism is systemic and pervasive on the subcontinent. For Nepal, it forms part of Narayan Shah’s enduring legacy, and for those of Indo-Aryan stock, secular or Hindu, male chauvinism is reinforced by cultural and political mores emanating from ‘Mother India’.

Patriots and Compradors

The major divide between patriots and compradors is not directly attributable to the first Shah but began with the deliberate neocolonialist turn taken by the military clan he had called forth as the monarchy’s Praetorian Guard, the Ranas. Following Jonge Bahadur’s precedent, their subservience to the British rendered direct colonization unnecessary. In the light of the post-1857 rebellion which the Ranas helped the British put down, the new Raj was more concerned with consolidating what he held than advancing into new territory and he actually returned to Nepal parts of the Terai seized following the 1814-16 Anglo-Nepalese war and Sugauli Treaty. While the Ranas suffered for their pro-British proclivities in 1950, with Nehru aiding the King and NC invasion, the returned Shahs from Tribhuvan to Gyenendra were always ambivalent towards India. Mahendra, for example, was quite willing to play the China card after its decisive military victory over India in 1962 by securing Peking’s aid in constructing a modern highway from the Tibetan border to Kathmandu. Birendra’s humbling in the events of 1990 Andolan was precipitated by an Indian blockade on Nepal that closed four out of the five major roads and quickly brought hunger to Kathmandu. This was prompted by the King’s attempt to purchase anti-aircraft equipment from China without consultation with and the agreement of New Delhi. These and other royal stratagems were nevertheless exercises and attempts at national sovereignty opportunistically exploiting interstices in the bedrock of Nepalese general political, cultural and economic deference to India and pragmatic royal acceptance of India’s strategic interests as the regional superpower. This ambivalence continues today as even the two RPP royalist parties are divided by pro- and anti-Indian sentiment. It is all the more surprising that, from Nehru onward, Indian administrations maintained a ‘Two Pillar’ policy towards Nepal following the collapse of the Delhi Compromise which supported the king and the political parties. It was never a rational option; attempting to balance the conflicting interests of Royalist absolutism and popular democratic sovereignty was destined to end with the victory of one group or another. Tigers want blood – not grass, and New Delhi appears naïve not to have understood this. It was especially puzzling that it involved India, as mentioned, supporting frequently freewheeling monarchs and marginalizing its natural allies in NC, and latterly UML, who had followed their Indian CPI comrades onto the parliamentary road and establishment status. New Delhi had a major geopolitical stake in ensuring a compliant regime in Nepal as a bulwark against the threatened proletarian expansionism of the PRC and yet tolerated often opportunist, awkward Nepalese monarchs who, in their turn, were trying to maintain neutrality and pursue and independent foreign policy. They were conscious of Narayan Shah’s warning that: ’Nepal was like a yam between two stones’, therefore, cunning and room for maneuver was required to avoid being crushed. Why successive Indian administrations continued to tolerate an, at best, ambivalent monarchy, when it had much more congenial partners in waiting is puzzling, especially given that the policy was not abandoned until 2005, when New Delhi finally lost patience and facilitated talks in India allowing the prorogued seven parliamentary parties and the Maoists to forge an anti-Gyanendra alliance. NC, after all, was created under Nehru’s aegis, and he effectively betrayed the party in the aftermath of the 1950 invasion, with first the Delhi Compromise and next with the subsequent Two Pillar policy. It may be argued that as the supreme arbiter of power on domestic and international issues, Nehru’s quixotic and capricious nature – if not Brahmin presumption – led to unchallenged contradictions. But even that does not fully explain the persistence of this approach post-Nehru, especially after the 1990 Andolan, which New Delhi precipitated and again drew back from by agreeing to having King Birendra stay on condition of accepting constitutional status (yet crucially allowing him to keep control of the army) in a ‘parliamentary democracy’. A former Indian diplomat turned critical establishment sage noted in exasperation in 2003:

“There is a serious inherent conflict between the interests of multiparty democracy based on the concept of popular sovereignty and the King’s political aspirations and self-perceived divine role to rule. Even in 1990 the coexistence between the King and the political parties was neither natural, nor sincere nor honest.” (31) – S. D. Muni

As this essay has argued, it was obvious from 1990 on that the parliamentary parties, governments and upper castes were either supine or in active collusion with Indian interests against the interests of the nation. They stood in even greater neocolonial submission to India than the Ranas before the British Empire. Their anti-national character was reinforced by functioning as agents/functionaries/transmission belts for imperialism in all its manifestations. There is no role for independent states under the present global imperium. The modern state was called forth by the European bourgeoisie during the early progressive birthing struggles against feudalism. These states later degenerated into a struggle between these new nations across the European continent. It was nationalism distinguished by a xenophobic hatred, intensified when rivalry spread from the continent to a world stage in the age of mercantilism and colonialism as each European power fought rivals for a ‘place in the sun’. The aim of these various rampaging states was to either exterminate or exploit native peoples and by blocking independent development maintain their subjugation. The aim of the First World has always been to kick away the ladder of protection it climbed up, from under Third World countries preserving them as arenas for super-exploitation. If there are domestic capitalist sectors in underdeveloped countries, they are crushed by unfair competition or leveraged out by multinationals using the dominant financial and political institutions and instruments of international capitalism. Since national capitalist sectors are not permitted in underdeveloped countries like Nepal, no national bourgeoisie can exist. Only one that is comprador can flourish. Individuals from upper caste/bourgeois backgrounds do at times betray their caste/class interest and join the struggle for national liberation, and their contribution is not negligible, but patriotism finds critical mass among the rural and urban working masses because it is materially intertwined with class interest and takes political counteroffensive against oppressive conditions created by international capital. For the ‘wretched of the earth’, Fanon’s memorable, passionate characterization, in Nepal and other Shudra states of the present global dispensation, there is no ‘trickle-down’ from the engorging imperial heartlands. The much-touted benefits of capitalism are chimerical, a Coca-Cola sign on a Third World shanty mocking poverty inside. The gap between a banker on Wall Street and a sharecropper in an Assamese paddy field is as wide and unbridgeable as that between a patrician Brahmin or Newari Thulo Hakim in the gated Lazimpat area of Kathmandu and a barelegged Dalit sanitation operative sifting city filth and inhabiting a hovel in a less salubrious quarter. Capitalist imperialism has overseen Brahmin and bourgeois class rule equalized by mutuality of greed and hierarchical praxis.

Material Basis of Social Contradiction

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history; the simple fact hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even on ideas of religion, have been evolved,…..” – F. Engels, Speech at the Graveside of Marx, 1883, Selected Works, Vol 3, p 162.) “…an economic rationale can be provided for the origins of the Indian caste system as it can for European feudalism. All the great Eurasian civilizations being dependent on plow intensive agriculture needed some institutional means to tie labor…..Serfdom, indenture, slavery and the caste system were all ways to do so.” D. Lal, The Abuse of History, p. 2.

The genesis of Nepal’s divisions principally lies in the system imposed by Narayan Shah after 1769. This was an economic process galvanized by political means, with a ruling elite extracting surplus from downtrodden peasantry in an agricultural society through control of the land. Following Professor R. S. Sharma’s taxonomy (32) of this phenomenon in India during the first millennium AD, the appellation feudalism is used. Asok Rudra created the term ‘Brahminism’ (33) to emphasize the unique nature of the Indian system, rejecting parallels with European feudalism. What unites them, however, is mutual recognition that, whatever its discrete mechanisms and subsequent nomenclature, this was a tributary society. In other words, a type of pre-capitalist economic formation marked Eurasian history in this period. It was characterized by two main classes – first, a peasantry deployed in communal production, and second, a ruling class comprised of a priesthood, a nobility/military and an absolute monarchy that appropriated the surplus product/labor through control of land by repressive and extra-economic mechanisms There were marked divergences in the forms taken by these societies in Europe, India and China, but all instantiate the level of class struggle at this historical stage, albeit subject to differential momentum, development trajectories and cultural configurations. This is applying the methodology of historical materialism, précised in Engels’ quote above, which posits a sociopolitical superstructure arising from and sustained by an economic infrastructure which is appropriate to specific historical stages and the development of the forces of production therein. These successive modes of production encompass therefore not just the technological level of the productive forces but the corresponding relations of production under which they operate. The conditions under which social formations organize immediate physical necessities such as food and shelter shape their culture and provide a dominant worldview consistent with specific modes of reproduction. There have been qualitatively distinct historical stages in systematizing preconditions of physical existence, each sustaining its appropriate ideology. Marx reasoned:

“The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish social relations in conformity with their material productivity, produce also principles, ideas and categories, in conformity with their social relations.”(34) – Karl Marx.

Therefore European feudalism gave rise to Roman Catholicism with all souls subsumed in the Corpus Christi (Body of Christ) and with divinely ordained functions complementing hierarchical society. Capitalism, for its part, produces bourgeois individualism as an appropriate ideology for a dynamic or even unbridled society that is in constant flux. Similarly the caste system on the Indian subcontinent, as has been argued earlier and noted by Lal above, is a socioeconomic phenomenon brought forward by exploitative elites applying superstitious doctrine to rationalize and mask their extraction of surplus. It is, as Dr. Ambedkar rightly concluded, a mechanism for the ‘social division of labor’ within an ’unequal hierarchy’. Just as Hindu metaphysics spawned numerous avatars and manifestations of Para Brahman (the Supreme Being), increasing refinement in allocation of fixed, discrete socioeconomic functions gave rise to a plethora of subcastes and Jatis that remain determinate to this day, despite the impacts of urban cosmopolitanism and the phenomenon of many Dalits and lower castes forming their own organizations and joining trade unions. Hinduism’s credal syncretism contrasts strikingly with the rigidity of its hierarchical stratification by means of caste. Religion is an ideological component within a general culture and along with political and legal systems is a constituent element of the superstructure which consistently corresponds to the economic base. It is called forth and shaped by ruling classes to serve the base and changes accordingly as it does. It cannot be otherwise. It is not economic determinism, acknowledging there is a reciprocal relationship between the two. So, for example, changes to the social relations of production in the base give rise to distinct world views; while conversely, political activity in the superstructure such as revolutionary upheaval can transform the base. Feudalism gave way to capitalism, which reduced religion to residual role and developed education as mode of enculturation. These are Blake’s “mind-forged manacles,” prefiguring Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in civil society, showing how a dominant class maintains ideological control over exploited classes and thereby complements its monopoly of the physical means of repression. Human societies have always commingled consent and coercion in varying combinations according to circumstances and history, but all rest on specific, sequential economic infrastructures that are ‘determinate in the last instance’:

“… According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimate determining factor is the production and reproduction of life.” (Engels to J. Bloch, 1890. ME Selected Works, Vol 3, p.487)

Conclusion

The ideal for any ruling class is where its ideology takes root and is accepted by the subordinate classes as expressing normative, eternal human verities. The lower classes then, as Marx held, “…share the illusion of that epoch” (35). In this essay I have argued that the brutal genesis of modern Nepal continues to engender resistance that precludes mass popular consent to such ‘illusion’ because its inceptional arrangements remain largely intact. The caste system therefore remains pervasive and influential, if sotto voce, because the upper castes it benefits retain political and economic power, despite changes in polities from monarchy through the Ranas back to the return of monarchy and finally culminating in the multiparty parliamentary system, with each in turn representing a different modality of Brahminical predominance. This elite has lasted nearly two-hundred and fifty years, and it has managed to preserve a feudal/tributary mode beyond its epochal termination elsewhere. Although circulation of money, small scale commodity production and burgeoning private property penetrated this society assisted by inherent Brahmin avariciousness mediated as hucksterism, it did not produce a strong national capitalist sector. Therefore, it was easily sold out by entrenched upper caste interests ready to accommodate the socioeconomic and geopolitical authority and objectives of India’s Brahminical oligarchs and international capitalism’s power elites and institutions. Consequently the heirs of Narayan Shah via the neocolonial Ranas have mutated into today’s comprador ruling class, equally marked by cupidity, corruption and cultural capitulation. The Seven Party Alliance was squeezed between Gyanendra’s royal coup complete with dissolution of parliament and banning of parties on the one hand and the Maoists, strengthened by the gains of Protracted People’s War, on the other. The parliamentary parties in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement gave formal assurances to the latter in order to defeat the former regarding restructuring the state and army. In the following years, re-energized as a reactionary bloc and assisted/prompted by New Delhi and Washington, the same parties, led by NC and UML, decisively reneged on those commitments which they had conceded in a moment of weakness. Those promises, if translated into effective policies, would have effectively ended their role as Nepal’s traditional governing class functioning from the Kathmandu center. Thus discord continues to disfigure Nepalese society and is characterized by a plurality of contradictions reflected variously as antipathy between landlord and tenant, Brahmin and Dalit, Khas Hindu and Janjati, comprador and patriot, casteist and egalitarian, capitalist and worker, patriarchalist and feminist, centralist and federalist, Maoist and Status Quoist. They are all aspects and expressions of fundamental class antagonism, with a ruling elite on the right confronting the interests of the popular masses on the left. Finally, I will conclude with a quote from an assessment made just after the 2006 CPA outlining the steps necessary to avoid a repetition of Protracted People’s War. It encapsulates the arguments made at greater length in the preceding pages. It is not from class warrior ‘usual suspects’ or any of more erudite and equally committed Nepalese specialists, but it hails from a well-meaning and of course well-funded Norwegian ‘Conflicts Resolution’ NGO:

The long-term conflict trends in Nepal are linked to whether or not one succeeds in replacing social, political and economic exclusion with more inclusive institutions, processes and practices. Continued exclusion on the basis of caste, ethnicity, gender or other means of distinction will provide the basis for continued armed conflict, including the possibility for further violence. In political terms the key issue revolves around the ongoing efforts to establish legitimate political institutions accepted by all groups in society. In socioeconomic terms, this system will also have to, over time, succeed in becoming more genuinely redistributive that the current system. In the short term, several factors might trigger increased violence in Nepal, including: Increasing poverty: As noted above, the poverty and exclusion issue will remain central, in particular for the new regime when it will be established. Meanwhile, the government should succeed in providing at least some symbolic progress on the economic front in order to encourage belief in the system and indicate the way forward. Ethnic mobilization: With widespread exclusion and discrimination still the norm across Nepali society, the danger will remain that some groups may mobilize on the basis of violence. This danger will grow unless the government and Maoists succeed in driving the negotiations forward and ensure redistribution in broad terms. (36)

These aims, necessary for Nayaa Nepal (New Nepal), have been either ignored or had their implementation blocked by a revived Brahminical status quo that despite its rampant corruption and its inability to provide functional government or generally represent the national interest still clings to power and privilege. Meanwhile the country decays and the people grow poorer while a younger generation takes up the challenge of the unfinished revolution.

“The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.” (Gramsci, A. State and Civil Society, Prison Notebooks, p 276)

Gramsci’s apercu applies to the present right/left impasse in Nepalese society – for the moment.

Postscript

In these poor, underdeveloped countries, where the rule is that the greatest wealth is surrounded by the greatest poverty, the army and the police constitute the pillars of the regime; an army and a police (another rule which must not be forgotten) which are advised by foreign experts. The strength of the police force and the power of the army are proportionate to the stagnation in which the rest of the nation is sunk. By dint of yearly loans, concessions are snatched up by foreigners; scandals are numerous, ministers grow rich, their wives doll themselves up, the members of parliament feather their nests, and there is not a soul down to the simple policemen or the customs officer who does not join in the great procession of corruption. – F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, p. 138)

At the turn of the millennium, the Royal Nepalese Army had a complement of approximately 35,000 front line personnel, and bolt-action 303 rifles (first issued to the British Army in 1892) were the standard infantry rifle. Now, post-2008, as the Nepalese Army is 105,000 strong the and standard issue weapon includes the much more deadly American M-16 fully automatic, state of the art, high-velocity, assault rifle, replacing the substandard, fault-prone INSAS light machine gun, India’s generic AK-47. This results from Washington’s geopolitical strategy of encircling a rising China with a chain in which Nepal forms an important potential link. Egyptianizing the Nepalese Army was important in advancing this aim. Under the pretext of post 9/11 ‘War On Terror’, following the 2002 Powell mission to Kathmandu, Washington agreed to help Gyanendra by equating Maoist rebels with Jihadis in a spurious world ‘crusade’. In the following years, except for the brief blip of Gyanendra’s absolutist rule, guns, guidance and greenbacks have flowed in to the army as US military advisors implemented a strategy of re-equipping the army. The US has supplied the army with improved weaponry. In the air, the US is supplying aerial reconnaissance and attack capability with helicopters and short take-off-landing aircraft (STOL). And the US has introduced counterinsurgency training. All of this for an army that, prior to being sent into serious action against the PLA following the pro-Maoist King Birendra’s assassination, was only experienced in UN peacekeeping duties in various hotspots. Through the Office for Defense Cooperation, Nepal’s top military convene monthly at one of the two US Embassies in Kathmandu under the auspices of the US Commander in Chief – Pacific (CINPAC). (37) Many of the NA high command and officer class are Sandhurst trained, and like their Indian Army homologues are willing Koi Hais, the Indian colonial term for a native servant. Collusion with Uncle Sam, allowing him a forward base in Nepal in return for practical assistance turning the NA into a primarily domestic counterinsurgency force, came easily with this pedigree. Aside from the Pentagon’s infantry weaponizing of the NA, most of the army’s supplies have come from India. In 2013, India resumed its role of supplying most of the army’s other military requirements, including means for ground and air mobility. This followed an eight year break that had begun in protest against Gyanendra’s coup but was also motivated by suspicion and resentment at growing US presence in India’s traditional sphere of influence. The recent unity of purpose between Washington and New Delhi in regard to Nepal is evidence of a broader and deeper economic and strategic partnership between the two countries. This has been extended into the military sphere with the Pentagon providing guidance for Operation Green Hunt, a counterinsurgency campaign launched in 2009 aimed at defeating Maoist and Adavasi rebels who are resisting the plunder of resources and destruction of their traditional lands by insatiable multinational corporations in the five states comprising India’s ‘Red Corridor’. There is also a 40,000 strong paramilitary group, the Armed Police Force (APF). This group was originally set up under Deuba’s NC 2001 administration to offset Gyanendra’s NA monopoly of state repressive potential. With the advent of the republic, it morphed into common purpose with NA, giving the state nearly 150,00 armed personnel at its disposal. The UK, with twice the population of Nepal, has an army half its size of the NA. Further, Britain’s imperial heritage marks it as a singularly bellicose state, permanently at war with someone somewhere, usually as faithful deputy in various American campaigns of international aggression. Apart from the People’s War, the Nepalese Army fought a minor war in the 1970’s, routing a marauding Khampa rabble in Mustang Province that had been trained and primed by the CIA to cross into Tibet and continue America’s war-by-proxy against the People’s Republic. Nepal is not threatened by imminent military invasion from either of its neighbors and has a particularly casual arrangement of an open border with India without even a dedicated border guard. The Nepalese Army’s UN peacekeeping duties involve 4,000 personnel at most at any one time. It is obvious that the NA and APF are primarily intended as forces for domestic repression; they are ostentatious and ubiquitous across the country, with six fixed army divisions straddling the regions, backed up by three mobile specialist brigades. They have used the years since 2006 to improve fortified positions and entrenchments in rural areas and are everywhere in urban centers. Katmandu City itself is like a military camp, with never less than 20,000 personnel in barracks dispersed across the City like chocolate chips in a cookie. Soldiers regularly patrol streets and thoroughfares, man major chowks (public squares and intersections) and parade in Tudikhel Park, a private army marching ground in the center of the city which, apart from the national football stadium is the only grass covered area in Kathmandu. Strutting their stuff, the soldiery are designed as much to intimidate as impress. The army is the elephant in the room in the Nepalese situation, and has been referenced throughout this paper for its role and influence at key points in Nepal’s history from its birth under Narayan Shah, to the early years of the 21st. century. In the last decade it has become bigger and better armed, equipped and trained than at any point in its history. It proved politically decisive in forcing Gyanendra’s surrender that signaled the victory of the April 2006 Andolan, and crucially succeeded in overthrowing Prachanda’s administration when it attempted to enforce the CPA provision that the PLA regulars be integrated as a corps into the NA. The further seizure of PLA weapons from the UN cantonments in 2011 on paper cemented the Brahminical state’s monopoly of violence in Nepal. Its comprador officer corps and high command, well-groomed by American and Indian patrons, have demonstrated in such interventions decisive executive ability; dumping a malfunctioning, hubristic King, blocking army reform, martialing the phony 2013 election, and holding an informal veto over policies or proposals inimical to the status quo. The officer corps is dominated by Chetris and Thakuris and represents a military ascendancy formed under the banner of Narayan Shah. It stands ready for counterrevolution either as a state of emergency or military dictatorship as possible options should the existence of the state be problematic or in imminent danger of collapse. The State’s political class presents no coherent power, and in any event is presently sunk in corruption, paralyzed by the specific difficulty in getting the existing order ratified in a bogus constitution and its sheer general uselessness in providing clean, functioning government.

Unfinished Revolution

War hath determined us, and foil’d with loss Irreparable: terms of peace yet none Vouchsafed, or sought: for what peace will be given To us enslaved, but custody severe, And stripes, and arbitrary punishment Inflicted? And what peace can we return, But, to our power, hostility and hate, Untamed reluctance, and revenge though slow Yet ever plotting how the Conqueror least May reap his conquest, and may least rejoice In doing what we most in suffering feel? Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 2, lines 330/40.

However, the People’s War may resume in some form based on the announcement in early December that barely two years after the CPN-M (Dashists) broke from the UCPN(M) (Cashists), the CPN-M (Dashists) haves also split, with a faction led by Biplav (Netra Bikram Chand) forming the CPN Maoist. At the time of writing, the Two-Line Struggle’s policy differences that prefigured the rupture are not fully understood, but the new party is driven by what it perceives as the treachery and reversals of the eight wasted years since 2006 and declaring that if provisions given by SPA on behalf of the status quo are not honored then struggle will resume, and organs of dual power will be revived in re-established liberated zones. The split does not appear as politically and ideologically rancorous as that between the Cashists and Dashists and may exhibit a generational difference regarding timing; Biplav and many around him are in their forties but have considerable battlefield experience from the People’s War. On the other hand, Kiran’s close comrades are in their fifties and sixties, and while many are primarily political figures, they also include active-service veterans. Each party recognizes that the stalled revolution is certain to recommence at some point, but the lack of technical support makes any attempt in the short term to ‘go back into the jungle’ or resume any form of armed struggle against a new, domestically refocused, re-equipped, and expanded state repressive apparatus militarily inadvisable if not suicidal. A more immediate likelihood is military and police repression of the party that, whatever its evident caution, has openly declared the task of completing the revolution, sooner rather than later. That is why its launch was held at a secure location in the Kathmandu Valley, but there was still a palpable sense of urgency behind Biplav’s opening statement that, failing the NC-led elite unblocking and implementing the reforms of the 12-point agreement of 2005 between the SPA and CPN (M) that were ratified the following year with the post-victory CPA, there would be a return to:

Armed struggle in order to protect national unity, integrity, sovereignty and rights of people. (38)

The Nepalese security establishment and its foreign advisers have every reason to take Biplav seriously. He was an effective military leader during the People’s War. With his close ally Khadga Bahadur Bishwkarma, Prakanda (Mighty) offered a vision of a reformed PLA with the creation of a youth wing in the CPN-M, the National Volunteers, that made a strong impression during the 2013 election boycott with uniform red T shirts and formation marching. It is a proto-army and significantly, most of its cadre have gone over to the new party. State surveillance agencies will also note Kiran’s statement:

We will meet if Chand will raise arms and fight for people (39).

All of which makes a pre-emptive strike by security forces a rational option. It also demonstrates that the understanding that ‘political power comes out of the barrel of gun’ is the one point of agreement between implacable enemies. This is not only perceived in abstraction, an axiom that distills a precondition for establishment and maintenance of power in human society from its tribal origins to the contemporary nation-state, but it is directly informed and shaped by Nepal’s recent history since unification in the late 18th century. The major and inescapable lesson is that violence was the midwife of the new state and has marked every significant subsequent upheaval since. From Prithvi Narayan Shah to Jonge Bahadur’s seizure of power in the Red Kot Massacre that established a century of brutal Rana despotism to the NC/Royalist 1950 invasion and uprising to Mahendra’s 1960 feudal coup to the People’s War and Andolans of the last decades to the 2001 assassination of Birendra which paved the way for Gyanendra – all of these events combine to confirm that there has never been any significant change in Nepal without the use of physical force. All of the present political parties have their roots in violence; the RPP, NC, UML, UMF, and UCPN(M) all emerged sequentially from Nepal’s history through force of arms. This paper commenced with Machiavelli’s comment on the right of the people to engage in struggle against the ruling class nobility of his time and so will conclude with an equally apposite rubric from the first great European political scientist. It expresses a truth understood by revolutionary communists everywhere on necessity for the revolution to have an experienced, disciplined, combat-ready armed wing, and is reflected in the author’s his rueful conclusion on witnessing the execution of the charismatic Florentine preacher Savonarola in 1498 following Rome’s condemnation of heresy:

That is why the visionary who has armed force on his side has always won through, while unarmed even your visionary is always the loser. – Machiavelli, The Prince, p 23, Penguin ed.

Peter Tobin, December 2014

Citations/Footnotes

(1) Index Mundi, Nepal Economic Profile, 2014. (2) Karobar National Economic Daily, 05/10/2013. (3) Economist, “The Trouble With Ghee”, June, 2008. (4) A political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and restore the power of economic elites. See A Brief History of Neoliberalism, D. Harvey, p 19. Harvey provides further elaboration of neoliberalism’s elevation of market criteria over all aspects of life, particularly the shrinking of the state’s responsibility for welfare, economic planning, subsidies, &c. From the 1970’s on, it began dethroning Keynesian policies, with neoliberals believing that the Keynesians’ emphasis on state deficit spending as means of stimulating employment and production distorted the market and lacked fiscal rectitude. The phenomenon has also been described in popular parlance as, “Capitalism with its gloves off.” (5) OPHI Country Briefing: Nepal,  2010. (6) B. P. Bhurtel. 17/10/2013. “Rich Man’s World as Wealth Gap Grows in Nepal.” The Nation/Kathmandu Post. (7) However, it can be argued that the link between bourgeois capitalism and bourgeois democracy is purely contingent, with neoliberal capitalism flourishing equally in dictatorships and democracies both. It is worth noting in this respect that Pinochet’s Chile was chosen by Washington as an experiment in extreme free market capitalism, dispatching Friedman monetarist acolytes of the ‘Chicago School’ to Santiago and placing them in charge of the Chilean economy. This is not because contemporary transnational capital is neutral but because it has become a superior executive power reducing political systems and governments to irrelevance. A review in Le Monde, 10/10/2014, of the German scholar Wolfgang Streeck’s Du Temps Achete – La Crise Sans Cesse Ajournee Du Capitalisme Democratique (Borrowed Time – The Postponed Crisis of Capitalist Democracy) quotes his comment describing advancing global capital as class avatar:

“…elles est inapte a tout fonctionment democratique, par le fait qu’elle pratiquee en tres grande parti, en particulairement en europe, comme une politique international – sous la forme d’une diplomatie financiere interetatique.” – Wolfgang Streeck. Borrowed Time – The Postponed Crisis of Capitalist Democracy.

A rough translation of which argues that it is incapable of functioning democratically, because it is, in fact a politically dominant power, especially in Europe, in the guise of interstate financial diplomacy. He uses the word ‘post-democracy’ to describe this stage of the present era. (8) K. P. Prabhakaran Nair. February 2006. Grist for US Mills. GMWATCH. It is salutary to note that up until 2014, over 250,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide as a result of such policies reducing rural populations to immiseration and destitution. (9) Republica (English language Nepalese daily newspaper) 07/09/2014. (10) D. Gywali/A. Dixit. April, 2000. “How Not to Do a South Asian Treaty.” Himal South Asian. (11) H. Yami/B. Bhatterai. 1996. Nationality Question in Nepal. (12) ‘Kiran’ is a nom de guerre for Mohan Baidya. It means Ray of Light. All Maoist leaders adopted one during People’s War. ‘Prachanda’ (P. K. Dahal) means ‘Fierce’, ‘Biplav’, (N. B. Chand), means ‘Revolt’, &c. (13) Colloquially known as ‘Dashists’ because of the –M in their name. Conversely, the UCPN (M), the party the Dashists split from, are called the ‘Cashists’ by their opponents because their leaders and many cadre were accused of falling before ‘sugar-coated enemy bullets’ after ‘coming out of the jungle’ and decamping to Kathmandu and corruption in 2006, following the CPA. (14) 1991. “Caste and Ethnicity,” Ch. 7 in Nepal – A Country Study. (15) R. Dangal. Administrative Culture in Nepal,  p.95, Table 9: Caste Distribution of Higher Civil Servants. 16) This needs an essay in itself! Briefly parliamentary/presidential, multiparty systems emerged as systems to meet needs of emerging bourgeois capitalist society in the West. The various parties represented class interests devising contingent institutional solutions. Part of Western hubris is claim their necessity in all circumstances. It was applied unilaterally by an indigenous elite in many postcolonial situations. Apart from a democratic deficit, adoption of this project indicated loss of nerve and residual ideological colonization among otherwise resolute anticolonial political leaders of independence struggles such as Nehru, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Kaunda, and Bandaranaike, &c). But the main reason it proves ‘wholly unsuitable’ is total failure to provide effective governance in postcolonial situations anywhere and to have descended into nests of thieves and similar mechanisms of naked class aggrandizement when not replaced by sanctioned western ‘strongmen’ or red revolution. Going hand in hand with capitalism and its contingent institutions demonstrated how indigenous elites were fostered and suborned by their colonial masters. Marx, enthused, saw the inception of the program:

From the Indian natives, reluctantly and sparingly educated at Calcutta, under English superintendence, a fresh class is springing up endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science. – Marx, Future Results of British Rule in India, 1853, M/E Selected Works p. 495.

Nehru is an exemplar of the success of this project:

“By education I am an Englishman, by views an internationalist, by culture a Muslim and Hindu only by an accident of birth.”

He epitomized Macaulay’s ‘Brown Englishmen’. His pretensions, along with his secularization of Hindutva, are set out in his 1943 magnum opus, The Discovery of India, (written in English of course) where he establishes the existence of a precolonial Hindu ‘golden age’ civilization and his particular ancestral call to restore its historic harmony expressed in language reflecting his Cambridge education in the classics with references to Pericles, Demosthenes, et al, although when required he could refer to:”..the old Vedantic spirit of the life force.” (17) Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 36. Marx benignly notes emerging use of education as conditioning and improvement mechanism, A hundred years later Fanon is responding to its deleterious postcolonial effect as the ideological component of a comprador class. Vide (16) above re Nehru shows how this strata were eventually conditioned to reproduce bourgeois polity, albeit in ersatz, parodic form. (18) WCPI, 2011. Transparency International, (19):

…the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement…there is no national movement without the peasant army, nor can there be. That is what is meant when it is said that, in essence, the national question is a peasant question. – J. V. Stalin, The National Question in Yugoslavia, Works, Vol 7, pp. 71-72.

(20) Prachanda’s short-lived 2008 administration might be excused, as it was forced out by a military coup orchestrated by New Delhi in league with NC & UML. But Bhatterai’s second ‘Maoist’ administration, 2011-13, had less excuse for being so supine. (21) Ghurkhas are not an ethnic group but, according to their websites are a warrior caste claiming descent from the Hindu Rajputs and Brahmins of Northern India. Their valor, tenacity and loyalty deeply impressed the British enemy. After a successful invasion and defeat in 1814-16, the East India Company began recruitment into a specially created regiment that, in modern times, has been mainly drawn from the Rai, Limbhu, Magar and Gurung ethnic nationalities. The added glory of Hindu provenance (possibly a retrospective embellishment), but their cry “Jaya mahakali – Ayo gurkhali!”  (“Glory to great Kali – Gurkhas are coming!”), shares an evocation of Kali as the goddess of destruction and death with the Rajputs, belonging to the Kshatriya warrior caste, spread across Northern India, many driven into Nepal by the Muslim invasion of North India. In the Terai they became one of the ruling Bhadralok castes mutating into professional occupations as doctors, lawyers &c. Also Narayan Shah was from a Kshatriya jati, although he was pragmatic enough to recruit given national ethnicities into his army while raising up Hindu upper castes and establishing a divine Hindu Kingdom. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the etymological root of Gurkha as:

 ORIGIN name of a locality, from Sanskrit goraksa ‘cowherd’ (from go ‘cow’ + raks – ‘protect’), used as an epithet of their patron. – Oxford English Dictionary

This lends credence to Gurkhas’ claims of provenance from Hindu warrior castes. (22) J. Adhikari. 2008. Land Reform in Nepal, p. 23. (23)  CPN (M). 1997. One Year of People’s War in Nepal. GS’s Report. (24) J. Adhikari. Land Reform in Nepal, p 39. (25) The early Marx claimed centralized despotism as the essential feature of the Asiatic Mode of Production – a pre-capitalist form that he believed existed in static, ossified, oriental societies. He infamously commented:

Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. Marx – Future Results…ME Vol 1, p. 494. 1853.

and, while acknowledging the base motives of the English colonizers, he thought that imperialist incursion would, nolens volens, drag it into the modern world. However, after the first War of Independence in 1857 and subsequent study he revised AMP and undermined the despotic, stagnant society premise by declaring the uprising a ‘national revolt’, and expressed support for the insurgents. Though he never accepted that India, precolonial incursion, was feudal, he conceded that it could be described as in transition to feudalism. In this respect he wrote in 1859:

In broad outlines, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. Marx – Preface to Critique of Political Economy, ME Selected Works, Vol 1, p. 504, 1859

The concept has been an issue for polemic and debate among Marxists and communists and survives more as an analytic than a descriptive term. Whatever the taxonomy, Marx, by looking at the relations of production, outlined how an elite could appropriate surplus using the state as a mechanism for generalized exploitation. Dalits and Sudras stood before their Brahmin masters in the same relationship as a slave before a slaveowner, a serf before a lord, or a worker before an employer. (26) These are linguistic categories used by modern ethnographers, and while there were obvious physical differences between the two groups that added to perception in the case of Nepal, they are not a racial classifications. For example, the other linguistic group in South India is Dravidian, with minimal physical differences between its speakers and those of the Indo-Aryan bloc. (27) J. Adhikari. 2008. Land Reform in Nepal, p. 25. (28) ‘State capitalism’ is as fraught a term as feudalism, with multiple definitions, inspired by political polemics not only expressed between left and right but also a lively source of debate within the left denoting ultimate political allegiance . For the right, it can mean any state intervention either through ownership or control such the post-1945 policy of Dirigisme in France where, apart from extractive and heavy industry, private ownership dominated in a free market but was subject to indicative planning from a government setting national objectives. It could also be applied to the Scandinavian and British mixed economy model that was discarded after the 1980’s. In the case of France, state intervention predated capitalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie, and in the form of Colbertism, was initiated under Louis IV’s first minister, J. B. Colbert. The concept of ‘state monopoly capitalism’ has also been applied by left wing and extreme rightwing free marketeers to describe the state protection and support for the big corporations in the USA. The Military-Industrial Complex that emerged in the new triumphal global imperium following the Second World War is often cited as example because huge contracts are awarded rather than won, characterizing a cozy symbiotic relationship between business and the political functionaries of the American ruling class. For anarchists, Neo-Trotskyites and the Ultra Left, it is what happened after 1917 in Russia and 1949 in China, or indeed anywhere else there has been a socialist revolution. It assumes that party apparatchiks and bureaucrats inevitably become a new ruling class, owing to their control of the means of production and the appropriation and direction of the resulting ‘social dividend’ (surplus value). For Marxist-Leninists/Maoists it is what occurred in the USSR after Stalin’s death with Khrushchev’s failed attempts to follow Yugoslavia’s ‘market socialism’ and re-occurred with a vengeance in the PRC after Deng Xiaoping’s seizure of power in 1976. Apologists for China’s system describe it as a ‘socialist market economy’, where the commanding heights of the economy, the banking sector and land are state owned and where the state is responsible for macroeconomic policy with microeconomic decisions left both to management of state enterprises and licensed capitalists operating as private companies in designated Special Economic Zones. Therefore the political decision to allow free market mechanisms to determine price and allocations of goods and services with retention of profit by private companies, commentators opine, is more indicative of state capitalism especially when set against the background of scrapping the egalitarian, ‘Iron rice bowl’, full employment guarantee from the heroic period of socialist construction and mass mobilization. Therefore, it should be said that, like feudalism and indeed semi-feudalism, the concept of state capitalism is often used subjectively, indicating class or political orientation. See following note. (29) ‘Semi-feudal’ obviously relates to accepting the thesis of pre-existing feudalism on the subcontinent, Samantabaad is the Hindi and Nepalese word for feudalism and derives from the nobility of the Gupta Period, which some historians claim led the emergence of feudal society in India. The Samantas were also influential during the Licchavi Dynasty (400-750 AD) who established the first central state in Nepal. Even those who do accept the taxonomy applied recognize that it was a tributary society of a type that flourished the early city states, empires and later, nascent nation-states. European feudalism was one type of tributary society, with the exception that it enabled the growth of classes and productive forces that eventually burst its integument and established the capitalist society and mode of production. Marx did not recognize this dynamic in the Orient, and his AMP was his initial response in distinguishing its ossified despotisms with those of medieval Europe. It was this formulation that, while recognizing the utter venality and brutality of the British, nevertheless led him describe them as unwitting agents of progress, in breaking down the ‘Chinese Walls’ of societies incapable of generating internal change. Subsequently it has been argued that Indian society, pre-colonization, was subject to change, but that compared to Europe’s historical transformation it was imperceptible (as indeed was most of its history at that time). This had important political ramifications for Indian communists because they refused acknowledging any positive results from imperialist incursion and applying the term feudal to describe periods of Indian history implicitly underpins this position. Plus ‘Down with feudalism’ is less of a mouthful than, ‘Down with the Asiatic Mode of Production! The notion of semi-feudalism follows this thesis because it posits transitional developments. In the case of Nepal, it is marked by backwardness of the productive forces, sharecropping, increased tenancies and the growth of usury. The last are linked, representing the dominance of money payment in feudal rent, reflecting generally growth of a market economy but specifically the transition of feudal owners into capitalist rentier landlords. Semi-feudal is also used to describe relations of production continuing after their originating conditions of existing have changed, as expansion of agricultural capitalism has led to increasing numbers of landless and sharecroppers, who are objectively proletarianized but are learning to recognize residual feudal deference as subjective flight from their objective class reality. As descriptive tools, these terms are a continued source of argument not only between Marxists and bourgeois, but also intestinal within these respective groupings. As a slogan, however, ‘Down with Feudalism’ and the commitment to abolish ‘neo/semi-feudalism’ is a political call to the oppressed to break free of feudal/exploitative relations in order to confront the reality of capitalist modes of employment and exploitation in the agricultural sector. (cf: Pushpa Lal’s CPN’s program and Mazumdar’s for the Naxalite struggle in 1960s.). (30):

The informal rural credit markets of Nepal seem to be characterized by an aggregate constraint at the village level and oligopolistic collusion on price discrimination. Entries of new lenders are likely to be rare, due to high initial information cost. Lenders need to interact with the borrowers for a long period to be able to screen the borrowers and enforce payments…. Although it is reasonable to target poor households, the analysis indicates that one may as well target the higher priced segments. The analysis thus supports credit programs that target low status castes. Examples from Nepal are programs that target ethnic groups living in Terai. These households pay real interest rates that are almost double of the rates paid by high castes living in the hills. – M. Hatlebakk. 2000. “Will More Credit Increase Interest Rates in Rural Nepal?” Technical Report and Recommendations, pp. 42-43. Nepal Rastra Bank.

(31) S. D. Muni. 2003. Maoist Insurgency in Nepal, p.61. Muni is perhaps too close to see the Brahminical tree from the wood, he is a pragmatic, secular ex-diplomat critical of and puzzled by the ambivalence of Nepalese policy that allowed King Mahendra, e.g. to block: “India’s legitimate and enlightened interests in Nepal.” (ibid, p 62). His views are an apologia for Indian expansionism, pitting progressive capitalism against residual feudalism, which synchronically informed the position of Dr. Bhatterai, earning him the sobriquet of ‘Mr. India’ in anti-revisionist Maoist ranks. I would also speculate that the attitude towards the last divine Hindu monarchy was schizophrenic, with even ostensibly Westernized secularists like Nehru acknowledging the weight of Brahminical Chaturvarna tradition and unconsciously deferring to caste supremacy, however apparently exotic and uncongenial to a Cambridge-conditioned cosmopolitan world statesman. Nehru was a Hindutva with an occidental humanist face. Successive Indian administrations, particularly Rajiv Gandhi’s administration, elided further into more open Hindutvaism, which, mixed with growing accommodation with Western capitalism in triumphalist form following the suicide of Gorbachev’s USSR and collapse of Soviet Bloc, was Modiism avant la lettre. (32) R. S. Sharma, Indian Feudalism, 1965. (33) A. Rudra, Non-Eurocentric Marxism and Indian Society, 1988. (34) Marx. 1847. The Poverty of Philosophy, p.105. (35) Marx, Feuerbach. 1846. Opposition of Materialist and Idealist Outlook, ibid, p 43. (36) NORAD. 2007. Report on Conflict Sensitivities, pp. 67-68. (37) Tobin, P. 2011. “Balance of Military Forces in Nepal” Beyond Highbrow – Robert Lindsay, website. (38) http://www.ekantipur.com, Chand Announces CPN Maoist, 02/12/2014. (39) Republica, D. B. Chhantyal, 06/12/2014.

References

Adhikhari, J. Land Reform in Nepal – Problem & Prospects. Bhatterai, B. Monarchy vs. Democracy & Articles, Essays from People’s War. Dangal, R. Administrative Culture in Nepal, 1991. Fanon, F. The Wretched of the Earth. Karki/Seddon, (eds.) The People’s War in Nepal – Left Perspective. Kumar, A. The Black Economy in India. Lecomte-Tilouine, M. (ed.) Revolution in Nepal, Collected Essays. Marx/Engels, Selected Works. 3 Vols, Poverty of Philosophy, Anti-Durhring, Capital, Vols 1 &2. Maxwell, N. India’s China War. 1970 Muni, S. D. Maoist Insurgency in Nepal. Nehru, J. The Discovery of India. Prinsep, H. T. The Gurkha War – 1814-16. Regmi, M. C. Land Ownership in Nepal. 1976 Sharma, R. S. Indian Feudalism. Thapa, D. A. Kingdom Under Siege – Nepal’s Maoist Insurgency – 1996-2003. Upadhyaya, S. P. Indo-Nepal Trade Relations – 1858-1914 .

General

Rough Guide to Nepal. Studies in Nepali History & Society, Vol. 15.

Reports/Commissions

NORAD (Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation) Report on Conflict Sensitivities in Nepal – 2007. Transparency International. “Nepal.” World Perception Corruption Index – 2011. UN Human Development Report – 2014.

Articles

Ambedkar, R. B. The Annihilation of Caste. Basnyat, P. S. Nepalese Army in the History of Nepal. Dak Bangla, Nepal’s Civil and Military Relations and the Maoist Insurgency. Habib, I. Kosambi. Marxism & Indian History. Lal, D. The Abuse of History. Puniyami, R. Hiding the Truth About Caste. Rajan, V. ‘Dalits’ and the Caste System in India. Tobin, P. Balance of Military Forces in Nepal – in Relation to PLA Integration – 2011.

Newspapers/Journals/ Periodicals/Websites

Dak Bangla – website. Democracy & Class Struggle – website. Economist – magazine. Himal – South Asia – magazine. Himalayan – newspaper. Kathmandu Post. Nepal Monthly – magazine. Red Front – One-off English language version of Krambaddha (Continuity) Pro-Kiran 2012 journal, editor, Prem Darnal, Bikalpa (Alternative). Republica, newspaper. Worker, English-language journal of CPN (Maoist).

Why Do I Write About White People on Here?

A commenter asks:

Why the obsession with whiteness, Robert?

A few reasons. The first is that I love my people! I love them wherever they are on Earth. I support Pan-Aryanism, the unity of all the Whites or even Caucasians. I even or especially love my Caucasian brothers and sisters outside of Europe because they are so neglected and abused by some of my fellow Whites. I love being White. I wake up every morning, look up at the ceiling, and think, “Thank God for making me White!” I think everyone else should be free to feel just as good about their ethnicity as I do. But I want nothing to do with most pro-White people because almost all of them are racist jerks. I’m not interested in any kind of racist BS – I just love my people! I would support an anti-racist or non-racist pro-White movement, but it would probably never happen. To me pro-White just means feeling good about being White. It doesn’t mean up with the Whites and down with everyone else. As an internationalist, all workers are my brothers. The only enemies of the workers are our class enemies, the rich and the upper middle class. I am also very interested in the definition of Whiteness and how it is defined and whatnot. Caucasian is a real race for sure, not a social construct. The way Whiteness is defined, except by some Pan-Aryanists, is pretty much of a social construct, let’s face it. They define in everyone they like and they define out everyone they don’t like. Anyone who thinks Jews are not White needs to have their head examined. Just look at them.

Support For South Ossetian Secession

Repost from the old site. A good progressive principle, but one subject to some exceptions, is the principle of self-determination. This leads naturally to support for most if not all separatist movements. In my case, I do support most, but not all separatist movements. It’s interesting of all the people around the world, that only leftwingers and various seceding nationalities support this principle. It’s also interesting that once nations secede and become their own state, suddenly they do not believe in the right to secede anymore! We on the Left have always upheld this basic principle. The USSR held that all Russian nationalities had the right to secede. Unfortunately, it was not enforced much, but it was this very principle that allowed Gorbachev to permit the various USSR republics the right of secession in 1991. At that time, on at least that one variable, the USSR was the most civilized nation on Earth. Its civilized nature was a direct result of the progressive principles that were embodied in the USSR by the first Bolsheviks in 1917. Later, Czechoslovakia split up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The reason they were able to do this so civilly is, number one, because they are White, and number two, due to the decades of internationalism that had been inculcated into them by Communist rule. I say that being White is important because I am absolutely convinced that only White nations are capable of breaking up civilly and peacefully without slaughtering each other in the process. In a way, breaking up your country without massacring your countrymen is the ultimate civilized act. Even Asians, as civilized as they are, would never be able to break up one of their countries without turning it into a mass slaughter. On this metric, they are not that civilized. What is it about Whites that allows them to break up a country? Is it altruism? Although studies are rare, in the US, Whites have rates of civic participation, volunteerism and donating to charity far above other groups. Now, it is true that Communist China has not done a good job of living up the progressive principles of self-determination. Clearly, Tibet has a right to go free, and I would argue that East Turkestan does too. And Taiwan is a separate country. Mao never was a true internationalist. He was always a Chinese nationalist first and a Communist second. Another reason to support secessionism is that the people who hate it most are the fascists. Idiots are always saying that fascism and Communism and fascism and socialism are the same thing. Let us call them on this one at least. This is a prime difference between fascists and Communists, the Left and the Right. The Left supports self-determination and cultural autonomy for national minorities and the Right has always opposed this, instead choosing to force all national minorities into a single ethnoreligiolinguistic entity. No one opposes separatist movements more than fascists, and no fascist nation has ever given one national minority an inch of cultural autonomy. Even in China, national minorities have considerable cultural autonomy and have the right to education in their national tongue. It’s true that the USSR’s commitment to cultural and linguistic freedom varied throughout the lifetime of the state. Its commitment was highest in the 1920’s, wavered seriously in the 1930’s when Stalin murdered many leaders of national minorities and never attained earlier depths with the subsequent promotion of Russification by Stalin and his successors. The Left nowadays is sleazy and unprincipled on the question of national self-determination. Sadly, the entire world Left refused to support the right of self-determination for the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, all because Yugoslavia was a Communist state. Then they all opposed the right of Kosova to break away from Serbia, I guess because Serbia used to be Communist state! This leads us to the recent fighting in Georgia. First of all, Georgia is pretty much of a fake state. Sure, there have been Georgians living in that area for a very long time, but the Soviet republic called Georgia included not only Georgians but other nationalities as well. Other minorities included Abkhazians, Adjarians and South Ossetians. It is possible that the republic of Georgia was seeded with these minorities as a divide and conquer strategy by the early Soviets, who were not perfect on the national question. Seeding Georgia with non-Georgians would make it more difficult for Georgia to secede from the USSR. Similarly, splitting the poor Ossetians between Russia and Georgia was probably another sleazy divide and conquer game. Anyway, in 1991, this completely fake state called Georgia (really just a republic of the USSR) gained its independence. If we are to support the principle of self-determination, we need to allow national minorities in fake states newly birthed the right to secede. On what basis were Abkhazia, Adjaria and South Ossetia an inherent part of some entity called “Georgia”? On no basis whatsoever! On what basis is some new fake country one day or one month old entitled to the bullshit and fascist principle of “inviolability of borders”? On no basis. So, when the Georgian state (really just a place with lines on the map with a lot of Georgians living in it, but drawn wider than the Georgian nation) got its independence, Abkhazia, Adjaria and South Ossetia surely had the right say, “Screw this, we want no part of this new state. We’re out of here.” Adjaria, a Muslim region in the southwest, seems to have settled its beef without fighting, but Abkhazia and South Ossetia both waged nasty and ugly separatist wars and managed to secede from the new state of Georgia. South Ossetia apparently wants to marry with North Ossetia and become a state in Russia called Ossetia. I’m not sure what Abkhazia wants to do. I think they may wish to join Russia also. Abkhazia is located in the northwest and populated mostly by Orthodox Christians. South Ossetia is located in the north-central part of Georgia and is composed mostly of Ossetians. The Ossetians were formerly called the Alans, an ancient kingdom related ethnically and linguistically to Iranians. They speak a language that is close to Iranian and resemble Iranians physically. Russia is being cynical about this, as befits an imperialist state. While Russia under Putin has fascist tendencies in the nasty repression on national minorities such as the Mari and the people of the Caucasus, Putin is willing, like all sleazy imperialists, do support secessionism when it benefits imperial goals. Russia has it in for Georgia, lately because Georgia has lined up heavily on the side of the US. There are US and Israeli advisors working with the Georgian military right now, and Russia is terrified by Georgian threats to join NATO. We need to note that NATO doesn’t have much right to exist anymore. NATO was set up to deal with the Soviet threat. That’s gone. So why is NATO still there? Apparently to form an imperialist bloc to oppose Russia! The Russians are furious about this, and rightly so. Who can blame them? Sadly, it is also possible that Russia is using this as a payback to the West for supporting the secession of Kosova. The West, including the US in its extreme cynicism, first of all supported the secession of all of the former states of Yugoslavia (apparently on the cynical grounds that since they were seceding from a Communist nation, therefore the right of self-determination was invoked). Then, just to stick it to Russia for the most part, the US and most of Europe supported Kosova and Montenegrin independence, just so long as they were pro-West. I supported it too, on the basis of solid principles called the right of self-determination. It is sad that the entire world Left opposed the independence of Kosova. This made Russia furious. Yet in Abkhazia, in the same sleazy West that championed every micro-state to be cleaved out of the former Yugoslavia, not a single Western state, nor any state anywhere, would support the principled secession of the Abkhazian people from Georgian imperialism. Does fascist Russia under Putin support the right of self-determination, however limited? Of course not. As a capitalist, and in fact fascist and now imperialist state, Russia clearly has no principles whatsoever. As payback to Kosova secession which hurt their pitiful fascist pan-Slavic feelings, the Russians are now supporting secession in Georgia. Principles? Come now! This whole conflict is shot through with imperialism all the way. The US is supporting Georgia not out of any principles, because as an imperialist state, the US has zero principles other than profiteering, plunder and subjection of other states and peoples. The US supports secessionism when it benefits imperialist interests, and opposes it when it hinders imperialist interests! And of course, it never admits this. When it supports secessionism, the US apparently invokes the right of self-determination. When it opposes secessionism, the US invokes the right of inviolability of national borders, as it is doing now in the case of Georgia. Contradictory, no? Sure is! The sleazy and pro-imperialist US media fails to point out this dissonance, and your average educated American will inconsistently invoke, like a moron, either the right of self-determination of the right of inviolability of borders, depending, as they support the imperial projects that they have been inculcated to support. This conflict, like all imperialist bullshit wars, boils down to various imperialist nations waging armed conflict over access to markets and natural resources. As is, oil from Azerbaijan and gas from the Stans goes through Georgia and I believe hooks up with Russian pipelines. The US, Georgia, Israel and Turkey wish to cut Russia out of the deal and cut a new pipeline through Georgia to Turkey. At least some of the oil will then go to Israel and from there, through the Suez and out to the Indian Ocean and various nations in that region, in particular India. Someone suggested to me that the West is cutting this new pipeline because they are afraid that Russia will cut off the flow of oil to the West. Forget it. They will not do any such thing unless pushed to the wall. The US, Israel, Georgia and probably Turkey are all doing this because they are more or less imperialist states. This conflict is also shot through with old Cold War “Beware the bear” bullshit. Even after the fall of Communism and the return of capitalism to Russia, US imperialism and anti-Communists everywhere have continued to see Russia through and Cold War and anti-Communist lens. It is as if the fall of the USSR never occurred. Any analysis of the conflict between the US and the West that leaves out this essential element is lacking. As a socialist, I want to ask the supporters of capitalism on this blog some questions. Show me how advanced capitalism can exist without imperialism. Prove to me that an advanced capitalist state can exist in the modern world without becoming an imperialist power. It seems to me that large capitalist states are typically mandated to become imperialist states and from there to engage in conflict, often armed, with other imperialist states for markets and natural resources. If this is so (and I think it is) how then can one support capitalism as it now exists, since it seems to be impossible to have large capitalist states that are not also imperialist? As you might have guessed, I support the right of South Ossetia to self-determination and to secede from Georgia and the right, however sleazy, of Russia to assist them in this principled endeavor. This conflict is getting real nasty real quick. Russia is threatening Israel and the US over their support for Georgia and the US has incredibly ordered Russia to withdraw its forces from South Ossetia. And the conflict very quickly seems to have expanded to Abkhazia. We have the potential for a really nasty conflict here. I would like to point out that the neoconservative scum who now pretty much run this country are first and foremost ferocious imperialists. They are some of the most voracious backers of US imperialism out there. In this endeavor, neoconservatives have been picking fights with Russia for a long time now. Many Jewish neoconservatives are involved in this imperial conflict with Russia, and unfortunately, in this light, they have supported Chechen independence not out of any decent principles, since neocons have no principles, but just to screw Russia. The fact that elements of imperialism have supported the Chechen separatists rouses Russian nationalism and paranoia and makes Russia all the less likely to give the Chechens and other Caucasian peoples the independence they deserve. It’s not known why the neocons have such a beef with Russia, but they also backed the Russian Jewish oligarchs in their fleecing of Russia. There seems to be an old beef between Jewish nationalists and Russia. We can see the outlines of this conflict in the campaign to “free the Soviet Jews”, which was one of the original catalysts for the formation of the Jewish neocons back in the 1970’s. There may also be a “screw the Russians” mindset dating from the hostile history of Russians and Jews in Russia, a history replete with pogroms of Jews.

Alt Left: George Habash, a Revolutionary Life

Repost from the old site.

The following tribute to George Habash, leader of the Palestinian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was delivered to a meeting organized by the CPGB-ML in Central London on Saturday 10 February 2008. The Communist Party Great Britain Marxist-Leninist, basically a hardline pro-Stalin group, last time I checked. This document is interesting for various reasons.

For one, it shows that hardline Communist rhetoric in the style of the former USSR is still popular. The PFLP are lauded for being a hardline Marxist-Leninist organization. It’s hard to say whether they still are or not, as they seem to be downplaying this in recent years, and no one really knows what Communism even means anymore. It is true that there was a Communist state in South Yemen, but I am not sure if they accomplished much down there. One of the biggest heroes of the Arab Left is Gamel Nasser, leader of Egypt. One great thing that he did do was to initiate a land reform. Most Arab states probably do not have feudal or semi-feudal land relations in the countryside anymore, but Egypt did in the 1950’s. 1 The vast majority of the rural population was reduced to the status of landless laborers or sharecroppers in debt peonage on the land of the landlords. Nasser was able to break up the large estates by buying them up via the government and giving the land to the sharecroppers. It was one of the great progressive events in modern Arab history. Back in the day in Yemen, you would go into the houses of the poor in South Yemen and see Nasser’s picture on the wall – they knew he was a hero to the Arab poor, and mostly for the land reform. Unfortunately, land reform was not enough. Population was exploding and Egypt desperately needed to put more farmland into production. Hence the Aswan Dam, a necessary evil. But even this did not solve the problems, as the rural poor continued to pour into the cities to look for nonexistent work. The landowners were bought off by assuring them a place in industry, which was and is heavily corrupt and tied in with the state. But the Egyptian economy was so shaky that the rich didn’t really feel like investing in it. Socialism was and is a pretty easy sell across the Arab World, in part due to Islam. Islam is a pretty socialist religion, although fundamentalists will argue the point with you and point out that the Koran says that there are those who have more and those who have less and this is ok. Nevertheless, the Koran is hardly a raging individualist tract. Nor are the deserts of the Arab World suited for individualism. In such an environment, the every man for himself libertarian is lost and probably dead quite quickly. One must form alliances or one will be destroyed. One must work cooperatively or the elements will take your life. In a world of perennial scarcity, mass hoarding by a few means death for many more. Hence, in the past century, most independent Arab states have opted for some kind of socialism. Where the states could not do it, the religious or militant groups did. There is no hatred of welfare or government as we have it in the individualist US. Socialism is simply normal and free market libertarianism is seen as a bizarre and cruel aberration. Nevertheless, in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and probably other places, the clergy did resist land reforms on the grounds that they were un-Islamic. Iraq, newly emerging from semi-feudal relations in the 1960’s, saw the Iraqi Communist Party become one of the largest parties in the country. It was particularly popular with poor Shia who flooded in from the countryside and poured into what later became Sadr City. At that time, the Shia clergy were widely regarded as corrupt. They were tied in with large landowners, often involved in money-making scams, and were noted for enticing women into sexual relationships with them. One of the few great things that the Shah of Iran did was to institute a land reform to realign the semi-feudal relations in the Iranian countryside. It went off pretty well, but some ethnic groups opposed it and hence were persecuted. The tone of the Communist Party Great Britain Marxist-Leninist in the statement below is what might be called Stalinist or anti-revisionist. Anti-revisionists hold that the problems with Communist states came from them leaving the path of true Communism and diluting their economies with capitalist relations. I do not know how much there is to that, so I can’t comment on revisionism. But even staunch Marxist sites nowadays post long pieces stating flat out that the Soviet model failed. The North Star Compass is a pretty interesting site. It’s run by former Communists from the East Bloc and the USSR, and it is dedicated to the reestablishing of the Soviet Union as a socialist state. For these folks, Gorbachev was enemy #1. There are quite a few interesting essays there, and for those who think that Putin is a Communist, these guys really hate Putin. For those who think that Russian Communists are all racists and anti-Semites, note that the North Star Compass despises the newly emerging fascist threat in the USSR. There are many Trotskyite sites on the Net. The Trotskyites used to be totally nuts on the question of “Stalinists”. Can you believe that they supported the German attack on the USSR and opposed the Soviet army’s war in Afghanistan? Trotskyites seem to have calmed down a lot lately. Many of them are supporting the Nepalese Maoists and the Colombian FARC. They even support Cuba. Usually this is measured with a tone that these states and movements would be better off if they adopted Trotskyism. Truth is that it is possible that Trotskyism has hardly even be tried anywhere, except possibly in the USSR from 1917-1922. Trotskyites have a reputation as the ultimate splitters, and in the Philippines they have, incredibly, taken up arms alongside the feudal and fascist state against the Maoist NPA. In Defense of Marxism is a good example of a Trotskyite site. It seems that many Communists nowadays in the West are Trotskyites of some sort. No one really knows what to make of them, and many Stalinists just laugh about them and regard them as irrelevant. Western Trotskyites seem to have a lot of money for some reason, and often put up nice websites. Non-Trotskyite Communist sites often have mild critiques of Trotskyism as some sort of irrelevant hairsplitting movement. Western Trotskyites were heavily Jewish in the West until 1967 or possibly earlier. World Trotskyism opposed Israel in the Six Day War and Jewish Trotskyites consequently defected en masse. Many seem to have made their way into the neoconservative movement. There are a variety of reasons for the heavy Jewish presence in Trotskyism, and that Trotsky himself was Jewish cannot be ignored. Trots have tended to oppose both Stalinism and Maoism as horribly brutal ideologies that committed atrocious human rights violations. Trotskyism has been a serious movement only in the West and it has tended to flounder in the rest of the world. One of the Trots’ main points is that a rapid buildup of urban industry is essential for the development of a modern socialist state. Trots are almost the opposite of the Maoists and their emphasis on the peasantry. There are sites that basically uphold the former USSR and even Stalin, but they are often angry at Maoists, whom they accuse of adventurism. In India, Maoists are killing traditional Communists in the state of Bengal, a state that has been run by pro-Soviet Communists for about 30 years now. Marxism-Leninism Today is an example of a pro-USSR, pro-Cuba, anti-Maoist site. They support the CPI-M (Communist Party India-Marxist) in Bengal and are not too happy with the Indian Maoists for killing their comrades. Here is a cool site by a Georgian artist who is the grandson of Joseph Stalin, showing the Stalin family tree among other things. Stalinism.ru is a site run by Russian Stalinists, but if you can’t read Russian, it’s not for you. The National Bolshevik Party is some sort of a bizarre marriage of Stalinism and racial nationalism (I don’t want to say Nazism, but I fear that is what it is). It’s Russian too, but check out the scary party image, complete with Nordic lettering, and the background on the homepage. Lots of related links at the bottom – looks like they have chapters all over the place. Another great site, coming from a somewhat different point of view, a Maoist one, is the Single Spark. Although Maoists are often described as ultra-Stalinists, Maoists and Stalinists are not necessarily the same thing. The Maoists have always been the real bomb-throwers on the Far Left. Despite Cold War rhetoric, pro-Soviet Communists often did not take up armed struggle until all peaceful avenues for change were blocked, and the Left was up against a death squad state. Otherwise, the idea was to try to gain power through parliamentary means, despite Lenin’s denouncements of “parliamentary cretinism”. If the state was reasonably democratic and not killing the Left, the pro-Soviets often argued that “an objectively revolutionary situation did not exist”. On the other hand, Maoists tend to reject all bourgeois democracy as invalid, particularly in very backward societies with mass extreme poverty and accompanying disease, hunger and premature death. Hence, Maoists have launched insurgencies against formally democratic states as Peru, Sri Lanka, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Philippines, Nepal and India in recent years. In most of these cases, the pro-Soviet Left decided to sit out armed struggle, and the Maoists were denounced as adventurists irresponsibly taking up arms in spite of a lack of an objectively revolutionary situation. In Peru, the war launched by the Shining Path led to a state that was less and less democratic and soon became just another Death Squad State. Thus in 1984, the pro-Cuban Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) took a vote and decided that “an objectively revolutionary situation existed” and opted to take up arms. Another difference is that despite Cold War rhetoric, Maoists are often a lot more vicious than the Castroites and pro-Soviet rebels. Maoists have no qualms about killing “class enemies” – anyone prominent advocating rightwing politics or abusive landowners – whereas the Castroites often try to take the high ground in guerrilla war. Examples in Latin America are the Castroite ELN in Colombia, URNG in Guatemala, FSLN in Nicaragua, FMLN in El Salvador, the aforementioned MRTA, and the FARC in Colombia. Despite crap from anti-Communists and the US government, all these groups have tried pretty hard to abide by the rules of war. At any rate, the overwhelming majority of grotesque human rights violations in each of these conflicts were committed by the state. On the other hand, the Maoist Sendero Luminoso was a profoundly savage and cruel guerrilla group, though they almost seized power. Communism doesn’t mean that much anymore. Cuba allows religious believers to join the party, and there are millions of liberation theology Leftist Catholics in Latin America and the Philippines. The Chinese and Vietnamese Communists have introduced major elements of capitalism into their economies, while retaining a great deal of socialism at the same time. Over the course of a few years, from 2003 to 2005 and 2006, the Nepalese Maoists underwent a sea change in politics. They went from hardline Maoists railing against revisionists and opposing anything but the dictatorship of the proletariat, to an embrace of multiparty democracy and a mixed economy and measured critiques of Mao, Lenin and Stalin as outdated for the needs and realities of today. I think this is fantastic. I care nothing about dogma. I just want results, and I don’t really care how you get there – capitalism, socialism, communism or whatever. If Marxism is indeed an ever-evolving science (which, if it is a science, it must be) then there must be no treating its elementary texts as some sort of religious books. The works of Marx, Lenin, Mao and others must be regarded as the works of men, not Gods, positing theories. These theories must be tested in praxis to see how well they test out, as in any empirical investigation. The theories of these mortals will either test out or they will not, and if not, we need to adjust them accordingly. We know what our goals are; all that is at stake is how to get there. Let us listen to top leader Prachanda and other Nepalese Maoist leaders, from the Single Spark site:

Since MLM is a progressive science, the people’s war calls for ideology and leadership that is capable to complete a new People’s War in the 21st century. Our Party’s CC Extended Meeting last September held that the ideologies of Lenin and Mao have become old and inadequate to lead the present international revolution. The political and organizational report passed by the meeting says, ‘The proletariat revolutionaries of the 21st century need to pay their serious attention towards that fact that in today’s ground reality, Lenin and Mao’s analysis of imperialism and various notions relation to proletariat strategies based on it have lagged behind.’ As Marxism was born in an age of competitive capitalism, the strategies and working policy formulated during the times of Marx had become old when they arrived at Lenin’s times of imperialism and proletariat revolution. Similarly, the ideologies developed by Lenin and Mao at the initial phase of international imperialism and proletariat revolution have become inadequate and lagged behind at the present imperialistic phase. Therefore, ‘the main issue is to develop MLM in the 21st century and to determine a new proletariat strategy.1 The second [wrong trend] …is not to concentrate on how revolutionary struggle can be developed in one’s country by developing correct strategy and tactics, but to talk more of world revolution, enjoy classical debate, eulogize strategy and tactic of the past successful revolutions, teach other fraternal parties as if they know everything about the concrete situation in that country and stick to what Lenin and Mao had said before. This trend represents dogmatism.2 What we think is that situation has undergone a considerable change, so the communist revolutionaries must not stick to what Lenin had said about insurrection and what Mao had said on Protracted People’s War.3 Q. You have envisioned a people’s republic, no? Prachanda: Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic cannot fulfill the needs of today’s world. It cannot address today’s political awareness appropriately. Mao said cooperative party theory; we called it competitive party theory. We have said let’s move ahead from the conventional People’s Republic and develop it as per the specialties of the 21st century. Q. You do not follow the old concept of communism? Prachanda: Definitely not. What happened without competition? In the USSR, Stalin gave no place to competition and went ahead in a monolithic way. What was the result?4 Does Communism make sense today? P: It’s a big question, starting with Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong, who wanted to apply the Marxist teachings in semi colonial countries. Now, we still need Marxism, but in accordance to the needs of the 21st century. We have to apply Marxist science in a very new context, understanding social, economic and also technological changes, without dogmatism and without sectarianism. We are trying to develop a completely new concept, different from what happened in the past century. When we are in the government, our experiment will surprise everybody. This will happen only if foreign investors trust a communist government… P: Yes, I know. We cannot ignore the whole process of liberalization in the world. So, we will apply mixed economics to this country. Right now, we are not saying that we plan a total socialist economy, though we will not blindly follow western liberalism. We have some national priorities and we will welcome foreign investors, using capital from abroad for the well being of Nepal.5 Though Mao made some bold experiments to revive and develop socialist democracy, his efforts did not result in any qualitative advance. Why did socialist democracy ultimately fail? Why did it have to bear the stigma of ‘totalitarianism’ from its adversaries? If the revolutionary communists of the 21st century have ‘to win the battle for democracy’, as Marx and Engels had declared in the famous Communist Manifesto, we must dare to question the past practice in socialist democracy and take some bold initiatives.6. All selections from this document7.

CPGB-ML Tribute to Habash

In his 1944 speech, “Serve the People”, Comrade Mao Zedong said these famous words:

All men must die, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said: ‘Though death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.’ To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.

Today, the heroic Palestinian people are continuing to resist, whether in the breaking of the barrier with Egypt to alleviate the genocidal siege of Gaza, or in the martyrdom operation at Dimona, the nuclear site where imperialism and its stooges do not demand inspections, to express a sense of grief at the loss of Al-Hakim, Dr George Habash, one of the greatest leaders of the Palestinian people, and, more importantly, to celebrate his glorious life and give real political vitality and clarity to the essential work of building solidarity with the Palestinian people in the British working class and in the anti-war and other progressive movements.

Nice memorial poster of PFLP leader George Habash. In all of the obits in the US news, few detailed the reason for the radicalization of Habash. At university in Lebanon, he was apolitical and preferred to play guitar. He raced home during the “Israeli War of Independence” to his home in Lydda. Jewish militias attacked the town and forced 9 Most were Palestinian Christians. His sister died of typhoid fever during the siege of the town and Habash buried her in the backyard. He blamed the Jews for blocking access to the hospital that could have saved her. There were some notorious massacres of Palestinians during the attack on Lydda, including the execution of many young men in a mosque. The Jews forced Habash and others to line up and leave their homes and all of their possessions. One man asked if he could return to get the keys to his house and for making this request, he was shot dead in front of Habash’s eyes. From that point on, the apolitical future doctor was transformed into a revolutionary.

Comrade George Habash, who has passed away at the age of 82, gave more than six decades of his life to the revolution. He was born into a prosperous Greek Orthodox family in the Palestinian city of Lydda. At that time, the Palestinian people were under the rule of the British colonial mandate, which was systematically preparing the way for the creation of a Zionist settler colonial state, which, in the words of Sir Roland Storrs, the first British governor of Jerusalem in the 1920s, would form “for England a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”. In the summer of 1948, whilst studying medicine in Beirut, George went back home to help organise resistance to the Zionist catastrophe that was sweeping over the Palestinian people, driving them from their ancestral homes and lands into exile and dispossession. At this time, he and his whole family, along with 95 percent of the inhabitants of his native city, were forced out at gunpoint by the Zionist terrorists and ethnic cleansers commanded by Yitzhak Rabin. Years later, Habash was to observe:

It is a sight I shall never forget. Thousands of human beings expelled from their homes, running, crying, shouting in terror. After seeing such a thing, you cannot but become a revolutionary.

During al-Nakba, the catastrophe, more than 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and lands, made stateless and refugees. Graduating as the first in his class, Dr Habash eschewed the chance to pursue a lucrative career, opting instead to open a people’s clinic offering free treatment and a school for refugees in the Jordanian capital, Amman. Around this same time, he and his comrades founded the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), the first pan-Arab movement to take up armed struggle against colonialism and to win back the lost lands. The significance of the ANM should not be underestimated. Not only was it to be the root of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); from its ranks also came revolutionary forces in many parts of the Arab homeland, including the National Liberation Front in Aden and South Yemen, which not only defeated British imperialism in a revolutionary armed struggle to win national liberation, but, later as the Yemen Socialist Party, leading the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, stood in the vanguard of to date the only real attempt to build an Arab socialist state on the basis of the scientific principles of Marxism-Leninism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the 1960s, Comrade Habash, like many other anti-imperialist fighters then, before and since, came to accept that the liberation struggle of the oppressed people, if it was to be crowned with success and carried through to the end, needed to be based on Marxism-Leninism. Lamis Andoni, an analyst for al-Jazeera, who knew Comrade Habash well, expressed matters this way in his tribute to his friend:

He belonged to a generation influenced by Franz Fanon, Mao Zedong, General Vo Nguyen Giap and later by Che Guevara. In their views, colonialism epitomised systematic, institutional violence and subjugation of people under its control … In the early 1960s, George Habash, already a paediatrician in Amman known for treating the poor for free, endorsed Marxism as he grew convinced that the national struggle should not be separate from the struggle for social justice.

After the founding of the PFLP in December 1967, following the Arabs’ bitter defeat in the June 1967 war, Habash declared that the struggle was “not merely to free Palestine from the Zionists but also to free the Arab world from remnants” of Western colonial rule. All Arab revolutionaries, he said, “must be Marxist, because Marxism is the expression of the aspirations of the working class”. In a 1969 interview, he declared:

By 1967, we had understood the undeniable truth, that to liberate Palestine we have to follow the Chinese and Vietnamese examples.

Indeed, Comrade Habash paid close attention not only to the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, but to the experience of all the socialist countries and the revolutionary movement in all parts of the world. Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were also two countries close to his heart and with which he and the PFLP forged tight bonds of active solidarity. In the memorial hall for Comrade Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang, the Korean comrades proudly display the several awards and medals presented to their great leader by the PFLP over the years. Under Habash’s leadership, the PFLP forged close and active ties of combat solidarity with national liberation movements in all parts of the world – the ANC in South Africa, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the Irish Republican Movement, to name but a few, embracing training, material assistance, joint operations and moral encouragement. In the September 1970 hijackings that gave the PFLP worldwide fame, Leila Khaled was joined by Patrick Arguello Ryan, a militant of the Sandinista National Liberation Front and the only martyr of those operations. In 1983, after the Nicaraguan revolution, the Sandinistas commemorated Arguello by renaming the Geothermal Plant at Momotombo in his honour. A poster still available on the PFLP website describes Arguello as the “symbol of common Nicaraguan/Palestinian struggle”. Comrade Habash sought to translate into reality, and himself embodied, these inspiring words of Che Guevara, which go to the very essence of proletarian internationalism:

Let the flag under which we fight be the sacred cause of the liberation of humanity so that to die under the colours of Vietnam, Venezuela, Guatemala, Bolivia, Brazil will be equally glorious and desirable for a Latin American, an Asian, an African and even a European.

Comrades, The Palestinian revolution is a complex and difficult one, throwing up many challenges and inevitably differences of view. Equally inevitably, Comrade Habash often found himself embroiled in internal controversy, particularly in terms of the sometimes painful compromises, concessions and retreats that have been forced on the Palestinian people at various times. But what shines out is the fact that he never lost sight of the importance of unity in the national liberation movement. In their own tribute to their leader, the PFLP put matters this way:

In 1987, with the outbreak of the great Intifada, Dr. Habash called for upholding Palestinian national unity, and convening the Palestinian National Congress in Algeria in 1988. Comrade Al-Hakim always understood national unity as a necessary condition for the continuation of the struggle and the national liberation movement, whether in Beirut during internal fighting among Palestinians and after as well, recognising that the internal contradictions among Palestinians could not be solved through military mechanisms, but rather through the democratic processes of the liberation movement.

Lamis Andoni, to whom we have already referred, wrote:

‘His message to the Palestinians was to restore our unity,’ Issam Al Taher, a senior aide, who saw him a day before his death said.‘Unity, unity, unity — that was his only message,’ said Al Taher.

Andoni notes of the relationship between George Habash and Yasser Arafat:

The two men never severed ties and continued a complex relationship of camaraderie and rivalry until the end.

Andoni continued:

Tall and handsome, Habash exuded a certain charisma that disarmed his distracters who admired his persistence but criticised what they saw as rigidity. A stroke that partially paralysed half of his body changed his appearance later but did not affect his ardour for the cause.It was that Habash that I saw and met for the first time in Tunis in 1983. The PLO was expelled from Beirut too and most its leaders moved to this northern Mediterranean capital of Tunisia. Habash moved to Damascus, Syria instead. On that day the PLO was holding a meeting. Most of the leaders had arrived and then there was a stir and silence. Habash entered slowly on crutches, hampered and subdued by his physical disability. The hall, filled with hardened fighters, stood on their feet while Arafat hugged Habash and escorted him to his seat.

Of the final period of Habash’s life, Andoni notes:

He would get so distressed during conversations discussing the events in Palestine and most recently in Iraq, that his wife, and closest friend Hilda, would interfere to stop it.When Israel besieged Arafat in 2002 in his compound in Ramallah, Habash stood by his rival. When Arafat died, amid Palestinian suspicion that Israel may have been involved, Habash deeply mourned him. The few times I was able to see him over the last three years, he never stopped monitoring and learning every detail about Palestinian life. His physical ailment deepened the sense of soulful pain he internalised. Those who were with him during his last days recall how disturbed he was by the rift between Fatah and Hamas. He opposed the strategy of Mahmoud Abbas, the current Palestinian president, of accommodating US and Israeli demands but did not endorse Hamas’ military take over of Gaza. His main concern was the damage brought upon the Palestinians by the most serious internal rift in their history.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the mourning for Comrade Habash has transcended the differences in the Palestinian ranks. President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of national mourning, noting that Habash had dedicated his life to struggling for his people. Hamas leader Ismail Haneya said, “Dr. George Habash spent all his life struggling for the cause of the Palestinian people.” Islamic Jihad described him as a “real leader” and other Palestinian organisations paying their tributes included the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestine Popular Struggle Front, who said that his path was and is one of liberation for the Palestinian and Arab people. In its December 1967 Founding Statement, the PFLP declared:

The masses are the authority, the guide, and the resistance leadership from which victory will be achieved in the end. It is necessary to recruit the popular masses and mobilise them as active participants and leaders … The only language that the enemy understands is the language of revolutionary violence … The slogan of our masses must be resistance until victory, rooted in the heart with our feet planted on the ground in deep commitment to our land. Today, the Popular Front is hailing our masses with this call. This is the appeal. We must repeat it every day, through every breakthrough bullet and the fall of each martyr, that the land of Palestine today belongs to all the masses. Every area of our land belongs to our masses who have defended it against the presence of the usurper, every piece of land, every rock and stone, our masses will not abandon one inch of them because they belong to the legions of the poor and hungry and displaced persons … The struggle of the Palestinian people is linked with the struggle of the forces of revolution and progress in the world, the format of the coalition that we face requires a corresponding … coalition including all the forces of anti-imperialism in every part of the world.

Much more can be said on the life, work and legacy of Comrade Habash, but in summary these are some of the things he advocated and taught: • That the fundamental way to liberation lies through armed struggle and people’s war based on the masses. • That for the struggle to be successful and carried through to the end it needs to be based on Marxism-Leninism, the scientific world outlook of the working class. • That the oppressed peoples must uphold proletarian internationalism in their struggle for liberation, based on militant unity within and between the three major currents of the world revolutionary process, the socialist countries, the national liberation movements, and the working-class movement in the imperialist heartlands. • That the liberation of the nation necessitated the principled and democratic unity of all the forces of the nation, even though major differences will also exist and must be struggled over. Clearly, all these are not just lessons for the Palestinian people alone. In June 2000, age and ill health led Comrade Habash to step back from the day-to-day leadership of the PFLP. Giving an inspiring speech on that occasion, in many respects he wrote his own epitaph. He told his comrades:

What I have lived through over the course of these militant decades, and the rich experience I have acquired, is not a matter to be taken for granted. It is your right, and the right of coming generations to review the content and lessons of this experience with all of its many successes and failures.

As befits a man who gave all of his own life and strength to the revolution, Comrade Habash said of the martyrs, the prisoners and his comrades, and it is with Comrade Habash’s own words, from his farewell address, Palestine Between Dreams and Reality, that we conclude this tribute:

I remember each of the martyrs, one by one, and without exception – those martyrs to whom we are indebted, for whom we must continue the struggle, holding fast to the dream and holding fast to hope, and protecting the rights of the people for whom they shed their blood. Their children and their families have a right to be honoured and cared for. This is the least we can do for those blazing stars in the skies of our homeland.I also remember now the heroic prisoners in the jails of the occupation and the prisons of the Palestinian Authority – those militants who remind us morning and night of our patriotic duty by the fact that they are still there behind bars and by the fact that the occupation still squats on our chests. Each prisoner deserves the noblest signs of respect … Now permit me to express my gratitude to all the comrades who have worked with me and helped me, whether in the Arab Nationalist Movement or in the Popular Front. They stood beside me during the hardest conditions and the darkest of times, and they were a great help and support for me. Without them I would not have been able to carry out my responsibilities. They have been true comrades, in all that the word implies. Those comrades helped to create a congenial atmosphere, an environment of political, theoretical, and intellectual interaction that enabled me to do all that was required. Those comrades have a big place in my heart and mind. I offer all my thanks and appreciation to each one of them by name. In addition, to the comrades who vigilantly guarded me, looking out for my safety, all these long years, I offer my gratitude … As a last word, I feel it necessary to say that I know well that the goals for which I worked and struggled have not yet been attained. And I cannot say how or when they will be attained. But on the other hand, I know in light of my study of the march of history in general, and of Arab and Palestinian history in particular, that they will be attained. In spite of this bitter truth, I leave my task as General Secretary of the Front with a contented mind and conscience. My conscience is content because I did my duty and worked with the greatest possible effort and with complete and deep sincerity. My mind is content because throughout my working years, I continually based myself on the practice of self-criticism. It is important to say also that I will pay close attention to all your observations and assessments of the course taken by the Popular Front while I was its General Secretary. I must emphasise that with the same close attention, if not with greater attention, I will follow and take to heart the observations and assessments of the Palestinian and Arab people on this course and my role in it. My aim in this closing speech has been to say to you – and not only to you, but to all the detainees, or those who experienced detention, to the families of the martyrs, to the children of the martyrs, to those who were wounded, to all who sacrificed and gave for the cause – that your sacrifice has not been in vain. The just goals and legitimate rights which they have struggled and given their lives for will be attained, sooner or later. I say again that I don’t know when, but they will be attained. And my aim, again and again, is to emphasise the need for you to persist in the struggle to serve our people, for the good of all Palestinians and Arabs – the good that lies in a just and legitimate cause, as it does in the realisation of the good for all those who are oppressed and wronged. You must always be of calm mind, and of contented conscience, with a strong resolve and a steel will, for you have been and still are in the camp of justice and progress, the camp whose just goals will be attained and which will inevitably attain its legitimate rights. For these are the lessons of history and reality, and no right is lost as long as there is someone fighting for it.

Notes

1. Ashok. (May 2006). Our Experiences of Ten Tumultuous Years of People’s War, The Worker#10, pp. 68-73. On Lenin and Mao, p. 71. 2. Basanta. (May 2006). International Dimension of Prachanda Path. The Worker #10, pp. 82-90. 3. Ibid. On Models: Page 87. 4. Kishor Nepal. (June 2006). Prachanda Interview. Maoist Revolution Digest. 5. Alessandro Gilioli. (Early November 2006). Prachanda: Our Revolution Won . L’espresso, Italy. Excerpts. 6. Prachanda. (November 18, 2006). Democracy: The Forbidden Fruit or Nectar for Progress? Speech at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi. 7. MLM Revolutionary Study Group in the U.S. (Dec. 21, 2006). Assessing Recent Developments in Nepal: A Bibliography on the State, a Peaceful Transition to Socialism, Democracy and Dictatorship, Negotiations and Their Relevance to the International Communist Movement in the 21st Century.

The "Nazis and Soviets Were Friends" Lie

Wade writes:

The hatred between Nazi and Bolshevik was just a surface conflict. The real underlying conflict was between German and Russian which had been going on for long before WWII. 30 million dead is just a result of more advanced technology and policies based on Nazi race hatred.

In the beginning of WWII the Nazis and communists had actually signed a pact. When Hitler invaded the northern part of Poland, the Soviets went into the south. Hitler eventually turned east not because he didn’t trust Bolshevism, but because he didn’t trust the Soviet Union (the new Russian state).

You can’t have it both ways. Fascists and the Left have always been the deadliest of enemies. Sure, there are some crossover 3rd Position type groups like National Bolsheviks, but those are based on a faulty reading of history. You have to pick one or the other. Are you a fascist choosing the Right or an anti-fascist on the Left. You can’t order both. Fascists and the Left don’t hate each other just because they think alike and are having a lover’s quarrel. They really are polar opposite ideologies in many ways. Fascism is best seen as a “popular far rightwing authoritarian movement against the Left.” I’ve spent a lot of time on Left sites. One group they will not abide is the fascists. I’ve also been on a fascist sites. What they hate more than anything else is the Left. They want to kill us. This is complete nonsense about the Nazis and Soviets being allies. The Nazis raison d etre was the wipe Bolshevism off the face of the Earth. They were an anti-Communist party to the core. They put people in the camps in this order: 1. Communists 2. Socialists 3. Trade unionists 4. (Last) Jews If you read Hitler’s writings and those of other top Nazis, it’s all about the danger of Bolshevism to Europe and how it had to be wiped out. The Jews were tied in with Bolshevism, so that is why the Jews were targeted. They were out to wipe Judeo-Bolshevism off the face of the Earth. All the other fascists were like this too. Their deadly enemies were the Communists, socialists and union members everywhere, all through Europe. There was a hot war in Spain. When fascists came to power in Europe everywhere in WW2, they immediately went after the Communists. Rightwingers the world over supported the fascists, including the Nazis, as the biggest, baddest Commie killers that ever lived. Stalin knew that Hitler was out to wipe out the USSR from the very start. That was the reason for the breakneck collectivization and industrialization, and frankly for the paranoid purges of the 1937 – Stalin suspected a Nazi plot to overthrow him. The 1940 pact was just a means of buying time temporarily in the war that Stalin knew was going to happen. The US and UK had been egging Hitler from 1938-1941, trying to get him to attack the USSR and take them out. In 1938 Chamberlain gave Hitler Austria not for peace in our time but as deal for Hitler taking out the Soviets. For a long time, rightwingers in the US and UK had been hoping to use and control Hitler long enough so that he could be used as a weapon against the USSR. When Hitler first came to power in 1933, the NY Times praised him as an anti-Communist. If the Left loved fascists so much, why was there a deadly hot war in Spain? Mussolini came to power as a coup against a resurgent Left in Italy. In the early 1920’s, landless peasants were rioting in the streets and marching in the fields all over Italy. The rich use fascism as a last ditch effort to save capitalism in the face of an overwhelming threat from the Left. The postwar fascists of Latin America, the Philippines, Fiji, Ethiopia, Morocco, Indonesia, Turkey, Greece, Zaire, Spain, Portugal, Iran and many other places were admirers of Hitler, Mussolini and all of the other European fascists. The Indian Hindutva fascists hate no one so much as the Left and also admire Hitler. Fascism is all about “exterminate the Left.” The conflict is more nationalism versus internationalism than anything else, but it’s also about wealth and priveleges. Fascists declare the class war dead in the name of class solidarity, but then it goes on nonetheless. All classes are locked into position forever as part of the eternal blood and soil national pact. The rich are rich, the poor are poor, and that’s that. Especially after WW2, rightwing authoritarianism and fascism has been all about everything for the rich and corporations and screw the people. As the class war grinds the masses into the dirt, the fascists march them off to anti-Communist rallies and have them wave flags. They seek to negate the class struggle but prioritizing nationalism over class. With the cloak of nationalism, they seek to make the class struggle seem to disappear under the flag of the nation.

The White Race Traitor Left in the US

A reasonable progressive commenter from the UK, the brilliant and reincarnated Abiezer Coppe, is stunned by the insanity of the US Left, as exemplified in the Red Flag for White Bulls post:

More weirdness from the US of A. How anyone can take this stuff seriously! Is Race Traitor aligned with any…uh…social movement as we understand it? Or is it highly marginal like White nationalism?

I am not sure how big this movement really is in US culture. It seems a lot bigger than it is because it is so huge in academia and on the Left. But most Americans laugh at academia and the Left. You won’t find much of this talk in the mainstream US press, though it is starting to gain followers among anti-racist Blacks (like here), Hispanics and Asians (most of whom simply have a racial grudge against Whites, and are not really progressive in any other way). You’ll never see views like this in the US mainstream media, not yet anyway.

But! The entire Western Left is into this crap! Retarded or what? As a logical consequence, I have known White Leftist workers who despise the US Left as anti-White and “only cares about the Blacks and the Mexicans.” I joined the Communist Party USA a while back and told them about a friend who was also a Communist. The CPUSA very much wanted to give him a membership, but when I asked him, he refused to be associated with them, as he saw them as “anti-White worker.”

The Left in the US is simply insane, and they have completely blown off (and blown it with) the US White working class.

Also there is a large but not really Left* “Cultural Marxist” movement in the US which buys into this nonsense. A lot of them are not Left at all on economics, instead they are moneyed bourgeois, Blacks, Hispanics or even Whites (often Jewish), who promote this anti-White crap for a variety of reasons. The Black and Hispanic bourgeois, while rightwing and pro-elite on economic matters, wants to stick it to Whitey for racial reasons. I should make alliances with these rightwingers why now?

There are sectors of the White “Left” in the US now that have abandoned economics altogether. The article above exemplifies the only way that they are “Left” at all anymore. Stick it to Whitey Left. They combine the nutty anti-racism above with, of all things, neoliberal economics! They support multiculturalism, fuck-Whitey anti-racism, worship of everything non-White, Open Borders in White countries, and neoliberal economics! What that is called, I don’t know. Smells like Shit Stew!

In some ways, they are a faction of the “rootless cosmopolitan” internationalist pro-multinational corporation neoliberal elite which is loyal to no land and knows no borders. This is the Screw Whitey “progressive” branch of that elite. They share with the rest the neoliberal economics, the support for Open Borders in White lands and the support for multiculturalism (really multinational corporate McWorld).

*Commenter (and great writer) Lafayette Sennacherib says these folks are not Left since they are rightwing on economics. As he notes, when you take economics out of the Left, nothing remains. You’re not on the Left anymore. I concur, and Saint Karl in Heaven surely agrees. Therefore, this weird Cultural Marxist-neoliberalism stuff is not any kind of Left politics at all. What it is, and whether it is liberal, Centrist or Right, I have no idea.

Opposition to Illegal Immigration: Nationalism or Internationalism?

A new and very smart commenter (and apparent supporter of amnesty for illegals) asks my rationalization for opposing illegal immigration:

Is your rationalization for kicking out all the illegals primarily driven by nationalism (saving the jobs and high living standards of the United States for its “natives”) or internationalism (the (somewhat dubious in my opinion) notion that a “safety valve” into the United States for masses of the impoverished underclass discourages economic development and alleviation of poverty within Mexico)?

Nationalism of course. But I don’t see why progressives should be assisting the Mexican elite with their shit project of exporting their poor to the US so they can hog all the money and not support their own citizens. And that is what the Mexican elite is doing. Most everyone who has studied the issue agrees on that.

In fact, one argument in favor of illegals is that if we don’t let them flood in here, the safety valve will be turned off, and there will be a revolution down in Mexico. Which will be bloody and violent, and which will end up coming over here. I’ve actually heard progressive people make this argument to me.

I think it’s absurd because Mexico already had a revolution. That’s why Mexico was quiet in the 1980’s while Central America was on fire with revolution. At the time, I asked a friend of mine why Mexico was not on fire with the rest of Mesoamerica. A wise woman, she thought a moment and said, “They already had their revolution.” Well of course.

Nevertheless, as they say in Mexico, there is a revolution about every 100 years or so. The The last revolution (1910-1920) was exactly 100 years ago. It ended feudalism and gave all Mexicans land on the ejidos. No matter how shitty things get in Mexico, you can always go farm on an ejido and not starve. It’s a common lie that people starve in Mexico. Almost no one is starving; obesity is a much bigger problem. There’s plenty of food down there but not much money.

Yet the revolutionary party, the PRI (The Party of the Revolution, literally) has gone stale and now forms a far rightwing elite state in many ways. The PAN is even worse. The PRD is a progressive party, but the last two Presidential elections they won were stolen right out from under them while the entire US media, both US political parties and the US government cheered and looked the other way. If the Left keeps being denied power via peaceful means, they may well take up the gun. That’s how the revolutionary process works.

It is certainly conceivable that if the valve were shut off, the elites could come under pressure to create a more fair society by having to share with the rest of the Mexicans. The challenge would probably be peaceful and not armed at this time. In the future it may become armed. The elites are very worried about this for good reason, and that is why they use the safety valve.

Mexico does have a revolutionary tradition, even embedded in the ruling party itself. This would make it difficult for the elite to resist peaceful revolutionary forces to make a fairer Mexico. In addition, Mexicans are violent people, do not fear death (and even seem to love it in a perverse sense – see below)*, and are quite willing to slaughter huge percentages of the population in revolutionary wars if need be.

The Mexican Revolution killed 4X as many Mexicans per capita as the US Civil War did. Most Americans think the Civil War was horrible. Most Mexicans think their Civil War was wonderful.

*On All Saints Day, Mexicans go to graveyards, carry little skulls around and in general have a great big Death Party with all sorts of morbid and ghoulish imagery. This is a fatalistic land where death is everywhere and no big deal, and life is rather cheap.

Transcript of My Latest Interview July 7, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it Godfrey Feder?

No.

He was their economist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There weren’t any Gentile capitalists who financed Communism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are no moderate pro-White movements!

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

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

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

Break

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

Isn’t he a Jew though?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s correct, exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But they are occupying another people’s land.

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

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

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

The Military-Industrial Complex.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

But you support rational criticism of the Jews.

Right.

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

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

The only people who think Jews are important are:

1. Jews. 2. Anti-Semites.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you think that is for racial purity reasons?

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

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

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

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

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

Has that happened in Europe at all?

In the UK, about 1

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

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

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

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

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

Yes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some people think that those traits are genetic.

Yes! I don’t agree with that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy Grove Takes on Tommy Friedman

Andy Grove (Jew – economic populist and US nationalist), captain of Intel, takes on Tommy the Traitor Friedman (Jew – rootless cosmopolitan and neoliberal traitor). Grove advocates protectionism, trade wars, economic populism, state economic planning, the whole nine yards. Tommy the Traitor is the spokesman for the entire US plutocracy, both traitor political parties, and the entire US media.

Calling the Jews rootless cosmopolitans is absurd nowadays. Every neoliberal capitalist on the face of the Earth and the ruling classes of most nations are all rootless cosmopolitans, traitors to their homelands, loyal to no one but the Kali-like destroyers of the internationalist investor class. Singling out the Jews misses the point. In most nations, your own plutocracy and neoliberal class are the internationalists, the traitors, the rootless cosmopolitans with no blood or soil ties to the land.

Grove may be a capitalist, but he’s also what few capitalists ever are, he’s a patriot. Capitalists go where the money is. If that means wrecking your own economy or sinking your own country in the shit, so be it, as long as your margins widen. Just move to some fortified neighborhood, invest in a 4-wheel drive, fund an oppressive state security apparatus and fuck the homeland.

Tommy the Traitor says that we need to stop funding old manufacturers and start funding startups, because startups are where the money is these days. Grove points out that US startups are as shitty at creating jobs as the National Association of Manufacturers. The computer industry in the US now has fewer manufacturing jobs than it did in 1967.

Everything, I mean everything, in IT is made overseas. Great for the bottom line, shit for the nation. For every one Apple job in the US, there’s 10 in China. Foxconn in China, computer manufacturer for the world, was unheard of until a recent spate of horrible worker suicides brought on by nightmarish work conditions. Now the lights are on: Foxconn isn’t a corporation. It’s a fucking mega-city. Foxconn employs over 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Sony.

Take photovoltaic cells, one of the latest “green jobs” hypes. Green jobs may be green, but they sure ain’t American jobs. The photovoltaic cell industry in the US hires a whole 10,000 workers. 9

Lithium-ion batteries is another one. A green job that even fights global warming. It’s taken forever to get it going, and the advanced battery industry is finally taking off. But about 9

The truth is that the US can’t make batteries anymore because we have forgotten how. The US ditched that 30 years ago when we quit making consumer electronic devices. The entire US ruling class, both parties and the entire MSM cheered as this venerable US industry went the way of the Titanic. What’s so great about the fact that televisions, invented and initially made in huge numbers in the US, are no longer made here? There are now zero US jobs in making televisions.

Let’s hear internationalist Princeton University economist Alan S. Blinder (Jew – rootless cosmopolitan and neoliberal traitor):

The TV manufacturing industry really started here, and at one point employed many workers. But as TV sets became ‘just a commodity,’ their production moved offshore to locations with much lower wages. And nowadays the number of television sets manufactured in the U.S. is zero. A failure? No, a success.

Blinder isn’t even a hardline economic neoliberal. He’s called, incredibly, a neo-Keynesian! Wow, this is what it means to be a Keynesian nowadays. The rest of the community are Chicago-school guys, way worse than he is. In the economics profession, appallingly, Blinder is what passes for a liberal! Blinder even served on Bill Clinton’s Board of Economic Advisers. He’s the economic voice of the Democratic Party, a party with a deadly spear aimed at the heart of American workers.

In consumer electronics, all of the knowledge and the accumulation of contacts between manufacturers and suppliers went overseas and stayed there. That knowledge and experience and those contacts are not something you can get back by waving a wand. Now that it’s gone overseas, the US industry can probably never catch up with the foreigners. The US battery industry is gone because the US consumer electronics industry is gone. Because the US battery industry is gone, we can’t make lithium-ion batteries either.

Another thing has gone almost entirely overseas in IT is something called scaling. This used to be done in the US. The product was invented and designed in the US. Then the corporation gradually scaled up. For Intel, a new chip plant costs several billion dollars. Intel has to authorize the money for these plants years before they even make the product, without any idea of whether and how well the product will sell, if at all. That’s scaling.

Grove points out that excellent new evidence is now emerging that neoliberalism doesn’t work as well as state corporatism, as in Asia. The Asian economies boomed in the last 40 years in part due to heavy state involvement in the economy, particularly in terms of helping to create jobs. The “state capitalist” economies of Russia and China are doing very well, and were shielded from much of the World Depression that the US bankster-criminal class created. Yes, the US bankers actually blew up the economy of the world. Amazing that they have that much power, no?

Grove advocates for a job-centered economic policy in the US. Both traitor political parties talk the talk about jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, but really the economic project of both parties is anti-US jobs. Of course it’s anti-US workers, that’s usually the case.

That state-capitalism model of Russia and China is starting to look better and better. At least Russia and China’s economies are run by patriots. Neoliberal structural adjustment policies, like the ones advocated by both US political parties, the whole US media and the world ruling class at the recent G-20 economic summit on Toronto, have never developed one single economy on Earth in recent years. In contrast, the nations that told the bankster crooks at the IMF and World Bank to stick it have done much better.

Stop the Western Left Before It Kills Again

In the comments section to Alpha Unit’s latest post, Patrick writes:

We’re all a bunch of idiots who have been lied to. There is no need to export our manufacturing jobs to China. America used to have one of the highest living standards in the world due to our manufacturing being based here in America. These greedy capitalist worms will do anything in order to pay a lower wage for their workers and then they print economic textbooks full of lies so that morons will believe that losing our jobs and having a low minimum wage will somehow help us.

At this point I’m not sure who will support the worker. The mainstream in the democratic party is not for the worker. When the standard of living for the workers is better the result is that crime is reduced and the quality of products are better. Helping the worker helps everyone.

Americans have been just so brainwashed with the idea that helping the worker is bad and they think that living in a crazy society is somehow good. I don’t know what the answer is. I dont know what party can do it or if pro-worker people can infiltrate the mainstream parties.

Patrick’s comment is excellent, and so exquisitely written I wish I could have written it myself.

The dominant theme in White US culture is that everything good for US workers is bad and everything bad for them is good. Everything good for US business is good and everything bad for it is bad. The pro-business, pro-corporate, anti-worker mindset is across the board to the extent that it’s not common to meet pro-worker US Whites. Even most US White workers that I meet have this attitude.

US White workers are completely insane. They hate the workers and love the bosses. In other words, they hate themselves and love their enemies. They don’t want higher wages or good benefits. They like being fucked over and shat on. Even the lowliest worker peon in the US is typically in effect a pro-management traitor.

Pro-worker consciousness, even on the part of the workers, where it ought to be if it’s anywhere, is almost nowhere to be seen. The US worker is in love with his exploiter and at war with anyone on his side who wants to help him. A part of me says that US workers deserve the river of shit that logically flows from this “Love your enemy, hate your friends” masochism, but then I even feel sorry for idiots, and letting the country go to the dogs is not option, as I have to live here too.

The entire media, every large newspaper, all of the large newsweeklies, most of the large topical monthlies, many of the small intellectual journals, almost all topical radio stations and almost all of US TV promotes the screw the worker, enrich the boss line, so this is why US workers eat this gruel and proclaim it’s the finest caviar. They’ve been brainwashed. They’re also re-enacting The Emperor Has No Clothes every day.

Not only are both parties resolutely anti-worker as Patrick notes, but the entire media spectrum, from top to bottom, is the same. The only exceptions are public TV and radio, and they are under relentless rightwing attack. The rightwing is furious that they only have 9

Some softie might hear that voice and instead of letting the baby die as capitalist culture mandates, try to be human and help it. That’s the rightwing’s nightmare, a nation where workers pursue their own interests and people give in to “soft” emotions like charity, kindness, fairness and justice (together, coded as mercy). In an atomized America, only lust, gluttony, greed, avarice and, if you have the money, sloth, are allowed.

America, the most floridly Christian large nation, disallows the very and specifically Christian notion of mercy above and the respect, evenhandedness and self-defense that flows from it.

The Western Left is almost equally useless. The entire left wing of the political spectrum is aligned with an Open Borders position that mandates a continual flood of low wage workers, both skilled and unskilled, from the Third World. That this pro-corporate project devastates US workers is clear. Hence, the Western Left, on this issue anyway, is the handmaiden to the very corporations that they claim to despise.

The Western Left has also, incredibly, promoted the rightwing strategy of splitting the working class by gender and race. Via Identity Politics, woman is set against man, non-Whites against Whites, and as one might suspect, the result is that all of the workers are divided and at war. Just as the rightwingers always do. Once again, the Western Left serves its corporate accomplice, willingly or not.

Now that Economics has almost been erased from the Western Left, all that remains is the sorry yet ludicrous detritus of Identity Politics.

Defend the queers and their right to screw 20 guys a night in bathhouses and spread AIDS everywhere! Why? Why not? Better than defending the workers.

Defend the “immigrants” who flood illegally into the land, devastate native workers, pulverize the wage scale and create locust storms of crime, social decay and ghettos everywhere they go!

So not only does the US worker lose his job or see his wage crash into the the bottomless well, he gets his nice neighborhood turned into a crime and trash blighted slum in the process. Win-win! Win for the bosses, win for the Useless Western Left!

Defend the transsexuals! You know, the chicks trapped in dudes’ bodies! Why? Who cares? Better than defending the workers!

Defend the women! Turn them into men, have them assaut men’s masculinity and wage gender jihad against us! Why? Why not? Better than defending workers.

Defend the criminals! Now that we’ve imported gigantic armies of low-skilled Third Worlders who logically created vast dope, crime and gang infested slums, obviously we’ve created tons of crime where there was none before. Therefore, let’s defend the criminals that we created in the first place!

If you go to a US university now, you will have to take an entire syllabus that may as well be called Anti-White Studies. There is no purpose to this curriculum other than attacking Whites and especially White males. It’s pro-gay, pro-woman, pro-immigrant, and pro-non-White.

On Economics, bizarrely enough, it’s neoliberal, and promotes a ferocious pro-corporate agenda that could have been scripted by the National Association of Manufacturers. Open Borders is part and parcel of this weird Multiculturalism/Neoliberal Project.

The people teaching it are usually called liberals or even leftwingers, but there is nothing remotely pro-worker or economically Left about their agenda. They make very good money and live in very nice, mostly White, neighborhoods far away from the bitter blots of criminalized degradation, the  Diversity Squalor they created.

Stop the Western Left before it kills again.

Dutch Left Grows a Brain

Incredible, a Western Leftwing party with the sense to oppose mass immigration on non-racist and purely economic  and pro-worker grounds. Mass immigration of labor from low wage countries to high wage countries is a disaster for the workers of the high wage country. Duh. Yet the entire Western Left is still screaming for Open Borders. Suppose I am a member of a Left party in a low wage country. Why should I support Open Borders there? On the one hand, my best workers take off to high wage countries for higher wages. I guess they send some money home if we are lucky, but how does this help develop the economy of my low wage country. Further, I bet even low wage countries have to deal with lots of immigrants from even lower wage countries flooding in. Sure, Romanians get to go to the UK and make big bucks, but how does the mass emigration our best and brightest help grown the Romanian economy? Besides, there are always workers from Ukraine or Africa or wherever trying to flood into Romania to make what to them is big bucks. I understand that India has a huge problem with illegal immigrants. From where? From Bangladesh. I guess things are so horrible in Bangladesh that workers pour across the border to head to the paradise called India, where I suppose they can undercut Indian workers. That’s a scary thought. You mean Bangladeshi workers work for 5 cents an hour and that undercuts Indian workers at 10 cents an hour. Good God. There’s no end to the nightmare of this “free movement of labor” crap and it’s hard to see how anyone but the capitalist businessmen benefit. If anything, this shows that we need to drive a stake through the heart of Marxist “internationalism.” It’s based on some future borderless socialist Kumbaya utopia that’s not on the horizon. When I die in 30 years, this utopia won’t be one step closer. So why base current policy in the capitalist world on the whimsical fancies of a Dreamworld?

An Analysis of Different US Immigrant Groups By Nationality

Repost from the old site. This piece tries to look at all of the major immigrant groups that are currently immigrating to the US in large numbers in order to determine which ones are causing problems and which ones are being a net positive for society. When I say net positive, I do not mean to be pro-immigrant. I mean that they are positive above and beyond any inherent detractions is their mere being immigrants. The question of whether huge numbers of even good immigrants are good for the country is another one altogether and goes beyond the scope of this post. This post hopes to put across the idea of a points system for immigration. We need to quit importing low quality immigrants to the US. If they are to be imported at all (and I have no problems with say up to 400,000 immigrants a year) we should only import high-quality immigrants from the rest of the world. Importing problem humans to a country that already has its hands full with the problem humans already residing there has to be the ultimate in insanity. This article has been praised by a famous person, who shall remain nameless. We have quite a few folks coming to this blog who are opposed to immigration. To be honest, almost everyone in the US who is opposed to immigration is White, and to some extent, it’s associated with White nationalism. There are also anti-immigrant sites out there like Vdare, but they are almost always on the crazy end of the spectrum. Vdare is not White nationalist, but they do want to end all immigration altogether. On the far moderate end of White nationalism, we have American Renaissance. I do like to hang out there because it’s nice to hear real, honest talk on race for once. In general, the White nationalists on Amren want to end non-White immigration altogether. I’d like to point out that this is a crazy and extremist point of view. Furthermore, Whites are only 6 I suppose with a White population declining like this, we would expect to see wild and crazy proposals like this. It’s really just a sign of desperation. Few non-Whites want to limit immigration this strictly, and even many Caucasians don’t. Keep in mind that most White nationalists call only Europeans White. Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Indians – none of them count. So almost everyone who is not a European White in the US has recent immigrant roots and does not want to end immigration. We should feel lucky if they want to limit it at all. Arabs, Turks, Kurds, North Africans, Africans, Hispanics of all types (even White Hispanics), Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, SE Asians, Filipinos, Polynesians, East Indians, Central Americans, Caribbeans, Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis – none of these folks are on board for an immigration moratorium. That leaves us the 61. Looking around the world, we would be very hard-pressed to find even one country that has banned all immigration. Someone find me one, please! Japan and Korea are always being brought up, but there are plenty of immigrants in both places. What may be a lot more difficult there is getting citizenship. But that’s not unusual, nor is it the point here. Germany had race-based citizenship until recently, and may still have it. Syria and probably other Arab nations has race-based citizenship (The Kurds have not even been allowed to be citizens, because they are not Arabs!) So White nationalists are really changing the subject here. We ask them to show us some countries who have been so crazy as to ban all immigration, and they point to Japan and Korea, who have merely made it difficult to be a citizen, while immigrants are fairly common (indeed, Jared Taylor, head of Amren, was an immigrant in Japan for years). So the truth is that there are almost no nations that have banned immigration altogether. Why are White nationalists promoting this then? Because they are nuts. At this point, this project isn’t going anywhere, like every White nationalist project. So I would say it’s time for those of us on the anti-immigrant spectrum to cut our losses and do some damage control. As immigration isn’t going to be ended, sensible folks ought to focus on limiting it. Negative Population Growth advocates an end to illegal immigration to the extent possible, a removal of all illegal immigrants, and a reduction in legal immigration to 200,000. This is reasonable, and I support that organization. Here is a good example of the White nationalist mindset from my comments section:

Why do Whites oppose massive non-White immigration?Because non-White immigration causes higher crime, declining standards in education and morality, more drugs, more economic degradation and economic inequality, more strife/suspicion/competition between ethnic groups, more welfare and big government, more overpopulation and pollution, and so on. ALL countries and empires have eventually fallen or balkanized after being swamped by millions of ‘immigrant’ invaders, even the non-White empires and countries — and the same is now happening in America. Those opposing massive non-White immigration to America are more opposed to the decline of America than they are against other races and ethnicities. If they are against other races or ethnicities it is because their presence hastens and is an obvious sign of this decline.

You will find this mindset all over Amren, and probably deep down inside Vdare, too. The problem with this is that it is in large part false. The notion that immigration leads to inevitable strife, group competition, environmental degradation in an already crowded nation, etc. is going to be true with any group of immigrants. However, White nationalists are pro-natalists who cheer stories about White women having 18 kids, so they really shouldn’t talk about overpopulation leading to environmental degradation. Furthermore, your average White nationalist is a hard rightwinger, and at least their voting patterns suggest that they are quite hostile to environmentalism. All of the other points are not true for non-White immigration in toto. There is no problem with “non-White” immigration per se, but there are problems, sometimes major problems, with select groups. As a good rule, less restricted immigration from US colonies, of refugees and illegal immigration is problematic because of a lack of a rigorous selection process that winnows out many applicants. Legal immigration with a rigorous selection process has been associated with few problems, except in the odd case of Dominicans from the Dominican Republic. Let us look at the “non-White” immigrant groups in the US: South Americans: No problems here. They are very well-screened, and with the exception of some Colombians in New York City, pretty well behaved. It’s not a large group. There are small Peruvian, Ecuadorian and Argentine enclaves in Los Angeles, and there are Venezuelan enclaves in Florida and Texas. Japanese: Always one of the best immigrant groups. There are enclaves in San Francisco and Gardena, California. The enclaves are safe as far as the Japanese go, but Gardena now has many Blacks. When I taught school in Los Angeles, the non-PC teachers used to joke, “Gimme a class full of Japs and Jews and I’ll never complain.” A teacher friend of mine was asked to fill out a form that idiotically said, “Ethnic preference”. He was White, but he put, “Japanese”. The principal called him in and asked, “What do you think you’re doing? You’re not Japanese.” He answered, “It said ethnic preference. I prefer to teach Japanese students.” I was amazed that Japanese students got a little squirrelly in 8th grade. All humans are horrible at age 13, but I thought maybe the Japanese transcended that. They didn’t, but they were the breeziest 8th graders I’ve ever taught. By 9th grade, they were back to normal, and by 7th grade, they were still ok. If all kids were like this, parenting could be done with your eyes closed. Chinese: See Japanese. There are many new immigrants with poor English who are are adding to already existing Chinatown enclaves in many large cities, but this problem will sort itself out. There is poverty in Chinatowns, but there is little crime. For some reason, poverty in Chinatowns is not a serious societal problem. There are also quite a few exploited Chinese illegal immigrants, but almost all are working in Chinatowns and speaking Chinese on the job. They are taking few, if any, jobs from Americans. Very low crime rate. Chinatowns are safe places in the daytime at least and generally pleasant at night. Koreans: More or less the same as Chinese. They are probably better assimilated than Chinese. There is a vast enclave in Los Angeles (Koreatown) and a large enclave in Garden Grove, California. The enclaves are safe both night and day. Very low crime rate. Vietnamese: Most came as refugees and got off to a rocky start. There are some gangs, but overall it appears that their crime rate is far below Whites. Their criminals generally prey on their own. Young Vietnamese in Orange County, California are becoming a new high-achieving elite. This is the highest scoring group in the CA school system and US Irvine is full of Vietnamese students. They have formed some ethnic enclaves, but the young ones are assimilating, and even their enclaves are pleasant, non-dangerous places in both night and day. One large ethnic enclave is in Garden Grove, California. There is an enclave in Richmond, California that has a high crime rate and is not doing well, but this seems to be anomalous. Khmer: Not a large group, but there are some enclaves, especially in Long Beach and Santa Ana, California. There is still heavy welfare use, but a new generation is coming up. There are some youth gangs, but overall, the crime rate seems low. Khmer enclaves are pleasant and not dangerous at least in daytime. Hmong: This group of refugees still has very heavy welfare use. There are also gangs, but the overall crime rate seems much lower than the White rate, at least here in Fresno. There are enclaves in California’s Central Valley and in Minnesota. The new generation is coming of age, going to school and doing well. Highly intelligent; they resemble Chinese. Their enclaves are not that pleasant and tend to be poor and rundown, but don’t seem to be all that dangerous. Their criminals generally prey on their own. Mien: There are enclaves in Northern California in Davis and Merced in the Central Valley. They are refugees that came in with the Hmong. In appearance and behavior, they are very Chinese like the Hmong. A friend of mine worked in Social Services in Davis and said she would go to these poverty-stricken, blighted, rundown, hellhole apartment complexes and visit the Mien welfare families. The parents would be sitting on the floor eating out of a rice bowl and did not speak a word of English. They seemed like they were fresh out of the jungle of SE Asia. The walls would be covered with the kids’ report cards – all A’s. Think about it. On balance, seems to be a good group. High welfare use is balanced by a crime rate probably way lower than Whites, and the kids seem to have a good future. Lao: This group of refugees still has high welfare use, and there are youth gangs. The young people seem to be doing well, going to school, graduating, moving on. Despite the gangs, the crime rate seems to be much lower than the White rate, at least in Fresno. There are enclaves in Fresno and Santa Ana, California. Their enclaves are poor and run-down, but not that dangerous for non-SE Asians. They are part of the high-crime, poorly-performing Asian enclave in Richmond, California that is so far pretty anomalous. Khmu: Khmu from Laos are part of the poorly-performing, high-crime Asian enclave in Richmond, California, along with Vietnamese, Lao and Samoans. So far, this situation is pretty anomalous. This seems to be a case of very poor Asian refugees moving into a horrible Black ghetto and aping the worst Black behaviors. I don’t have any data on Khmu other than the Richmond report, and on that basis, I’m inclined to mark them as a problem ethnic group, but to tell the truth, I lack good data on them, and they really are a miniscule group anyway. Thai: Not a large group, but there are some enclaves in Los Angeles. They seem to be doing well and are out of poverty. Little or no gangs or crime. Professionals, owners of shops and restaurants. Burmese: A tiny group that seems to be doing quite well, at least those I met. Tibetans: A very small group that is active politically. No known problems. Behaviorally resemble Chinese. Filipinos: A much-vilified group, even by other Asians. There are youth gangs. They form large enclaves in California in Carson, Wilmington, north of downtown Los Angeles and in San Fransisco. There are also a number in the Central Valley. I have no idea what the crime rate is, but their enclaves in the Harbor area are pleasant enough at daytime. I taught them in school for a long time and felt they were well-behaved and pleasant students. Some are quite intelligent. Filipinos may undergo high selection pressure by US immigration, because they are said to be one of the highest performing immigrant groups of all, and the highest performing of the Asian groups. Indonesians, Aborigines, Melanesians, Papuans, Malays, Mongolians, Nepalese: For all intents and purposes, these groups don’t even exist as immigrant communities in the US. I’ve never met an immigrant from most of these groups. I have met a few Indonesian and Malay students who were very well-behaved. Micronesians (Marshall Islands): There are a few of them in the US, but not many. Some have serious diseases, because the islands are a disease haven. As immigrants, they are totally unscreened, as the islands are still pretty much US territory. Overall, little problem. Warm, friendly, pleasant, easy-going people. I do recommend completely cutting these islands off from US colonization. Polynesians (Hawaiians, Tongans and Samoans): Samoa is still a colony of the US, so they get to come here totally unscreened. I taught them for years in LA, and I really don’t mind them too much, but some can be violent. Easy-going, warm, friendly, pleasant people who like to laugh and party. There are gangs, but Samoans are not a large community, so it’s dubious how much of a problem they are. They are reportedly causing major problems in Salt Lake City. There appear to be some problems with Tongan gangs, but it doesn’t seem to be serious because there are just not that many of them. This is one immigrant group that may on balance be a problem, albeit a small one. They are an issue purely because they are unscreened. Hawaiians are not immigrants in Hawaii, but they are a serious problem there, where they form a vast and teeming underclass. They are not violent so much as thieving. This is not an immigrant issue because Hawaiians are native to the US. Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans: This group more or less does not exist in the US. Never met one. East Indians: This is a fairly large immigrant group here in California. H-1B scab guest workers are a problem, but they are not immigrants, so they are best dealt with elsewhere. Here in this part of California, this group is mostly Punjabis. Punjabis are a very high-functioning ethnic group in the US who cause almost no problems at all. Punjabis in the US have surprisingly high intelligence, work extremely hard and commit almost no crime. Other Indians are not so common, but they tend to be very high-functioning also, and are often professionals. Mass immigration of this group would be a bad idea, but it’s not happening yet. Afghans: A very small group of very high-functioning immigrants. I have met some. Many professionals. Those here tend to be quite secular and even progressive or even Leftist. There is a small enclave in Fremont, California. Pakistanis: We have some here in California. Here again, a very high-functioning group with few to no problems. Many professionals, some shopkeepers and a few students. Tend to be seculars or even Christians. Iranians: This group is doing very well in the US. There is an enclave in Beverly Hills, California. The ones who are here are often the rich and secular supporters of the Shah. This group causes almost no problems at all. High education attainment and professional involvement. Kurds: A very small group that appears to cause minimal problems, but some in Tennessee have formed street gangs for some reason. Little known. Iraqis: Those here tend to be Chaldean Christians who cause almost no problems at all. We have a few in California. There is an enclave in Michigan. A very traditional group who do not mingle much with outsiders. Palestinians: We have some in my area. They run small stores, gas stations, bakeries, and cause no problems at all. A very high-functioning group. Most around my place seem to be pretty apolitical. Quite a few are Christians. Warm, easy-going, happy, talkative and very hard-working. A few are militant in a quiet way. Syrians: Mostly secular, often secular Muslims or Christians. Often well-educated. A small group. Lebanese: A small group that does quite well. A very large number are Christians. Often run small stores. An enclave in Michigan. Many have been in the US for a long time. Yemenis: There is a small group around me who run markets. They do very well, are extremely hard-working and cause no problems at all. Tend to be apolitical religious Muslims who are very conservative and traditional. Turks: A small group in the US who often run stores, dry cleaners, etc. Very well-behaved. Tend to be secular. Kuwaitis: There are some students here. Tend to be very, very religious Muslims. I’m not aware of any problems though. They seem to go home after school. This is a tiny group. Jordanians: Secular, often Palestinian, mostly students. I only met one, and she was a militant but secular Palestinian-Jordanian and was very well-to-do. A tiny group. North Africans: Honestly, I have never met one other than Egyptians. This must be a very tiny group. The US is not having problems with Kurds, Iraqis, Turks and North Africans like the Europeans are. Mass immigration of Turks, North Africans, Kurds and Arabs as the Europeans did would probably be a disaster – this entire whole group is extremely well-screened, and that needs to continue. Egyptians: Run gas stations or work in the professions. Many are Coptic Christians. Absolutely zero problems at all. Most here are apolitical, secular and divorced from Middle Eastern issues altogether. Often traditional, even the Copts. Often surprisingly intelligent and educated, as is the case with many Arabs in the US. Ethiopians: There are enclaves in California’s Central Valley and in Los Angeles down around the airport (LAX). This group seems to cause few to no problems. Many are students and are quite intelligent. They very much keep to themselves. Many are Christians. The women are often quite beautiful. Somalis: Apparently a disaster. They are also causing terrible problems in Europe, especially Norway and Finland. Almost all are coming to the US as refugees, and refugees are typically a more or less unscreened population. In other words, almost anyone gets in. Probably 9 There are not many of them here, but the few that are have quickly descended into an Underclass of chaos, crime, poverty, unemployment and heavy welfare use. These refugees are not appropriate for America. They come from Africa, and are not the sort of Africans who do well here (see the next listing). They can easily go to other African nations. It won’t be ideal, but I assume that in general, they won’t starve. There’s no reason to bring an African refugee all the way to the US. Sub-Saharan Black Africans: There are few in the country. There are some Nigerians, but they are often extremely high-functioning professionals. There are reportedly some Nigerian criminals in the US, but the number is not large. This group undergoes extreme screening (99. Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kazakhs, Kirghiz: Virtually nonexistent in general, yet there is now a large Uzbek community in New York City. They are mostly Bukharan Jews, but there are quite a few Uzbek Muslims moving there too. No problems to speak of. Armenians: Some White nationalists say they are not White, so we include them (Just for the record, I strongly disagree with that – in fact, I think Armenians may be the remains of some of the most ancient Whites of them all). A very high-functioning group. There are some street gangs in Los Angeles around Hollywood and Glendale, and there is some organized crime also, but overall, they appear to not be much a problem. There are enclaves in California in Los Angeles (East Hollywood), Glendale and vicinity and around Fresno in the Central Valley. The enclaves are quite safe. Most Armenian crime involves fighting amongst and preying on their own kind. Here in the Valley this is a very high-performing, intelligent group that is still quite traditional and often still keeps to themselves somewhat. They are farmers and run retail stores, restaurants and repair outfits, work in sales and the professions, and in general, do all sorts of things. Can be very warm and friendly. They have actually formed an elite in this area. Georgians, Azeris, people of the Caucasus: They barely exist in the US. Europeans: White nationalists seem to think this group is not a problem, and indeed they are not. Some formed highly criminal and impoverished Underclasses in the US for decades in the past, but they have moved out of that now. In my area, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, etc. (Mediterraneans) form a White elite and do very well, despite some White nationalists who insist they are not White. Gypsies: Disaster. Fortunately, there are few of them in the US, and it needs to stay that way. They have adopted crime as a way of life. Very few should be allowed to enter the US. A small number are assimilated, out of crime and doing very well, but it’s not typical. Cubans: Hard to say. They have taken over Miami, turned it into a part of Latin America and virtually torn it off from the US. Many are arrogant and refuse to learn English. Miami as a city has virtually done away with the English language. They have formed a Latin American style White reactionary elite that has seriously corrupted Miami. Miami has one of the most extreme wealth differentials in the US, as the reactionary Cubans have transplanted semi-feudal Latin American economics to their pet city. The wet foot – dry foot policy needs to end, and this group needs to be well-screened at least. I feel that on balance this group is not positive, mostly because they are arrogantly refusing to assimilate and are recreating Batista’s Cuba in the US. Dominicans: Reports indicate that this group is on balance a nightmare. Some are educated and intelligent and doing very well – I know one who is a clinical psychologist. Many others have transformed New York City neighborhoods into crime-ridden Underclass hellholes. My understanding is that the vast majority of them in Washington Heights in New York came to the US as illegal aliens pretending to be Puerto Ricans, starting in the 1970’s. They gave birth to anchor babies who are now all US citizens. This group needs to be much better screened at the very least. This group formed an Underclass quickly after they came here post-1965, and in general this scenario has continued or even gotten worse. Puerto Ricans: Same as Dominicans – a nightmare. A colony of the US. As such, they get to immigrate unscreened. Some are highly intelligent, are doing very well and are even in the professions. Back East, they have formed crime-ridden, gang-infested Underclass hellholes, especially in New York City. We need to cut this colony loose and let them go their own way. Like Dominicans, they have formed long-lasting Underclass wrecked zones that have lingered or even gotten worse. This is one group that is not climbing out of the Underclass. Future immigrants need much better screening, but that will never happen as long as Puerto Rico is a US colony. As long as Puerto Rico is a colony, Puerto Ricans can go to the US the same way I can move from California to Nevada. Jamaicans: Tough call. There are supposed to be some drug gangs around, but I’m not sure how serious of a problem this is. I’ve met a few who were very warm, pleasant, friendly, hard-working and honest. It does not seem to be a large group. Mass immigration would be a mistake. Haitians: Although we turn most of them away, there are quite a few in the US anyway. One might think they would form Underclass hellholes, but that does not seem to be the case. I don’t know much about them. There are quite a few in New York and Florida. Other Caribbeans (Virgin Islands, Grenada, etc.): There are not many here. Those who are here are often professionals. I met two who were schoolteachers and were doing very well. Panamanians: Few, doing well. Very small group. Costa Ricans: Small group that is doing well in the US. Nicaraguans: On balance, seems to be a positive group, but little is known about them. Those that I have met were functioning well. Seems to be a small group. There is an enclave in Florida. Hondurans: This group seems to be a problem. Many are illegals, and are caught up in the usual Mesoamerican illegal immigrant scenario. Doesn’t appear to be a really large group. Needs much better screening and needs more research to be done on them – poorly known. Salvadorans: Disaster. Many came here in the war as refugees and eventually got legalized. Many are in street gangs, selling dope, living in barrios and ghettos, and not doing well. They have a vast enclave near MacArthur Park in Los Angeles that is probably quite dangerous at night. I have been there in the daytime, and even then it seems run-down, teeming, Third-Worldish, horribly overcrowded, impoverished, chaotic and somewhat Hellish, but I used to walk around there anyway, and nothing ever happened to me. The English language does not exist in this part of Los Angeles. This group is not working out at all. Needs much better screening at the least. Guatemalans: Nightmare. Huge numbers are illegal immigrants. Others are caught up in the gangsta thing. Many do not speak English well. This group is doing very poorly. Seem to have very high rates of criminality and gang membership. Needs much better screening at an absolute minimum. Mexicans: A very complex group that makes up the huge majority of Hispanic immigrants to the US. A vast number of Mexicans are illegal immigrants who have destroyed towns all up and down California and all over Arizona and Texas. They are now fanning out across the US, causing crime and chaos everywhere they go. Typically, cities with large numbers of Mexican illegals become run-down, dirty, trash-ridden (they don’t believe in trash cans), graffiti-covered, crime-ridden, drug-drenched, gang-infested, noisy, chaotic, dangerous and overcrowded wrecks. Sex crimes in particular seem to escalate. Petty thievery becomes epidemic. Spanish becomes the native language and English is sidelined. Services are quickly overrun, hospitals close and schools are overwhelmed. Very political, and many harbor irredentist and revanchist (in particular) aims on the US Southwest, which many claim as a part of Mexico. This treasonous mindset has also been adopted by the Left and is highly disturbing. Cities with many Mexican illegals may quickly become very corrupt. Mexican farm labor contractors utilize employer-employee relations out of the Third World. Cities taken over by Mexican illegals come to more resemble Tijuana than American cities. Many are hostile towards the US and especially towards Whites. This group, viewed as a whole, is a total catastrophe, and is the main source of immigration problems in the US today. At the same time, many older Mexican illegals are hard-working, pleasant, polite, generous, family-oriented, religious and very well-behaved, but their children are often a horror. There is also a large group of Mexicans who have been here a while, in some cases for over 100 years as the original residents of the US Southwest. In most cases, they are assimilated and doing very well. Another group of Mexican legal immigrants came more recently and has assimilated well, though they continue to speak Spanish a lot. Their English is also often good to excellent, and many are lighter-skinned. This group could be classed as the White Mexicans, and they tend to form a bit of an elite in these Mexican communities, although the extreme racial stratification of Mexico seems to be breaking down in the US. They are often very well-behaved and so are their children. There is another group of recent legal immigrants that are not necessarily White Mexicans, but are also also assimilating and doing very well. As you can see, this is a very complex group that is split in two huge classes, one a good-functioning and assimilating group that causes few to no problems and the other a vast Underclass that is a total clusterfuck. There are also many that are floating somewhere in between these two vast sets in a transition zone, or into one set and out of another, or back and forth into the transition zone. At the very least, illegals need to be tossed out or encouraged to leave, Mexican legal immigration must be lowered, and we urgently need to do a lot of research on which Mexican immigrants are likely to join the positive assimilating group and which are going to augment our Mexican Underclass horror. Continued mass immigration of this group will cause a continuation and vast deepening of the gang and Underclass horrorshow in the US, along with an increasingly radical and militant Mexican politics in the US. As they get into power in some states, Mexicans will tend to promote Open Borders with Mexico. If they ever get into power, expect to see Spanish made into an official language at the state level at least. If they get into power at the national level, expect Spanish as an official language in the US and an open border with Mexico. Abortion may be made illegal. Women’s rights may nosedive. We may develop a much more corrupt society. Human rights and basic liberties may go out the window in favor of the usual Latin American authoritarianism and lack of respect for the individual. Gay rights will take a nosedive. We may get a politics of either the Hard Left or Hard Right, as in Latin America. The result of open borders with Mexico would quickly be 1/2 of Mexico in the US, and the US would be transformed just another Latin American country. This endgame must be resisted at all costs and with all of our might. This is an issue that transcends Left, Right and Center and needs to be put front and center by US patriots of all ethnicities across the spectrum. Conclusion: There is an urgent need for more research on the immigrant groups that are performing poorly, or at least those have large sections that are performing poorly. Some of these groups, such as Mexicans, have large groups that are doing well, large groups that are doing horribly, and probably a large group drifting in between or in and out of the two main groups. It is essential to determine the characteristics of those sections of Caribbean and Mesoamerican immigrants that are causing so many problems for our society. This research will be difficult to do because the usual suspects will scream racism at the very mention of it. No one is talking about keeping certain ethnicities off of the immigration rolls altogether. We are only trying to determine a set of characteristics that winnows the successful from the unsuccessful and then hopefully allows us to proceed to a saner immigration policy from there. Problems with native citizens are bad enough, but you can hardly keep them out of the country – you are more or less stuck with them. Immigrants are guests at best; they are here at our whim and can be either expelled or denied entry in the first place as we see fit. It is sheer madness to import large numbers of persons who are bad for the nation. By that definition, America has been an insane nation for many years now. It’s time for some treatment. Time is of the essence and we have little to spare. We also need to seriously reconsider family reunification immigration. This research takes a lot of time, and I do not get paid anything for it. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a a contribution to support more of this valuable research.

error

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)