Category: Marxism

Alt Left: The Latest Lies of the Russo-Ukrainian War

Civilians Being Targeted: False. I have yet to see one single of case of civilians being deliberately targeted by Russia. Sure, there have been civilian deaths and injuries. These always happen in wars no matter how hard to try to avoid them. Civilians typically get targeted in wars nowadays, but I haven’t seen any cases of the Russians doing it.

On the other hand, Ukraine has targeted civilians many times in the Donbass and in Mariupol. Ukraine considers them to be enemy civilians and hostile. After they withdraw from an area, they often shell it and level the whole place. They abuse the civilians in the cities they control. They won’t even let them go outside. When they go outside, sometimes they are targeted by Ukrainian snipers. When people try to get out of these pro-Russian areas, the Ukrainians shoot at them.

We have a number of videos from citizens of Mariupol. All of them are blaming Ukraine for everything and the Russians for nothing. And many say that Ukraine shot at people who were trying to leave. They also told residents that they were not allowed to leave and if they tried to leave they would be shot at “by Russians.” Much of the structural damage in Mariupol is being caused by Ukraine just shelling the buildings, especially as they withdrawal. Once again this is from testimony from Mariupol civilians.

I have no information about Ukraine targeting their own people when they try to flee in pro-Ukrainian areas. That would seem to be stupid. Armies target hostile civilians, not friendly ones.

Russian bombing of Mariupol theater: False. Three days before this incident occurred, pro-Russian sources announced that according to civilians in Mariupol, the Azov Battalion had wired the theater with explosive and were going to blow it up to blame Russia. Sure enough, three days later, an explosion occurs at the theater exactly as predicated and Russia was blamed. But there were no Russian aircraft active anywhere in Mariupol on that particular day.

Furthermore, Russia was aware of the situation in the theater where Azov was holding people as human shields and using the upper floors for firing, and the theater had been removed from the target list. Yes, Azov had written CHILDREN in huge block letters outside the theater, but they wrote that in front of every large building in the city no matter who was in there. They did this to make it seemed like Russia bombed a theater even though CHILDREN was written outside, apparently just to be evil.

Russia knew there were civilians in there and said so and  removed it from the target list. However, 99

Azov told people to leave before they blew up the theater. But there were still many people in the bomb shelter in the basement which was not damaged in the attack. Nevertheless, there are still people down there buried under the rubble. Russia knew they were in that basement. Why do they blow up their own supporters and bury them in rubble? That makes no sense.

We now have videos coming out from people who were in the theater saying it was indeed full of civilians and Azov had mined the roof and wired the ceiling. As they withdrew, they told people to leave, and everyone left except for the people in the basement. Then Azov withdrew and blew up the theater. We also have another video from a woman in Mariupol who also says, “The Ukrainians blew up the theater.”

So it’s settled. The whole attack was faked. Why would Russia announce that Azov was going to do a false flag in the theater and then go ahead and bomb it anyway, just because they really, really wanted to bomb a theater full of civilians? It makes no sense! On the other hand, Azov is highly motivated to blow up a theater full of hostile civilians who support Russia in order to blame Russia.

Russia has been shooting at people trying to leave Mariupol and other locales in the Donbass. False. We now have interviews on video of Mariupol residents and residents of Volnovakha. The Mariupol people are all saying that Ukraine shot at people trying to leave and forbade people to leave. They even shot at buses of people trying to leave. There’s video testimony from the victims themselves! What more do you need?

The majority of Mariupol refugees are fleeing to Ukrainian controlled areas near Dnepropetrovsk. False. In fact, only 1

Russia won’t allow aid convoys to come into Mariupol. Unknown. I have no information on this, but it seems odd as those convoys are made up all of Russian vehicles. Is it possible the situation is still too dangerous?

Russia is kidnapping people from Mariupol and putting them in camps in Russia where they are torturing them. False. I have no idea what they are talking about. As noted, 99

Russia has mined the Black Sea, which is dangerous as the mines have done loose and now threaten shipping in the Bosporus in Turkey. False. Ukraine laid a lot of sea mines which have now come loose and are floating around the Black Sea.

Russia will throw Russians in prison for 15 years if they criticize the invasion or call it a war. False. First of all, “Putin the dictator” did not do that. The Duma did and it was democratically elected. To date the worst offender has been an anchorwoman who jumped behind a newscaster and waved a sign saying, “Stop the War.” She was just sentenced to pay a $300 fine for this rather grievous offense.

18 million Russians openly oppose the war. They can’t arrest 18 million people. They will have to triage.

I am on pro-Russia Russian sites, and pro-Russians call this a war all the time on there. I got tired of counting how many times they said. Those sites are also full of either Ukrainians or antiwar Russians. The antiwar Russians are pretty bad, and they’re practically traitors. There are many of them on these forums. Nothing is done to them. They’re not even banned! People just insult them.

The woman demonstrating with the sign on Russian TV fears for her safety and that of her child. False. Give it up.  She had to pay a whole fine of $300. Now they’re going to murder her? No way.

All opposition media in Russia is shut down. False. Depends what you mean by opposition media. The media that was shut down represents a section of society that gets 5

Russia is running out of manpower, fuel, and food, and its supply lines are badly stretched. Hence it has stalled out and can go nowhere. False. Progress indeed is slow as it is supposed to be when you are trying to minimize civilian casualties. Keep in mind that this nonsense is coming from the Pentagon, “US intelligence” (glowies), and military analyst media talking heads, all of whom are worthless in my opinion. They’re all lying to spin this as badly as possible for Russia. I haven’t found any good evidence that anything in the first sentence is true.

Ukraine is winning the war; Russia is about to be handled a humiliating defeat. False. The Western media features endless stories about Ukrainian success on the battlefield, how they are winning or are going to win and how Russia is losing or is going to lose.

On the contrary, Ukraine is losing the war and Russia is winning the war as best I can tell. The Ukrainian Air Force is gone. The Ukrainian Navy is gone. There are desertions. In some places, soldiers have run out of food and are raiding local homes to get enough to eat. I will grant that the Ukrainians are fighting very hard and well, and I credit them for that. They are being very brave and noble in many places on the battlefield.

Russia has lost 7,000 men KIA in this operation. False. This is from US intelligence glowies. Not buying it. That’s way too high. Try 2,000 KIA. I will agree with that figure.

Russia has lost 18,000 KIA and Ukraine is trying to repatriate 14,000 Russian KIA to Russia for burial. False. Forget it. Get out. It can’t be more much more than 2,000, and I doubt if many of them are in Ukrainian hands.

Ukraine conducted a counterattack in NE Kiev and Russia suffered major losses. False. On the contrary, the counterattack was fought off by Russia, and Ukraine sustained serious losses.

15 killed, 21 wounded by Russian shelling in Kharkiv. Unknown. I suppose it’s possible. These things happen in urban warfare.

1 killed, four wounded in Kiev when Russia targeted an elementary school. False. Ukraine shot down a Russian missile, and it landed on an apartment building, hence the casualties. There was an elementary school right nearby, but the missile was not targeting either the school or the apartment building.

Russia is deliberately targeting schools and hospitals. False. I’ve seen no evidence of this, and this goes against Putin’s directive to spare as many civilians as possible.

Zelensky made a video with a backdrop of Kiev, proving he is still in the capital. False. All of my information is that he is in Poland, and he has been there for a while.

Zelensky made a video showing a conference between him and leaders of Poland, Slovakia, and Czechia taking place in Kiev. Russia was warned and cleared the way for the train. False. This entire video was faked. We know this from analysis of the film and also from sources inside Poland. None of them ever left Poland. Instead it took place in Poland on the border with Ukraine.

The train was a train parked at that city. The part of the video where they are having a conversation in a train while going to Kiev is faked. The train is standing still. In the video there are journalists present but we believe there were no journalists at this fake meeting. Instead those men are Polish Secret Service posing as journalists. One of them ended up next to Zelensky in the meeting but he forgot to take his bulletproof vest off.

A number of Western stenographer-whores, I mean journalists, know full well that this whole video was faked but they reported it as it happened anyway. Sickening.

Russia will soon run out of lifesaving medicines. False. They have enough for 3-6 months and the foreign companies that supply them will continue to do so. Also many of them are made in Russia, and the Russian government is now forcing these companies to produce these drugs, and they will not be allowed to stop.

Russia will be thrown off the GPS system. False. You can’t just throw a country off of the GPS satellite system. There’s no way to do it. Also Russia has its own alternate GPS system that works just fine anyway.

China is embarrassed by their alliance with Russia; the US will be able to separate Russia from China with sanctions on China. False and probably false. The first part is not true at all. They have a strong alliance, even stronger now because they both know they are in the same boat. I do not think the US will be able to throw a wedge between the two countries.

Putin is a dictator. False. The Duma passes most legislation and if they won’t pass bills, they won’t get passed. Putin is not Stalin. Putin is quite limited in how he can act towards his political enemies because he has to follow the law, and this limits him a lot. The Russian people do not want to have a dictator anyway and do not think Putin is one. To them a dictator is Stalin.

Putin is a fascist. False. He seems to disagree with this movement pretty strongly. I’m having a hard time understanding how it is that Putin is a fascist. Can someone clue me in here? He’s coming from the anti-fascist tradition of the USSR. Remember this guy is former KGB.

Putin is a Nazi. False. He hates Nazis and he has nothing against any ethnic group. At any rate these groups have much greater rights in their country than they do in ours. The Russian Empire has long been multiracial and multi ethnic. Yes, there are Nazis in Russia, but Putin doesn’t like them, and a number of those organizations have been made illegal.

That’s about all for now! I’ll have more tomorrow when Ukraine, the US, the West, and NATO will dole out another huge helping of lies! See you then!

Alt Left: The Russian ‘Denazification’ PR Disaster: How, Why and What To Do

The Russian ‘Denazification’ PR Disaster: How, Why and What To Do

by Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker blog

Maybe it’s worked in Russia, but a military operation in Ukraine based on “denazification” has been a total public relations disaster everywhere else. Quite simply: Russia should have known that the use of the word “Nazi” totally shuts down any discussion in the West. Russia is waging a new type of military operation but they lazily or foolishly thought that “denazification” was a new enough concept to base its justification around for non-Russians — they have paid a price of total intellectual defeat so far in the battle for hearts and minds.

They could have known it was coming – I wrote about this issue just two weeks prior to the start of the Ukraine operation, in an article on France’s elections titled, France’s conservatives cry out for National Socialism – Zemmour’s response?:

“Ah, old Adolf – we can’t bring him up in the West, can we?

Many have heard of Godwin’s Law, or the rule of Nazi analogies: an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches. However, an important corollary is that whenever someone compares someone or something to Nazism – that person has lost the argument and/or the argument is summarily over.

Essentially, the world is to accept that all discussions of Western politics cannot discuss the anti-Western Liberalism ideology which was German Nazism.”

Yes, Russia should have accepted that in February. Practically nobody west of the Oder River understood what Moscow meant by “denazification”, and they still don’t after a month of Russian explanations.

Russia’s military operation has made much harder by failing to recognise the iron Western cultural reality of Godwin’s Law, and the reality that the West only associates Nazis with anti-Semitism and – not at all! – with Russophobia, despite the 20+ million Russian deaths at the hands of the Germanic Nazis.

This is how iron that law is: Political science PhD holders have responded to me with, “But… Ukraine’s president is Jewish – how can there be Nazis?” If you cannot even get Western political science PhD holders to see where you are coming from – even remotely – you have zero chance to get the average Westerner to understand you.

Thus it’s a total, ongoing public relations catastrophe.

It’s not an easy problem to fix

It’s such a huge problem I actually have to discuss it in detail in my new book on the Yellow Vests, in a chapter titled: “Where the West is stuck: The fascism of the 1930s and the ‘fascism’ of the 2020s”. The West is stuck in misunderstanding what fascism is, and in 2022 Russia has not solved this problem; they have maybe even made it worse?!

It’s not an easy problem to fix, but in April 2014 I must say that I was farther along than Russia is in 2022 – well, at least I tried to propose some solution in a column for PressTV titled, “Ukraine: The Rise of the ‘Nalis’”.

I can’t find a link for it anywhere – I’d complain about how Iran’s PressTV has been so deplatformed but – thanks in part to the awful Russian public relations campaign – Russia has now become even more deplatformed than us, wow! If someone finds a link, great, but these highlights show the idea still holds up: the combination of rabid Nationalism and far-right Liberalism (in economics, politics and in anti-socialism) is still the problem in Ukraine. The column began:

“The combination of ultra-nationalists and ultra-liberals who have overthrown the Ukrainian government is indicative of a new type of political party in the region: National Liberals, or ‘Nalis’. They are to be differentiated from ‘Nazis’ – National Socialists – only by the economic ideology of liberalism (otherwise known as free-market capitalism).

…

But it is a mistake to call the protesters in Ukraine “Nazis”. Yes, at Maidan Square there was plenty of footage taken of neo-Nazis, fascists, violent anarchists and other types who showed up to a political protest in camouflage and armed with a firearm. But they are actually “Nalis” – National Liberals.

…

That’s why not all of Ukraine’s protesters should be called Nalis: There are true progressives who were calling for legal, constitutional changes to the corrupt Yanukovych government. Unfortunately, they have been outgunned by the Nalis, who have deposed a president unconstitutionally, voted to ban the Russian language and whose violent tactics have created the real possibility of civil war.

…

Many of these people are true Nalis: economic nationalists who do not even want to join the EU.

But the moneyed set of the Nalis certainly do. They want to work with the US and the EU to institute IMF-led austerity reforms. They want to reduce pensions, reduce government subsidies on things like heat, reduce wages and increase corporate protections to foster a capitalist society. All you need to do is look at their proposals and it’s clear: they want free market liberalism…but of course for the benefit of themselves and the other moneyed Nalis.

…

Two things are certain: Western politicians will back the Nalis to the hilt. Of course, always putting the best interest of the EU or US or Germany (or many others) well-before the interests of the Ukrainian people.

And two: The Western media, passionately pro-Nali and just as passionately anti-Russian and anti-Putin, will also be unquestioningly backing the Nalis until the bitter end.”

Did “Nali” catch on? No, but did Russia come up with anything better?

Are they even strenuously pushing the term “Ukrainian Civil War”, which is no longer just a “possibility” but today’s reality, in my estimation?

I understand how Russians would use “Nazism” synonymously with “Russophobia”, just I understand how Jews would use “Nazism” interchangeably with “anti-Semitism”, but clearly most Westerners do not understand the former and only the latter. Given that the “Nalis” have been around since 2014, and given that the US has used shameless Russophobia to distract from the political failures of the two mainstream parties in their 2016 election, I’m surprised that Russia couldn’t come up with a better way to express “pathological and murderous hatred towards Russia”?

“Anti-Russianism”, “Russophobic paramilitaries”, “Nalis” – somebody better come up with something better than “denazification” because it takes more than hating Russians or Jews to make a Nazi, and because “denazification” has clearly not worked. If they don’t come up with something – anything – other than “denazification” they will never explain the situation in Ukraine correctly. Take Nali, or improve upon Nali, but come up with something to increase diplomatic understanding.

However, Russia needs to not only admit they got it wrong, but they need to get at the root of why they got it wrong, and this is actually much harder for Russia.

Russians need to ask why they get – as their failed PR campaign proves – “Nazi” as wrong as the West does

It’s not really that the times have changed and “Nazi” is outdated – it’s that “Nazi” was never accurate to begin with in Ukraine, as I wrote back in 2014.

Racism or xenophobia – the hating of Russia – isn’t enough to make one a Nazi, merely a racist. Germanic Nazism had political and economic components, and to ignore them is only ignorance and only causes more ignorance. The West only associates Nazis with anti-Semitism, and that’s foolish, but some Russians think associating Nazis with anti-Russianism is a complete picture, and that is just as foolish.

Incorrectly believing that it does is to totally ignore the economic factor, and the factor of political structure, and to merely make ethnic/identity politics the only factor – it is also to lay the foundation for total PR failure outside of Russia, and that cannot be denied.

The obvious difference is that Russia is on the right side of being against the “Nalis”, but… they don’t even know what that means, or what being anti-Nail implies for their society going forward – and the implications are revolutionary-big.

The Western and Russian elite leadership both misuse “Nazi” because it serves them – cui bono applies here too.

Both Russian and Western elites do not want to seriously talk about the economic/political aspects of socialism – of any variety – whatsoever. This is because post-1991 both regions’ elites began to wrongly take for granted that Socialist Democracy is a failure (China has emphatically disproven this, thankfully) and thus Russia adopted many aspects of what I term “Western Liberal Democracy”.

I can list a half-dozen synonyms: liberalism, neoliberalism, ultra-liberalism, English parliamentarian oligarchy, Western democracy, Nali-ism, etc. It all comes down to the same thing: liberalism, which is the ideology that emerged after the downfall of absolute monarchy in 1789 and before the establishment of socialist democracy in 1917.

The West is fighting for Western Liberal Democracy, and thus they do not permit honest discussion and honest critiques of Western Liberal Democracy. This explains why there is no admission regarding the historical reality that Nazism and 1930s European fascism won power precisely because so many people realised that Western Liberal Democracy was nothing but awful oligarchy. Most of Russia does not understand this either – not since 1991 – and thus they are stuck between aping Western Liberal Democracy and rejecting Socialist Democracy.

Putin definitely doesn’t want to talk about socialism honestly – or even acknowledge its achievements in Russia – because socialists are not just an ideological rival but an actual political one, unlike in the West: The Communist Party is the main opposition party in Russian parliament. Clearly, Western Liberal Democracy still has plenty of detractors in Russia.

But Putin is thus at an absurd and contradictory place in his political outlook: He wants to oppose Western Liberal Democracy’s surprising counter-attack on Russia with… more Western Liberal Democracy in Russia? It’s illogical, and thus it can’t work, and here’s why:

Putin is essentially saying that he wants Russia to take the Iranian road of taking total sanctions war head-on, but… without the influence of 1917? It won’t work. In 1979 Iranian political leaders were aware of Marxism, Leninism and Maoism, and they were also aware that Western Liberal Democracy was an awful economic and political model, and as a result they nationalised the economy to a degree only surpassed by North Korea and (maybe, I contest) Cuba – that’s the only way to beat sanctions!

What Russia is proposing in response to the Western counter-attack is truly radical for them in the sense that it is a total overturning of the economic and political choices of Western Liberal Democracy, and thus of many Russian choices post-1991. I don’t think Russia realizes how radical what they are proposing to do in response to sanctions really is, and how much it requires a complete rethink in political terms and interpretations of history – is Putin willing to embrace the USSR’s political and economic past?

What’s certain is that if Russia wants true sovereignty and independence as a response to the Western sanctions war – if they want to follow the Iranian road, as I first posited here, in an article which deserves way more attention, given that Russia now has 54

Yes, the EU isn’t sanctioning Russian fossil fuels, but France just announced they want no more Russian gas by 2027. The EU sanctions and what they portend are serious.

The Iranian road led to sovereignty – and maybe even an actually-signed JCPOA which would be more proof its correct choices – because Iran rests on totally different (i.e. revolutionary) economic power and political power structures than those of Western Liberal Democracy. Russia cannot defeat a sanctions campaign with Western Liberal Democratic structures – it’s a system geared to protect oligarchs, of course.

Does Russia have oligarchs? Of course, to Western Liberal Democrats west of Russia “oligarchs” only exist in Russia, never in the West – absurdly and falsely. Listening to Westerners, “oligarchs” must only be a region in Siberia, perhaps? But oligarchs are not going to help counter sanctions; they are not going to accept mass nationalisations; they are not going to accept price controls, profit limitations, central planning, etc. and etc. and etc.

If Russia continues to face off with the West a la Iran they can either have a revolution in thinking or they can fail. Western Liberal Democracy will not save them, as Russians were told in 1991.

Perhaps Putin is just bluffing about his totally anti-capitalist response to the Western sanction war? Or perhaps it’s truly a new world, with China-Russia-Iran leading the way?

But the fact that no one in the West can easily grasp Russia’s intellectual campaign for the war indicates a major problem. Russia needs to think and talk honestly about political terms, and I recommend starting with “denazification”. This will, I think, necessarily take them into bigger issues, such as how a “bring on your sanctions” stance necessarily reacquires very revolutionary (or perhaps return-to-revolutionary, for Russia) changes.

Should Russia fail to realise this, it may reveal that they are as intellectually stuck as the West: If the conflict in Ukraine is only about Russia-hating, then they have succumbed to the same identity politics worldview of the West – they have made “race” the end-all be-all of their political-economic discourse. It will be proof that they have ignored the class warfare lens, the imperialist lens and 1979’s “maybe we do need some spiritual morality in our socioeconomic policies?” lens. These are all lenses which came around between 1917-1991, which current Russian leadership has rather disavowed.

These are strong, serious ideas, but they are motivated by the catastrophic failure of the “denazification” idea outside of Russia, which seems like thus far the biggest failure in Russian planning for their military operation.

Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

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

About East European Nationalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Belarussian nationalists are Nazis, but they are not popular. They only get 20-25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: Western Claims about Russia in the Russo-Ukrainian War

The Western media and states have made all sorts of claims about the Russian military in this latest war. Unfortunately, most US military analysts, including those out of the Pentagon, are simply propagandists. They’re not there to tell you the truth. They’re there to lay out war propaganda. I’ve also been told that US analysts, including those in Pentagon, did not understand Soviet military doctrine and do not understand Russian military doctrine. If all they want to do is propagandize and lie, then why would they need to know the truth about the military doctrine of the other side.

However, this is unfortunate because I think a lot of Western analysts, including those in the Pentagon, come to believe their own lies. This is not a good thing. You need to know the complete truth about your adversary in wartime. Propaganda is fine for the masses, but the actual analysts need to know the straight story.

Claims:

A 40 mile convoy of Russian military vehicles had run out of food and gasoline due to supply line problems, hence they were stuck outside of Kiev. First of all, it was only 3.5 miles long, not 40 miles long. Some people measured it. It was 40 miles outside of Kiev though. I assume this is where they got the false 40 mile long figure. The truth is apparently that the convoy was waiting for the Gostomel Airport to be fully cleared, and this took some time. Once the airport was cleared, the convoy moved in. Now Russia has a huge supply depot at the airport. I think Western analysts were just wrong on this one.

Russians are experience serious supply line problems of food and gasoline. We’ve never been able to verify this on the Russian side. Perhaps they are, perhaps they are not. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem to be true.

Russian troops are suffering from very poor morale. We’ve not been able to verify this on the Russian side either. The Chechens seem in high spirits as do the militias of Donetsk and Luhansk. Perhaps they are, perhaps they are not.

Russia is running out of reserve soldiers. Russia has only committed one-fifth of its reserves.

The US and Ukraine say that Russia has lost up to 10,000 men. This is false. I am not certain of Russian losses, but I would put them at 1,000 men lost so far.

The Russian people hate this war and are rising up against it. Fully 15

The war has bogged down and Russia is basically stuck and can’t go any further as Ukraine has fought them off. Russia is simply going very slow in this war. In part this is to avoid civilian losses but another reason is to minimize Russian losses. Russia and the separatist militias are advancing slowly, maybe 3-10 miles a day.

Russia has kidnapped several mayors on towns it is occupying. They are being taken away with bags over their heads to be tortured. We have no information about this one way or the other. It sounds dubious but you never know.

Three Russian generals have been killed so far. I believe the Russian side has said that one of those generals is still alive. No word on the other two generals. Perhaps they were killed, perhaps they were not.

Putin removed his Defense Minister, Gerasimov. That’s just not true. Furthermore, military doctrine is you don’t change horses in midstream.

The initial Russian plan was a failure so they had to go to Plan B. We don’t know if the actual Russian plan was to take Ukraine in a blitzkreig seige. Perhaps it was, perhaps it was not. But this argument suffers from a fallacy. First of all, in a mission of this sort, the Russian general staff will draw up perhaps 10-20 different plans dealing with every conceivable contingency. So even if the initial plan did not work out, they simply shifted to one of the other plans. Russian analysts keep saying that the venture is going as planned.

Russians are deliberately targeting civilians. This does not seem to be true at all. There is urban warfare in the cities, and civilians will be hurt and killed in such combat. Everything we have heard is that Russia is going to great lengths to avoid harming civilians. In fact this is said to be the reason that they are moving so slowly. This also means that they will take casualties rather than put civilian lives at risk.

The Russian sites are full of angry commenters demanding that Russia take the gloves off and quit  pussyfooting around trying to save civilians if it means Russian soldiers are harmed. They wouldn’t be saying that if it wasn’t true. The best analysis seems to be that Russia is indeed going slowly to try to minimize civilian casualties.

A Time Magazine reporter was deliberately targeted by Russians and killed. There are Western reporters everywhere in this war. Russia hasn’t been targeting any of them so far. Journalists get hit by stray fire all the time while covering wars. This seems to be the best analysis for the death of this war correspondent. It now turns out that this man and his colleague were shot at a Ukrainian Army checkpoint by Ukrainian soldiers.

Russia deliberately bombed a maternity hospital, apparently just to be evil. We’ve gone over this before and this looks like a Nazi battalion false flag attack against an empty hospital. The star of the video, a pregnant woman, is an actress, and the photographer is a professional photographer who has been engaging in Ukrainian propaganda for years. We have testimony from staff that the hospital was emptied and turned into a base on February 25. Russia also stated two days prior that the hospital had been turned into a base.

Russia won’t let civilians leave the cities and shoots at them if they try to leave. This just seems to be false. Russia says that the Ukrainians are the ones who won’t let people leave, especially the Nazi battalions. We have videotaped interviews with refugees saying that the Nazis would not let them leave and fired on them if they try to escape. The Ukrainians are the ones who benefit from having civilians as human shields. The Russians gain no benefit at all. Their only motivation would be to clear the civilians out of the city. This charge seems false. It is the Ukrainians who are blocking civilians from leaving.

2,600 civilians killed in Mariupol. Probably not. There would be so many photos of dead bodies, wounded people, stretchers, ambulances. We see none of that. The figure is false.

Zelensky is in Kiev. False. The video of him visiting wounded soldiers was shot in mid-February. He is accompanied by a female physician. She died on February 26, so the video must have been shot before then.

Russia bombed itself with a Tochka missile in Donetsk, killing 20 and wounding 28. False. The missile came from the Ukrainian side from Kramatorsk. Also Russia quit making that missile in 2013 and in 2019 the last ones were cleared out of storage. This was obviously payback for the missile attacks on the barracks of the foreign mercenaries in Lviv.

Russia attacked 15 miles from the Polish border. This means he’s going to expand the war to Poland. False. They hit the base where the mercenaries and supplies were coming in.

35 were killed in the Russian attack on the base near the border. This is the tally for Ukrainian soldiers. It does not appear to include the mercenaries of the Foreign Fighter Brigades. Members of those brigades say they were decimated and lost 180 men in the attack. Surviving mercenaries fled to Poland afterwards. It’s also reported that they are being rushed into combat in Kiev with very little training and old automatic weapons that do not work well. Morale amongst the foreign legion is very poor.

Russia shut down all opposition media. This is not so. I’m on Russian sites all the time and there are vigorous debates going on there. They did shut down some particularly virulent opposition media.

Keep in mind that this type of opposition has no more than 5

On the Russian pages I went to, it was about 50-50 split between support for shutting them down and opposition to it, which shows right there that the opposition viewpoint is allowed. 15

A woman wounded in the maternity hospital attack has died along with her unborn baby. There is one woman, a model and actress, who plays two different pregnant women in this production. She was in Istanbul, but suddenly she showed up in Mariupol. Reports indicate that she just gave birth to a baby, however, she also plays the second woman who supposedly died along with her baby. But it was one crisis actor playing both women.

Russia reported to the UN that Azov was using that hospital as a base four days before. And it doesn’t even look like Russia attacked the hospital at all. All of the windows are blown out and all of the 110 rooms destroyed and there are only 17 wounded? No way. See the US bombing of the hospital in Kunduz because they were treating wounded Taliban fighters. Look at the damage to the building. It’s covered in soot. 42 people died and many more were wounded. That’s what happens when you bomb a hospital.

Also in the maternity hospital production, the victims have no soot on them. With all of those windows blown out, there would be many glass injuries. There are none. The blood on the actress does not look real to me. It looks fake.

Russia is planning a chemical or biological attack. There’s no evidence to suggest this when Russia is winning the war. This comes on the heels of the bioweapons labs of the US discovered in Ukraine. US officials said that they are not bioweapons labs first, and second, that if any chemical or biological attack occurs, it will be Russia’s fault. How do they know one will occur? How do they know Russia will do it? This is what they did in all of the lead-ups to every one of the fake White Helmets chemical weapons attacks.

They always said Syria was going to do a chemical weapons attack. Then Russia would usually say NATO was planning a fake attack. Then the attack would happen and it was always fake. So there is a serious risk of a fake biological or chemical weapons attack in Ukraine along the White Helmets model. US media and citizen suckers fell for it over and over in Syria, so they’ll obviously fall for it again in Ukraine.

Also chemical or biological weapons attacks serves as a casus belli for attacking with a military force as the UN allows nations to go in and attack governments that use chemical and biological weapons. That’s why WMD’s were used as a casus belli in Iraq and Syria and now possibly in Ukraine – it gives us an excuse to attack!

The US has no bioweapons labs in Ukraine. That we do is Russian-Chinese disinformation. I’ve been studying these labs forever. There may be as many as 200 of them. When Congress ended the bioweapons program, the Pentagon simply shifted them out of the country to many other countries.

The US says they are just “biological” laboratories and there is nothing off about them. Then why are they run by the Pentagon? Why is all information about them classified? Why is the Pentagon busy scrubbing the webpages and shredding the files about these labs? If there’s nothing weird going on there, why is Victoria Nuland, the monster, so worried about this material falling into the hands  of the Russians? When I first heard about these labs, what I read contained extensive documentation, but I didn’t really believe it. It was way too out there. Now it turns out that they are real.

I know all about these labs. They are not “biological research” labs. They are out and out bioweapons labs, period. Everywhere these labs go in the world, weird mini-epidemics of never before seen diseases seem to pop up in the country where the lab is. I don’t know what’s going on and how this stuff is getting out of the labs into the local population.

Georgia complained that a lab in that country resulted in an outbreak of an odd strain of Hepatitis never before seen in the country. The lab was also collecting samples of Russian DNA and sending it back to the US. This was almost surely for making a bioweapon to target a specific population group.  They were working with many highly virulent agents at this lab and the research involved trying to find ways to weaponize these agents.

Whatever the Hell on Earth those labs are doing, I’m not really sure, but I don’t trust the government and this stinks to high heavens and looks like a bioweapons program. Every one of those labs needs to be shut down right now and all of those pathogens need to be destroyed pronto.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fake Holodomor That Never Happened

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

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

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

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

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

None of that makes sense!

Or…

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

Which is more likely, one or two?

The whole story of a bumper harvest confiscated by Stalin just to kill Ukrainians has now been proven wrong. 1932 was a famine harvest. It was only 50

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: The Nazification of the Supposedly Non-Nazi Sectors of Ukrainian Society

The Nazification of the Supposedly Non-Nazi Sectors of Ukrainian Society

Generals of the supposedly non-Nazi Army have been photographed with the Nazi Azov Battalion.

Four eight years now, members of the supposedly non-Nazi government, intelligentsia, and media have repeatedly made homicidal and genocidal statements along the lines of “kill the Russians” and “exterminate the Russians.” These statements are all documented.

There were five men negotiating for the Ukrainians with the Russians in these recent peace talks. One of the men, one of the most powerful men in the country, wanted to sue for peace and give in to Russian demands. In downtown Ukraine he was pulled out of his car by the Ukrainian SBU Intelligence Agency and executed with a shot to the head for “treason.”

Hackers hacked into the SBU database and found a list of pro-Russian leaders in the Donbass. There was extensive information on each one. It is believed that this is a kill list.

The SBU is supposedly non-Nazi.

They’re all through the main and local governments. A while back, the Vice President, an Assistant Vice President, a member of the National Security Council, the Interior Minister, the Defense Minister, the Head of the Intelligence Agency were all Nazis. All in a supposedly non-Nazi government.

The Azov Battalion are not the only Nazis, and they have Jewish supporters and members. They even have a tiny synagogue in their headquarters for their Jewish members. There are quite a few other Nazi groups. Svoboda, the Right Sector, the Azov, Adair, and Dniper Battalions and C14, a White Supremacist Nazi group that may be led by a Jew.

The Jewish president Zelensky is controlled by the Nazis. Ukraine is run by a combination of Jewish money and Nazi muscle. Zelensky tried to go against the Nazis, but after a year they had a meeting with him and told him that if he didn’t go along with them, they’d assassinate him. Zelensky presently has a very strong relationship with the Azov Battalion and has been photographed with them.

I think the nationalists just use those Jews as democratic window dressing on what is basically a fascist authoritarian state or dictatorship. It helps that they are Jewish as it helps them to deflect charges of antisemitism.

Furthermore, the “non-Nazi” parties are pretty damned Nazi. They passed laws ending Russian as an official language, banning Russian from public and introduced laws forbidding the speaking of Russian in public and forbidding Russian speakers from working for the government. All of this by a supposedly non-Nazi Parliament from supposedly non-Nazi parties.

When the new government came in, the supposedly non-Nazi government outlawed the Communist Party, went around smashing down all the Soviet statues and outlawed the largest party of the Russian speakers, the Party of Regions. Together the two parties made up half the population. So the new “democratic” government immediately outlawed the entire opposition! Before that, there were threats against members of the Party of Regions, and some of them were murdered by the Nazis. The supposedly non-Nazi government looked the other way.

There were murders of Communists. Nazis attacked a Communist labor union, chained 35 of its members to heaters, and set it on fire. This was in Kiev. There was an attempt to kill the leader of the Party of Regions by setting his house on fire. They set his neighbor’s house on fire. He fled to Russia.

There were attacks and threats against all of the major intellectual and political leaders of the Russian speakers. Some were beaten, others imprisoned, some murdered, and all of them have now fled to Russia. The Russian speakers have no intellectual, media, political presence. The supposedly non-Nazi government did nothing to stop any of these attacks.

In Odessa, the Nazis attempted a false flag on members of a Communist labor union who holed themselves up in an a mansion. The Nazis invaded the mansion, murdered some of the resisters and set the rest on fire. They were egged on by a vast crowd of purported non-Nazi Ukrainians. The supposedly non-Nazi government, NATO, and the US all said it never happened and tried to cover it up. The entire supposedly non-Nazi US media went along with it.

There were jokes all over the Ukraine about burning Colorado beetles (Russians are called Colorado beetles due to their flag). The millions of Ukrainians making these jokes were supposedly non-Nazis.

The most popular rallying cry heard at the Maidan was, “Hang the Russians, drown the Poles, stab the Jews!” This was that great “democratic” revolution that Americans love that was actually a violent CIA coup that murdered scores of people to overthrow the pro-Russian government. Maidan was supposedly a non-Nazi revolution, and indeed, though only 8

In Mariupol, Nazis beat, tortured, and murdered Russian speakers. Russian speakers were imprisoned. Then the Nazis went to their homes and ordered them out at gunpoint. Then whoever was left took off. Mariupol is supposedly a non-Nazi city.

In parts of the now-liberated Donbass, separatists are finding torture chambers run by the Nazi Aidar Battalion. It was here that many Russian speakers were imprisoned, tortured and murdered. This area was under the control of the supposedly non-Nazi Ukrainian Army

In other areas of the South, the same thing happened. Many Russian-speakers were simply murdered early on by the Nazis, and most of the rest fled. That’s why you are seeing pro-Ukie demonstrations there. These are supposedly non-Nazi cities.

White nationalists, White Supremacists, and neo-Nazi volunteers from France, Germany, Canada, Slovenia, Estonia, and Belarus have been flooding into Ukraine in the last eight years to fight the separatists. They all joined the Nazi nationalist battalions. They went there to fight “Communism” because these retards think “Russians are Communists.” The supposedly non-Nazi government let them in to fight Russians.

Kharkov isn’t even part of the Donbass, but after 2014, Ukrainian nationalists took over this Russian-speaking city. Hundreds of Russian speakers there were tortured and murdered by the Ukrainian SBU intelligence agency in basements and dungeons of that city. Keep in mind that this agency is supposedly non-Nazi.

Countless supposedly non-Nazi parents send their children to Nazi Ukrainian nationalist summer camps where they learn to chant Nazi slogans about killing Russians. There are children’s books in supposedly non-Nazi Ukrainian schools that sing the praises of the OUN, a Ukrainian nationalist WW2 army that killed 200,000 Jews, 40,000 Poles, and countless Russians.

There are statues all over the supposedly non-Nazi Ukraine to the Nazi war heroes of the Ukrainian nationalists. All of the heroes of Ukrainian nationalists were Nazis. Countless supposedly non-Nazi Ukrainians, often members of supposedly non-Nazi nationalist youth groups, pay homage to these heroes at their monuments every year. The supposedly Ukrainian Orthodox Church commemorates a certain Ukrainian nationalist on a certain day of the year. He was a Nazi war criminal.

The chants “Glory to Ukraine” or “Slava Ukraine”, “Glory to the Nation”, “Death to the Enemies” and “Knives for the Moskals (Russians)” are chanted all the time by millions of supposedly non-Nazi Ukrainians.

Supposedly non-Nazi intellectuals have gone on supposedly non-Nazi TV channels and stated that the Donbass was overpopulated and 1.5 million Russians would have to be exterminated. The particular TV station is run by Kolomoisky, the richest man in the country who now lives in Israel. He is Jewish. It was an airplane from his airport that shot down that M17 jet in the false flag to blame Russia. He funds the Nazi nationalist Dniper Battalion, and I’m told that he helps fund all of the Nazi battalions in the country. Yes, that is correct. The richest man in the country, a Jew, funds all of the Nazi nationalist battalions.

Please note that there has been pretty much zero prosecution of the nationalist battalions for all of these crimes.

Alt Left: Repost: Down with Colin Flaherty

This is a nice old post about Colin Flaherty. I like it and I think it’s worth a repost.

The problem is that Colin Flaherty’s whole shtick is that he is not racist at all in any way whatsoever! No, really. That’s exactly what he says. And that’s how he comes across, endlessly, in article after article and video after video. And that is exactly why this man is so dangerous.

Mr. Flaherty is a journalist and a good one at that. But in his middle age, he has decided to branch out into the area of Black crime, except that his focus has a twist – it’s all about Black crime against Whites. The subtext of every Flaherty article or video is that Black people are deliberately singling out Whites to attack as hunters single out prey. Nothing could be more nonsensical. Blacks do not preferentially prey on Whites. It’s nonsense.

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The principal one was symbolized by the noted theory of Le Griffe du Lion, a very racist White professor of…get this…sociology! He did some fancy mathematics showing that Black people mostly see other Black people all day long and don’t see many White people. So of course they prey mostly on their own kind. That’s who they are around all the time! If Blacks were around Whites just as much as they were around Blacks, their propensity to hunt Whites preferentially as a predator hunts its prey (Le Griffe’s exact words) would come out.

But the other side can play that game too. There are 6X more Whites than Blacks. If Blacks displayed no preference at all in victims, they would kill 6X more Whites than Blacks, right? This argument spouts the rejoinder, “But they are only around their own kind all day…” which is probably a tautology and is certainly not falsifiable, so it fails as theory on its face.

Flaherty wrote a book called White Girl Bleed a Lot. It’s all about Black crime against Whites. Yes, Blacks commit some very bad crimes against Whites. But they commit just as bad or worse crimes against their own kind. So only writing about Black crime against Whites is lying in a sense, and worse, you are selling a form of poison to the masses. Racist poison. A really nasty racist poison.

Because nothing drives Whites up the wall more than the idea that Blacks preferentially prey on them as victims. Some of these theorists even go as far as to say that Blacks are waging a low-level guerrilla war against Whites. Oh, what nonsense.

If you study ethnic conflicts all over the world, one of the things that sets off massacres and ethnic cleansings is the notion that Group B, the out-group or the other guys, is trying to kill us, Group A.

Hitler set off the genocide by saying the Jews were trying to exterminate Germans.

The Rwandan genocide was set off in the same way.

The Sunni-Shia wars start off in exactly the same way. ISIS propaganda goes to great lengths to show how the Shia are preferentially singling out and slaughtering the Sunni. “They’re trying to kill us all,” is the message.

This was the line that the Young Turks used to kill 1.7 million Armenians. “The Armenians were starting a war against the Turks, and they were trying to kill all the Turks.”

The genocide against Muslims in Bosnia was set off by Serbian lies that “The Muslims were trying to kill the Serbs.”

Even the anti-Communist slaughters of the last century which the US fully participated in, each and every one of them, were all predicated on the idea that the Communist killers were going to seize power and kill lots of people. Hitler justified his genocide against the Jews by saying that they were Communists and that the Communists were mass murderers who were “killing millions of Christians” in the Ukraine. Yes, the fake Holodomor, the terror famine that never even happened, was used as a pretext for the Holocaust.

Remember that the next time any of you wants to rant about “Stalin’s terror famine.” Every time you say that, you are repeating Nazi propaganda. Does it make you feel good to parrot Hitler?

Many of the massacres of Indians were predicated on the notion that the Indians “were coming to kill us all.” In the original wording of the Declaration of Independence, there is language about how savage the Indians fought, knowing none of the rules of decency in wartime. “They’re savages, so we need to kill them all.” See how that works?

In Indonesia in 1965, there was supposedly a Communist coup to take over the government. All the world’s media reported it exactly that way. Except that it never happened. There was a fake Communist coup to take over the government. “The Communists tried to take over, and they are going to kill millions of people” lie was then used as an excuse to kill 1 million Communists all over Indonesia in only a few months. Most were hacked to death with machetes. Islamic fundamentalists were used by the US and Indonesia in this slaughter. Remind you of anything? Afghanistan, anyone?

The CIA was on the scene immediately and they supplied the new government with lists of known Communists. These lists were then used to single out people for killing. The US media then lied about the whole affair, with the execrable New York Times leading the charge. Later there was an attempt to bury this mass slaughter as “unfortunate but necessary and a good idea in the long run.”

It was only years or even decades later that we learned the truth about the fake coup and the mass slaughter. The Left was devastated in Indonesia and has remained in a meager state to this day. Obviously people in Indonesia have gotten the message about what happens to Leftists, which is always the general message of anti-Communist slaughters.

Hence it follows that once White people get it in their heads that “the Blacks are trying to kill us,” we can set ourselves up for some serious persecutions of Blacks based on that narrative. I doubt if we will start massacring Blacks, but “the Blacks are trying to rape and kill Whites” was always the excuse for lynchings and Jim Crow.

It’s an ugly narrative, and it’s a lie.

I could write articles about this sort of thing too, you know. I see articles all the time about Black people acting terrible, killing each other, killing White people, you name it. 98

Yes, we know that Black men kill many White people – but they kill far more Black people, and by and large, they prey mostly on their own kind.

Looking at the larger picture, Black criminals simply prey on other humans. They rob, rape, and kill Hispanics, Asians, Whites and Blacks. They attack everyone. They are not real particular.

And the evidence shows that if anything, they by far preferentially select their own kind for violence, and they preferentially select against White victims. So if anything, Blacks prefer to prey on their own kind and it looks like Blacks actively avoid preying on Whites. If that’s the reality, then it’s quite a poisonous stew to cook up to sell the lie that Blacks preferentially attack Whites. “They’re coming to kill us! The Blacks are trying to kill us White people!” It’s not only a lie, but it’s a very dangerous lie, a mental poison with grave effects.

Just to see what sort of vibes Flaherty is churning up, look at the commenters. Looks like Niggermania, Chimpout, American Renaissance, and Stormfront. There are all sorts of very vicious and ugly remarks against Black people as a race on there. So even if Flaherty really is a non-racist as he insists, look at all the wild racism that his irresponsible (or worse) videos and articles sprout. He’s fertilizing the land with poison, watching the weeds he watered grow and take over the land and choke out all the good and decent crops, all the while protesting that he had nothing to do with it, he was just some innocent farmer trying to grow crops. Yeah. Crops of weeds.

Whenever I see that language, I think, “This person is promoting hatred against Greg and Alpha.” I think that’s unacceptable. None of these Black people do much of anything wrong. They live like good, law abiding citizens, and in short, they are good people. Selling hate propaganda against good people just because they are Black is wrong.

And that is why you, Mr. Flaherty, are wrong.

And that is why you, Mr. Flaherty, are promoting a very dangerous lie.

Alt Left: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, “Merry Christmas (War Is Over)”

John and Yoko in their full-blown hippie phase and the height of the hippie era in the US in 1971. I was a freshman in high school, and I didn’t think much of hippies. In fact, the next year I worked for CREEP (The Committee to Re-elect the President) for the Nixon campaign.

This was the infamous campaign organization that was behind the paranoid Watergate mess. And that whole mess was caused by anti-Communist paranoid McCarthyite fanatics (of which Nixon was one). The broke into the DNC headquarters because they thought the Democrats were Communists!

What’s an insane anti-Communist campaign in the US without a few gusanos (Cuban exiles)? Not much! And sure enough, crazy gusanos played a huge role in this idiotic break-in because gusanos like their compatriots in Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay, are some of the most flat-out deranged anti-Communist fanatics on the planet. The rest of the world doesn’t have much resembling this type, although Hong Kongers are similar. There are plenty in the Baltics and the former East Bloc and in the Ukraine and Belarus. There are probably some in the Philippines too.

Believe it or not, the entire rest of the world doesn’t give two shits about Communism or socialism or any of that. Probably because almost the entire rest of the world is already socialist in one form or another. Latin America is odd as a far rightwing outlier, the last holdout against socialism.

Anyway, John and Yoko released this as a single. The backing singers were done by the Harlem Children’s Choir, and boy were they good! Hey, Black ghettos can produce a lot of decent and talented people. The whole problem with places like that is not that everyone is lousy but more than there are way too many lousy people. I’ve met some of the finest, more morally upstanding folks in the ghetto when I used to teach there. They were often older, of course, but I also met some young ones. They’re often very religious.

Hardcore Christianity seems to be pretty good for Black people. This may be what keeps crime rates artificially low in the Black South, especially the rural South, as opposed to the cities. Also the South is where is actually an authentic and true Black culture or even Black civilization if you will in the US, with deep roots. You see it most in the rural areas, and yes, there is a lot of religion, but a lot of Southern Blacks act really, really good. So good that they would surprise you. And a lot of those smaller Black towns actually function pretty well. I don’t think Blacks up north ever created decent cultures. Even in Harlem, they mostly just created ghettos.

Happy Christmas, Kyoko Happy Christmas, Julian

So this is Christmas And what have you done? Another year over A new one just begun And so this is Christmas I hope you have fun The near and the dear one The old and the young A very merry Christmas And a happy new year Let’s hope it’s a good one Without any fear

And so this is Christmas For weak and for strong (War is over if you want it) For the rich and the poor ones The road is so long (War is over now)

And so happy Christmas For black and for whites (War is over if you want it) For the yellow and red ones Let’s stop all the fight (War is over now) A very merry Christmas And a happy new year Let’s hope it’s a good one Without any fear

And so this is Christmas And what have we done? (War is over if you want it) Another year over A new one just begun (War is over if you want it)

And so this is Christmas We hope you have fun (War is over if you want it) The near and the dear one The old and the young (War is over now) A very merry Christmas And a Happy New Year Let’s hope it’s a good one Without any fear

War is over If you want it War is over now Happy Christmas! Happy Christmas! Happy Christmas!

(War is over if you want it) The near and the dear one The old and the young (War is over now) A very merry Christmas And a Happy New Year Let’s hope it’s a good one Without any fear

War is over If you want it War is over now

Alt Left: Christianity Has Not Always Been So Kind and Tolerant

Great comment here by Francis Miville. I’ll let you read it and do whatever you want with it.

Unfortunately, I think you are very mistaken. First piece of bad news: Christianity did NOT start as a religion more compassionate than the Judaism it stemmed from. Turning the other cheek clearly applied only within the fold considered, so as loving one’s enemies.

In Latin (and also in Greek and Aramaic) there are two words to mean an enemy: inimicus which means the guy you really don’t like from within your group or circle of direct acquaintances and who doesn’t like you, and hostes which means those from the hostile world outside your fold, no matter they are actually unfriendly or seem friendly.

Right from the very beginning of the Christian phenomenon to a very recent historical era, you were NOT supposed to befriend the presumed enemies from without, which formed the greater mankind you were not even supposed to pray for by command from Jesus himself: humanity at large is a hostile and damned entity and the community of the truly saved are numerically negligible. Right from the very beginning of Christianity you had far more actual friendships to cancel than new ones to enter so as to become a good Christian.

Early Christianity took wholesale the rightmost Jewish doctrine of then very few Jews actually applied or believed in to that point, and gave an even more restrictive definition of the in-group which namely asked the elect not only to combat actual sins of the kind the pagans committed but thoughts: free thought was the original sin you had to renounce first to.

The thinking was now onwards the church authority’s job and no longer yours. Jesus himself referred to the Jewish fold as his only reference, and he admitted converts from outside Judaism more reluctantly than most Jews then did.

Later on, it appeared that the boundaries of the Christian fold were becoming less and less ethnic in nature and more and more ideological, but that movement was not at all one of greater opening of heart to the outside world Vatican II style.

Quite the contrary, it was made up of more intolerance and exclusivism: the Replacement Theology that prevailed just stipulated that since so many Jews had fallen, the empty places would be taken by the required number of individuals from without but that the overall structure of the chosen people would not change from what it was when the OT was written and that the proportion of that chosen people relatively to humanity would not change neither, that is to say about one to a thousand or even less.

But even then, inter-ethnic and interracial opening were not valued at all, just tolerated at a minimum rate for the new fold to grow when the ethnic community of departure proved too hard to convert: you had to remain in the ethnic group you were born in according to the flesh, as well as in the social class you were born it.

Early Christianity very stringently prohibited all upward social mobility in the fashion of rightmost Judaism and Hinduism with a supplementary touch of intolerance. Racial prejudices were never to be combated: you had to believe in the inequalities generally admitted by all and consider them as divinely-willed. You could not as a born-again Christian go yourself towards other cultures and ethnic groups, even already Christianized ones unless you were mandated to do so as a missionary by the whole church organization.

The Law was not abolished (only Saint Paul held a discourse that seemed very liberating in this regard in the wording’s appearance only, because he was a disciplinarian of the strictest kind in practice; the other apostles and early Church fathers just called for the same law plus far more stringent restrictions): you had to renounce to know about the Jewish law and leave the knowledge of its application and implementation to the authority above you and it was nearly always in the direction of more, not less restriction.

The main fear was that by interpreting the Mosaic Law by yourself you would grant yourself too many indulgences.

For instance separating meat and dairy in the kitchen was not of your concern because meat along all luxury food items would be prohibited to you except for two or three days a year maybe where you would be given some cooked by others. What was feared if you knew too much about the law was your feeling of personal sovereignty over your life.

It must be noted that up to the times of the American and French Revolutions, conversion to Christianity was even more difficult and less easily accorded to neophytes and necessitated more time of preparation than entering most Jewish folds. Only the Jesuits had become to make the process somewhat shorter and more amicable and even then they ended up being outlawed for that very reason.

In sociobiological terms the turn the other cheek attitude was not one of humanism at all but of group solidarity against the outer world : you had to sacrifice yourself and all your whims and preferences for the survival of the community (both the religious one and the ethnic one) not by compassion for the human kind: that was considered perverted in the near-sexual sense.

It was Darwinian minus the Theory of Evolution. Christianity is more strictly incompatible with Communism than any other religion, though it is also as strictly incompatible with economic liberalism of any kind.

Judaism is by its principle far less opposite, as it has actually shown to be with fits and starts at various times in history, until the advent of late established Zionism by which Jews have but very little to identify themselves as Jews with but the existence of Israel on the map, which happens to be a fascist state since about 1967-73. Jews however racist or snobbish towards their non-Jewish contemporaries were often encouraged otherwise to think that in the future it would be otherwise, as the whole human kind would be Jewish at last.

In traditional Christianity such a hope is to be forgone as a main heresy : humanity at large will always be wicked, and it has no future but to persecute the last saints at the end of the world before being itself destroyed by fire, and all humanistic doctrines challenging that Christian anti-humanistic pessimism were to be interpreted as Jewish booby traps set up in the intention of robbing money or achieving a future world dictatorship.

What must be noted is that Christianity is in principle a religion with Love as a fruit but NOT a religion of love: it is by its own NT definition a religion of the discourse (logos), of the preached word you have to submit to unconditionally by renouncing to all personal ideas with an intolerance towards whomever tempts you in contrary direction to be as directly as possible imitated from OT.

Love in the Christian sense is better thought of as care: though that care is for fellow Christians or potential Christians, and even more eternal truths approaching you from God, never humans as such and even less humanity or anything intended towards the good of the latter such as social or technical progress.

Though it is the main theological virtue, is only conditional and instrumental to the process of salvation brought about by submission to the divine Logos, which is NOT the Logos as defined by Athenian philosophy as accessible through reasoning, discussion, and exchange of ideas: for traditional Christianity as was crystallizing right after the first Resurrection news, Satan is free discussion in person, the element of air.

The fact that now Judaism has become more difficult, intolerant and anti-humanistic (even though it was always so to a certain good degree) than Christianity which seems now to be sentimentally humanistic (but that impression it gives is very recent: it started with Anglican Latitudinarianism in the 1680-1730’s, continued with Dickens’ and Victor Hugo’s literary approach and was finalized about 1960 with Vatican II), testifies to the exceptionally inverted times we are witnessing, which could be apocalyptic, though this is far, far from certain.

The only sign pointing towards that direction among many others that still lack is the Jews having gone back to Israel, but it may well be a misfire as many Jewish scriptures and admonition by sages clearly state that the Jews will have to make no specific effort and even less any move of conquest to get back to their point of departure as divinely intended: otherwise they are due for a splendid defeat and maybe a few other millennia of Diaspora or the realization that they have never been Jews at all actually.

Among the numerous other apocalyptic syndromes, clearly lacking are general abandonment of Christianity by humanity: this is true only for the Modern West which now comprises less than 10

But conversion of the Jewish fold to Jesus’ teaching as it is abandoned by all other peoples: we are further from that point than ever. The most probable immediate outcome, if we are to believe the best-established narrative, is as a kind of harsh retribution by the jilted Christian God, a military conquest of most of Europe by Islam as it happened earlier with the Christian nations of the former Middle East and Byzantine Empire, while other parts of the world become more Christian and also more prosperous while the West turns into a kind of Iraq-Syria.

A lesser but important syndrome to watch before any true apocalypse can happen is the Jews losing their whole financial fortune to return to the exact lifestyle they had in Antiquity as well as all former Christian countries losing all their political power and scientific knowledge once they have given up believing.

This will be probably true for the US quite soon (my opinion is that the US brand of “Christianity” is the religion most contrary to Christianity ever devised, rather a kind of Jewier than Jew Noachidism for Jesus that could jettison Jesus at once as soon as Israel stringently asks for all pilgrims to go to Jerusalem), but once it has happened, it will turn out to have been a numerically negligible part of the world, setting a very negative example not to imitate for millennia to come maybe.

Alt Left: Neuveau Fascism in South America and Europe

Manuel Rodriguez: Back to politics. What is going on in Bolivia is worrying me. We have fascist squads lynching “undesirables” like peasants. We also see that there have been placed barricades with rubbish and tires that block vehicle mobilization, causing people to be fed up and remove the barricades. You know what this all reminds me? The guarimbas of 2014 in Venezuela and Nicaragua. I can see where this is going.

————————– Separate: There is an tendency that is pretty worrying going on at least in Latin America.

The people are tired of the structural inequalities from the neoliberal policies of the right, causing them to lose in elections whenever they appear as they are, and the people are conscious enough.

The mutation consisted on swapping in the public’s mind the Traditional Right image with Center-Right, which seems like a more popular alternative. The complementary tactic is for thee Center-Right to dress up as the Center-Left, which in reality are already prepared sell-outs whose main purpose is try to divert votes from the Left to help the Right win.

The media did their thing, which was to help Center-Left Boric would win over the Leftist Jadue. The whole purpose of Center-Left Yaku Pérez’ candidacy was to make the Leftist Andrés Arauz lose.

That strategy seems to be being recently changing. They are changing the Center-Right for populist Trump-style fascist Far Right candidates. The most worrying thing is that they are getting a lot of support from the population. Bolsonaro is an classic example. Jose Antonio Kast is a more recent example. It seems that Vamos in Argentina is going to win in the parliament.

I would like to point out that the election in Ecuador was profoundly unfair. First of all, the main opposition party kept getting banned, and its leaders all have warrants out for their arrest on fake charges. This “lawfare” is similar to what was done in Brazil. By the way, the FBI greatly assisted the Brazilian fascists in the lawfare against the Left down there. The US is also engaging in lawfare against Venezuela.

Vamos are Argentine fascists?

Obviously Bolsonaro is a fascist, and Kast is clearly a Pinochet-style Chilean fascist.

Why are people voting fascist? I don’t get it. Although Chile and Argentine both have deep fascist blocs in each country, in my opinion mostly because those are majority-White countries. Brazil is also a majority-White country, which may be why they are going fascist too.

In Latin America nowadays, where you lack a White majority, fascism is hard to install because Latin non-Whites hate fascism. They’ve had quite enough of it. However, they do support it in Colombia. On the other hand, Colombia is also a fairly White country. Fascist roots in Colombia go back to Independence. The country simply has developed a culture of popular fascism for whatever reason. Turkey is very similar. The people get no benefit for voting fascist, but they keep doing it anyway.

There are fascist governments in non-White Haiti, Honduras, and Paraguay, but all of those are dictatorships. The Right seized power with fascist coups – armed in Haiti and Honduras and legislative in Paraguay – and they have ruled by dictatorship ever since.

In the Americas, Whiteness is associated with rightwing authoritarianism and fascism. In Europe this is not the case, but Whites are a huge majority over there. It appears that Whites go fascist when they are in the minority, but Argentina and Chile are majority-White, so I don’t get it.

Really any population descended from the Catholic Spaniards divides into the typical Far Right-Far versus Left Collectivist pattern. This pattern is also seen in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, and Lebanon, all Mediterranean countries. This is also seen now somewhat in France. Spain, France, and Italy are Catholic, Greece is Orthodox, Turkey is Muslim, and Lebanon is mostly Catholic and Muslim. Mediterranean countries are collectivist, so politics tends to be collectivist. Islam, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity are collectivist religions.

Left collectivism is Communism and socialism, while Right collectivism is fascism.

The Catholic East European fascism in Poland and Hungary is different and has a Catholic socially conservative and anti-Communist tint. Liberation theology never took hold in Eastern Europe except in Czechia, where there is a long tradition of “Catholic Communism.”

In Ukraine, the Baltics, and Belarus, the fascism is simply Nazism, pure and simple. Ukraine and Belarus are Orthodox, and the Baltics are Catholic (Lithuania) and Protestant (Latvia and Estonia). The Nazism here stems from World War and the independence movements in these countries making alliances with the Nazi occupiers who promised them independence. The Communists in turn were seen as anti-nationalists who thwarted these nations independence dreams. See below for more on that.

In Orthodox Georgia and Russia, fascism nationalist – ethnic nationalist in Georgia or simply nationalist or “Russian Empire nationalist” in Russia.

Protestant Northern Europe is more individualistic. The Right there is just about dead except in the UK and the Baltics. The Right in the UK is a pale copy of US politics. See below for the anti-Communist roots of the Right in the Baltics.

The Right in the northern individualist parts of Europe is mostly anti-Muslim. It’s conservatism is toned down like all politics in Northern Europe is toned down, so it’s not really fascist, instead a type of Woke Anti-Islam. Otherwise they are very left on social issues. One of their leaders in the Netherlands was a gay man. And they support a more socialist economics, but this is the case for both the Right and Left in most of Europe proper other than the Baltics.

The Economic Right is only popular in the UK, where the political economics mirrors the US, and in Czechia, the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. In all of these places except the UK, it is an anti-Communist reaction where many people are angry about living under Communism in the past, so they have gone to extreme Right economics as an overreaction.

In Estonia and Latvia, support for the economic Right has been disastrous and has almost destroyed both countries. The Economic Right has little power in Russia and Belarus, with only 10-20

Alt Left: Socialism for the Win!

You guys wonder why some of us are socialists. Well, here ya go.

As you can see, Cuban socialism beats all of its capitalist competitors in administering COVID-19 vaccines to the largest number of people in the shortest period of time. And keep in mind that the US has, I believe, a GNP 15 times bigger than Cuba’s and it still totally failed in this competition. In addition, many of those countries have social democracies with attendant socialized medicine, but even that didn’t seem to do very well against socialist planning in the health sector. Cuba beat the UK, Europe and North America as a whole, and the combined groups of high and upper middle low income countries.

I don’t have anything against socialized medicine in social democracies, but it does seem to fair worse against a pure Communist system. And in the UK and parts of Europe, public health is under relentless attack by the capitalists under the rubric of austerity and budget cuts.

The UK in particular has been devastated by these cuts which the Tories have been doing for decades now. Nevertheless, the idiot Brits appear to be ready to march off to vote Tory once again in the next election. The entire media combined to promote the Tories and destroy Labor’s left candidate. The current candidate is a centrist named Starmer and he’s so bad, he loses to pathetic Tories like the clown Boris Johnson. But hey, at least Starmer cleaned out the antisemites in the party! That’s all that matters, right Jews. You all would rather have a damned Tory government than a left Labor government unfriendly to your precious little hate state over there.

I’m not sure about the rest of Europe, but I know that public health has been devastated in Greece. The Left Syriza ran on an anti-austerity program but changed and went Centrist as soon as they got in, supposedly due to “forces beyond their control.”

This shows how hard it is to change the system absent an actual revolution as happened in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Without a truly revolutionary party as we had and have in those countries, the forces of capitalism will simply assert themselves and any Left candidate will be boxed in. This is already happening to Castillo in Peru, who finds his options limited more and more every week by the forces of the military, the big capitalists, the media, and the population in media, which is really all the same thing and could be called the Peruvian oligarchy or in US terms, the Peruvian Deep State.

And we can see how this is happening in the US as Biden progressively scales down his promises. At first he rejected Sanders’ Medicare for All, though it has majority support. Then he rejected Sanders’ free college education, a staple in many countries, including places like Mexico! In its stead he offered free community college. Well, he just got rid of that, too. What’s next, Joe? Free ice cream on Sunday?

Really, I don’t blame him. America is still a terrifyingly reactionary country, and in fact it is nearly a fascist country as about half the population is perfectly willing to vote for fascism and the Republican party is now an undemocratic authoritarian fascist party along the lines of the Latin American Right. It follows because the Latin American Right is run by the oligarchies that run those countries, and increasingly, the US is also an oligarchy and is no longer a democracy at all.

Nor are our elections free and fair. They’ve been hopelessly corrupted since the advent of computerized voting and gerrymandering and serious obstacles placed in the way of voting means that we are absolutely not a democratic country anymore.

Democratic countries do not allow partisan gerrymandering, attempts to steal elections, obstacles placed to discourage voting, and open theft of elections via computerized voting machines. I wonder if we ever had a democracy in this blighted country. Perhaps from 1965-2000, we had a pretty democratic system, but under Reagan, the Justice Department under Sessions interfered to keep voting restrictions against Blacks in while putting Blacks who worked for voting rights in jail. The FBI did this, if you can believe that. And you wonder why I despise feds so much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only a small landholding and import-export elite (maybe 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Moral Differences Between Christianity and Judaism

*Except where otherwise noted, “the Jews” below means Israel or the Jews of Israel, not the Diaspora. Diaspora Jews will be referred to as such.

Mungamunga: I’ll point out the obvious: A look at European history reveals that Christians aren’t any more merciful than anyone else. Its main use in this context is to give Christians the assumed moral authority to be appalled at other people doing what they themselves have been doing for centuries. I’d point out examples like King Leopold of Belgium in historically recent times, but that would be piling on.

I will admit that the NT valorizes mercy, etc. for those who want to practice it, and the OT basically doesn’t. If anything, the fact that Christians had a founder and a text teaching mercy and yet still failed spectacularly to practice it makes them look worse if anything.

At least we are supposed to be merciful. Are the Jews? Look at how they act!

I’m thinking though that that’s why the West has been so appalled at the behavior of the Jews (Israel). The way the Jews act offends our sensibilities. Robert Fisk was reporting from there one time and he said it’s about a difference in values – the Jews value Old Testament values of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. This is where I got the whole idea for this essay – from his article.

I’m having a hard time understanding why the West is so terrible and unmerciful these days.

The West is leading edge of all sorts of rights-based movements that could be argued are based on mercy. Do the Jews believe in equal rights? Hell no. Look at how they act.

The most humane prison conditions are found in the West. Do the Jews believe in humane prisons? Are you kidding?

There are countries in the West that literally have no homeless. Do the Jews believe in helping the homeless? Hell, no. One could argue that the Palestinians are the ultimate “homeless” people – the Gods of Homelessness as it were. Are the Jews building houses for these homeless folks? Hell, no. They are tearing them down and stealing everything of theirs that isn’t tied down.

Even the Jewish “Left” in Israel is shot through and through with OT values. Granted the Jews in the Diaspora act pretty good, but they are secularized and largely removed from the Jewish religion. Their behavior is based on Reform Judaism, a bake your own cake approach to Judaism where you pick and choose what you want to believe and and throw out in the Jewish religion.

“Reform Judaism: Leading the Way to a Better World”

This has resulted in a lot of Diaspora Jews pushing a Left idea that the Jews were chosen by God to lead Gentiles to a better world. I believe this is a bit insulting as it implies that we Christians can’t do it on own, but maybe that’s true and anyway I’m not one to quibble with the idea of leading the way to a better world. The basic concept is great. This is the Judaism of, say, Bernie Sanders. He’s been quoted many times to that effect. It is this impulse that has been behind most of the Jewish-led rights movements in the Diaspora for the last century.

It’s pretty obvious that the behavior of the Jews in Israel – “Jewy” Jews or Super Jews if you want to call them that because they are really Jewish – is not based on such an expansive “lead the Gentiles to a better world” way of thinking. However the Jewish Left in Israel is “progressive except for Palestine” – that is, they buy into the basic package of Reform Judaism of leading the way to a better world when it comes to everything else, but they are fascist monsters when it comes to their treatment of the Arabs. These Left Jews are already heading outside of standard Orthodox Judaism, which one can argue is the true or at least pure Jewish faith undiluted.

Marxism as an “Additive Factor” to the Rights and Mercy Based Approach to Christianity

Another huge justice-based approach has come from Marxism, which in a lot of ways has mirrored a Christian rights-based approach to mercy and fairness. No society ever treated national minorities as well as the USSR did and China does. Sure, Europe is doing this too, but this is also flowing out not just Christianity but the extent to which the Christian-based societies have had their Mercy quotient doubled by the addition of right-based Marxism to rights and Mercy-based Christianity. This is particularly powerful.

I think the Marxists were wrong to attack Christianity. It is the only religion that seems compatible with Marxism. The Jews? Forget it. They can’t do it. The Jewish Marxists in the West and the USSR all left the religion. Muslims? Muslims and Marxism don’t mix real well. It hasn’t worked out very well there, although those societies are based on “socialism for Muslims” as you point out. To that extent, the Jews also have done very well at pushing a “socialism for Jews only” in Israel.

To the Extent Christian Societies are Unmerciful, This Impulse Is Backed Up by Quoting the OT, not the NT

Our failures in the past are not particularly relevant, especially since most of that shitty behavior was backed up by quoting the Old Testament.

If you notice, all of the unmerciful stuff is being pushed by Republicans, who base it on – guess what? The Old Testament! When do you hear a Republican quoting the OT?

The Christian societies of Latin America have been deeply unmerciful, but the Left there has been based on an extreme rights and justice based approach. A lot of this is coming out of an extremely NT-based Catholic philosophy called Liberation Theology that prioritizes “the preferential option of the poor.” You see any of that in Israel? The darling of the Jewish “Left” in Israel now is fully behind Prime Minister Bennett, who openly brags about how many Arabs he has killed and says that the Palestinians will never be free. He’s as reactionary as Netanyahu.

Mungamunga: I would also note that to the extent that mercy, etc. was an ideal in Christian societies, it mainly was practiced among members of the in-group. Jews and Muslims do the same things for each other. That’s the nature of humans as a social species.

Nowadays the West is very merciful towards Muslims, Jews, etc. They have more rights in the West as minorities than they do anywhere else, where they are sometimes not treated real well. How about the Jews and the Muslims? How do they treat religious minorities? Not real well! The Christians are the only people who even try to treat religious minorities well.

A Strictly Theological Argument

In fact, I would argue that the OT isn’t even Christianity anymore. If you asked me, I would say the OT is simply Judaism. It’s not even our religion. And this is true in a theological sense.

I was mostly arguing in a theological sense and I’d prefer to keep it to that. By Christian doctrine, all of the Christians were originally Jews, bound by the Law. We also had Israel. Israel and the Law. The greatest Jew in history, Jesus Christ, came to us, possibly from the spiritual world above, to free us from the Law. In place of the Law, Jesus brought Mercy with a capital M.

The Jews, now Christians, were freed from the Law and ordered to live according to the new religion, the Religion of Mercy. At the same time as they lost the Law, they also lost Israel. So the Jews don’t get Israel anymore by Christian thinking. Instead of them getting, the “Church became the New Israel” in a theological sense. The promised land, the homeland, instead of Israel, became the Church itself. Instead of “next year in Jerusalem,” it became “next year in the Church.”

In addition, with the advent of Jesus and Mercy, the OT itself was “replaced” by the NT. That’s what Replacement Theology is all about. The OT isn’t even relevant to us Christians anymore, except perhaps as an historical document about our less than civilized roots. To me, Christianity is just the NT. We might as well throw out the OT. It’s just Judaism anyway.

Mungamunga: Its main use in this context is to give Christians the assumed moral authority to be appalled at other people doing what they themselves have been doing for centuries.

Sure, but we don’t do this anymore is the argument. And we don’t. Rest of the world following suit? Not so much. But where they are, many of them are aping the West, to their credit.

Mungamunga: I can’t really blame anyone for this, because the Christian ethic demands complete self-abnegation, or you’ve already failed. Turn the other cheek. If someone steals from you, give them more than they stole.

This part of Christianity does not fly. I’ll give you that all right. The problem with Christianity is that it requires you to be “too good.” Most of us are just not “good” enough to be these good Christians that we are supposed to be. We are too sinful in a Christian sense or one could argue survival-based instead of subjection and surrender based. For those who could not be good Christians, they had other options. Atheism, Judaism perhaps, Islam, or a warped OT version of Christianity that frankly doesn’t require you to be nearly as good or at least not so self-destructive and supplicant.

Alt Left: What Are the Causes of Antisemitism?

Jews Out-compete Gentiles, Probably Due to Superior Genetics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be that as it may, but how stupid do Gentiles have to be to let 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not wealth. Polish Jews were poor as dirt, and Jews in the USSR hadn’t much. On the other hand, in 1932, Jews had 1

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

Granted, Jews were prominent in the depravity of Weimar, but they were only 1

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

It wasn’t Communism. Jews were 3

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: Repost: Interview With a Bhutanese Maoist Leader

This is a repost from some time ago. The old posts are nor formatted properly, so they are very difficult to read. A lot of them are pretty cool for reposts though. This is an interview with a leader of the Bhutanese Maoists who are beginning an armed insurgency against the Bhutanese state.

A little background: Actually, in some ways, this is a racial conflict. About 100 years ago, many Nepalese moved into Southern Bhutan as immigrants. Apparently this immigration was completely legal, as in they were not illegal immigrants. The majority of the people in Bhutan were more Mongoloid Asian types, Buddhists who phenotypically resemble Tibetans and speak a Tibeto-Burman language. The Nepalese were Hindus speaking Nepali, an Indo-European language.

Phenotypically, Nepalese are very unusual. They are on the border between Caucasians and Asians. Some more resemble Caucasians and some more resemble Asians. Most of the ones who moved into Southern Bhutan were more Caucasian types. Anyway, at some point, they become 60

A few decades ago, for some unknown reason, the monarchy simply ethnically cleansed most of the Nepalese out of the country and so ended up with a more mono-ethnic and monocultural state. Furthermore, the Nepalese were forbidden from returning. They have been festering in refugee camps ever since, and have been growing more and more radical.

Soon a Maoist party was born and it developed a huge following in the camps. Very huge! In the past few years, they have began an armed struggle inside Bhutan, but there have only been a few incidents. Apparently they are laying the groundwork for people’s war, which they claim they have not yet began.

Sushil claims that the Bhutanese state is feudal or semi-feudal, and I think he is probably correct. The entire region remains feudal to semi-feudal – India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and even Afghanistan. The feudalism tends to cut across ethnic and religious boundaries and seems to be a regionalism. Recall that Tibetan was actually feudal until the Maoists took over in 1949 and overthrew the feudal monarchy.

In this region, the feudal monarchs usually use religion, as such folks always do and have always done, to enforce feudalism. The Hindu monarchs in Nepal claimed tied closely into their Hindu Gods. More or less the same with the Dalai Lamas in Tibet, similar to the divinely appointed religous-political monarchs that ruled in Europe for so long.

I figure if you throw a bunch of humans on an island, after a while, the strongest will kill and or subject the weaker ones. Some total prick will rise up, call himself ruler – king – whatever, somehow gather up 90

This group has connections to Maoists in Nepal who now form a huge portion of the government (40

An Interview with Comrade Sushil of the Communist Party of Bhutan (Marxist-Leninist- Maoist), the party which is waging armed struggle against the Monarchy in Bhutan. Talks about tactics, strategy and aims of the party.

———— ——— ——— ——— –

Saturday, May 23, 2009

The following Interview was conducted at some point in the previous few weeks. It occurred somewhere in the area of the Indian-Bhutan border.

Lal Salam Blog: Thank you very much for meeting with me. So are you from Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Yes, from Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: From the Bhutanese refugee camps?

Comrade Sushil: Uhh, actually people think that all our party are from the refugees, but i am from Bhutan. I have spent allot of time in India, working, but then also in Bhutan and then in Nepal working for the party as well.

Lal Salam Blog: So you are a cadre of the Communist Party Bhutan (Marxist Leninist Maoists)?

Comrade Sushil: Yes i am a member of the Communist Party of Bhutan (Marxist Leninist Maoist). I have been a member since 2003 and i have worked actively as a whole timer since the same year. I joined the party from within Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: What is the history of the Party?

Comrade Sushil: The CPB (MLM) was established on the 7th of November 2001, and the announcement of the Party was on the 22nd of April 2003. From this time the party has been working with the exploited people in Bhutan. The people are all exploited by the regime, so our party has been working with all the people, mainly in rural areas, but in urban areas also. Mostly we work with the people in the villages.

Lal Salam Blog: So what are the problems in Bhutan? What sort of oppressions are forced on the people of Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: The biggest problem is the feudal monarchy. Because of this monarchy the problems are created. Peoples standard of living has been kept backwards because of the Monarchy. In a third world country like Bhutan, this is because of feudalism. This feudalism is the main problem of Bhutan. This is why the Communist Party, our glorious party, is working to overthrow the regime, and to overthrow feudalism.

Lal Salam Blog: So the goal of the Party for now is to throw out feudalism from Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Definitely. The main aim of our party is to overthrow feudalism and to establish the peoples rule in Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: So you would like to establish a People’s State in Bhutan? Is that what you would have replace the King?

Comrade Sushil: We should not understand like this. We should replace the king with a Proletarian Dictatorship. Our aim, our hope, no our dream is to establish a New Democratic Socialism. Only after that can we achieve our ultimate goal, which is to achieve communism. It is not only our goal to throw out the king and overthrow feudalism in Bhutan, but to establish a peaceful society that can achieve socialism and communism.

Lal Salam Blog: Last year your party started a Peoples War in Bhutan…

Comrade Sushil: No. We have not initiated a protracted peoples war in Bhutan. Since our parties establishment we have however had many rural peoples class struggles and these struggles have used different means. In different ways we have launched many struggles and programs, and we have the aim of reaching a level where we can launch a Protracted Peoples War.

Last year we did initiate some armed struggles, which is only a factor of the rural class struggle. Much of the media proclaimed this as the beginning of the Peoples War, but we are not at that phase. We are trying to reach the level of Peoples War, but we have not yet reached it, and are preparing for it. We do not know how long this will take, it will depend on many factors.

Lal Salam Blog: So there will be more attacks, more bombs and more armed actions in the future?

Comrade Sushil: Certainly. We are preparing for this. There will be more armed struggle. Without the armed struggle, we cannot change the situation in our country. We cannot change the state power. We will one day take the state power, but for now we are in preparation, making networks with the peasants and in the cities, training, preparing for the struggle.

Lal Salam Blog: Do you think Peoples War can be successful? Bhutan is already a very brutal state. As many as a sixth of the population lives in exile and the state has beaten, attacked, arrested and even raped and murdered those it perceives to be political activists?

Comrade Sushil: Our parties thought is that only by waging the armed struggle and the Peoples War can we win the liberation of our exploited people. I believe so. Thousands of people have been evicted from Bhutan, we are very aware of this. Why were they evicted? They were evicted after political activism and movements. They were evicted because the people in the southern belt had a high political consciousness. This is totally not a refugee problem, this is a political problem. It is a problem of a brutal monarchy and a restrictive feudal system. Without destroying these institutions we cannot solve these problems.

Our party is launching this armed struggle to liberate the exploited people and we know that one day we will be successful. This is a long term plan, it will take many preparations, and without this and without correct politics we cannot be successful. We have this ideology, the Marxist-Leninist- Maoist and this is a political weapon. With this weapon we believe that one day we will be successful.

Lal Salam Blog: So have you learnt much from the experiences of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and their experiences in Nepal? Are there close or special links between your parties?

Comrade Sushil: We do not have special or direct links with this party. But, and also like communists all around the world, in Peru, India or the Philippines we have ideological links. These places all have communist parties leading revolution through the armed struggle, and with all of them we have ideological links and an ideological relationship.

That means we support them ideologically and they support us ideologically. We have a relationship with the CP Nepal (Maoist) , but also with the CP India (Maoist) who are also waging an armed struggle. We don’t receive any physical support, or anything like that, but we should understand that we are all communists, and we are all internationalists, and we receive and give moral support.

Lal Salam Blog: What does your party think about Prachanda Path and the Nepali Maoists synthesis? It has been controversial to some international communists.

Comrade Sushil: About this Prachanda Path. It is something we should study. And also it is not only a thing to be studied, it has shown it has the ability to guide workers actions. I don’t want to comment more because the ideological things i have had not sufficiently studied, and till now our party has not discussed at length Prachanda Path.

Lal Salam Blog: The Maoists in Nepal have given up their Peoples War and taken a new tactic in pursuing the Constituent Assembly elections. Is this a correct tactic in your parties opinion?

Comrade Sushil: In regards to the UCPN (M) we do not think that they have given up their goals. We think they are pursuing another way, another tactic to establish a peoples state. We don’t think they have established the proletarian dictatorship. So we, our party, does not think that they have achieve state power. We too will go for a Constituent Assembly at first, and only after that can we step or jump or leap forward to a New Democratic revolution.

In the context of the Maoists we don’t think they have state power, and are still struggling for it. It is a fact that the future shows you which path you must take, you can only pick your path depending on the concrete situation you face. We will also move for a constituent assembly elections and a new state, but without establishing the proletarian people at the center of this new state then it cannot reach higher and improve the lives of the people. We think that the Maoists of Nepal face similar situations to us, and have similar actions, so we will continue to watch closely.

Lal Salam Blog: So a Constituent Assembly is a tactic that you are interested in for change in Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Actually it is the tactics and strategy of communist parties in the third world. Third world countries are semi-colonial and semi-feudal. So without a New Democratic Socialism stage we cannot reach socialism. So we are in this revolution, it is a peasant revolution we can say. So to reach our aims, to some extent we should aim for a Constituent Assembly, and this is our main slogan and the main aim of the present situation in our revolution.

That is not our only slogan, and out only goal, and it isn’t the only thing that we campaign around with the peasants and people of Bhutan. And we don’t want or aspire to another bourgeois constitution, but we need a constitution that is in favor of the oppressed and poor people of Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: Last year the government of Bhutan held elections, in a very restricted and controlled way, but the western media still presented this as a opening up and of “democracy”. If there was to be a more open electoral system, would the CPB (MLM) pursue peaceful politics through elections?

Comrade Sushil: WE think there is only one path to real democracy in Bhutan. We don’t believe in the current “democracy” this is well known. And we don’t think that this system can lead to real democracy. The international community has its formula and they see votes and call it democracy- but there is no such thing in Bhutan and it is not possible to impose a real democracy from the outside into Bhutan.

Any “democracy” that the regime brings into practice itself will be done in such a way so that real power continues to be restricted and kept in the hands of the old order, and not in the hands of the mass of exploited people, so that this “democracy” could not be used against the regime. Even if the regime cast out the king, it would not fundamentally change it. Our party will not make compromises with that order. We wont co-operate with their agenda, we have another agenda that is contradiction to theirs.

We are going to establish the rule of all the people while they just want to exploit them. There is this contradiction between the people and the regime. Our party struggles because of that. If they were to try and set up a “democracy” for then when we should not be a part of it. When i say this it does not mean that we are militarists. The people want peace, and don’t want to live in terror but this regime suppresses and exploits the people, they already live in terror. It is not a hobby to carry out armed struggle, it is our only option the liberation of our people.

Lal Salam Blog: Bhutan is such a tiny country, and it has very close relations, with India in particular. If you care to reach peoples war, do you think India would interfere to defend its interests?

Comrade Sushil: On this the whole party is very much conscious. But in the present situation India is not so dangerous to Bhutan. China is quite dangerous. 11,500 square kilometers of Bhutan’s lands have been occupied and taken by China. So we are surrounded by two very large and powerful countries, who are always looking to interfere into Bhutan. They have two ways of interfering. Political intervention and direct intervention. There are Indian Army camps established in Bhutan. There are several big barracks. We have known this but we don’t think they will intervene directly.

Maybe at some point in the future. There will be political intervention, and we can try to counter this with our allies by rousing grassroots support for our cause in India. We are already doing this. If they try to intervene militarily it will be a heavy cost for them, a bloody and long civil war. Also the regime and the fuedalists don’t want this. They want to defend their borders, protect his kingdom. We also want to establish the sovereignty of Bhutan, so we will always fight foreign influence, from India as well as China.

Lal Salam Blog: I understand that your party has allot of support amongst the refugees in Nepal.

Comrade Sushil: We are not just a party for the refugees. We have support where ever our people are.

Lal Salam Blog: So in India, Nepal and Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Yes.

Lal Salam Blog: And your party does work amongst all the communities of Bhutan and across the whole country, not just in the southern Belt that is largely Nepali speaking?

Comrade Sushil: The southern belt is not only Nepali speaking, but there are people from many communities there as well. Myself i haven’t been to the north as yet, our party does work there, but i have been working in the south and also in the east. In allot of people, and in the media there is allot of confusion. The CPB (MLM) is not just a party in the refugee camps, and not just Nepali speaking. We have cadres of many ethnic backgrounds, and our party works all over Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: For the refugees in Nepal is it true your party favors repatriation in Bhutan rather then resettlement in third countries?

Comrade Sushil: It is not that our party policy is just to return people to Bhutan. It is not a solution. Liberating the people of Bhutan is the only real and long term solution to this problem. We are not for resettlement, and we are not for repatriation in Bhutan without changing anything else. Moving people around like they are animals is not a solution. That is our position. There needs to be a political solution to this, and only then can the refugees get their rights.

Some people have said our party was created to agitate for the repatriation of refugees, this is not the case. Our party was established within Bhutan and amongst the people. We are in favour of all the oppressed people.Only understanding the problem of the refugees as a problem of the political structure of Bhutan that we can find a solution. Our party was not established for the refugees, but for all the Bhutanese.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: The Catholic Church in Latin America

Do you think churches, private schools should pay property taxes? In Latin America, the Catholic Church probably doesn’t pay property taxes and usually supports the Far right conservatives that you and me greatly despise. I think the Catholic Church plays a big role in upholding the oligarchy land power in Latin America do you agree?

Um I’m not sure to what extent that is true. There’s also a lot of Liberation Theology being preached all over Latin America. Keep that in mind. The Vatican used to look dimly at it, but it’s very common at the parish and lay worker level. In Latin America you have murals of leftwing guerrillas waging battle led by Jesus Christ holding an automatic weapon. The mural will have leftwing slogans written all over it. There is a strain of Liberation Theology that can be seen as “Jesus Christ with a machine gun leading a guerrilla column into a war against the rich.”

The Sandinistas had a lot of church people on their side. One of their leaders was a former priest.

In Colombia, the priests helped the leftwing guerrillas. The ELN guerrillas were founded by Camilo Torres, a priest preaching Liberation Theology, the original “priest with an automatic weapon.” The ELN still has deep roots in the church. A lot of the churches in FARC territory support the FARC.

An Irish priest from the US led a guerrilla column in Honduras in 1983 until he was killed.

Same in El Salvador. The Salvadoran guerrillas had deep roots in the church. Remember when the death squads assassinated the five top priests in the country in 1989 for being “the brains behind the guerillas?” Remember when Bishop Romero was assassinated in 1980 for preaching Liberation Theology? The FMLN Leftist guerrillas in El Salvador were practicing Catholics.

The Chavistas in Venezuela are Catholics and Chavez was a practicing Catholic.

Towards the end of his life, Fidel Castro said he was a “cultural Catholic.” There is a lot of “Catholic Communist” thinking coming out of Cuba these days and now many Communist Party members are believers who attend mass. There were also many “Communist Catholics” in the Czech Republic.

Aristide of Haiti was a priest.

The Leftist leader of Paraguay was a former priest.

In Peru, a lot of priests at the parish level even supported the Shining Path!

Remember Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker newspaper? In the US, the Church has often been quite liberal.

It all depends on the country.

Yes, the church hierarchy traditionally supported the elites in part of a deal to let the elites take power and lay off the church, but this all changed with the advent of Gustavo Gutierrez “Theology of Liberation” published in 1965 advocating “the preferential option of the poor.”

A lot of the militarizes down there back in the 1980’s used to have this attitude of the Church as being a hotbed of Communist subversion.

Catholicism lends itself to both rightwing and leftwing thinking due to the nature of the Church. Church doctrine can be interpreted either towards the Right or Left depending on which type of thinking you wish to emphasize.

Protestantism tends to have a rightwing bias pretty much baked into it.

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

Alt Left: PFLP Funeral from 1976

Translation: From the funeral of the martyr Abd al-Wahhab Eid al-Tayeb, a leader in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a member of its central committee, who was assassinated with his militant wife Khalidiya Ali Khalid in Beirut, December 25, 1976. The commando Laila Khaled appears in the video, shooting in the air.

Alt Left: An Overview of the Recent Israel-Gaza War

I have contacts very close to the whole Resistance Bloc  and I can tell you flat out that a lot of the material published by corporate media is just false. I know people close to Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis, the Iraqi militias, and the Iranian and Iraqi governments. They’re journalists with great access.

During this war, rockets were shot from Lebanon. The corporate media began insisting that the rockets had been fired by Hezbollah. First of all, Hezbollah did not shoot any rockets out of Lebanon. They wanted to stay out of this fight. Also, Hamas themselves did not want Hezbollah to join in.

Instead, Hamas asked permission from Hezbollah to launch rockets, mortars, etc. from Lebanon. Hamas has many activists in Southern Lebanon, probably associated with the refugee camps. The request was  granted. Five rockets were launched. They were all Grad missiles! As they were Grads, they probably came from Syria. A couple of rockets were fired from Syria days ago. I don’t know who did it, but it wasn’t the government.

The point here is very important. Assad gave those missiles to Hamas in Lebanon to shoot at Lebanon. And he probably gave whoever shot those missiles from Syria at Israel permission. This is very important. What this means is that Assad was getting his revenge for years of attacks against his army in Syria. This war was also used by Iran to get revenge on Israel, often via Syria, for all of the attacks Israel has made against Iran recently. Iran and Syria used this Hamas war to get their revenge on Israel.

In an important sense, every one of those 4,400 rockets came from Syria, and to an even greater extent, Iran. You would think this would be a great line for the corporate media to play on, but they completely missed it as did the US and Israeli governments. This war was really Iran (and to a lesser extent) Syria versus Israel. Of course the Palestinian role was essential  also and they were a major source of the combatants, but to overlook the vengeance Iran and Syria got out of this war is a huge mistake.

A drone was at first thought to be launched from Jordan and shot down over Israel. Later examination showed it had been launched from Iraq by the Shia militias parts of the Iraqi Army.

Vast crowds massed at the Jordanian border trying to cross into Israel. Police held them back but the Jordanian police were completely in favor of the demonstrators. It’s false to say that Jordan is pro-Israel. Sure, the government is but that’s because it’s a dictatorship. If they had elections there, a vehemently anti-Israel government would be voted in very fast. 65

Three infiltrators got in. These are just local Palestinian Jordanians try to sneak in to Israel. They all say they want to go to Jerusalem. I know that one Palestinian in Jordan somehow made it to Gaza and was very happy that he had returned to Palestine. He was killed in the war, but he had gained his wish and he died happy.

Also, Hamas reported that one of their suicide submarines bombed a gas platform off the coast. A platform off of Haifa caught fire. Israel said the cause was an accidental explosion, but we still don’t know yet if it was hit by one of these suicide subs. Israeli Shin Bet intelligence somehow knew nothing about this submarine, so their intel is not as good as you think.

Mossad does not work in Gaza, as Israel considers Gaza part of Israel and Shin Bet is the intelligence force for Israel proper. Mossad only works overseas in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Qatar, Iraq, and UAE.

A missile that hit a building in Beersheba killed 2 civilians and wounded 15 more. The building was a small factory that employed overseas workers.  That must have been a big missile that hit that building, considering the damage it did.

In the course of a single day, there were eight IDF troops wounded, two seriously, in the Gaza Belt or Gaza Envelope. In Kissifum, an IDF helicopter crashed. possibly hit by a rocket. At Nahal Oz, several soldiers were wounded, probably by a mortar barrage. The helicopter that crashed was coming to evacuate the wounded soldiers. These mortar barrages were being launched by a number of groups, not just Hamas.

The DFLP and PFLP, two explicitly Marxist or leftwing groups, were launching quite a few rockets and mortars, mostly shorter range. Hamas and Islamic Jihad seem to have the long range missiles and rockets. Surprisingly, the DFLP and especially the PFLP are very popular in Gaza, which is interesting as they are both basically Communists.

The Salah al Din Brigades are (Popular Resistance Committees) Fatah rejectionists. Fatah, the armed wing of the PLO, gave up armed struggle and surrendered to Israel. However, many members of Fatah rejected this surrender and split off to form their own groups. The Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades, especially large in the West Bank, was the largest of these. AAMB is explicitly secular.

The Popular Resistance Committees were groups of Fatah rejectionists in Gaza. The Salah al Din Brigades is their armed faction. They tend to be more Islamist than Fatah proper. They have quite a bit of weaponry and fired a lot of rockets and mortars in this war, mostly short-range. SADB is the third largest group in Gaza after Hamas (13,000 members) and Islamic Jihad (7,000 members).

A new group called Palestinian Mujahedin or PM is ideologically close to Islamic Jihad Hamas. They also shot some missiles. This is one of the smaller groups in Gaza.

The PFLP-GC is a secular group founded by Ahmad Jibril that is secular. They are very close to Syria almost to the point of being Syrian-controlled. They have a fair amount of support in Gaza but they do not have a large force or arsenal.

The “resistance” in Gaza actually consists of 17 different groups. One is a Hamas cutout, then there are DFLP, PFLP, PFLP-GC, SADB, AAMB, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and PM. I was only able to find names for nine of them. Most of the rest seem to be Fatah rejectionists, secular.

They all work together, Communist atheists right alongside Hamas and Islamic Jihad Islamists.

This whole war was cynically started by Netanyahu in order to stay out of jail, and it worked. He’d been stoking the flames for these wars since he came into office in 2009. Really most of the Israeli public is aligned with either Netanyahu’s Likud Party or similar parties like the one Bennett is a member of that are just as bad if not worse. The Israeli Left, including the Labor Party, has basically collapsed.

The uprising among Israeli Arabs in Israel proper was an utter catastrophe for Israel. Netanyahu said it was a worse problem than the rockets from Gaza.

The whole Arab population of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza was in open revolt along with large sections of Arabs in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. There was also a huge outcry in Pakistan.

This was due to a accumulation mostly of 11 years of Likudism and worse. This is where it led. There were huge riots in Jerusalem. Entire Arab cities all across Israel shut down one day for a general strike. Gangs of Arabs rioted all across Israel and in the north, they were even gathered along major highways where they threw rocks. It was dangerous to go anywhere in Israel during this war. In the first week of the war, 1,000 arrests of Israeli Arabs were made, 500 for attempted murder. So 500 Israeli Arabs, basically an army, all tried to kill Jews in the last week. Disastrous!

Of course Hamas decided to attack. Neither they nor any of the rest of the Resistance takes orders from Iran. The corporate media is wrong about that. They go to Iran if they want to do attacks, and Iran gives them a list of attacks that they might do that Iran would be ok with. Then they can do them. For really crazy attacks, they have to get ok’d by Iran first, and they get shot down a lot. If they do decide to do an attack, Iran may help plan and carry it out.

Iran helped plan that Houthi attack on Aramco. Also there are Iranian and Hezbollah advisors in the Houthis. The Houthis are just the former Yemeni Army, and they have huge factories, mostly underground, where they are churning out all these drones and missiles. They use Iranian prototypes and then modify them from there. Iran and Hezbollah, especially Hez, help them make the drones and missiles.

The “Iraqi militias” are just the Iraqi Army! They are not attacking the US directly usually. Instead, member of those militias take leave and go off on their own and form little resistance groups and moonlight as guerrillas while being soldiers the rest of the time. The militias have plausible deniability, as they are not doing or planning the attacks. However, anyone in Iraq who tried to crack down on those resistance groups would be stopped. You can’t. They’re too popular and wield too much power. No one can go against them.

Also, these grouplets contain moonlighting Iraqi Army from outside the militias people and Federal Police members. Munitions are probably Iraqi Army stuff.

Hezbollah was in contact with Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Lebanon every hour since this started. Later, we heard that Hezbollah used drones to help the Gaza resistance avoid Israeli attacks. I have also heard that much of the tunnel infrastructure is intact. Most of it is 90 feet underground and as such, it is going to be very hard to for conventional bombs to get at those tunnels. They will either require a ground invasion or the use of mini-nukes to take them out.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad make their own stuff now in underground factories. Some is Iranian smuggled in. It is very easy for Iranian weaponry to get into Gaza. Only a week after a war, Iran was already busy resupplying the Palestinians with money and weapons.

Once again as with Ansar Allah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad use Iranian prototypes and then make local knockoffs. Iran and Hezbollah help them a lot in these underground factories to make these munitions, and they helped, especially Hezbollah, helped build the tunnels.

The decision to launch this attack was Hamas’ alone. But once it started Iran and Hez gave them moral support.

The Palestinians have their own agenda so they did not launch this war for Syria and Iran, but in a way this is a multiple front war. Israel was attacked from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Gaza and the West Bank was in open rebellion with a number of towns in the West Bank becoming “liberated zones” by Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, normally quiescent but now resurrected and the main force in the West Bank. They’re secular.

During the war, there were many attacks every day in the West Bank: 5-10 shooting,, 1-2 attempted or completed ramming or stabbing, ~20 firebomb, and 80 fireworks! Some Israeli soldiers are even fled the front briefly. They felt under siege. A checkpoint was abandoned by fleeing troops and briefly taken over by AAMB.

Also all of these rockets and missiles that everyone has all come from Iran in one way or another. Even the weapons that the Commie groups have. The AA weapons, antitank guns and automatic weapons are all Iranian. Some is smuggled in. The smuggling route goes from:

Iran -> Sudan -> Egypt -> Sinai -> tunnels -> Gaza.

Alt Left: Argument: There Is No Peaceful Road to Socialism

Transformer: I saw this on Facebook with a discussion about Communism and this is a statement from a Libertarian:

The Marxist delusion of no government always leads to absolute tyranny. The anarcho-communists sweep away tolerably governments and pave the way for the Stalins, Maos, Pol Pots, Castros, Mugabes, Chavezes, etc. It’s not that they justify Stalinism, but that they justify measures that always result in Stalinism, and they still don’t have a clue as to why that keeps happening.

I disagree with his statement that the governments before these revolutions were tolerable.

The CIA supported Pol Pot.

Yes, the US supported Pol Pot the whole time they were in and for many years afterwards as guerrillas.

You are certainly free as a liberal to Leftist to oppose Marxism. A lot of people on the Left, especially liberals, are against Marxist dictatorships. There’s a good argument against them. They’re not exactly democratic.

Chavez was not a dictator at all. Venezuela under Chavez was one of the most democratic countries on Earth. Mugabe wasn’t really a dictator. The opposition always ran in every election, and Mugabe always got the most votes not counting fraud. Same thing in Russia. Putin always gets the most votes whether he steals a few or not. Same thing in Belarus. The opposition runs every time and Lukashenko always gets 75-80

There’s never been any serious electoral fraud in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Haiti, Iran, Syria, or Peru or most places the US has alleged that massive electoral fraud allowed the Left to win. I can’t recall the last time the Left anywhere on Earth had to steal an election to win. It’s usually the Right who does that.

Anarcoms have never completed a successful revolution. The no government thing is supposed to be way off in the future and it’s never happened anywhere. The “Stalinism” is just the dictatorship of the proletariat. It’s part of Marxist theory. It’s not an aberration or anything. Look at Honduras, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Bolivia, Guyana, Peru, Mexico, Italy, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Iran, etc.

There’s no peaceful way to put the Left in power. Anytime a Left government comes in, there’s this nonstop war to overthrow it, usually culminating in a rightwing fascist coup. They always ruin the economy, first and foremost. This is why orthodox Marxists regard the peaceful road to socialism as either a sick joke or a great idea that is not possible in the real world. Lenin called advocates of the peaceful road to socialism “parliamentary cretins.”

Alt Left: Rural Land Reforms: An Overview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A land reform was definitely done in Iran.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The land reform was incomplete in Venezuela.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, Islamic countries are just not like that.

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

No North African country is like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Alt Left: Christianity Is Anti-Capitalist?

Christianity Is Anti-Capitalist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: Right and Left in Islamic and Catholic Societies

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

–Malcolm X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European Style Fascism in the Middle East

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economics and Catholicism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: Israel Versus Egypt and Lebanon

Polar Bear: Egyptians, Lebanese, etc. defeated Israel in battle, and they backed off.

Egypt

Egypt, sure. But Egypt also has to suck up to Israel as part of the peace deal. They also get $1.5 billion completely wasted tax dollars a year as part of the peace deal. Consider that $1.5 billion as more or less aid to Israel.

However, the peace between Israel and Egypt is a cold one indeed. Especially the ordinary people seriously hate Israel. The Israeli Embassy was burned to the ground by a mob of thousands of people a few years back. The entire staff had to flee. The cops just sat back and let the mob burn it to the ground. Curiously enough, the mob was not mostly Islamists. Sure, they were there too, but it was mostly Leftists, including quite a few Communists. There were a lot of women without hijab in that mob. At any rate, the Leftists and Islamists worked very well together.

It’s the same thing in Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel proper. Both Islamists and Leftists in those places really hate Israel, so they get along swimmingly. There are two Marxist Palestinian groups who work very closely with Hamas!

For one thing, Leftists tend to be extreme rejectionists of making any sort of peace with Israel, so they have that in common with a lot of Islamists.

Obviously I am not including the Islamist sellout traitors in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE.

In Morocco and Sudan, sure, the governments made peace with Israel recently (because they were bribed to do so, as were the Gulf Arabs), but the people still hate Israel. The difference in opinion between the people and the regimes is vast in all of those US-allied Arab states. The only reason any of those US Arab allies are in power at all is because they have dictatorships. If they had real elections, no way would any civilians in the Arab world vote in a pro-Israel government, never, ever.

Truthfully, of all of the governments that recently recognized Israel (they didn’t make peace like the idiots keep saying because they were never at war recently anyway), only the UAE has excellent relations with Israel. The UAE is so friendly to Israel that it is almost bizarre. I guess they sold out the Palestinians for the $$. That’s all they care about anyway. They and the other Gulf traitors think they can make a lot of money working with Israel, and more than anything else, they want Israeli weapons systems.

They’ve all been allied with Israel forever anyway, but it’s always been behind the scenes, so no one saw it. The Saudis have been allied with Israel for a good 40 years. The Saudis used to own some islands in the Gulf of Aqaba. In 1979, the Israelis, with their usual charm, decided that those islands were really owned by Jews, so they demanded that the Saudis hand them over. The Saudis did just that and of course got nothing in return. They sold out to Israel like craven sissies.

However, Oman, Kuwait, Yemen, and especially Qatar do not have good relations with Israel at all. Qatar has long housed the leadership of Hamas. Khaled Meshal made an appearance there recently to a mob of cheering civilians.

In Egypt, an anti-US and anti-Israel Muslim Brotherhood (Ikwan) government that won with 75

In addition, Egypt maintains a terrible blockade on Gaza, an anti-Hamas blockade. The probable reason is because Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood of Palestine, and the Egyptian government despises the Ikwan.

The Ikwan is also despised in Saudi Arabia and UAE, but this is due more to competition than anything else. This is why you see Islamist UAE and Saudi Arabia allying with Egypt and why you see the UAE arming the anti-government army in Libya where the UN-recognized government is the Ikwan. Turkey and Qatar support the Ikwan, so this is why you see Turkey in Libya supporting the government.

The Ikwan proper is often friendly to Iran because they figure the Iranians are very religious Muslims too. Hamas, Qatar, and Turkey enjoy good relations with Iran. This was strained for a bit when Hamas supported the Syrian rebels. The Iranians didn’t care that much, but the Syrians were very angry. Syria has now made up with Hamas. Sunni Hamas has excellent relations with Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon, the PMF in Iraq, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Iran.

Hamas never talks about being Ikwan-Palestine because the Ikwan has always been unpopular in Palestine. Palestine is actually one of the more secular Arab states, a longstanding trend. 27

Gaza is a very conservative society and has been for a long time. The West Bank is also pretty conservative but not as conservative as Gaza. In Israel proper, the Arabs are less conservative. In that famous recent video from Lod, those are young Arab women or teenage girls climbing that pole, tearing down the Israeli flag, and putting up the Palestinian flag to the cheers of a crowd below full of teenage girls and young women. None of them are wearing a hijab. But Lod is in Central Israel very close to Tel Aviv, which is the secular, SJW center of Israel, so there’s probably some bleed-over.

East Jerusalem probably has the most secular Arabs in Palestine for some reason. Why might that be? In videos of recent riots, many of the younger women were not wearing a hijab. In a lot of these communities, you often see teenage girls and young women not wearing a hijab while the older women still do.

But in Umm al Fahm in the Galilee, a famous nearly all-Arab town, most women wear the hijab.

Lebanon

Yes, Hezbollah eventually threw Israel out of Lebanon, but Hell no, has Israel backed off on Lebanon. See that nuclear bomb Israel dropped on Beirut a while back? You call that backing off? By the way, speaking of civilian populations hating Israel, the Lebanese probably are some of the worst Israel-haters in the Arab World.

Like Syria, Lebanon is still officially at war with Israel. Syria has been since 1973, but Lebanon has been since 1948. Both refused to sign an armistice. The Christian Maronite Phalange, however, are pro-Israel to some rather weak extent, but the rest of the Maronite Christians are with Hezbollah. The Greek Orthodox are represented by the Leftist, profoundly anti-Israel Syrian Social Nationalist Party. The Druze go back and forth, but Walid Jumbalatt has been a serious Israel-hater in his time. He’s just a guy who no principles of morals with his finger to the wind.

Opinion polls in Lebanon recently showed that 85

What people don’t realize is that Lebanon has no real army. The true army of Lebanon, with much more power and capabilities than the Lebanese Army, is Hezbollah. The Lebanese Army has been deliberately kept weak by the West, with whom they are rather unstably allied. Notice that the Army worked for Israel in the latest conflict, arresting a few of the Hamas people in Southern Lebanon shooting Grad missiles at Israel and dismantling some rocket launchers. They’re traitors, or maybe they are just scared.

Alt Left: Liberal in the Diaspora, Fascist at Home

RL: It’s always been odd that Jews are the most liberal group in the US, yet they’ve been supporting what is obvious Jewish ethnic nationalist fascism all this time. Israel has been a far rightwing country for a long time now. The disconnect is jarring and it was probably always unsustainable.”

Rishi: You can say this for pretty much most ethnic groups. Indians are notoriously liberal in the West and far more conservative than any group when it comes to India and the BJP. They’re ethnic nationalists who are hardwired worse than the Nazis (and that’s saying something).

This is excellent. Thank you to Rishi! He just pointed out that Jews are not unusual in this regard and that this tendency is somewhat true of ethnic groups in general. I had thought of this before but never quite so explicitly. You learn something new every day! One thing he did not mention is for these same groups to be liberal when in the minority and conservative to fascist when in the majority. That’s not just true for these particular groups but it is true in general. Minorities tend to be liberal as they tend to be at least somewhat oppressed or at least feel different and a bit unwelcome or not truly a part of things.

Majorities tend to be more conservative as power creates bullies and a particularly arrogant type of bullying and domineering chauvinism.

They also tend to have privileges which they do not wish to give up. When you have nice things there is legitimate fear of having them taken away from you. When you have nothing, you have no such fear. Instead, you envy and hate everyone who has more than you to the point where you want to steal their stuff either covertly at night or openly with weapons. This the basic revolutionary spirit wired into all of humanity and ruling classes and groups are correct to fear it and worry about villagers with torches and their heads being put on pikes. Marx was absolutely correct when he pointed this out and it has always been true and always will be true. A peasant rebellion is a brutal thing.

A revolution…is not a picnic!

– Mao Zedong

It also causes them to fear weaker majorities taking power over them in their own homeland, which is particularly disturbing. Like if you live in a huge apartment complex with 100 people like you and 10 people from a different ethnic group move in and start lording it over the majority. This is what the Arabs go through in the West Bank. This is what Kurds go through in Turkey and Iran. Any time that happens, it’s pretty much just colonialism.

Alt Left: Why Are American Jews So Liberal?

It’s always been odd that Jews are the most liberal group in the US, yet they’ve been supporting what is obvious Jewish ethnic nationalist fascism all this time. Israel has been a far rightwing country for a long time now. The disconnect is jarring and it was probably always unsustainable. The liberalism of Jews is odd especially odd given their extreme wealth, which by all rights should make them conservative. However, Jews associate conservatism with fundamentalist Christianity and they don’t like any kind of Christianity, fundie or otherwise.

In addition, US conservatives are very uptight and Jews are notoriously loose about sexual and other matters. In addition, the Jews were very poor when they came here and most were originally working class. The suffered all of the deprivations of an abused working class group in US cities suffered 100 years ago. Hence, a lot of them became active leftwingers. Jews in Russia supported liberalism and even Communism mostly as a reaction against anti-Semitism and the racism of Czarist society. Jews worldwide have been very influential in the Left. This started the day that Napoleon let them out of the ghettos. In contrast all of those centuries in the ghettos, Jews were a very conservative, typically wealthy minority with the usual rightwing politics of any group of rich people.

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