Business As Usual

In the shitty little country, the Jews’ little hate state.

This is in East Jerusalem, mind you. Not the West Bank. East Jerusalem is not even considered to be part of the West Bank. It’s part of Israel, you know, the only democracy in the Middle East and all that shit. This is the way Israeli Jews treat humans inside their very own beacon of democracy, the City on a Hill. You know, the place where the “civilized Western Judeo-Christian (White) values” of the Jews is most starkly contrasted with the sheer animal viciousness of the Arab primitives. Or so the Jews would have it. Yeah right.

What I don’t get is how Israel gets the support of all these US liberals. I mean, the place is the living embodiment of a contradiction to so many values that we libs hold dear to our hearts.

The whole Israeli project reminds one of the Jim Crow South.

Can you imagine this in the US?

White cop calling an ambulance: “There is someone injured…” White ambulance dispatcher: “White person or a nigger?” White cop: “It’s a nig.” White dispatcher, sneering: “Call the SPCA. We don’t pick up injured animals.” White cop: Laughs. Black boy continues lying bleeding in the street while cackling Whites with evil smirking grins prance around and throw stones at Black people. “Nigger go home!” They yell gleefully as the Blacks, faces clouded in shame, scuttle away.

Now, just replace White with Jew and nigger and Black with Arab and you’ve got the Israeli project in a nutshell.

And the same liberal Whites who recoil in horror at the Jim Crow South squirm their reluctant praise for Israel, all because it’s Jews being the shits, and not White Gentiles. And you know, the Jews got killed in the Ho-lo-caust and all that. So they get to be shits for decades, or centuries, or until we forget the Shoah.

I was talking to a nice White liberal the other day. I told her that the Palestinians believe in Replacement Theology, because it implies that there’s no religious justification for Israel in Christianity. She sighed and said, “They’re all nuts.” I said, “Well, they got their land stolen. They don’t agree with that. What are they supposed to do, pack up and go to some other Arab country?” She gave a disgusted sigh and said, “They might as well.”

This wouldn’t be ok if anyone else but Jews was doing it. This particular White liberal is Judeophilic like so many millions of US White Gentiles, and this leads her to excuse in Jews what she would condemn in anyone else.

I can’t see any liberal supporting Israel.

I can see rightwingers supporting them. They eat oppression, imperialism, colonialism, land theft and discrimination for breakfast every morning. Those are practically conservative values.

If you object to that, then they are surely fascist and racist values. The behavior of those Israelis in that piece above is typical of many fascist states. It’s also typical of racist societies around the world. If we are anti-fascist and anti-racist liberals, what in God’s name are we doing supporting Israel?

Anyone?

Stop the Western Left Before It Kills Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop the Western Left before it kills again.

Nepal’s Former Ambassador to U.S.: What About a Military Takeover?

This is a very interesting article written by Nepal’s Ambassador to the US. What he’s doing here is throwing out a trial balloon of a rightwing military coup in Nepal to overthrow the civilian government, followed by the inevitable death squad terror that always follows in such cases. Note that towards the end he mentions Pinochet, Suharto and Chung Park Hee. All ran far rightwing anti-Communist military dictatorships, all three came to power via military coups at a time of a threat or reality of a Communist or Leftist takeover of the article.

This is what capitalism always does, and in a way, the Leninists have a point, which is that the capitalists never allow any substantial challenge to their power to come about legally. If it does or even threatens to, there’s usually a military overthrow of the state followed by years of death squad terror aimed at decimating the Left for decades to come. It happened in Haiti, Chile, El Salvador, Uruguay, Guatemala, Argentina, Peru and Indonesia. They tried it in Venezuela recently.

You can forget about the parts towards the end where he talks about how a fascist coup followed by a death squad regime is the only way to eradicate poverty and bring about prosperity and opportunities. Those are the last things this guy wants, and these rightwing coups never bring about any of that. Fact is, they’re designed to prevent just those sorts of things.

The coup would need the support of both the US and India. I’m sure it would be forthcoming from both places.

What happened in Nepal is that there was a negotiated settlement to the Civil War there. As part of the settlement, there were elections which the Maoists won with 4

It would be as if the Head of the US Joint Chiefs refused to obey the Commander in Chief, then refused to step down when the President fired him. It was for all intents and purposes a military coup. It seems that India was involved up to their mitts in this. Then the Maoist President simply resigned, as the rule of civilian control of the state was being violated.

As you can see below, the Ambassador chides the whole notion of “civilian rule.” Apparently he thinks it’s a bad idea. Since then, I’m not sure what’s been going on on the ground in Nepal, except the Maoists have been involved in a lot of protests up and down the country, and yes, they have recently declared a few new states.

All in all, this is a pretty ominous proposal the Ambassador is tossing out there.

The original appeared here. La Republica is apparently the voice of the rightwing and business community in Nepal, best as I can tell.

Getting Out Of The Quagmire

by Sukhdev Shah

(Shah is Nepal’s ambassador to the U.S. He worked for the International Monetary Fund for two decades and is a U.S. citizen.)

As things have evolved over the past three years, Nepal has become a fertile ground for a military takeover of the government, independently or under the shadow of a constitutional authority.

Such a possibility has been talked about in a limited circle but been forced open by a delegation of some Nepali Congress (NC) leaders who recently urged President Ram Baran Yadav to consider imposing President’s Rule to help restore peace and enable the Constituent Assembly (CA) to complete writing the constitution before the expiry of deadline in five months. This is not an incredible or inappropriate suggestion, considering the marathon obstructions staged by Maoists to prevent the CA to open for business and carry out its mandate.

Even after losing the control of government in May this year over the enigmatic issue of civilian supremacy, Maoists have not softened their stance on the president’s action that re-instated the ex-army chief after his firing by the then Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal. In order to further press on this issue, Maoists have announced formation of autonomous states in several parts of the country in defiance of the wishes of government, which also seems to challenge the constitution- making authority of CA.

By doing so – unilaterally deciding to divide up the country into ethnic enclaves – Maoists have started the process of a slow dissolution of the State which they eventually would turn into an all-powerful proletarian dictatorship, making the country a one-party State. This particular perception of Maoists’ ultimate objective and long-term planning is not based on fancy or conjecture but comes straight out of their public declarations that claim the virtues of `fusion’ of ideologies and role of peoples’ war – jana yudhha – as means to capturing the State power.

The Maoist strategy of declaring autonomous states is probably the shrewdest means adopted until now to undercut the legitimacy of Maoist-version of a bourgeoisie State and assert people’s power under its own leadership. And this strategy would be highly appealing for the grassroots, who have had no great admiration for all-powerful Kathmandu-based governments doing the dictates of generations of family dynasties and self-serving corrupt politicians.

With the promises of self-rule allowed to ethnic majorities under the autonomous state system, ordinary people can see the benefits of localization of government authority, with a chance of liberating themselves from the tyrannies of centrist authoritarian rule.

Facing the challenge

Needless to say, government is at a loss on how to face up to the Maoist new challenge. The easiest course of action will be to ignore it – let them disrupt house-sitting, demonstrate on the street, put-up road blocks, spread anarchy, and declare more autonomous states, which can be viewed as no more than a symbolic defiance. However, by ignoring such threats to its authority, the government in power is unlikely to generate confidence and win sympathies, or hope that current impasse is going to end quietly and uneventfully.

If Maoists continue with its present strategy of making the central government look irrelevant, indifferent, and detached from the basic functions of the State, there will be no need for them to make a forceful entry into the capital to capture power. This will come to them naturally and effortlessly – from the growing irrelevance of government at the center, aided by gradual shift of state functions to regional, autonomous states.

There should be nothing wrong with the slow dissolution and eventual disappearance of the traditional State and its replacement by a grassroots entity that is built-up from grounds up. Indeed, by forcing the dissolution of the State, Maoists would be making a bloodless coup, which would be entirely legitimate in an environment of deepening conflict, lack of direction, heightened uncertainty, and loss of control over critical government functions.

There is not much that the Maoist-less current coalition government can do to stop or even slowdown the country moving in this direction except if it chooses to force-stop the process by making a last-ditch effort and take one extreme measure, similar to the one advocated by NC leaders noted above – presidential rule backed by the army.

Given the limited options the current government has in outsmarting the Maoists, it may be attracted to do just that and the army would, most likely, choose to go along. The army’s willingness to comply with such an option can be argued in two ways, the first being that it never got to use its full force to suppress Maoist rebels during their decade-old insurgency.

Reportedly, the army was held back by palace orders, which had to come to think of Maoist challenge more as a counter to political parties than a threat to itself. Second, by making civilian supremacy a battle-cry, Maoists, once in power, will seek a quick dissolution of the army, which they view as the last hurdle on the road to complete victory.

Maoists have been in sort of an undeclared war with the army for sometime now but it is becoming increasingly certain that the army will not just sit back and surrender. Rather, it may be getting ready for a showdown and final war with the Maoists – an opportunity it was looking for during king’s regime but was repeatedly denied. Army’s willingness to face up to the Maoists will be strengthened if its actions are given the legitimacy of enforcing presidential rule, which is allowed under the constitution.

A discouraging outlook

There are many ways in which the current conflict can get resolved and the much-lauded peace effort moved towards its logical conclusion – which is to get an agreement on the constitution, hold broad-based election, and usher in an era of constitutional rule that upholds people’s sovereignty. However, the outlook for consensus building and restoration of normal conditions appear increasingly dim, even non-existent.

The main reason for pessimism is that communism generally, and Maoism in particular, is now a ground reality in the country, reflecting not as much the smartness of ideology Maoists have brought to bear upon the population but the utter incompetence, lack of vision, and unabashed dishonesty of the regimes that have governed Nepal for decades and centuries.

In particular, all of them have failed to create glue that binds people together, encourage them to pursue a common goal, and motivate them to work for a better future, for themselves and their children.

The Maoists have taken advantage of this vacuum by creating grassroots organizations to bring the people together, partly by the force of their ideology but mostly by aligning people against the hereditary and traditional interests.

Of course, the record of nine-month rule by Maoists has caused much disappointment and helped cool down enthusiasm for its long-term sustainability but they continue to remain in public consciousness as the last hope for people who consider themselves dispossessed and have not much to lose from serious anarchy and breakdown of the law and order. At least one half of the country’s population would fit this category who seem united backing up Maoists’ intention of winning over and destroying the bourgeoisie democracy.

Presidential rule or army takeover can eliminate some Maoists and subdue their backers but it will be incapable of winning the ideological war. At the same time, if the ideologically- hardened comrades in hundreds of thousands face up to the army onslaught and engage them in running battles, the situation can easily get out of hand and millions will flee to take shelter across the border in India.

It is difficult to predict how India will respond to the emergence of calamitous situation across its 800-kilometer open border with Nepal, but it is hard to think that it will do nothing. Most likely, it will commit itself actively to prevent the spread of violence, including the stationing of its own peace-keeping force to keep order. Of course, such a move will have unknown consequences for Nepal’s separate and independent existence.

There is little or nothing to take a bet on how the events are going to unfold over the coming months and years, but the present cat-and-mouse maneuverings by political parties and Maoists are likely to move the conflict to center-stage for a showdown. If this comes to pass, army will have a greater chance of claiming victory, provided that the conflict involves mostly the leadership on the top.

Another big uncertainty is if Nepal has the good fortune of some strongmen rising to the occasion – the likes of Korea’s Park Chung-Hee, Chile’s Pinochet, Indonesia’s Suharto – to take up the challenge of suppressing dissent and mobilizing the machinery of the State to focus on only one mission: Building a strong and prosperous nation.

With so many options tried over so many years to eradicate poverty and catch-up on the bandwagon of growth, opportunities and prosperity, this last option may just have a chance to succeed.

Trotskidiots Support Contras in the Philippines

Just to show you how useless Trotskyites (Trotskidiots) are, this Trotskidiot named Pierre Rousset has been championing a variety of splitters in the Filipino revolutionary movement as “the real Left.” They range from social democrats to Trotskidiots. The problem with a lot of these groups is that they are out and out traitors! A number of them have formed “independent revolutionary armies” with names that have phrases like “Liberation Front” in them.

Problem is that these “Liberation Fronts” work side by side with the Philippines military and police as paramilitaries and death squads to attack the real revolutionaries, the Maoist NPA. They also abduct, torture and kill people seen as “NPA supporters,” really just innocent civilians who have not taken up arms or broken any laws.

Trotskidiots are worse than useless. They are out and out traitors! They supported the Taliban contras who fought against the Red Army in Afghanistan, the refused to oppose the anti-Nazi front in World War 2, insanely arguing that the Axis and the Allies were simply “two arms of the capitalist movement.” Nearly the entire Western Left is now in the hands of these worse than useless Trotskidiots. What a shame.

By the way, never was an icepick put to better use!

What follows is a press statement from Cordillera People’s Democratic Front, an arm of the NPA’s aboveground political front in northern Luzon (that’s where the Cordillera region is). The statement warns people about the so-called Cordillera Peoples Liberation Army, and tells them not to be fooled by the name as it’s nothing but a reactionary government death squad. Apparently these are former NPA members who surrendered about 10 years ago, sought amnesty and then asked to form they own contra army to fight the NPA.

The CPLA Is in the Same Sinking Boat as the Ampatuan Private Army and Other Armed Groups Coddled by the Arroyo Regime

Simon Naogsan, Spokesperson Cordillera People’s Democratic Front December 15, 2009

The most recent in the long-running series of splits in the Cordillera Peoples Liberation Army (CPLA) has produced a purported new and reformed group but is composed of the same old opportunist elements. The reported ouster of Mailed Molina and the rise of a new group led by Arsenio Humiding is nothing more than a quarrel over the division of spoils within their dwindling organization.

This same thing has repeatedly happened to the CPLA in the past as various factions squabbled over the funds, weapons, and jobs in the AFP that were dangled before them by the reactionary government.

As an armed group devoid of any ideological mooring, the CPLA serves as a special paramilitary force for AFP counter-insurgency operations in the region. Its members were involved in horrible human rights violations such as the abduction, torture, and murder of Cordillera Bodong Association chairman and Cordillera People’s Alliance vice-chairman Ama Daniel Ngayaan and the killings of scores of Cordillera activists and civilians.

Various factions of the CPLA serve in the private armies of warlord-politicians in Abra and other Cordillera provinces. In Isabela, CPLA members serve in the private army used by the warlord Dy clan in land-grabbing activities. In recent years, even the PNP has complained about the armed robberies, extortion, land grabbing, illegal logging, drug dealing, gambling protection rackets and other crimes perpetrated by the CPLA.

The current CPLA interim leadership keeps on harping on the same tired issues of the integration of more of their members into the AFP and the continuation of their supposed peace-talks with the government. This underscores their confused and laughable position. Peacetalks are held between adversaries. The CPLA is not an adversary of the government. In fact, the CPLA is pleading for more of their members to be integrated into the reactionary armed forces.

The CPLA raises the issue of their imaginary peacetalks and their empty threats of “going back to the hills” whenever they demand more financial assistance and projects from the government.

The CPLA should be ashamed calling themselves rebels or a “liberation army.” It is simply a criminal armed group used by the military in counter-insurgency operations against the NPA, the rest of the revolutionary movement, and the people. The CPLA is in the same sinking boat as the infamous Ampatuan private army and other armed groups funded, equipped and coddled by the military and the Arroyo regime.

The Cordillera Peoples Democratic Front (CPDF) calls upon the public not to be deceived and to vigorously reject the purported new and reformed CPLA. It is nothing more than an armed gang of lapdogs begging for crumbs from an increasingly isolated regime. The CPLA must be immediately disarmed, disbanded, and punished for the various abuses and human rights violations it committed against the Cordillera people!

Racism and Opposition to Heath Care Reform

I haven’t written much about health care lately because the whole reform process is so sickening. They’re about to kill the public option and that means no reform. The “reform” is going to be to force every American to buy overpriced evil private health insurance, and if you don’t, the IRS will come after you. Great! Some reform! It will be the biggest shift in income from working non-parasitic human Americans to corporate parasitic shitballs in the history of America.

Why? All so Black people don’t get free health care! Way to go racists! Way to skin your own asses to save your racist hides.

This would have been a Euro-socialist country decades ago were it not for tens of millions of racist White Americans. If you want to be a racist, that’s your problem, but I have issues with White dickheads who have turned a great country into a wealthy version of a banana republic just to “stick it to the niggers.”

Found on the Internet. Oh no! Opposition to health care reform, which will benefit tens of millions of White workers, has nothing to do with race! Those anti-Obama crowds of 100,000 where 9

"Don't Tread On Me," by Alpha Unit

New Alpha Unit. Good one, AU. This is our PC World in a nutshell. Along with life, liberty and the pursuit of a six figure income, I mean happiness, we all have the right not to be offended. If we do get offended, we get to jump up and down like animals in a zoo, go on TV and radio, give interviews in the papers, and demand apologies from everyone in a 10 mile radius of the scene of the crime. The anti-racists paint America as some kind of horrorshow run by grinning White racist Gestapo overlords. Instead, the Whites are running around like mice watching every damned move and word and making sure they don’t, you know, um, offend anyone. Blacks and increasingly Hispanics have adopted a lifestyle that could be called Perpetual Offense. They get up in the morning trying to figure out all the different ways they can hopefully get offended today so they can collect their Offended Brownie Points to pin to their Righteous Victim sack-cloths. If the Blacks keep this up, they’ll give the Jews a running for the Paranoid-Masochistic Character mantle. I’d say life is about having fun, but for some it’s the Pursuit of the Holy Grievance instead. Only once you get it, you don’t feel better. Like a crack rock, you just need another hit fifteen minutes later. Grievance collection and other masochistic addictions are ultimately unfulfilling, because once you’re satisfied, the war is over, and to the grievance collector, the war’s never over, because the enemy’s always winning. Hell of a way to live your life, but it takes all kinds to fill the freeways. It was at the beginning of my stint as a graduate student that I first learned about political correctness. It was the early eighties – 1984 or so. I was friends with some undergraduate women and we used to talk about all kinds of issues women cared about, including some incendiary issues that were sure to cause controversy. One day I voiced an opinion about one of these issues in the casual, self-assured way you’d talk about whether or not it was raining outside. It was a costly mistake. One of these young women disputed what I said, and we had a brief discussion about it in what I thought was a civil way. Well, the next time we saw each other, she acted as if she didn’t know me. We never spoke to each other again. Another time, I was visiting another young woman, a very passionate Communist who would give me copies of some newspaper her group dispensed. We weren’t talking about Communism on that particular evening. We were talking about the same issue I had lost my other friend over. But I hadn’t learned my lesson. Our discussion was getting intense, and then I stated an opinion rather bluntly. Oh, my God. What happened next was like watching Dr. Bruce Banner turn into the Incredible Hulk. I can remember that furiously moving mouth sputtering in outrage, outrage her body could scarcely contain. Did she unleash obscene denunciations of my character? Insult my family origins? Damn me to Hell? No, she didn’t. “I’m getting very offended!” This is what she wanted me to know. I was sitting there in amazement, but in the back of my mind I was thinking, “What? You’re offended? Because I disagree with you?” Yes. Offended. I learned my lesson that time. Never, ever say anything that offends people. Even if it’s your sincere opinion. Even if you really like the other person but happen to disagree with them on something people disagree about. What I’ve seen since then is that people insist on not being offended. If you go to any kind of public forum you are bound to have someone, at some point or another, leave a comment like, “I am very offended by that statement” or, “I find this very offensive.” That’s when the person running the place is supposed to immediately retract whatever statement has caused offense and make an abject apology and behave as if they have been properly chastened and will never do it again. Where did people ever get the idea that nothing, or no one, is supposed to offend them? How did our parents and grandparents ever make it through life? As a Black person, I find this especially ridiculous. When I think of everything past generations of Black people had to put up with, I can only shake my head at some of the things Black people get upset about today. I’m not talking about actual instances of racism, either. I’m talking about stupid, ignorant crap like,”There aren’t enough Black people in lousy sitcoms on network TV.” There are a lot of other examples that people are familiar with. But this isn’t about Black people. Nobody will take being offended lying down. People have the right, in their own minds, not to be confronted with points of view that make them uncomfortable. Nothing should offend you, no matter how true? Who the hell do you think you are, anyway? God?

“Don’t Tread On Me,” by Alpha Unit

New Alpha Unit. Good one, AU.

This is our PC World in a nutshell. Along with life, liberty and the pursuit of a six figure income, I mean happiness, we all have the right not to be offended. If we do get offended, we get to jump up and down like animals in a zoo, go on TV and radio, give interviews in the papers, and demand apologies from everyone in a 10 mile radius of the scene of the crime.

The anti-racists paint America as some kind of horrorshow run by grinning White racist Gestapo overlords. Instead, the Whites are running around like mice watching every damned move and word and making sure they don’t, you know, um, offend anyone.

Blacks and increasingly Hispanics have adopted a lifestyle that could be called Perpetual Offense. They get up in the morning trying to figure out all the different ways they can hopefully get offended today so they can collect their Offended Brownie Points to pin to their Righteous Victim sack-cloths. If the Blacks keep this up, they’ll give the Jews a running for the Paranoid-Masochistic Character mantle.

I’d say life is about having fun, but for some it’s the Pursuit of the Holy Grievance instead. Only once you get it, you don’t feel better. Like a crack rock, you just need another hit fifteen minutes later. Grievance collection and other masochistic addictions are ultimately unfulfilling, because once you’re satisfied, the war is over, and to the grievance collector, the war’s never over, because the enemy’s always winning.

Hell of a way to live your life, but it takes all kinds to fill the freeways.

It was at the beginning of my stint as a graduate student that I first learned about political correctness.

It was the early eighties – 1984 or so. I was friends with some undergraduate women and we used to talk about all kinds of issues women cared about, including some incendiary issues that were sure to cause controversy. One day I voiced an opinion about one of these issues in the casual, self-assured way you’d talk about whether or not it was raining outside.

It was a costly mistake.

One of these young women disputed what I said, and we had a brief discussion about it in what I thought was a civil way. Well, the next time we saw each other, she acted as if she didn’t know me. We never spoke to each other again.

Another time, I was visiting another young woman, a very passionate Communist who would give me copies of some newspaper her group dispensed. We weren’t talking about Communism on that particular evening. We were talking about the same issue I had lost my other friend over. But I hadn’t learned my lesson.

Our discussion was getting intense, and then I stated an opinion rather bluntly.

Oh, my God.

What happened next was like watching Dr. Bruce Banner turn into the Incredible Hulk.

I can remember that furiously moving mouth sputtering in outrage, outrage her body could scarcely contain. Did she unleash obscene denunciations of my character? Insult my family origins? Damn me to Hell? No, she didn’t.

“I’m getting very offended!” This is what she wanted me to know.

I was sitting there in amazement, but in the back of my mind I was thinking, “What? You’re offended? Because I disagree with you?”

Yes. Offended.

I learned my lesson that time. Never, ever say anything that offends people. Even if it’s your sincere opinion. Even if you really like the other person but happen to disagree with them on something people disagree about.

What I’ve seen since then is that people insist on not being offended. If you go to any kind of public forum you are bound to have someone, at some point or another, leave a comment like, “I am very offended by that statement” or, “I find this very offensive.” That’s when the person running the place is supposed to immediately retract whatever statement has caused offense and make an abject apology and behave as if they have been properly chastened and will never do it again.

Where did people ever get the idea that nothing, or no one, is supposed to offend them? How did our parents and grandparents ever make it through life?

As a Black person, I find this especially ridiculous. When I think of everything past generations of Black people had to put up with, I can only shake my head at some of the things Black people get upset about today. I’m not talking about actual instances of racism, either. I’m talking about stupid, ignorant crap like,”There aren’t enough Black people in lousy sitcoms on network TV.” There are a lot of other examples that people are familiar with.

But this isn’t about Black people. Nobody will take being offended lying down. People have the right, in their own minds, not to be confronted with points of view that make them uncomfortable.

Nothing should offend you, no matter how true? Who the hell do you think you are, anyway? God?

China Turns Towards Maoism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who Are The Maoists And What Do They Want?” by Rita Khanna

Great stuff here. Who Are The Maoists and What Do They Want? A good overview of the Maoist revolution in India.

Now from a generic Left POV, I would have to say that this post makes it clear that all of the previous solutions have completely failed to address the needs of the vast majority of Indians.

That includes the Congress Party, of course the BJP and the Right, the “Indian socialism” of the first 20 years of India’s statehood, and even the parties of the Left, including, to their shame, the Communist Parties in power. Not to mention the neoliberalism of the last 15 years or so. Failed, all failed.

Now that leaves your generic Leftwinger a couple of choices. To continue to support the various failed projects of the past, Left, Right or Center, or to try something new for a change. It’s clear that the Maoists, for better or worse, are the only people in India who even have a chance at addressing the various problems outlined below. Therefore, I support the Maoists! Not because I’m a Maoist myself (I’m more of a grocery list Leftwinger, and I even support social democracy in many places as the greatest good for the greatest number) but because their model is way better than all of the atrocious alternatives.

There aren’t enough Communists in India to put this project forward, nor enough in the world to support them. So the Maoists need the support of all Communists, socialists and even progressives in general for their cause, and they ought to welcome support from the non-Marxist Left and even non-Leftist liberals and progressives.

After reading this, all I can say is, “Go Maoists Go!”

War Against the Maoists: But Who Are They and What Do They Want

Rita Khanna

Radical Notes Journal

November 19, 2009

Author’s Note: This is meant to be a simple and brief exposition of the goals and strategies of the Maoist movement in India for people who may not have much awareness about it and are confused by the propaganda in the mainstream media. This does not go into the arcane debates about mode of production in India, the debates among communist revolutionaries over strategy and tactics etc. This aims at people who, for example, are perplexed why the Maoists, instead of trying to ensure safe drinking water like an NGO, rather, often resort to violent activities against the Government.

The Indian government is launching a full-scale war against the Maoist rebels and the people led by them in different parts of the country. The initial battles, without any formal announcement, have already started. For this purpose, they intend to deploy about 75,000 security personnel in parts of Central and Eastern India, including Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand. The government will organize its regular air force in addition to paramilitary and specially trained COBRA forces. The air force has begun to extend its logistic support.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Home Minister P. Chidambaram have declared the Maoist rebels to be “the biggest internal security threat” to India and a hindrance to “development.” The mainstream media seem to have taken them at their face value.

Their publications and television programs seem to be building a war hysteria against the Maoist rebels regardless of the fact that this attack by the government will be directed against some of the most deprived of the Indian people. Indeed this is turning into a war of the state against its own people!

While paying lip service at times to the notion that the current people’s insurgency led by the Maoist rebels has its root in decades of vicious exploitation of the poor, especially the Dalits and tribals, the blare of government propaganda tries to convince us that the Maoist rebels are dangerous, bloodthirsty terrorists determined to establish their areas of influence.

The Government is preaching that the Maoists can go to any extent to maintain their influence in these areas – by either preventing the government from undertaking development activities or by using the power of their guns and killing disobedient individuals. Their ideology is to terrorize the common people, wrest power from the democratically elected governments and destroy the entire fabric of the society.

The government and the media want us to believe that the only people, apart from a few romantic misguided intellectuals, who willingly support Maoists are the poor, ignorant, uneducated, uninformed tribal people. They seem to claim that no sensible, intelligent person living in a society like ours would support them voluntarily. But is this a true picture?

Could it be that the Maoist rebels are supporting and organizing the poor, exploited people to fight oppression, to establish a more egalitarian society where the wealth of our growing economy will be spread among all, not merely among a very small minority? Could it be that in the name of suppressing the Maoists, the state is going all out to break the backbone of these poor peoples’ fight? Could it be that the government is planning to wage a war, in our name, against our own sisters and brothers to help line the pockets of the rich?

In this hour of crisis, we must ask those questions that the government seeks to suppress.

What do we really know about the Maoist rebels, their ideology, their plans and programs? Why does the government need to go to war against its own people and inside its own territory? Are the Maoists really blocking development? Who are these Maoists anyway and what do they want?

Let us take one question at a time.

Who are these Maoists?

The Maoists are revolutionaries mainly extremely poor people, including a large number of Dalits and tribals. They come mainly from the toiling masses of India, and they are trying to organize the vast population of such masses of this country. They seek to arm and train them so that these masses can resist the onslaught of the rich. In this effort, they go beyond the idea that mass movements should focus on some specific issues like wage increases, better health care, more honesty of public servants and so forth.

The view of the Maoist rebels is that the poor and exploited people must first and foremost establish their own democratic political power and their own state power in various places. This is because without controlling state power, the poor and the exploited can at most hope for only limited improvements in their living conditions, i.e., so long as it does not inconvenience the rich who usually control the state power.

So, the Maoists mobilize the poor to fight against the existing state, even with arms if possible, as they consider the existing state to be a set of agents acting for the big multinational corporations, rich landlords and the wealthy in general.

The fight is an extremely challenging and unequal one, as the rich are aided by the government bureaucrats, the police and even the military. Also, contrary to what the Government and the mainstream media are propagating, the Maoist rebels are actually completely opposed to individual killings; they openly denigrate such stray terrorism-like acts. What they have been attempting to build up is a mass movement, even armed, to take on the violence of the ruling classes and its representative state machinery.

The Maoist movement was born in India in the late 1960s, after a radical section of political workers broke away mainly from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM) because they felt the CPIM and other such parties like CPI, RSP, etc. had discredited themselves with their opportunist politics of placating and compromising with the rich. The movement has a long history of development. The present party, CPI (Maoist), came into being in 2004 by the merger of a number of fraternal organizations.

Is development in India arrested because the Maoist rebels are blocking it?

What is the state of the people of India at present? With its current high rate of growth, this is also a country of abject poverty and extreme inequality. Home to 24 billionaires (second largest in Asia according to Forbes), India can also boast of 230 million people who go to bed on a half-empty stomach (World Hunger Report).

A country whose economy grows at

In this so called “hub of knowledge economy,” only 1

Maoists do not oppose “development” at all, they only oppose the “pro-rich development” at the expense of destitution or often total destruction of the poor. For example, in the Dandakaranya region of Chhattisgarh, they oppose the setting up of helipads, but there, the poor themselves, led by the Maoist rebels, have built irrigation tanks and wells for help in agriculture, something the Indian government did not bother to do.

The Indian government routinely blames the Maoist rebels for blowing up schools! But what the government tries to suppress is that these blown up school buildings were actually being used or requisitioned as  camps for security personnel!

And what changes do they want? Why do they want these changes?

(1) Overhauling the entire structure of oppression instead of piecemeal reforms

In addition to all the woes described above, India is also a country where thousands of Muslims can be butchered in broad daylight by fascist Hindu forces (the most widespread and gruesome such pogrom in recent times happened in Gujarat in 2002), while the ministers and police look the other way.

And these features are not the stray results of the misdeeds of a few villains. The existing sociopolitical system in India has a built-in mechanism which ensures that the common masses will be oppressed by a rich and powerful few. Widespread systemic violence is required and is routinely applied by the Indian state so that common people remain disciplined and do not revolt in the face of oppression.

(2) Land to the tillers and destruction of the landlord class

About 6

In the last four decades the proportion of households with little or no land (landless and marginal farmer households) has increased steadily from 6

The Maoist revolutionaries want to change this to ensure equitable distribution of land. They do not deter the landless and poor peasants and the poor rural labourers from collective armed fight against the existing state power for achieving this goal.

(3) Freedom from money lenders and traders

Indebtedness in rural India has been increasing by leaps and bounds, especially in the recent decades. Public rural banks are closing down due to relaxation of government regulation. Therefore, instead of securing credits from public institutional sources, rural folk are now being forced to approach the village money lenders (who are often big landlords or rich farmers as well) on a larger and larger scale.

Unscrupulous traders are adding to the misery of poor peasants. They sell spurious inputs to small and marginal peasants at exorbitant prices. They also make huge profits by buying their harvest at throwaway prices and selling them in urban areas at a premium.

Not-so-well-off peasants, in this no-win situation, of course end up needing substantial credit. Private moneylenders and various for-profit financial companies take advantage of this situation by extracting enormous sums from peasants. Interest rates can be as high as

The Maoist rebels want to change this.

(4) End of caste system and eradication of untouchability

It is well known that the caste system is still thriving in India. Economically it keeps the overwhelming majority of the people in dire poverty and politically it suppresses their fundamental democratic rights. Often the lower castes are robbed of their human dignity. They are even denied access to public facilities like some sources of drinking water, schools etc.

An Expert Group of the Planning Commission reports that in 7

According to an NCDHR report, on average, 27 atrocities (including murder, abduction and rape) against Dalits take place every day. The well-off landed sections in the villages still come mainly from the upper castes. They use Brahminical ideology to try to keep all other sections of the population under domination.

The same is true for usurers, merchants, hoarders, quarry owners, contractors – all mainly come from the upper castes. In short, the upper castes are still very much in command in all aspects of rural life. Often they run a parallel raj with their own private army of goondas.

The Maoists want to break this stranglehold of the upper castes and ensure equal rights for Dalits and Adivasis.

(5) Freedom from exploitation by foreign multinationals and its local partners

Since 1991, foreign capital, in alliance with big capitalists like Reliance, Tata and state bureaucrats, has penetrated vast sectors of the Indian economy. Every sphere of our life, starting from road construction, electricity generation and communication networks to food retail, health and education are under direct control of this coterie. In the name of “development” thousands of acres of land are being transferred to big business and multinationals.

For example, in Bastar, Chattisgarh, in the name of the Bodh Ghat Dam project, tens of thousands of Adivasis are being forcibly evicted from their “jal-jangal- zameen” (water-forest- land). In Niyamgiri, Orissa the land which is the abode of several Dongria tribes has been handed over to the multinational Vedanta group, which will completely destroy the livelihood of these tribes, affecting more than 20,000 people. The state government and the mainstream opposition parties of the state are actively supporting such activities.

The Maoists, over the years, have been resisting such plunder.

(6) Ensuring people’s democratic rights

It is well known that elections are often a sham in India. The parliament, as we have seen several times, is a bazaar where the rich and super-rich can buy the MPs. According to the ADR (Association of Democratic Reform), the average asset of an MP has gone up to 5.12 crore in 2009 from Rs 1.8 crore in 2004. In our democracy the erstwhile rajas and maharajas, like the Scindias, are still proliferating and control the local economy and polity in many places.

And we also know the state of the judicial system in our country. The Salman Khans and Sanjeev Nandas can kill by running over commoners with their cars, yet they can still escape the law for a very long time, perhaps forever.

B.N. Kirpal, the judge, who arbitrarily ordered that Indian rivers be interlinked, ignoring the resulting ecological and human calamity, joined the environmental board of Coca-Cola after he retired.

The Maoists want to establish people’s court where poor people can get true justice. In fact, such courts run in many places where the Maoist movement is strong.

(7) Self-determination for the nationalities

The Indian government ruthlessly suppresses the national aspirations of many people. These people and their land became part of India by accident – because the British raj annexed their homeland or a despotic king wanted their land to be a part of India. Lakhs of Indian troops have been deployed in Kashmir and the northeastern states to curb the  struggles of the people in these states for their national self-determination.

Since 1958, AFSPA has been imposed in northeastern states, which allows armed forces to conduct search and seizure without warrant, to arrest without warrant, to destroy any house without any verification and to shoot to kill with full impunity. In Kashmir, there is 1 military personnel for every 15 civilian.

Cold blooded murders, like those of Thangjam Manorama Devi, Chungkham Sanjit, Neelofar and Asiya Jan, are carried out frequently in the name of “countering terrorism.” The Maoist rebels seek to establish freedom of self-determination for all nationalities.

So, to sum up, the new society the Maoists want to establish will have the following components:

  • Land to the poor and landless. Later on cooperative farming is to be established on voluntary basis.
  • Forest to the tribal people.
  • End of the rule of the rich and the upper caste in villages and the uprooting of the caste system. Uproot all discrimination based on gender and religion.
  • Seizure of the ill gotten wealth and assets of multinational corporations and their local Indian partners.
  • Self-determination for the nationalities, political autonomy for the tribes.
  • Establish a state by the poor and for the poor, where the present day exploiters would be expropriated.
  • Participation of people in day to day administrative work and decision making. Democracy at the true grassroots level with people having the power to recall their democratic representatives.

In summary: ensuring freedom, rights and democracy for all sections of the toiling masses.

What have the Maoists-led people’s struggles achieved so far?

Information in this section is taken, purposely, from the Expert Group Report to the Planning Commission, which is available on the web.

Contrary to what the media try to portray, the government’s own report says that the movement led by the Maoist rebels cannot be seen as simply blowing up of police stations and killing individual people. It encompasses a mass organization. Mass participation in militant protest has always been a characteristic of such mobilization.

Although the Maoists by their own admission are engaged in a long term people’s struggle against the oppression by the present India state, their movement has already achieved some short term successes in improving the condition of the poor people.

The Maoist movement in India was built around the demand of “land to the tillers.” Numerous struggles, led by the Maoists, have been fought all over the country, especially in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, to free land from the big landholding families. In many such cases landlords have been driven away from the villages and their land has been put in the possession of the landless poor. But the police and paramilitary do not allow the poor to cultivate such lands.

In Bihar, landless Musahars, the lowest among the Dalits, have struggled and taken possession of fallow government land. This has had the support of Maoists.

Under the leadership of the Maoists, the Adivasis have reclaimed forest land on an extensive scale in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, Orissa and Jharkhand. The Adivasis displaced by irrigation projects in Orissa had to migrate to the forests of the Visakhapatnam District of Andhra Pradesh in large numbers. The Forest Department officials harassed and evicted them on a regular basis. The movement led by the Maoists put an end to this.

In rural India, the Minimum Wages Act remains an act on paper only. In the forest areas of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand, non-payment of legal wages was a major source of the exploitation of Adivasi laborer. Maoists-led struggles have put an effective end to it. These struggles have secured increases in the rate of payment for picking tendu leaves (used for rolling beedies), washing clothes, making pots, tending cattle, repairing implements etc.

The exploitation previously had been so severe that as a result of the sustained movement led by the Maoists, the pay rates of tendu leaves collection have over the years increased by fifty times.

The movement has given confidence to the oppressed to assert their rights and demand respect and dignity from the dominant castes and classes. The everyday humiliation and sexual exploitation of laboring women of Dalit and tribal communities by upper caste men has been successfully fought. Forced labour, begari, by which the toiling castes had to provide obligatory service for free to the upper castes, was also put an end to in many parts of the country.

In rural India, disputes are commonly taken to the rich and powerful of the village (who are generally the landlords) and caste panchayats, where the dispensation of justice is in favour of the rich and powerful. The Maoist movement has provided a mechanism, usually described as the “People’s Court” whereby these disputes are resolved in the interests of the wronged party.

Why then does the government need to go to war against its own people led by these rebels instead of hailing them as true patriots?

There is a simple answer. Chattisgarh, Orissa are rich in mineral wealth that can be sold to the highest multinational bidder. The only obstacle standing between the corrupt politicians and ALL THIS MONEY are the poor, disenfranchised tribal people (and the Maoists leading them). So, this war. This is not something new in India or for that matter in other parts of the world.

Mobutu’s corrupt regime selling off the Belgian Congo piece by piece to the US, Belgium and other countries comes to mind. In the sixty years of independence from direct colonial rule, the Indian state has been doing the same. It has systematically impoverished the overwhelming majority to serve the interest of a powerful few and their foreign friends.

The impending war to evict the tribal people from their villages, on the pretext of eliminating the Maoists, will be fought at the behest of big corporations, who want to control and plunder our resources such as minerals, water and forests. It is high time that we recognize this pattern of waging war which will be fought by the poor on both sides, but will benefit only the big capitalists and their cheerleaders in the government.

Note: For an interested reader, the Banned Thought site contains an enormous wealth of information about the Maoist rebels, including their own documents.

African Immigrants in Europe – Is The Camp Of The Saints Coming True?

In the comments section, the brilliant James Schipper notes:

Some white countries are not very attractive, but whites can create attractive places, while so far we have not seen one black-dominated country that even remotely resembles Switzerland. This means that, it there is freedom of movement between black-dominated and white-dominated countries, there will be a massive flow from the former to the latter.

Europe has now around 700 million people and low fertility while black Africa has around 800 million and high fertility. Already there is constant illegal immigration from Africa into Europe. If nothing is done to stop this, Europe may eventually become a mainly black continent. I think that the white nationalists are quite right to warn about that.

James’ comment is absolutely right-on. This is exactly what is occurring in Southern Europe as we speak. He’s also correct that only the WN’s and the Right seem to be raising a fuss about it.

The entire European Left has gone insane on this question, and the Far Left, such as Italian Maoists who regularly send me communiques, are the most deranged of all. The Italian Maoists’ main issue seems to be to let all of the African illegal immigrants stay in Italy and get legalized. They’re obviously pro-Open Borders as the whole Western Far Left is. So they’re basically advocating a mass invasion of Italy by Black Africa, at which point Italy will become unrecognizable and will transition to a Black country. I can’t put into words what a terrible idea this is.

To which tulio responded that most Africans want to stay in Africa, and there are probably more Whites in Africa than Africans in Europe. Sure, but the Whites in Africa are not a problem and if anything, probably help the place out. Mass movement of poor, uneducated Africans into Europe is another matter altogether.

So the fact the flow goes in both directions is sort of irrelevant as it’s good in one direction for the hosts and bad in the other.

Clearly, not all Africans in Europe are bad news. A friend of mine is from Togo. He is one of the most brilliant people I have ever known, and he is Black as the night. He went to Morocco, got a degree there (and had a great time as a Catholic in a Muslim country) then went to France since he spoke French. He went to more college classes in France and graduated with honors. He was instantly snapped up by an IT firm.

This guy is so smart that he regularly works with MIT graduate students in computer science on IT stuff that is so cutting edge that I can’t make heads or tails of it. He now has a nice job in Brittany, France, and he is usually in a corporate meeting of some sort. He’s also been very popular with the White girls in France, but that’s another matter. He managed to get his sister into France too. Guys like Coco are great for France, but most Africans in Europe are not like this guy.

It’s true that most Blacks are staying in Africa, but African (Black African, not North African) immigration mostly to Southern Europe is seriously out of control. It’s kind of sad in a way because a lot of them are coming on boats, and they have to turn them back. The boats are coming to Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Malta, etc. Malta at this point is so overrun it’s almost a disaster zone. Black Africans are all over Ibiza, filling up the Internet cafes with Nigerian scammers. Almost all of the Black Africans in these cafes are Nigerian criminals.

The Black African population in Italy in Greece is a huge problem like the illegal Hispanics in the US. The countries are dominated by liberal fuckheads so they don’t want to kick them out, but the Africans can’t really live there legally. Everyone knows they are illegals, but no one really does anything about it. Kind of like this stupid-ass country! A lot of the Africans are just squatters and whatnot. Many of the Nigerians have formed criminal gangs in Italy, where the Mafia is now whacking them off as competition.

The Europeans are too nice for their own good, kind of like us.

Mass camps of immigrants are in the north of France trying to make it to the UK, where the welfare pickings are a lot better. They periodically make mad rushes for the boats to the UK. Police come in and tear down the illegal camps, but they set them right back up again. Black Africans in France are already a serious problem, and they are committing tons of crime, especially rape, including gang rape (the Black and Muslim specialty crime).

It’s sad and pitiful that these boats are heading to Europe but they really need to be turned back. Have you heard of the book The Camp of the Saints? It really is something like that, and it’s happening as I write this.

In West African nations like Senegal, boats regularly leave for Spain and Portugal.

As an aside, White nationalists like to ridicule Africans by saying that they were too stupid to even figure out how to get to Madagascar, but this is apparently not true. They did get to Madagascar a long time ago, but then I guess they forgot how to build boats to go there anymore.

That is, there was an ancient hunter gatherer population of Blacks (Mikea) who could only have gotten there by boats when the Indonesians landed, but the more modern agricultural Blacks in Africa at the time did not have the maritime knowledge to figure out how to get there.

At any rate, my point is these historical arguments are sort of stupid. Who the F cares how backwards East Africans were 1,700 years ago?

My point is that nowadays anyway, even totally backwards West African Blacks are capable of building and steering boats that take them all the way from Senegal to Spain. Not bad. The take home point is that pre-contact Africans may have been backwards, but post-contact Blacks are much more advanced. That they are more advanced due to contact with other cultures or even White cultures is not that relevant. Cultural diffusion happens!

Revisions to Races of Man Classification

Repost from the old site.

Click to enlarge. This is the chart from the paper, The Origin of Minnan & Hakka, the So-called “Taiwanese”, Inferred by HLA Study, utilized in this post.

I usually try to be very conservative about adding in new races to my races of man post, but sometimes I just feel like I’m forced to. Based on this article, and in particular, the figure above, forced me to make some new splits.

The question was what to do about the Taiwanese people. Not the Taiwan aborigines – but the Hakka and Min Nan people of SE China who settled in Taiwan in the past 400 years. It turns out that they appear to be a discrete race, and that they are linked to Singapore Chinese and the Thai Chinese. In Singapore and Thailand, Chinese form a market-dominant minority position.

They are a minority of the population, but they tend to run businesses and be very wealthy. Similar cases are seen in Indonesia and the Philippines, where tiny Chinese minorities of 2-

So the interesting question arises – who exactly are the Chinese minorities of Thailand and Singapore? By genetic studies, we can now see that they are SE Chinese people related to the Min Nan and the Hakka.

The Min Nan and Hakka both speak languages that are called Chinese dialects, but in reality, they are completely separate languages. Both languages are doing fine – Min Nan (Southern Min) with 49 million speakers and Hakka with 34 million speakers.

Min Nan and Hakka both strangely lack official status anywhere, although Southern Min is widely spoken in Taiwan. It’s odd that some of the world’s most widely spoken languages lack official status – Min Nan is the 24th largest language, and Hakka is the 35th largest language, in terms of numbers of speakers.

Both languages are vigorous and are in good shape. Southern Min has a roman script that is fairly widely used. Hakka also has a roman script, but I am not sure how widely it is used.

Southern Min is actually a number of separate languages: Min Nan proper, Amoy, Click to enlarge. Here is a map of the various Chinese languages. These are not Chinese dialects, but actual separate languages. Some may be dialects of other Chinese languages though. The main languages are Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Min, Xiang, Hakka and Gan. Ping, Hui and Jin are classed above as dialects of those larger languages.Jin is classed as a dialect of Mandarin, but it is actually a separate language with 45 million speakers, making it around the 25th largest language in the world.Min is said 5 separate languages, but it is actually many separate languages. The 5 separate recognized languages are Min Nan, Min Dong, Min Zhong, Min Bei and Puxian. Min Nan itself is a number of separate languages. Huizhou, or Hui, is a separate language that is actually a set of related languages. Wu is more than one language.

Ping is traditionally considered to be part of Cantonese, but it is a separate language. Mandarin is also a set of related languages instead of one language. Cantonese is also be more than one language. Hakka is also be more than one language.

It is nonsense to say someone speaks “Chinese”. There is no such thing as a language called “Chinese”.

Instead, there are various languages in the Chinese language family – at least 14 separate languages, and actually many more. Mandarin is by far the largest of these languages, and most of the smaller languages are suffering under the influence of Mandarin. In addition, the Chinese government favors Mandarin and does not support the other languages much, if at all.

I also split off a group called the Li and another group called the Oroqen based on the chart above.

The Li are a transitional group between the Northern Chinese and the Southern Chinese, though they live on Hainan Island in the far south of China. They speak a Tai-Kadai language called Hlai which has 667,000 speakers. Use is vigorous; the language is doing well, but it is generally not written, although a Roman script exists. Mandarin is used for writing.

The Oroqen are nomadic people who live in far northeastern China and speak a Tungusic tongue. As you can see from the chart, they are closer to the Japanese than to the NE Chinese. There are only 1,200 speakers left out of a small 7,000 population, but there are 800 monolinguals, and use is vigorous by those who speak the language.

They live by hunting and used to practice shamanism. They still lack an official script for their language, but there are radio programs in Oroqen.

The truth is that both the Oroqen people and their language are in poor shape, and most of the blame can be placed on the Communist Chinese regime, even though the regime has also done many good things for the Oroqen. The Cultural Revolution in particular was a period of insanity, stupidity and terror.

An Oroqen Race was added to the NE Asian Major Race due to the extreme divergence of these people. I also added Inner Mongolians to the Mongolian Race inside of NE Asian.

I added the Buyei to the Tai Race within the SE Asian Major Race and created a new race called SE Chinese Race, consisting of Min Nan, Hakka, Singapore Chinese and Thai Chinese. The Buyei live in southern China and northern Vietnam and speak a Tai language that has over 2 million speakers yet has no official status. Buyei language use is vigorous, and it is in good shape.

There is a romanized script, and there are newspapers in the language, but they mostly use Mandarin for writing. The Buyei language is probably made up of a few separate languages, because some of the dialects are not mutually intelligible. The language is very close to the Zhuang language.

The SE Chinese Race really consists of the descendants of the ancient Chinese people known as the Yueh. The Yueh, or Yue, formed a state in southeastern coastal China during the Warring States Period and the Spring and Autumn Period. The state lasted from about 525 BC to 334 BC. The Chinese were already involved in metallurgy and were producing excellent swords during these periods.

The new lineup looks like this:

Northeast Asian Major Race*

Japanese-Korean Race Southern Japanese Race (Honshu Kinki – Kyushu) Ryukyuan Race Ainu Race*** Gilyak Race** Northern Chinese Race (Northern Chinese – Qiang – Manchu – Hui) Oroqen Race Sherpa-Yakut Race Nepalese Race (Nepali – Newari) Mongolian Race (Mongolian – Inner Mongolian – Buryat – Kazakh) Northern Turkic Race (Dolgan – Altai – Shor – Tofalar – Uighur – Chelkan – Soyot – Kumandin Teleut – Hazara)*** Central Asian Race (Kirghiz – Karalkalpak – Uzbek – Turkmen) Tuva Race Tungus Race (Even – Evenki – Russian Saami) Siberian Race Beringian Race** (Chukchi – Aleut – Siberian Eskimo) Koryak-Itelmen Race Reindeer Chukchi Race General Tibetan Race (Tibetan – Lisu – Nu – Karen – Tujia – Hui – Akha – Burmese – Bai – Yizu – Pnar – Mizo) Bhutanese Race Siberian Uralic Race (Nentsy – Samoyed – Ket – Mansi – Khanty) Nganasan Race Uralic Race (Komi – Mari) North American Eskimo Race

Southeast Asian Major Race*

Southern Chinese Race (Hmong – Mien – Dong – Henan Han – Yi – Naxi) Li Race Southeast China Race (Hakka – Min Nan – Singapore Chinese – Thai Chinese) South China Sea Race (Filipino – Ami Taiwanese Aborigine – Guangdong Han) Tai Race (Thai – Lao – Lahu – Aini – Deang – Blang – Shan – Dai – Vietnamese – Muong – Buyei) Kachin Race (Kachin – Va – Nung – Lu) General Taiwanese Aborigine Race (Ayatal – Bunun – Yami) Island SE Asian Race (Paiwan Taiwanese Aborigine – Sea Dayak – Sumatran – Balinese) Indonesian Race (Sulawesi – Borneo – Lesser Sunda) Malay Race (Javanese – Sarawak – Malaysia) Zhuang Race (Senoi – Zhuang – She – Santhal – Ho – Nicobarese) Austroasiatic Race (Mon – Khmer – Khasi – Nongtrai – Bhoi – Maram – Kynriam – Wajaintia) Meghalaya NE Indian Race (Khasi – Garo – Lyngngam) Philippines Negrito Race (Aeta – Ati – Palau Micronesian) Mamanwa Philippines Negrito Race Andaman Islands Negrito Race** Semang Malay Negrito Race***

References

Lin M, Chu CC, Chang SL, Lee HL, Loo JH, Akaza T, Juji T, Ohashi J, Tokunaga K. March 2001. The Origin of Minnan & Hakka, the So-called “Taiwanese”, Inferred by HLA Study. Tissue Antigens:57(3):192-9.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Shall Certainly Defeat the Government

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1947 INDIA SPRINGS FROM THE HEAD OF MARS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Muslims from a crowd into a nation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1950 INDIAN INTERVENTION IN NEPAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IRISH AND INDIAN NATIONALISM – A COMPARISON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patriots of Ireland , your cause is mine.

and in 1920 said that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although they achieved a growth in GDP of

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later, in 1962, he observed:

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

THE STRUGGLE FOR INDIA & NEPAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did this happen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE UML AND THE STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROGRAM

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

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

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

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

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

A prominent UML commentator summed up the results:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The principle driving this demand is that:

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

It also complains that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy and capitalism have been turned upside down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a similar naivete in the UML’s self-image on offering a middle way between the Scylla of capitalist imperialism and the Charbydis of Communist revolution. In this sense, its propaganda is replete with condemning the excesses of these oppositional forces, e.g.:

Today’s Nepal is in the quagmire of extreme Leftist and Rightist ideologies and, as such, (is) caught in the crossfire of violence and counter violence (of) these extremist ideologies. (Ibid , p.iii)

And again:

The “People’s War” launched by the CPN(Maoists), the Communist faction heavily marred with ultra Leftist thinking and terrorist activities, has been a serious concern of Nepali politics. The state is still under the control of reactionary and anti-worker forces. And the movement for the democratization of Nepali society still continues. (One Union, 2005, p.2)

The UML too thought that it could beat the Maoists electorally following the 2006 ceasefire and the subsequent April Andolan. In fact, it was humiliated and lost a third of its electoral support.

The UML has also promoted extreme military measures against the Maobaadi both before and after it became a member of Koirala’s NC government when it launched in the 1998 ‘Killer Sierra Two’ operation; a brutal army crackdown under the guidance of American and Israeli military advisers against the Maoists and their supporters over a more extended geographical area than Operation Romeo in 1996.

Throughout the period of the PW, it backed any repressive legislation against the Communist revolutionaries. Though still steeped in the idea of Communist opposition, the leadership was determined to play the role of a respectable parliamentary opposition, and the glaring contradiction gave it problems with its rank and file. It maintained this posture despite a drain of cadre who take their Leninism seriously which continues to this day. It has also led to a fierce debate withing the leadership.

The leadership’s re-branding has been described as an attempt to become a Eurocommunist style party and to move away from Leninist insurrectionist vanguardism. Gramsci, a great original Marxist thinker, became widely read among leading cadre. I was asked to send an English edition of Prison Notebooks to a Central Committee member, as it was difficult to obtain anywhere on the subcontinent. I was only too pleased to do so, and it made me realise how much we in the West take easy access to such theoretical works for granted.

The UML was attempting to give intellectual ballast within a Marxist spectrum as a means of justifying its embrace of reactionary politics. As was noted earlier, unequal development between the urban centers, particularly the Kathmandu Valley, and the countryside, particularly in the West where the Maoists flourished, was pronounced.

It meant that a strong civil society existed in the former, and therefore using a Gramscian conceptual framework was no mere fanciful affectation but could be accurately used as a tool of descriptive critical analysis.

The Maoists implicitly recognised how developed this urban civil society was. It was one of the reasons they modified Mao’s original PPW strategy in the context of Chinese conditions of “letting the countryside encircle the city,” realizing that any attempt to take urban areas by force would lead to a Pyrrhic victory at best and therefore a political defeat. The UML’s problem was the political line that was grafted onto this matrix that left it open to a charge of opportunism.

Whatever the new strategy, it steadily lost electoral support from the highpoint of 1994 when it emerged as the largest party with 3

The most crucial problem the UML faces is not its participation in parliamentary politics but its attempt to find a middle ground between two irreconcilable forces. In the developing world, the contradiction exists in its most antagonist form as the privileges of the Western World depend upon the increasing deprivation of the populations of the former.

War, famine, hunger, dispossession and superexploitation is the lot of the majority of the peoples in this Third World. The stark choice facing the twenty-first century is, to paraphrase Luxembourg, “Socialism or capitalist barbarism,” or as Arundhati Roy, the writer and activist, put it in relation to India, “either justice or civil war.”

There is no halfway house, and attempting to inhabit one will not only fail but implicitly gives support to a reactionary status quo.

It has also led increasingly to the UML, like the CPI(M), giving explicit support to, if not actually initiating, retrograde policies and stratagems. The Maoists have gone as far as claiming that the UML is in thrall to US and Indian interests, and that is borne out with its participation in the coup that provoked the resignation of Prachanda and the withdrawal of the then CPN(M) from government. It openly backed the CoS, Katawal, with one of its rewards being the installing of UML leader as Prime Minister.

What is also illustrative of the UML’s subservience to Indian interests is the failure to ever criticize the policies of successive Delhi governments. I have previously detailed, for example, how Indian administrations have used their economic and geographic dominance to force a series of unequal treaties on Nepal, following the example of their previous British masters. The Maoists have consistently called for their repeal, and this is a popular Nepalese demand.

Yet the UML is silent on the issue for the most part. In one instance referred to earlier, they were actually the government that facilitated and signed the 1996 Mahakali River Treaty (Mahakali River Integrated Development Treaty). This marked a new low, even by the standards of previous treaties, in giving India full control of the river in return for next to nothing. When it was ratified by the Parliament, it outraged many Nepalese who concluded all the parliamentary parties involved were Indian stooges, and rumors even circulated that the UML lead negotiators had taken money under the table.

Another measure which brought UML further opprobrium, especially from the Janjatis, was the decision to broadcast news in Sanskrit, which is spoken by no one in Nepal. This further fueled the resentment among those tribal groups already aggravated by the imposition of Nepali as the national language and the introduction of compulsory Sanskrit in schools which were controversial features of the 1990 Constitution.

Nepali, like Hindi, is a member of the Indo-Aryan group of languages which have their roots in Sanskrit (similar to the role that Latin played in Europe in relation to the evolution of the romance languages). Nepal is a multiethnic, multilingual society with over sixty ethnic groups, each with its own language, customs and religions.

For over two hundred years, these groups were excluded from political and economic power by dominant Brahmin castes who established Hindu dominance and sought to impose cultural and linguistic homogeneity upon all the peoples of Nepal.

In the Panchaayat era of Mahendra and Birendra, the slogan “One people – one language – one religion,” only intensified the resentment of the Janjatis against the phenomenon of Hindu domination. Unlike their Indian counterparts, the Adivasis, they form a sizable part of the population, and they supported the first Andolan by way of challenging Hindu hegemonic chauvinism. They felt betrayed however by the policies of the new democratic parliament which actually took steps to consolidate Hindu power.

This was especially true of the first NC government who dominated the shape of the new constitution and was controlled by the upper Hindu castes. What was surprising was the notionally progressive UML continued and even intensified the entrenchment of Hindu cultural and political control when they took over the reins of government from NC in 1994. The issue of the Sanskrit radio news emphasized this reactionary policy.

Consequently, many Janjatis flocked to the Maoist banner after the PW was launched in 1996 as the Maoists offered to reverse the domination of the minority Hindus in favour not only of the tribals but of the Dalits and the Terai Madeshi. The campaign against Sanskritism and the demand for cultural, political and economic freedom was an important part of the CPN(M) program.

It served to underline the fact that the UML, despite its residual Leftist rhetoric, was firmly set on a path of reaction first trodden by the CPI(M). How far this has taken the latter is shown by the recent events in West Bengal where a ‘Left Front’ government has been in power for over thirty years and now openly represents monopoly capitalist interests. It has gone, in the words of one local critic, “from Marxism to marketeering.”

This has been dramatically shown by its attempts to ethnically cleanse Adivasis from a 40 km square area around Nandigram, designated by the government as a Special Development Zone (SEZ), so that Salim, an Indonesian based multinational, can establish a huge chemical complex there.

Local resistance has been so fierce that the government dispatched 4,000 armed police, cadre and goondas to crush it. The violence and terror of this campaign led, in one notorious instance, to a massacre of 14 unarmed demonstrators. Consequently, leading CPI(M) cadre have been targeted and assassinated by Maoist guerrillas, acting as the armed wing of the CPI(Maoist).

It was mentioned earlier that this is prompted by the central government as part of the accommodation to a neoliberal strategy and is replicated in the individual states selected by whatever party is in power. The Left Front regime’s ruthless behaviour is in this sense no different from that of the BJP in Chhattisgarh, even to the extent of sending in CPI(M) cadre leading gangs of armed goondas against the Adivasi resisters.

That the UML is capable of such reactionary extremities is not in doubt; in its brief period of government, it proved that, far from establishing a progressive hiatus, it was indistinguishable from its NC predecessor, not only continuing its reactionary policies but formulating new ones of its own.

CONCLUSION

Like the NC, the UML has become a creature of Indian interests, and while each has developed by a different political route, they have arrived at the same destination. As they each largely draw support and membership from the Hindu segment of the population, they are culturally and linguistically homogeneous to India. Consequently they each find no great difficulty in pragmatically deferring to India’s economic and strategic power.

Like the Maoists, they recognize that, for example, Nepal is not self sufficient and is dependent on Indian imports to feed its population. Unlike the Maoists, however, this serves to bolster their pragmatism in the face of that power. Generally, again unlike the Maoists, they have no fear of Indian expansionism and would not even recognize the term. They rather see the growth of India’s influence as a natural reflection of its overall dominance in all the important spheres alluded to above, including its geographical position in relation to landlocked Nepal.

They are each willing agents, even if unconsciously, of the ‘Sikkimisation’ of Nepal. Sikkim voted in 1948 to stay out of India but gradually succumbed to Indian influence, a process stimulated by failure to produce an efficient government under its monarchy and which culminated in the 1975 occupation by the Indian Army and the subsequent referendum which a majority of the Sikkimese voted to ditch their King and become the 22nd state of the Indian republic.

They are each what could be termed ‘Indo-pendent’ parties, and thus, along with the reactionary pro-Indian officer class of the Nepalese Army, they found no difficulty in collaborating and scheming with primarily the Indian government but also with those of the US and UK in a campaign of sabotage against the Prachanda-led administration which culminated in the military coup recounted at the beginning of this article.

The weight of India’s actual and potential leverage on Nepal has also been implicitly recognised by the UCPN(M) and is one of the principal reasons behind its decision to move from the strategy of protracted People’s War and to the arena of multiparty democracy. It is, like freedom, a recognition of necessity; the realization that India could strangle any Nepalese revolutionary government at best or crush it by military intervention at worst.

It the understanding that there is no Socialist Bloc that can aid and support it, as was evident in the case of the Chinese Revolution, which could rely on the solidarity of the USSR to pursue its People’s War against a comprador Bonapartist Kuomintang clique and which led to victory in 1949.

Prachanda, in a recent meeting in London, said, in this respect:

The UCPN(M) cannot copy either the Bolshevik insurrectionist 1917 seizure of power in Russia or that of the CPC’s victory in China in 1949 but has to ‘develop’ its own strategy based on a concrete analysis of existing Nepalese conditions.

The looming and threatening power of Indian reaction is one of those conditions. The UCPN(M) has upset dogmatic Western Maoists by this adaptation to the existing reality and has developed a strategy to recognize the particularity of Nepal in the 21st century.

The acceptance of multi-party democracy by the UCPN(M) is such a ‘development’ and is not an opportunist stratagem to achieve power but is a long-standing principled policy to establish a ‘new democratic state’ in place of the present bureaucratic/comprador structure. It does not contemplate, therefore, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat following a Protracted People’s War, Prachanda in a speech in 2002 articulated this position:

…we want to clarify once again we are committed to guarantee party freedom in the new state power to be constructed after the destruction of feudal autocracy. The state envisaged by us will not be a one-party dictatorship. The freedom to operate political parties according to one’s ideological convictions and contest elections will be guaranteed.

There only the activities of such elements upholding feudalism and inviting foreign domination will be curbed. We are committed to establish and develop a people’s democratic system of the twenty-first century. Such a democratic system won’t be a mechanical imitation of the traditional kind but will be guided by the people’s needs of the twenty-first century.

In this light the commitment to draw the previously oppressed and excluded classes and castes within Nepalese into this process is a part of extending and deepening this ‘new democracy.’

It also accepted that this stage of political transition will be dominated, in the words of Bhatterai in a 2008 interview, by a “capitalist revolution”who further gave the assurance that, “We will not nationalize large scale industry and we will respect free enterprise.” That this is not in contradiction with orthodox Marxist-Leninism, as he further said:

Marx, Engels and Lenin have already addressed this question. Between feudalism and socialism there is capitalism. But we have not yet had a capitalist stage in Nepal. It is therefore necessary to develop one.

The desire of the UCPN(M) was:

To go beyond Mao. We need to elaborate our own model. Marxism is not a religion, it is a science. We want to develop Marxism. (Le Monde, 11/04/2008, Author’s translation)

This capitalism will not be a comprador but a national one. It is a distinction that Mao himself made:

In the period of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the people’s republic will not expropriate private property other than imperialist and feudal private property, and so far from confiscating the national bourgeoisie’s industrial and commercial enterprises, it will encourage their development. We shall protect every national capitalist who does not support the imperialists or the Chinese traitors. In the stage of democratic revolution there are limits to the struggle between labour and capital.

The labour laws of the people’s republic will protect the interests of the workers but will not prevent the national bourgeoisie from making profits or developing their industrial and commercial enterprises, because such development is bad for imperialism and good for the Chinese people. (On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism , Mao Tse-Tung, 1935, pp. 168/9 Selected Works, Vol.1)

Following a recent Central Committee meeting which produced unity after a party sanctioned ‘two line struggle’ regarding this position, a member of the UCPN(M) politburo wrote:

And those who were in favour of restructuring the state explained that they too were engaged in a struggle, but it was a different type of struggle which may look Rightist and reformist in form but that in essence it was neither Rightist or reformist. This is because all these steps are being taken not to consolidate the old feudal and comprador/bureaucratic set-up but to achieve a new restructured state. (Thesis, Antithesis & Synthesis, Hsila Yami, Kantipur Times, August 2009)

This is a classic exposition of the “negation of the negation.” It demonstrates the subtlety and sophistication of the Nepalese party cleaving closely to Mao’s analytical methodology. It has been criticized by the Communist Party of India(Maoist) as Rightist deviation from the strategy of PPW which intends to culminate in the smashing of the existing state. They are rightly engaged in armed resistance the length and breadth of India against the forces of a social-fascist comprador state.

But they will find it even harder than in Nepal for the “countryside to encircle the city”, as civil society is even more entrenched in Indian urban centers than in Nepal.

It is certainly a qualitatively different application from the religio-dogmatic, karaoke forms that pass for Maoism among some Western anoraks.

Finally, there is no inevitability that the strategy of the UCPN(M) will be successful, any more than there is about the victory of the worldwide proletarian revolution, but it is certainly better equipped, intellectually and politically, to handle the twists and turns that are distinctly manifest and unique in Nepal as they are indeed in all revolutions.

*My grandfather,Gabriel Byrne, was typical in this respect; he was a volunteer with the 6th Battalion of the Irish Republican Army during the 1918-21 War of Independence. He took the Republican side in the civil war that followed and for a while was de Valera’s driver. He was interned for a time in the Curragh and remained a ‘Dev’ man until his death in 1969.

He came from the Dun Laoghaire working class and started life as a railwayman at the station there, from which many Volunteer operations were launched including a famous ambush on the Marine Parade, two hundred yards from Dun Laoghaire station, where several Black and Tans died in a bomb attack on their Crossley Tender. In peacetime, through hard work combined with a shrewd business sense he became a newsagent in Monkstown next door.

He never lost his republican radicalism or his antipathy to British imperialism. When I was twelve, he thrust E.M. Forster’s Passage to India into my hands and said: “If you want to know what the British were like in India – read this!”

**I was not surprised by the results, as during April 2006, I went on a solo trek around the villages off the Annapurna Trail, a region that was supposed to be one of the few rural areas left under the control of the God-King’s army. Equipped with some Nepalese language, I found ubiquitous evidence of Maoist activity and propaganda and that they had almost total support from the people thereabouts.

One of the few exceptions was an ex-Ghurka shopkeeper who by coincidence had been quartered at barracks in Aldershot where I had worked as a carpenter during the late sixties. The CPN(M) opposes the recruitment of Ghurka mercenaries into either the British or Indian armies.

If I gave the Maoist greeting, Lal Salam (Red Salute), to peoples in fields or villages, it was readily returned, and I made many friends. The commitment was genuine and heartfelt and shaped by years of oppression from a state which was only visible in a repressive military form. The PLA was stood down in that area as part of the CPA.

If you Google: “Peter Tobin – Bishnu Rimal,” you will find an interview I conducted with the latter (a UML Central Committee member) a few days after the victory of the Andolan which will confirm that I guessed right on the depth of Maoist support.

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bhattarai, B. Monarchy versus Democracy.

Chauduri, N.C. The Continent of Circe.

Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of History.

Karki, A & Seddon, D. The People’s War in Nepal – Left Perspectives.

Mao Tse Tung. On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism, Selected Works, Vol. 1.

Marx, K. The Future Results of British Rule in India, Selected Works, Vol.1.

Maxwell, N. India’s China War.

Misra, A. War of Civilizations – The Long Revolution (India AD 1857).

Muni, S.D. Maoist Insurgency in Nepal.

Rimal, B. Challenging Globalization.

Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National Question.

Thapa, D. A Kingdom Under Siege.

Yami, H. Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis.

PERIODICALS & JOURNALS

Himal – Southasian

Kantipur Times

Le Monde

Nepal Telegraph

Nepali Times

The Worker, Journal of the UCPN(M)

UML/GEFONT PUBLICATIONS

One Union

Study & Research

Trade Union Rights

World of Work

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Kumar Sarkhar for his explanation of the term Bhadralok, and also for drawing my attention that any description of Indian civil society that does not represent its multiethnic, multilingual and multifaceted political culture and therefore exaggerates Hindu hegemony will be unbalanced. While I do not therefore resign myself from the ‘Two Nations’ theory in respect of Ireland, I do need to study the Indian experience further – after all comparisons might be odious.

He has also provided me with details of the position of the CPI(M) with regard to partition and their discussions with Stalin and Zhdanov representing the CPSU. This has pointed to a gap in the article relating to early history and development of the Indian CP.

I would like to thank Tongogara Tewodros for drawing my attention to Hegel’s views on slavery.

I would also like to thank Sudeshna Sarkar for correcting a Tourette’s grammatical tic I had developed by correcting my spelling of Hindu names, and by pointing out that KP Bhatterai was the first PM following the 1990 Andolan, and not GP Koirala. Her article on a sacred Hindu relic was helpful because it detailed the section of the Mahabharata where the Pandavas brothers flee to the Himalayas racked with guilt at the enormity of their victory over the Kuaravas brothers following the mythic battle of Kurukshetra.

This episode both bears out and challenges the notion of a historical martial Hindu spirit (which is proposed by Chauduri and which this article tries to confirm with the history since Independence); it confirms it in the battle, which although one among many, is pivotal, it modifies it with the anguished withdrawal of the victors. This rejection of the world finds its echoes throughout Hindu literature and history where powerful figures step down, practice virtue and find spiritual solace.

It was not particularly confined to Hindu myth – we have the historical figure of Siddhartha Gautama who relinquished his princely status in order to ‘become one with himself and the universe’ and become Buddha in the process.

Finally, I would like to thank her generally for a vigorous exchange on issues raised in the article.

Peter Tobin September 2009

Portuguese Translation of Russian Neo Nazi Video Is Up

A Portuguese translation of the Russian Neo Nazi Video post is now up at the Blogger site. It’s titled Vídeo Decapitação Neo Nazi Ruso .

Peter Tobin, “India and Nepal – Big Brother Little Brother Part 1″

This is an excellent document that reviews the relationship between India and Nepal from a Marxist perspective. There are commenters on this blog who say that the market has proven superior to socialist economies. This was true in Europe, when one compared socialist economies in Eastern Europe with the social democracies (really another form of socialism) in Western Europe. The social democracies definitely achieved better sustained economic growth, though I understand that socialism worked pretty well in Tito’s Yugoslavia. At the moment, all of Europe is pretty well developed, so I don’t see how Europe benefits from state socialism. In the rest of the world, it’s another matter altogether. One can make a serious case that capitalism is failing in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Philippines and Indonesia. Furthermore, it seems to be failing badly in Latin America. When you look at the horrible slums in this part of the world, when you count up all of those killed by hunger and disease every year, when you note all of those that lack even the most basic amenities of life, capitalism has disastrously failed in many places. At least socialism can build up an economy, get rid of slums, pave the roads, give everyone electricity, plumbing, clean water, schooling, health care, access to work, culture and transportation. I look at the slums of Rio, Lima, Manila or Delhi and say the Hell with it. Are you kidding? This is the best we can do? Capitalist apologists look at that mess and say, “We are working on it.” They’ve been “working on it” forever. When are the heartbreaking shantytowns ever going to go away? Probably never in my lifetime. Get rid of this system. At the least, socialism (or nowadays, some market socialism hybrid) can develop the country and meet people’s basic needs. At some point in the future, maybe it could morph into a Chinese-style system. This piece is excellent on so many levels I can’t even begin to write about it. I will just leave it to the commenters to take it apart. It takes a while to read it, so just print it out and read it at your leisure. Peter Tobin is a fine writer and thinker. He’s an Irishman and a lot of his thinking is watered with his Irish experience. Curiously, he’s opposed to the IRA and supports self-determination for the Six Counties.

INDIA & NEPAL – BIG BROTHER – LITTLE BROTHER

A CASE STUDY IN NEOCOLONIALISM

A MARXIST PERSPECTIVE

PETER TOBIN

When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production and subject to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain. (The Future Results of British Rule in India, 1853, Marx Engels, Sel.Wks. Volume 1, p.499)

INTRODUCTION

The alliance of the three principal parties, Nepali Congress, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) and the now renamed Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) that together overthrew the world’s last Hindu monarchy and established a secular republic following the Jana Andolan (People’s Uprising) in 2006 has finally ended. In this article I want to examine the reasons for this turn of events and the role that India, in particular, the US and the UK have played in undermining the coalition government led by the UCPN(M) leader, Prachandra, which provoked his resignation and his party’s withdrawal from that government. The coup was organised by RAW (Research Analysis Wing) an arm of Indian intelligence in conjunction with the CIA and after four April days in Katmandu meeting NC leaders, with Yadev, the Nepalese president playing a Quisling role. In relation to the first I will set out the policies of successive Indian administrations towards Nepal and see how it reflects their long-standing assertion of hegemony over the entire sub-continent. To provide a comprehensive analysis I will analyze India’s history since independence in order to show that its approach is consistent with this narrative and the world view that emerged from it. In relation to Nepal I will detail the record of NC and demonstrate its subordination to the authority of Delhi. Also the part played by the CPN(UML) will be investigated to how it mirrors the politics and practices of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). In passing I will touch upon the limitations of bourgeois nationalist struggles against imperialism which become exposed after they have successfully challenged and ejected their colonial masters and argue that they view the completion of that stage as an end in itself, precluding only residual territorial claims. While they have developed a national antithesis to the colonial thesis they have stopped short of delivering a real autonomous synthesis. In contrast I will advance the contention of revolutionary communists that they have only taken the first step on the road to genuine national liberation. Here I will cite the Indian and Irish experiences and contrast them with the Soviet and Chinese approach. That the latter followed a socialist direction which was ultimately more fruitful will be argued . In relation specifically to China that it was this socialist path that was the foundation of that country’s present economic ascendancy, albeit following the state capitalist course initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s. I will also account for the use of the term social fascist by the Indian and Nepalese Maoists to describe the polity of the reactionary forces against the peoples of those countries. I will contend that it is manifestly not polemical abuse serving an emotive political function but an objective assessment which has arisen from historical experience in definite situations which in their contemporary recurrence support its continued applicability. In order to fully understand how a formal bourgeois democracy, which has an imperialist or neocolonialist presence away from its metropolitan centre, can be classified as being social fascist, I will outline its historical provenance and the principal elements that constitute the ideology and practices of fascism. To that end I will compare and contrast the explicit form exhibited by German national socialism, from 1918 to 1945 with that of the evolved and extant forms exhibited by the established European and American empires. In this respect I will detail the uniqueness of Germany’s historical development from its comparatively late appearance as a unified state in 1871 and why its subsequent history led to the national socialist Third Reich. I will maintain that, in practice, there is no essential difference between the former and the latter; whether you apply the criteria of racist ideology, exploitation or wars of aggression and conquest, the distinctions are purely quantitative, or indeed, as in the case of Nazi genocide, purely a matter of geographical location. In short; fascism arises from imperialism, albeit in a compressed historical form and that contemporary imperialism is leading increasingly to a fascist polity. That this theoretical understanding is already equipping the progressive forces engaged in anti-imperialist struggles to apply the correct political taxonomy, the better to identify the enemy accurately is a task that the Indian and Nepalese Maoists have addressed and answered. Finally I will conclude that the Nepalese Maoists are correct in affirming that the present task is to complete the bourgeois democratic revolution and dismantle the bureaucratic, feudal, comprador state. Only then can a socialist stage be realised. But that in all events Nepali progressives room for maneuver will be circumscribed until the victory of communist revolution in India. For the present the Indian ruling class, riding on it’s economic, military and geographical dominance in alliance with American expansionists, will ensure that an independent state, whether bourgeois or socialist, in Nepal will be either crippled or crushed.

GENESIS OF THE PRESENT CRISIS IN NEPAL

The forces of reaction in Nepal, among whom we must regrettably count the UML (especially the leadership faction around K.P. Oli) have consistently refused to accept the result of the 2008 election which saw the UCPN(M) emerge as the largest party with a 4 The maneuvering of, principally, the last two who since then have attempted to undermine the Prachanda led coalition government as it has sought to address the major problems in Nepali society. Since its budget of late 2008 this administration promoted the need for greater female emancipation, land distribution to the peasantry away from the residual feudal classes, for necessary infrastructural development, a minimum wage to reduce poverty in one of the world’s poorest countries, disputing the historical Hindu oppression of the Janjatis (ethnic peoples) by the Babus Malikharu (Gentlemen Masters), the Dalits (untouchables, oppressed, similarly known as Shudras) and the Terai Madeshi (the peoples of the southern plain bordering India). A key provision of the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement was the integration of the People’ Liberation Army into the Nepalese Army (formerly the Royal Nepalese Army) advanced by the UCPN(M) in order to professionalize the PLA and democratize the NA. It was an important part of the CPA between the Seven Parliamentary Parties and the UCPN(M) which ended its ten year Jana Yuddha Lambyaunu (Protracted People’s War) by agreeing to declare a ceasefire and enter the arena of multi-party democracy. Immediately following the Andolan the then NA Chief of Staff, Thapa, indicated that he was ‘comfortable’ with the proposed merger. Since then the NA officer caste guided by their new CoS, Katawal, have become increasingly reluctant to amalgamate the two forces fearing that the Maobaadi (Maoists) would spread the contagion of red revolution through the ranks of the NA. Katawal’s foot-dragging led to Prachanda, as the elective authority, giving a direct order to Katawal to initiate the process and to cease fresh recruitment to the NA, which was again contrary to the 2006 agreement. His refusal to carry out a lawful order was the occasion for the present crisis. It was significant that this mutinous behaviour was backed by President Yadav, an NC appointment, reflecting that party’s class interests and foreign influences. This cabal was joined by the UML. When they resigned from the coalition government Prachanda was left with no option but resignation. Delhi was quick to rubber stamp this coup and sent its minister of defence, Bandari, scuttling to Kathmandu to tell the new coalition government, now excluding the Maoists, and whose Prime Minister was the UML General Secretary, M. K. Nepal, two things: firstly: that Katawal’s tenure as CoS should be extended “under any circumstances” (Nepal Telegraph, 22/07/2009), and to cancel his scheduled retirement. Secondly: that India would resume arms shipment to the NA which had been suspended when Gyanendra prorogued the Parliament in 2002 and seized absolute power. This was the ostensible reason but it was influenced by Gyanendra’s post 9/11 success in courting the American government and getting it to put the Maoists on their list of ‘terrorists’ to be included in the ‘War On Terror’. Gyanendra gave the US a foothold in Nepal and so threatened Delhi’s previous sole hegemony over that country. Conversely the Indian government supported the corresponding invasion of Afghanistan because they were amenable to the anti-Muslim strategy behind the WOT; particularly as it promised to destabilize the old enemy, Pakistan. By prompting and backing the undemocratic tactics behind this plot India asserted it’s neo-colonial authority over Nepal. Many Nepalese recognize this but the UCPN(M) is the only major political party that is committed to resisting and overcoming Delhi’s malign influence. It correctly reasons that the Nepalese should be masters of their own destiny. The latest events have only served to confirm it’s analysis and strengthen its resolve. The immediate challenge brought about by the combination of external and external reaction has generated in party ranks a sanctioned ‘two line struggle’ (this is unique in the history of Communist parties who have often handled internal arguments with extreme antagonism). The difference is whether to continue the ‘Prachanda Path’ of continuing the building of a new democracy and the restructuring of the state within the integument of a multi-party, parliamentary system or to go “back to the jungle”, (This term is common parlance in Nepal), and to resume the PPW? After a month long meeting of the Central Committee during this August they have hammered out a unified position which is to continue the ‘Prachanda Path’ in conjunction with an increased campaign of popular agitation through demonstrations, Bandhs (strikes, shut-downs), the Gherao (sit-ins, occupations) and continuing land seizures from feudal control. The declared aim was stated by Prachanda as “the capture of state power” and the drafting of new constitution. It is no surprise that NC organised and supported Katawal’s putsch, despite the fact that it has trade union roots and maintains residual links with the Nepalese labour movement and was launched on a explicitly socialist programme. It is now, however, the party of primarily the Hindu, comprador bhadralok* class. It was further swollen after the 1990 Andolan with an influx of former Panchayaat activists, (a feudal talking shop introduced by King Mahendra in 1960 following his dissolution of parliament) who were seeking a new political home after the apparent collapse of the absolutist monarchy. Nepal is at the crossroads and critical months, if not years, lie ahead. *The classification Bhadralok is a Bengali word and originally referred to the feudal strata prior to the rise of a bourgeois class. Now it is used pejoratively by class-conscious Nepalese to include both. I heard it often during the 2006 Andolan coupled with the epithet corharu (thieves).

FASCISM & SOCIAL FASCISM – TWO FORMS OF BOURGEOIS POLITY

Fascism in not a form of state power “standing above the masses – the proletariat and the bourgeoisie,” as Otto Bauer, for instance has asserted. It is not “the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state,” as the British socialist Brailsford declares. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpenproletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organisation of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations. (See The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism, Georgi Dimitrov, Main Report to the 7th World Congress of the Comintern, 02/08/1935). The phenomenon of social fascism arises wherever bourgeois order is threatened or it’s extension resisted. It originated in the Comintern’s ‘Third Period’ as a method of describing the attempts of succession of social democratic regimes to shore up the capitalist order initiated by Germany’s first socialist regime, under Ebert, which took power in the dying days of World War One when the country was in extremis; threatened by naval and army mutinies and the specter of red revolution driven by the Spartacists and led by Luxemburg and Liebknecht. The left’s attempt to seize power and install a soviet system, inspired by the success of the Russian Bolsheviks in October 1917, was defeated by Ebert and his Minister of Defense, Noske (“The bloodhound of the revolution”), who in collaboration with the German General Staff created the Freikorps as an armed counter-revolutionary riposte to the embryonic communists. Like the Black and Tans in Ireland, these right wing thugs were recruited from demobbed soldiers to initiate a reign of terror, torture and murder. They became the backbone of the fascist movement which finally took shape as the NSDAP (National Socialist German Worker’s Party), the Nazi Party. It was the Scheidemann government in 1919 that resisted the demand of substantial sections of the labour movement to nationalize key industries and, contrarily, responded by dismantling the dirigistic, wartime planning mechanisms and state controls that did exist and returning the economic sector back to the free market. The subsequent governments of the Weimar period built upon these counterrevolutionary foundations and so prepared the way for Hitler’s accession as Reichkanzler in 1933. The application of the term of social fascist to their political practice was the Comintern’s reaction to these circumstances. The line changed when the Nazi regime proved itself to be a more corrupt and virulent form of bourgeois power. The strategy of the ‘Popular Front,’ developed and advocated by Dimitrov, through the Comintern argued for the unity of all classes and social forces from the proletarian to the bourgeois in the face of this unique threat. The characterisation of the German bourgeois state during Weimar as social fascist was no longer applicable. The principal contradiction had changed in the new historical conjuncture. In this new situation the objective necessity was “To unite the many to defeat the few,” and this replaced the ‘class against class’ line. It is currently relevant because it explains and defines the political activities of contemporary imperialism. In reality there is no qualitative difference between what the Anglo-Saxon imperialists are doing to the Iraqis and the Afghans and what the German Nazis did to the Jews and the Slavs. The only distinction is formal as the bourgeois democracies retain the rhetoric of social democracy and the procedures of, what Lenin termed “parliamentary cretinism.” When he further advised against “making a fetish of democracy,” his object of derision was this bourgeois construct and its pretensions to egalitarianism and freedom. Contemporaneously it is used by the Indian Maoists to account for the genocidal attacks on the Adivasis (India’s Janjatis) and describe the policies of all the major parties exercising state and central power in India. These are aimed at clearing the land of the aboriginal tribal peoples to facilitate the extraction of natural resources by Indian and foreign multinationals. Hitlerite fascism was a distinct construct from the forms of bourgeois power that evolved in the democracies of Europe and the United States. It came out of the hothouse conditions of modern German history and it’s comparatively late unification occurred under the aegis of Prussian monarchical militarism which followed victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The Kaiserstaat came into being into being in January 1871 following the military defeat of France. The impact of the shattering defeat in World War One, which arose from the antagonism of the other European powers against the brash expansionism of the new German Empire, was the event that added specificity to the extreme right wing configuration of German nationalism which took final shape in the Gothic and virulent form of Nazism. Marx was particularly acute at recognizing the nascent elements of fascism in their individuation nearly a hundred years before the merged in the totality of Hitlerism:

These highfalutin’ and haughty hucksters of ideas (German post- Hegelian philosophers – PT.) who imagine themselves infinitely exalted above all national prejudices are thus in practice far more national than the beer-quaffing philistines who dream of a united Germany. (The German Ideology, Marx-Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1, p. 45)

The Third Reich was both a product and a catalyst of these particular elements in Germany’s cultural and political evolution. Marx is further prescient in identifying the incipient expansionism that lurked in the thinking of these new ideologues and their desire to impose Germanism on other peoples. For them it was a given that German kultur was the ultimate expression of Die Geistesgeschicte (Vide: The Philosophy of History, G.W.F. Hegel, 1805/6. The Spirit of History is the closest English translation of this term, in its German sense, however, Geist implies morale, motivation and intellect.) Hegel used the term to contrast it with the materialist concept of Naturgewissenschaft, (the natural sciences). It was his method of elucidating the intellectual and spiritual forces that defined the uniqueness of German culture. Hegel particularly identifies the Prussian State as the apotheosis of what he termed Der Weltgeist (World Spirit) in transcendent form. It represented Die letzt etappe im geschicte (the last stage in history)**. Hitler’s promise of a ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ derives from, and vaingloriously articulates, this proposition.*** As with so much of Marx’s thinking he was, in this instant, scrupulous in classifying the ideological tap-roots of German chauvinism. We have become all too aware of its rightist manifestations but xenophobia also infected the evolving labour movement. Kautsky, for example, perfectly expressed this metaphysical belief in German cultural ascendancy when he asserted that the Czechs would finally succumb because:

the force of unfettered intercourse alone, the force of modern culture brought by the German’s alone would, without any forcible Germanization have transformed into Germans the backward petit-bourgeois, peasants and proletarians who could expect nothing from their shabby nationality. (Kautsky’s preface to: Revolution and Counterrevolution, Engels 1896)

Kautsky was an active member of Ebert’s government where he served in the Foreign Ministry. This, no doubt, allowed him to demonstrate his kulturell uberlegenheit uber der menschlich auslander . ** Brecht has one of his characters say of Hegel:

…he had the stuff to be one of the greatest humorists among philosophers, like Socrates, who had a similar method. But he had the bad luck it seems to become a civil servant in Prussia and so he sold himself to the state. (Fluchtlingsgesprache, – Refugees Conversation, Brecht, 1961 p. 108)

***Significantly the latest of Hegel’s epigones have emerged among American neo-conservatives who flourished in the triumphalist years following the suicide of the Soviet Union in 1989. Fukuyama, it’s leading ideologue, gave them their Mein Kampf in The End of History, (a title appropriated from Hegel) published in 1992, asserting that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc signified the final victory of liberal capitalism and that no other progressive socioeconomic development was either possible or necessary. It was also a conscious riposte to Marx’s concept of “Das ende der prageschicte” (the end of prehistory, by which he means all history up to and including the capitalist epoch; prior to a proper civilized history which will begin with the establishment of socialism.) There is only a quantitative difference between German fascism and the empires of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland and America. The Nazis’ treatment of the Jews and the Slavs isn’t qualitatively dissimilar to what the latter did, and those who survive continue to do to countless other ‘inferior’ races away from their metropolitan centres. Genocide, dispossession, slavery, war and ruthless exploitation are routine to all empires, past and present, it is in their DNA. German Nazism was unique in that it committed its crimes in Europe and opposed to other empires who painted their criminal images from the palette of the world outside. Marx drew this conclusion:

The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from it’s home where it assumes respectable forms to the colonies where it goes naked. (The Future Results of British Rule in India, 1853, Marx-Engels Selected Works, Vol.1 p,498)

This was written four years before the 1857 Indian war of independence and it’s brutal, genocidal aftermath which recent Indian historians have estimated saw the physical annihilation of nearly ten million Indians, Dickens, the great avuncular, sentimental icon of British liberal culture somewhat blemished this persona by calling for the entire Indian race to be exterminated as punishment for rebellion and in expiation for their crimes. That his demented counsel was not followed was not from the want of trying. The Nazis avoided ‘profound hypocrisy’ and explicitly reveled in racist barbarism. German fascism was a specific form of imperialism whose development was accelerated and accentuated by frustrated national ambition. The current crimes of imperialism are dressed now in the garb of ‘liberal interventionism’ which posits defending and extending ‘human rights’ and the ‘gift’ of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ to those Kipling referred to as ‘lesser breeds without the law’. These are modish affectations which attempt to rationalize hegemonic oppression with the glib use of contemporary mores. ****Brecht in Die Dreigroschenoper, (The Threepenny Opera) accurately captures the casual racism and gratuitous butchery of colonial armies in Kanonensong (Canon Song) in duet sung by Macheath, the gangster, and Tiger Brown, the police chief as they fondly recall the good times when they served abroad together in the British Army.

Soldaten wohnen              Soldiers live
Auf den Kanonensong          Upon their canons
Vom Cap bis Cooch Behar      From the Cape to Couch Behar
Wenn es mal regnete          When a rainy day would come
Und es begegnete             And they met
Ihnen 'ne neue Rasse         A new race
'ne braune oder blasse       A brown one or a white one
Dann machen sie vielleicht   They'd probably make
daraus ihr Beefsteak Tartar. Raw mincemeat out of 'em.

They are a reconceptualization of what Kipling again referred to as: “The White Man’s Burden.”***** The conception of liberal imperialism has its roots in the ‘profound hypocrisy’ of the Georgian era when British authorities launched a campaign against the Hindu practice of widow burning (Sati, rendered by English 18th century phonetics as Suttee) was advanced as proof of Britain’s civilizing mission in India. This order of rationalization reached exalted heights during the Victorian period with the foreign policy of the sanctimonious Gladstone. The anti-Sati contingency initiated by the East Indian Company finds it’s echo in that one of the principal justifications for the invasion and continued occupation of Afghanistan is to emancipate females from a medievalist Taliban. But this a post hoc rationale designed to divert a credulous home front and mask the fundamental geopolitical aims of American imperialism. It has led to a drive to extend women’s rights and involves specially trained teams (no doubt recruited through the Guardian job vacancies column) visiting Pashtun villages to raise ‘gender awareness’. As part of the ‘profound hypocrisy’ represented by these torch-bearers for Western civilization it goes hand in hand with barely discriminate bomb and missile attacks on these same villages from Predator and Reaper unmanned aircraft guided by CIA operatives working out of Langley, stateside. The claim is that resistance fighters are the principal targets but the ‘collateral damage’ estimate is that forty villagers are killed for every one militant. As with the Israeli Zionists, who pioneered this tactic against the Palestinians and who along with CIA advisers guided the RNA’s application against the Maoists it lays bare the racist tenet that the lives of those, other than white, are of little consequence. It demonstrates that the tactic of imposing a Western feminist ideology on Afghanistan is contingent to the pursuit of global ‘Ameranglian’ interests. Consequently there is no pressure applied to the equally medieval Saudi regime on the same principle that Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State observed of Batista the Cuban dictator before the 1959 revolution:

He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.

*****Kipling, the high priest of imperial doggerel, wrote this poem to celebrate the emergent American Empire’s successful invasion of the Philippines in 1899. This was its first major foray over the ‘blue water’ and was also the occasion of their first substantial genocide away from the Americas, resulting in the systematic extermination of over half a million Filipinos during a protracted ‘pacification’ campaign. President McKinley saw it as a civilizing mission to help:

our little brown brothers” and claimed that the Philippines were, “a gift from the gods..there was nothing left for us to do but take them all and to educate the Filipinos…and by God’s grace do the best we could for them.

In truth it was a practical example of the newly minted Yankee credo of ‘Manifest Destiny.’ The current version is the neoconservative euphemism for global hegemony – ‘Full Spectrum Dominance.’ Therefore the racism, of the Nazi Reich, founded on the belief of the innate superiority of Anglo-Saxons uber alles, was not sui generis but reflected the ideology of those European powers who had begun serious colonial exploitation in the 16th. Century. The slave trade is the exemplar of this divinely ordered superiority but it was also accompanied by acts of genocide, subjugation, dispossession and exploitation against countless other native peoples wherever the European, and later, American colonial powers encroached.****** The system continues and imperialism remains a malignant force; those it doesn’t kill or maim, it exploits,pollutes and corrupts, whether it is the Indian compradors reign of terror against the adivasis, or Garcia’s regime in Peru attempting to ethnically cleanse ‘backward’ tribals so that their lands can be plundered in the name of ‘progress’. It presently manifests itself in the activities of the IDF Einsatzgruppen in the killing fields of the Gaza Ghetto and the West Bank and in the war of aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan where indiscriminate terror and destruction are visited on their respective populations. The list is not exhaustive as the tentacles of imperialism have become more ubiquitous in a world shrunken by technology and the ever pervading global market, but what is constant are the racial assumptions that sustain the system. The notion that peoples can be deemed ‘uncivilized,’ ‘backward,’ ‘primitive,’ ‘barbarous’ & which excuses any treatment meted out to them is the functioning ideology and the beating heart of imperialism. Racism is axiomatic to imperialism; whatever the spin of its contemporary apologists. The eccentric British historian A.J.P. Taylor used to shock his peers who argued that Hitler’s ‘evil’ was historically unique and the the crimes of Nazi Germany were a singular irrational aberration which traduced the continuum of Western civilization, by claiming that Hitler was “just another German statesman,” and that he was only different, for example, from Bismarck in promoting a Grossdeutsch (Greater Germany) against the the Iron Chancellor’s desire for a Kleindeutsch (Smaller Germany). Their linking narrative was a belief in a strong, militarist, centralized state and carving out ‘a place in the sun’ in the wider world for a German empire. The imperialism of Das Dritte Reich, in the light of the above, was just another imperialism, with the proviso that its aggression and volatility for that particular historical period made it the principle imperialist enemy in a world where the basic contradiction was imperialism per se, and indeed remained so after its destruction. In that context the principle imperial enemy became the US which inherited the anti-communist crusade of the Nazis and even their anti-Semitism, although they more pragmatically shifted from hatred of the diaspora to the indigenous Semites who occupied a strategic area which was rich in oil. The irony is that they used the returning European Zionists as their proxy Sondarkommando operating out of their Fort Apache colony – the artificial state of Israel.

****** Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as this may be, their lot in their own land is even worse…for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man who has not attained a consciousness consequently sinks down to a mere Thing. An object of no value. Among the Negroes moral sentiments are quite weak, or more strictly speaking, non-existent. (Philosophy of History, G.W.F. Hegel, P. 96)

60th Anniversary of the Liberation of China

Very nice article sums up very well the great changes that occurred in China on October 1, 1949. The author finds that almost every Chinese woman he meets his joyous about the Chinese Revolution. Why? It was the greatest movement for he liberation of women that has ever occurred in the history of the world. On that day, for instance, Mao issued a decree forbidding forever the binding of feet, a practice that was rampant under Chiang’s Nationalist government. Arranged marriages were ended and women received 1/2 of their husband’s property. As Mao put it, “China stood up.” Indeed. Were the Revolution never to have taken place, surely Chinese women would still have bound feet, would get screwed (literally in marriage) and would suffer form arranged marriages. In the rural areas, education and health care would be rare to nonexistent, just as it is in India today. Mao also tried to stop wife-beating, an ancient tradition in China. His methods were ingenius. Mao ordered women all across China to order the men in the villages to stop beating women. If they did not stop, there would be consequences. Many men did not stop, so party cadres in the villages told Chinese women to gather up their farm implements and raid the houses of the beaters and beat them up with farm tools. So all across China, in 100’s of thousands of villages, women armed with hoes and shovels stormed into houses and beat up men who were beating their wives. Wife-beating quickly dropped to a low level, though unfortunately it still continues today. The Chinese government is said to be capitalist, but that is not really true. The latest government educational decree sent teachers to all villages with over 200 residents. In the 3rd World, capitalist countries don’t do things like that. The reigning neoliberal model says the less the state spends on education, the better, as it is regarded as a waste of society’s money that would be better spent by the public sector. Instead, private schools are encouraged. The US “liberal”mass media cheers the closing of schools in the Third World and government issuance of nonpayable school fees. When the Sandinistas were thrown out of office in 1990, the entire US media stood up and cheered. Nearly all legislators of both US parties (the “liberal” Democrats nearly more than the Republicans) roared their approval for the defeat of the Sandinistas. The ultra-reactionary Violeta Chamorro got down to business very quickly. One of the first things she did was to close health clinics all over Nicaragua. Next she issued a $30/year fee that parents had to pay for every student in the public schools. This was unpayable for huge numbers of parents, so swarms of students all over Nicaragua quickly dropped out of school. I assume that that’s still the case today. It is for such things that the entire US media cheers. Floods of students being thrown out of schools all over the land because they can’t pay the bills. Countless health clinics closing all over the land, leaving poor 3rd Worlders with no medical treatment. Both parties, “liberal” Democrats and Republicans, roar their approval of such atrocities. The World Bank and the IMF, both of which are controlled both by US imperialism and also by World Jewry, imposes similar conditions all through the 3rd World. In order to get a loan, government spending must be slashed to the bone, especially health and education spending. Subsidies to poor for anything, for food, transportation, utilities, anything, are ordered to be slashed or ended altogether. Prices for food, utilities, transportation, you name it, rocket upward and taxes are raised on the poorest of the poor. At the same time, taxes on business and the rich are gutted or eliminated and poor country must be opened up to economic colonization by corporations from the rich nations, often US corporations. Careful studies have shown that IMF/World Bank policies have resulted in declining education and health figures across the board. The best estimates show that these sanctions have killed millions over the past couple of decades, and possibly continue to kill millions every year. So US imperialism and World Jewry are probably deliberately killing millions every year in the 3rd World through structural adjustment alone. So any government that massively increases education to its people in these days must be a socialist nation, since capitalist countries by their nature do not do such things. In the US, on Wikipedia and among reactionaries everywhere, there’s a new line out: the Chinese Revolution failed. Next time someone tells you that, think again.

Statement on the Jews and Antisemitism

Repost from the old site. This site, of course, has been accused many times of anti-Semitism by the usual suspects for the usual reasons. Nevertheless, some of my friends have recently noted that “I’m going easy on the Jews,” or worse, I’ve become pro-Jewish. Others have noted that I don’t talk about the Palestinians much on here anymore. Truth is, I’m bored with the Palestinians, I’m bored with Israel, and I’m bored with the Middle East. Plus, every time I mention that stuff, it spurs the antisemites in the comments section (who are allowed to post here, by the way) to make a ton of antisemitic posts, and after a while it brings in all these weird, combative, Zionist Jews who accuse me of antisemitism and try to start fights. There is supposedly a type of antisemitism called Anti-Zionist antisemitism. I guess I will gladly plead guilty to that. Other than that, to be honest, the Jews bore me. I’ve been reading up on Jews and Judaism and Israel for years now, and I’m all Jewed out. They bore me to tears, and it seems I’ve learned all I ever wanted to learn about them. There was a while there when I was on an antisemitic kick, but I started getting a lot of flack for it, and then I pulled back and started to examine it, and there was not much there. Antisemitism is one of many simplistic theories that tries to explain all, most or many of the problems of the world by pointing a single actor, force or mechanism. As such, I feel it is foolish, since all such ideologies are foolish. Including die-hard Marxists who boil everything down to economics. There is no one answer. There is no one problem. If only life were that simple. Life is so much more complex, and problems are as difficult to pin down as solutions are to fashion, that it makes sense that people would take the intellectually lazy way out. In terms of “Left antisemitism,” antisemitism really is the socialism of fools! I used to hate it when Leftists said that, but now I’m convinced. Jewish capitalists are just capitalists, and if anything, they tend to be more progressive-minded than the ordinary type. Further, antisemitism seems to lead inexorably to conservatism, racism, White Supremacism, fascism, social Darwinism, capitalism – feudalism – royalism, the worst kinds of nationalism and traditionalism, anti-Communism, anti-liberalism, anti-feminism, anti-integration, and really, an opposition to the whole modernizing project of the Left. Antisemitism is really an assault on modernity itself, as Jews are seen by antisemites as the “virus” that carries modernity in all of its scary self. And it’s true – they do! Going forwards is scary, and a lot of cowards would rather go backwards. So they blame the Jews for helping to drive us forwards. I don’t want to be a part of any regressive project. Yes, there are rightwing Jews. There are rightwingers of every race and tribe. Next? The Jews are the most progressive group in America, and possibly in the world. We on the Left owe a tremendous debt to them as they helped to birth and foster our project.

The "New Antisemitism"

Repost from the old site. I’ll proudly don this label, though I admit that some (or many) practitioners of this new form of “the oldest hatred” (sic) are taking it way too far into what I call “vulgar anti-Semitism”. As a basic philosophical position, this blog will take the logical Left position of embracing a reasonable form of “new antisemitism” while in general taking a principled Left line (at the very least following Paul de Man’s wartime essays and Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of his writing)* in opposing vulgar anti-Semitism as an example of backwardness, stupidity, lazy thinking, racism and in general, just reactionary bullshit. Confused? Good. Deal with it, anti-Semites and Jewish nationalists. *The link is to some deconstructionist stuff starring Derrida, Paul De Man and some others, and the subject is as abstruse as most of that stuff is. For this who don’t feel like wading through the post-structuralist mud, I will try to sum it up: During WW2, in 1942, Paul De Man wrote some anti-Semitic articles for the Vichy Nazi press in France. De Man later went on to become one of the big deconstructionist guys. So it came out that he had written this Vichy Nazi stuff, and it was a big scandal. Derrida “deconstructed” his work and noted that in his work, De Man had argued against “vulgar anti-Semitism”, which is more of an “I know it when I see it” thing than something well-defined. Nevertheless, his article would still be seen as anti-Semitic by any reasonable reader. So Derrida, in deconstructing De Man, wrote that since all anti-Semitism was vulgar necessarily, De Man, in condemning vulgar anti-Semitism and not mentioning any other kind, was actually condemning all anti-Semitism. This set off a spate of articles back and forth in deconstructionist circles.

References

Goldberg, David Theo. 1993. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning, pp. 229-230. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers Inc. Patai, Daphne, Corral, Wilfrido Howard. 2005. Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. Spitzer, Alan B., Chapter 17, The Debate Over the Wartime Writings of Paul De Man. The Language of Setting the Record Straight. New York: Columbia University Press

Good Progressive Perspective on the Health Care Debate

Good piece from a site that I belong to, The Pen, which is basically the left wing of the Democratic Party. They are quite radical by US standards, and they are often extremely critical of both Congressional Dems and Obama. In general, I find their analyses to be right on. This critique of Obama’s health care plan is spot on. I don’t understand what they mean when they say that the public option won’t save us any money. You mean we have to buy it, and it will be as expensive as private insurance? What good is that? Anyway, even the public option is probably going to be killed off. The only decent plan really is Single Payer, but that was DOA before this debate even got started. I would support Single Payer, then all the morons who love their private insurance so much can go ahead and fork over half their salary or whatever it costs for that precious coverage. If it’s so great, everyone should bail on Single Payer and buy that wonderful private insurance. The reality is that Obama and the Congressional Dems are really just trying to preserve the profits of the insurance industry. They suck up 3 The Republicans, in contrast, are ideologically opposed. I really think that what they fear is the “threat of a good example.” They are terrified that public health insurance might actually work for a lot of Americans and solve a lot of their health care issues and worries. The last thing they want is a government that works. That will make people like government, and they want people to hate government. Of course, they are also in bed with the health insurance industry too, but they also have ideological stuff going on. I’ve heard that most every country on Earth has some kind of government health care, no matter how meager. I think the US is only one of maybe three countries on Earth who doesn’t have one. And that doesn’t include Medical or Medicare. The problem in most of the world of course is that public health care is so horrible that if you have any money at all, you avoid public hospitals. My friends in India tell me that if you send a very ill relative to a public hospital, they will probably just die. They are “death hospitals.” Also, all of the docs at the public hospitals are on the take, and they all want bribes. If you don’t bribe them, the patient gets little to no care and probably dies. If you do bribe them, at least they have some chance. That’s simply sickening, but it’s indicative of the total failure of Indian “socialism” and the reason why I support the armed Maoist revolution in India. Other countries have public health care, but you have to pay. In China, the public hospitals cost money, and a lot of people die because they are too poor to go. This is part of Deng’s wonderful capitalist “reforms” that the Western media has cheered on so much. Oh that evil Mao! He tried to save the lives of seriously ill Chinese! For that, he’s the greatest murderer of all time! The Chinese state now offers health insurance coverage that covers the costs of 8 Anyway, we don’t even have any of that. We don’t have any public system available to the average person that I’m aware of.

Obama’s New “Improved” Leech Therapy

The sheer sappiness, even from progressives, of most of the commentary we’ve heard in the aftermath of President Obama’s address to Congress this week on health care is truly breathtaking. Now we are going to tell you what really happened last Wednesday night. The first thing we need to understand is that Obama HAS NO PLAN, at least not one that he will publicly disclose, otherwise he would put forward a particular bill and say, “This is what I want Congress to pass.” Instead, what he did the other night was embrace a hodgepodge of half-baked congressional proposals, all of which have ONE purpose and singular directive…to NOT curtail in any way the usurious profit margins of the existing health care industry. Worse yet, he went out of his way to SMEAR the one proposal that would actually make a meaningful difference, to institute a single payer system, like any of the ones which have been so successful in every other major industrial country. Indeed, what was so incredibly conspicuous by its absence was the fact that, while he dedicated a large part of his speech to debunking the lies being told about health care reform, there was not a word about the heinous and slanderous lies being told about single payer, namely that it is not working in all these other countries or that people there are not happy with their single payer systems. Instead he stabbed single payer in the back by trying to characterize it as “radical change”. This is EXACTLY the same tactic that right wing propagandists have deployed against any proposal Obama himself might make that would be even slightly worthwhile. Remember last month when every right wing Republican magically had the same expression, “risky experiment”, coming out of their mouths all at the same moment. Same tactic from Obama, same dishonestly slanted demagoguery, and you’d have to be a serious hardcore Obama Moonie not to see it. Obama literally played single payer advocates in the Congressional audience for suckers. There was a mini uproar when a lunatic fringe Republican house member committed the offense of being in contempt for yelling out, “You lie,” when Obama asserted that bills in consideration would exclude illegal aliens, even though that part was probably true. But what about when Obama said that they would consider the best ideas for reform? What kind of a lie was that, when the best idea of all, single payer, the approach favored by a majority of the American people when they are asked, the only change that would make an actual meaningful difference, has been pushed so far off the table that it is not even to be given serious consideration? Funding of the health care system in America is the 21st century counterpart of leech therapy. We have a massive medical insurance “industry”, the function of which is to “manufacture” senseless and unnecessary paperwork to generate outrageous profits for itself, in excess of 30 percent of every health care dollar, sucking the very life blood out of our economy. THAT is the problem, and yet all Obama wants to talk about is building on “what works”. NOTHING about the way we pay for our health care today works, except maybe for medical mega-corporation CEO’s reaping their obscene salaries and bonuses. For THEM it works just fine, and they want to keep it just like it is. For the rest of us it is an unmitigated disaster, a veritable Katrina for our whole economy, and nothing Obama said the other night was intended to change anything of substance about it. Remember in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina when George Bush got up on TV with the misleading rap Karl Rove put in his mouth, talking about how they were going to study “What went wrong, and what went right”, complete with cute synchronized hand gestures, as if ANYTHING went right. Nothing went right about the federal response to that cataclysm. And there is nothing worth building on top of the way insurance companies are currently gouging the American people. So when Obama talks about the government creating an “insurance market”, all he is really talking about is making the government the COERCIVE SALES AGENT for the medical insurance leeches. What is the need for creating such a thing? Don’t we already have a market where people can shop for the plan they like? Isn’t it called the “free” market? So the only difference they are talking about is creating a compulsive mandate, backed by fines if you don’t buy one of the provided choices, to FORCE you to buy essentially the same overpriced insurance you couldn’t afford last week, or to have taxpayers subsidize the difference. Sure, the hideously egregious insurance industry practices of denying coverage in every possible unjustified way needs to be outlawed. This should have been done decades ago. But what Obama is talking about is trading the one dollar we would get back in our pockets that way, for license for the same corporate greed heads to take TWO dollars back out with their other hand, by hooking up a catheter direct to the U.S. public treasury, for hardship cases who cannot possibly cough up the required insurance ransom. Net result, even more outrageous profits, not less, for the same culprits we have now, and at taxpayer expense!! The reason why the Congressional Budget office predicts that only A real single payer system would give we the people, we who need and have a RIGHT as citizens to the health care we deserve, real power to negotiate favorable prices for our health care services. And THAT is the LAST thing those exploiting us now would ever voluntarily allow. And Obama and too many members of Congress are in league with the medical industry devils, bought off, paid off, or just naively backing off, making deals behind our backs and then announcing them as “done” deals, and giving speeches to try to bamboozle the American people into thinking they are getting real substantive reform when in fact they are not. What Obama did more than anything else last Wednesday night was throw down the gauntlet to US, standing in the way of real single payer reform. He said as bluntly as possible, for those with ears to hear, that if you want single payer you will have to fight HIM, to go through HIM. For his real constituents in this are NOT YOU, they are the medical industry special interests, in that way just like George Bush served only the upper class, and we might as well face up to it now. Because for him to even suggest that a silly new insurance “market” would give you as a medical care consumer any negotiating leverage comparable to single payer, with each of us out there still forced to bargain all alone by ourselves, is absurdity on steroids. Moreover, as weak as Obama’s proposals are, taken all together, the medical mega-corporations are still on full press offense trying to kill off anything that would help cure any part of the real problem, which is THEM of course, at all. It is not enough that they have their own people literally writing these bills word for word, like ex-Wellpoint VP Liz Fowler, to ensure that the outrageous bottom line profit margins of medical mafia are in no way threatened. They won’t be satisfied until even the “public option” is literally killed off. In short, the plan is to do nothing to remove the leeches sucking the economic life blood out of our medical care system. We agree with Brent Budowsky, with his longterm perspective and insight into Capitol hill deal making, that Obama has absolutely NO intention of letting a truly viable public option of any kind survive. When Obama intimates that a public option is not a mandatory provision, this is not “change we can believe in”, this is not even “change we’d kinda like”, this is “maybe we won’t bother”. The only reason even the words “public option” are being allowed to hang around on the table is so they can be pushed off later. And THAT is Obama’s REAL plan, the one he won’t talk about in a public speech, to let the weakest possible “public option” hang around for a little while as an illusory sop for the terminally gullible, only to bleed it to death before it can actually go into effect. Yes, THIS is Obama’s new “improved” leech therapy. We would not have written all this if we were not also going to point the way to the path of salvation. It’s just what it has always been. You must speak out now, you must keep speaking out, and you must never stop speaking out. There was a story the other day about how certain special interest lobby groups were forging letters to members of Congress as if they came from the public. Now, ask yourself, WHY would they even BOTHER to do such a thing if writing letters, sending emails, and making phone calls to members of Congress did NOT constitute compelling pressure, and they KNEW it? Why would they do such a thing if real activism did not work?

Oil Speculators Account For 50% of Oil Trades

New study here. I don’t understand economics very well, but this seems ridiculous. What is the point of this? Why are 5 This seems absurd to me. People who are rewarded in society are people who are producing or distributing a product. Even artists selling schlock are producing something that someone wants to buy. Overpriced pituitary cases on basketball courts seem silly with their multi-million $ salaries, but they are producing a product, professional sports, which millions want to pay for in various ways. All of these strike me as socially useful types of production. Hell, even dope and porn are products that folks are willing to fork over bucks for. Production need not be socially beneficial, but I would suggest that production or distribution itself ought to be a requirement for any socially useful type of economic activity. I have no beef with folks who are either buying or selling oil, or any other commodity for that matter. That’s a product. Buying and selling is part of the function of the market in a market society. But sheer gambling seems to be completely extraneous to any social benefit. No product is produced, no product is purchased, no product is sold. This seems to me very much a useless, leech, “parasitic” type of economic function. Just gamblers in a casino called a Commodities Market. Well, it turns out that these gamblers blew up the cost of gas to $4.50/gallon last year. Similar gamblers serving no useful social function whatsoever blew up the housing market and screwed the economy of the whole damn world. Various arguments are offered. The typical one is, “They will make money and invest it.” First of all, that’s not really true, and second of all, that’s trickle down economics, which can be used to justify the most outrageous kind of economic inequality on the basis that the rich will somehow share the wealth in some funny and hard to see way. Various other neoliberal arguments were offered that I did not understand, with these capitalists suggesting that speculation plays an essential role in markets and in the economy. The assumption being that if you get rid of the speculators, the whole economy collapses, but no one cries “Chicken Little” like a capitalist. Anyway the speculators themselves are already collapsing the damned economy. How could things get worse if you reign the leeches in? These arguments were found on a liberal site I go to. It’s amazing how many “liberals” are hardcore, radical, neoliberal free market capitalists. One wonders, since economics is out of the question, what exactly their liberalism is all about? Clicking on their profiles reveals guys, some Jewish, always with lots of money, who are members of groups called “Progressives,”Left This”, “Left That”, “Fight the Right”, “Stop Rush”, “Obama Supporters”, etc. They’re main concern is “world peace,” which will never occur in my lifetime. I guess some of them want to save the whales or the fucking baby seals. As commenter Lafayette Sennacherib suggests, when you take Economics out of the Left, there’s nothing left. You have a bunch of greedy capitalist bastards living in mansions yelling about gay rights or feminism or baby seals or snail darters or “White racists.” What about the workers? What about economics? What about a fair and just system? Silence from these guys, as they try to count their uncountable piles of cash and write a check to the Democratic Central Committee. If this is “Obama liberalism”, Hell, just take it out and shoot it in the field in the back and put it out of its misery. I want no part. One final note on the oil commodities market: a reasonable regulation would be to require these speculators to at least take possession of the oil they are buying. Hardly any will do that, so that will kill the parasites right there. Reasonable, right?

Only WE Can Talk About Ourselves!

You are as white as rice. What exactly is your preoccupation with ‘race’ in the first place? What do know about living Black? Anti-natist (sic)? You are also an anoying (sic) little turd. So do us all a favor — hurl yourself off an extremely tall precipice. Take your Xxit for brains blog with you. Thanks Whitey

This is a rather typical comment from a Black commenter to this site, this one from Liberal Race Realism Starting to Grow. The comment was deleted, and the commenter has been banned. However, this shows the perils of Liberal Race Realism. Even my version. I’ve sampled all of the varieties of race realism on sale around the Net, and I must say that mine is the most pro-Black and pro-non-Whites in general of them all. There is a reason for this. I like Black folks, or, at least, I don’t dislike them. So most things that I write, I imagine that a close Black friend were reading it and edit accordingly. If even the most pro-Black version of race realism provokes such extreme responses in most Blacks, how will they react to the rest of it? Further, most liberals are sensitive folks. White liberals either like Blacks, or don’t dislike them, or at any rate, don’t like to hurt their feelings. Further, White liberals hate being called racists, because they really try hard not to be racists. Crafty Blacks and their PC White buddies know this and deviously exploit this vulnerability by shrieking RACIST at White liberals whenever they take the most tentative steps off the PC Plantation. This makes White liberals very hesitant about embracing anything other than the most insane PC nonsense on race. As long you spout the orthodox line, you can escape being called racist. This really is simple thuggery on the part of Blacks and PC Whites, but no one ever calls them on it. They are shutting down debate like the finest Stalinists. Furthermore, they are setting the terms of the conversation about race. But liberal “conversations about race” are just monologues. Anyway, they don’t do the slightest thing to ameliorate the problem. All they do is make Blacks feel better by trying not to hurt their feelings too much. The line, “Only we can talk about ourselves” (really, “Only we can talk shit about ourselves”) is not peculiar to Blacks. It is standard ethnic nationalism. All ethnic nationalists get on this kick. Only the Jew can talk about Jews. Only the Arab can talk about the Arabs. On and on. The problem with this is similar to the line a narcissist takes with his critics. What do you think of a guy who screams, “Only I can talk about my problems! You have no right to talk about my problems!” He’s a narcissistic shit with his face stuck in a mirror, right? Further, he’s never going to solve anything, because the only decent criticism comes from outside, and all internatl criticism is heavily censored and neutered by the ego. Bottom line is ethnic nationalists, like narcissists, never ameliorate any problems. Problems just fester because in general they won’t discuss them. Jews are probably the worst humans on Earth about this. Super-Jews are always screaming, “Why are you so interested in us anyway!?” While at the same time, if you listen to them talk, the Jews are the most fascinating people on Earth. Well, if that’s so, why wouldn’t we be interested in the most fascinating folks on Earth? Truth is? If you don’t cause any problems, nice, Western, White folks nowadays tend to leave you alone. Look at African immigrants to the US. Who cares about them? No one. Blacks say we hate them for the color of their skin and due to their facial features. Then we should hate Africans most of all, since they are Black as night, and with no White admixture, they have the most exaggerated Black features of all. But as the most accomplished immigrant group in the US, no one bothers with Africans. Do a good job, don’t start shit, and nice people will tend to leave you alone, right? Problem with US Blacks is that as a group they are causing problems. Let’s use the analogy of inviting a guy and his buddies into your house. Pretty soon they start causing a bunch of shit. Mean people, and even most normal people, would just throw them all out on their asses. Nice people (here the analogy is with White Liberal Race Realists) sit them down and say, “Hey, you guys are causing problems in my house. I like you and I don’t want to throw you out, so how can we sit down and work this out so you can stay here?” Pretty nice gesture, huh? Not according to the commenter. The commenter is like a guy who when you invite him and his buddies into your house, they start causing all kinds of trouble, and when you sit them down and see if you can work it out with them since you don’t want to toss them out, he and his buddies start screaming that only he and his friends can talk about their problems. You can’t, ‘cuz you’re not them. The arrogance and egocentrism is appalling, no? I am wondering, given the behavior of so many US Blacks, why would anyone let any significant number of them into their country? If you let them in to your country, they’re going to start causing trouble (almost guaranteed). If the guests are mean (I’m thinking Japan, China or most Arab countries) they will just toss them out on their asses. If the guests are nice, they will say, “Hey, you guys are causing trouble, man. Let’s sit down and try to work this out.” The US Blacks will then all stand up and scream that only they can discuss their shit, furthermore, they will blame the nice guests who let them into the country for the Blacks causing problems. “You made us cause problems with your evil racism! It’s all your fault, you assholes!” Fine. Ingrates. Now given a mindset like that, why would any country in their right mind let US Blacks immigrate in any significant number?

Dutch Left Grows a Brain

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

Neonazis Rusos: Video de la Decapitacion

The video has been removed following discussions with WordPress staff. Try here instead. I am looking for translators to translate this post into Dutch, German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Russian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Turkish, Japanese, Mongolian and Bahasa Indonesia. Email me if you are interested. This post has been translated into other languages. Italian version (traduzione in italiano). French version (en Frances). Bulgarian version (Българска версия). Romanian version (Versiunea română). Portuguese version (em Portugues). This is a new Spanish translation of the famous Neo Nazi Beheading Video post. It took me a very long time to find a Spanish translator. Lots of folks volunteer, but the vast majority flake out. A few produce about 1 The translator is Santiago Forte, a Psychology student at Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina. My Spanish is not totally fluent, but I can read it pretty well. Looking this over, I think he did a bang-up job of translation! Shout out to Santiago. Santiago intends to use this video for the super-edifying purpose of making a documentary movie about violence on the Internet. As Santiago put it to me, as long as kids are looking at all this horrible stuff on online forums and trying to out-shock each other, someone might as well try to do something socially productive with these horrible videos, such as making a documentary attempting to explicate the phenomenon in psychological terms. Regular readers, if you have not yet watched this video, be careful. A lot of people get seriously freaked out by this video, although it’s got some awesome background music. There have been lots of bad reactions, including one long-lasting bad reaction (depression, anorexia and weight loss) and one hospitalization – a man was hospitalized and lost a tooth after fainting on the sidewalk after watching this video. Exercise caution! Nota del traductor: Si algun error ortografico es detectado,haganlo saber, muchos acentos fueron suprimidos para favorecer a los motores de busqueda, sin embargo es posible encontrar algun minusculo error. Intente hacer la traduccion lo menos literal posible, no obstante respetando el contexto narrativo de Robert Lindsay. Algunas terminos en aleman, que no tenian aclaracion de su significado, fueron traducidos directamente al español. Saluda Atte. Santiago Forte. Este post fue traducido en otros idiomas. Version italiana (traduzione in italiano). Version en Frances. Version Bulgara (Българска версия), version en idioma Rumano (versiunea română). ADVERTENCIA: Este video contiene imágenes extremadamente violentas que pueden afectar tu sensibilidad. La persona que decide mirar este video esta advertida de antemano. Si este video es capaz de generarte resentimiento, rabia o algo peor. Por favor no lo mires. Si eres menor de edad por favor no mires este este video. Si eres un padre de familia y sabes que tu hijo esta mirando este video, por favor. Te pido que lo supervises, restrinjas la conexión a Internet o trates de conseguir un programa para impedir el acceso a este sitio. Cabe destacar que algunas reacciones adversas fueron reportadas despues de ver este video. Aquí abajo enumerare las siguientes: Vomitos, Perdida del apetito, Rabia, Tristeza, Nauseas, Convulsiones, Dolores de Estomago, Pesadillas, Sentimientos Suicidas, Temblores, Taquicardia, Mareos, Dolores de Cabeza, Entumeciento, Indigestion, Taquicardia, Inanicion (perdida del apetito por no comer), Retrospectivas, imsomnio, llanto, llanto y Risa combinadas, Agorafobia (Miedo a los espacios abiertos), Ansiedad, Depresion, Perdida de la consciencia, Incontinencia urinaria o sensacion de incontinencia e incapacidad de dejar de pensar en este video. Estas reacciones fueron anotadas en la revision de comentarios en Boletines y en el canal de Youtube, se pudo observar en los comentarios, las sensaciones desagradables provocadas por el contenido shockeante de esta grabacion. Muchos espectadores lamentaron haber visto el video y recomendaron a otras personas no mirarlo. Ten mucho cuidado de enviar este video a otras personas, por que muchos han reportado brotes de ira causada por el material explicito. Otros miedos fueron un poco mas espirituales, algunos temieron que al ver este video dañaron permanentemente su alma. Comunmente, la gente admitio no poder ser capaces de olvidar este video por el resto de sus vidas. Una persona reporto que nunca seria la misma despues de haber sido testigo de este material. Otras dijeron que se sentiran atemorizadas por el resto de sus vidas. Las reacciones adversas han durado generalmente algunas horas, pero en algunos casos han tenido un alcanze temporal de un dia o dos. Reacciones de Ansiedad, Depresion o una combinacion de ambas han durado en algunos casos una semana y raramente mas de un mes. Si las reacciones continuan, te recomiendo que busques asistencia profesional. Por mi parte he visitado muchas clinicas y no es algo por lo que uno deberia avergonzarse. Si crees que podrias tener algunas de estas reacciones de forma duradera reconsidera no mirar el video. Este video fue baneado en muchos sitios de Internet. Ha habido una gran cantidad de llamados para removerlo permanentemente de Internet y hacerlo ilegal. Despues de todo, es un Film Snuff, igual de malintencionada que la pornografia infatil, esa es la razon por la cual las personas se esmeran por ver estas cosas horribles que odian tanto. Miralo ahora, si te atreves, antes de que la policia en tu region lo prohiba ahora y para siempre. Este Horrible video parece ser una respuestas Rusa hacia los tambien espeluznantes video grabados por los Chechenos decapitando soldados Rusos. Uno de los mas videos mas horribles es el de Los 6 Rusos Concrpitos. E’ disponibile la traduzione italiana di questo articolo, intitolato “Nessuna Pietà per i Russi.” Traduccion al Italiano, titulada No Mercy For Russians! aqui. Traduccion al Frances tambien. En mi opinion esta grabacion es incluso peor de lo que pueden ver arriba. Éstoy buscando traductores que puedan traducir este post, hacia el Sueco, Noruego, Danes, Holandes, Aleman, Finlandes, Ruso, Estonio, Leton, Polaco, Checo, Eslovaco, Hungaro, Esloveno, Serbo croata, Portugues, Griego, Turco, Japones, Mongol, Indonesio. Nueva informacion ha aparecido probando que este video no es una farsa. Kistaman Odamanov,una dagestani, vio el video en internet e indentifico al hombre que estaba siendo cruelmente decapitado como su hermano, Shamil Odamanov de tan solo 23 años. Ademas, el resto de la familia Shamili y muchos conocidos en su aldea natal lo han identificado mirando el video. Shamil fue a Moscu en busca de trabajo y posiblemente de esposa en el 2005. Desaparecio a mediados de Abril del 2007 y nadie lo ha visto desde esa fecha. Eso implica que ha sido mantenido cautivo con vida durante mas de 3 meses antes de ser asesinado a mediados de Agosto. La hermana de la victima, Kistaman reconocio su rostro y las ropas que estaba vistiendo en el momento de la ejecucion. La Policia Rusa ha encontrado el lugar donde las escenas del comienzo del video fueron filmadas, pero todavia no han encontrado el lugar donde la ejecucion fue llevada a cabo, ni tampoco encontraron algun cuerpo, sangre o evidencia forense. Sin embargo, las autoridades estan tratando el crimen como un homocidio. La Fuerza Policial Alemana esta involucrada sugiriendo el accionar de un grupo Neo Nazi Aleman. El tajik que aparece a punto de ser ejecutado en el video todavia no ha sido identificado. Mas informacion que demuestra la veracidad de este video esta disponible en mi blog aquí. Muchos han preguntado el nombre de la cancion en el video. La cancion se llama “Rus” una banda de Folk Pagan Metal llamada “Arkona”. Puedes tambien ver un video de la banda tocando la cancion en este blog. Vas a necesitar una conexión de Banda Ancha para ver este video de forma adecuada. Este es el video de decapitacion que tomo a la Internet Rusa como un Tormenta en los principios de agosto del 2007 (alcanzo la supremacía en los motores de busqueda y records de visitas en Paginas Rusas). El video es tituladoLa ejecucion de un Dagestani y Taijistani”. Es un video de Rusos Neo Nazis decapitando dos “Negros”, es decir en base a su nacionalidad se considera para muchos Activistas de estos grupos o el pensamiento popular, como minorias etnicas despreciables, sin embargo se trata de dos hombres blancos. Uno de Dagestan y otro de Tajikistan. Para debatir la idea acerca de si es razonable considerar Dagestanies y tajiks como blancos según el contexto, vean mi meditacion aquí. Esta grabacion genero una gran controversia en el Internet un tiempo despues de su aparicion publica. Un grupo llamado “Nacionalsocialistas de Rus” claman por la responsablidad del video, pero las autoridades atestiguan que nunca han oido hablar de este grupo. Rus es el nombre de un antiguo estado Vikingo localizado alrededor de Kiev – El Kevian Rus. Este fue el primer estado ruso y el nombres de “Rus” es ampliamente usado por los nacionalsocialistas rusos como sinonimo de Rusia Un Grupo Neo Nazi similar, El Partido Nacionalista Ruso, puede ser visto en Youtube. Aquí y aquí. El segundo video de los nombrados por lo menos tiene buena musica. El video de ejecucion esta bien preparado con musica Heavy Metal en el fondo y fue lanzado a principios de Agosto. El material fue originalmente posteado en la version Rusa del sitio del LiveJournal por un usuario apodado vick23. Noticias del Ocicidente han reportado que fue posteado originalmente por un nombre de usuario llamado “Anti Gypsy”(“Antigitano”) simplemente fue uno de los que lo reposteo mas tarde. Tambien fue publicado consecuentemente en muchos Sitios Neo nazis de habla Rusa. No obstante fue rapidamente removido de la mayoria de los sitios donde fue posteado y el sitio de la agrupacion Neo Nazi que cometio los asesinatos, fue arrasado por visitas. El video abre con una Bandera nazi y un estruendo de una Ametralladora en el fondo y luego un grito en idioma Ruso que dice “Gloria a Rus”. Luego muestran una toma de un Pueblo Ruso Campestre y luego un lago rodeado de un bosque. La camara hace un zoom en el bosque y muestran a dos hombres atados de manos y piernas y amordazados en el suelo. Uno de los hombres esta claramente aterrorizado. Luego muestran a los dos hombres atados que dicen en pesado acento ruso a traves de sus mordazas “Nos arrestaron Grupos Neo Nazis.” Mientras estan atados de manos y piernas arodillados en el bosque. Hay una extensa bandera Nazi en el fondo. El video muestra la “Poca habilidad de ejecucion” de los captores, un hombre enmascarado con vestiduras militares, viene detrás de unos de los cautivos, tomandolo detrás y mientras grita “Gloria a Rus”, comienza a serruchar la cabeza del pobre chico, aunque por lo que se ve, se torna un trabajo algo complicado. El Chico grita un poco al principio, pero el incompetente verdugo tarda 90 secundos en cortarle la cabeza. Hay una gran controversia acerca de los sonidos guturales fueron emitidos por la victima misma inhalando sangre mientras la cortaban el cuello, otros dicen fueron productos de la frustracion del verdugo que no podia separarle la cabeza con eficacia. No soy competente de juzgar quien hacia esos terribles sonidos. Finalmente le corta la cabeza y trata de poner la cabeza sobre el cuerpo decapitado, pero la cabeza queda pegada al cuerpo. Seguramente necesita una leccion de Al Quaeda en la Peninsula Arabe, quienes hicieron un excelente trabajo cortandole la cabeza y retirandola fuera del cuerpo, al Ingeniero en Helicopteros Paul Johnson. Finalmente se muestra al otro rehen atado y amordazado. Pega el mismo grito “Gloria a Rus” y lo despacha rapidamente con un disparo en le cabeza, mientras cae hacia una tumba recien cavada. El video muestra a los Neo Nazis completamente camuflados desde pies a cabezas dando el clasico saludo que Hitler le robo a Mussolini en frente a la Bandera Nazi. Al principio, las fuerzas policiales rusas estaban algo confundidas, por que no sabian si el video si era Real, asi que decretaron que era falso, pero recientemente hay una prueba de que no es una farsa. Yo personalmente nunca pense que era falso, ya que para hacer una grabacion de tonos tan realistas deberias ser un especialista en efectos especiales en una compania de Cinematografica y tener un gran presupuesto. Un hombre fue arrestado por distribuir este video, si quieres saber mas acerca de el, cliquea aquí. Algunos se preguntan como un ruso podria apoyar una ideologia Nazi dado que ellos invadieron a la Union Sovietica provocando un total de 27 millones de rusos muertos. 4 veces y medio mas que los judios que perecieron en el Holocausto, acontecimiento que sigue pesando en nuestra conciencia dia y noche. Para entender como un ruso podria ser nazi, se necesita comprender la naturaleza de la sangrienta batalla facista que acontecio en el Siglo XX. Estudiando historia como un real Historiador y no como un profesional Oportunismo, como muchos hacen hoy en dia, veras que los comunistas y los Nazis tuvieron los peores festivales de odio y sangre del Siglo Pasado. Esos 27 millones de Sovieticos que murieron en la segunda guerra mundial no murieron por que Los rusos amaban tanto a los nazis que les entregaron 27 millones de sus Hijos. Cada vez que los rusos y los nazis se enfrentaban en los campos de batalla, los cuerpos se apilaban hasta el cielo y las atrocidades cometidas en ambos bandos eran numerosas. Esta no era una disputa de amantes. La maniatica invasion Nazi a Rusia fue una practica genocida, especialmente hacia los eslavos a quienes Hitler consideraba “Inhumanos”. Los veian como una raza inferior, una debil “Raza eslava” incapaz de defenderse a si misma.. En particular Hitler en su Maniaco antisemitismo, penso que los eslavos se habian permitido a ellos mismos esclavizarse por los judios. Se referia asi, al Partido Judio Bolchevique. La crueldad de la invasion Nazi a la Union Sovietica fue claramente ignorada por los libros de historia occidentales. Stalin pudo haber perdido 10 millones mas de ciudadanos y ademas la hazaña nazi se pudo haber logrado y habrian conquistado al mundo. El proyecto Nazi de exterminacion fue claro, como burocratas que eran, lo especificaron. Los eslavos, los Estonios, los Caucasicos, los Cosacos, varios tipos de Turcos, Uzbekistanies, Tartaros, Kazajas, Turkmenistanies, Azerbaijanies, Kalmyks, Karachais, Arabes, Armenios y Georgianos eran inferiores y requerian ser reemplazados por Alemanes, matandolos de hambre, asesinandolos, convirtiendolos en esclavos y deportandolos, dejando regiones despobladas para hacer carne el proyecto “Lebensraum”, termino acuñado por el Geografo Friedrich Ratzel, que sostenia que la existencia de un estado competente necesitaba de un espacio vital para su construccion, en el caso de la alemania nazi, los botines en territorio de las naciones conquistadas. Durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial Murieron 2,6 millones de Polacos (Solo el 50 por ciento era de origen judio) es decir el 30 por ciento de la poblacion. Lo mismo sucedió en Bielorrusia, el 25 por ciento de la poblacion fue exterminada al final de la guerra. En Rusia 27 millones de personas murieron, que consistia en esa epoca el 15 por ciento de la poblacion. Todas esas naciones eran “eslavas” para los nazis. Las purgas asesinas de Stalin a fines de la decada del 30, fueron un intento salvaje de destruir Tratado Bilateral Entre Rusia y Alemania, ejecutando Trotskianos y Bukharinites, que no solo simpatizaban abiertamente con los nazis, sino que tambien abogaban por una invasion Nazi a la Union Sovietica. Las persecuciones Stalinistas fueron producto de una amenaza de invasion Nazi latente aunque muchos de los que fueron juzgados y ejecutados eran inocentes. Sin Stalin hubieramos perdido la guerra, una prueba de ello es que el 89 por ciento del territorio aleman cuando el conflicto armado finalizo, estaba en manos sovieticas. Detrás de las lineas Rusas, en las ocupadas Latvia, Lituania, Estonia, Ucrania y Rusia Blanca un gran numero de personas estaban a favor de los nazis. Muchas de ellas se unieron alegremente a la matanza de Judios y Comunistas, colgados del ala de la Bestia Alemana. Durante el Asalto de Stalin, alrededor de 50.000 Sovieticos pelearon voluntariamente a favor de los nazis. El Destino de Rusia y los sovieticos estaba dificil. No habia tiempo para hablar acerca de los derechos humanos. Los rusos empujaron a los alemanes hacia el este y los que habian colaborado con la invasion Alemana fueron ejecutados. En una guerra, la misma palabra lo menciona, no se trata de justicia o derechos humanos, sino de muerte. Los rusos no podian ser blandos ante la traicion o la desercion. La nocion de Stalin durante la segunda guerra mundial fue antisemita (Dirigida hacia Judios Ultranacionalistas y Anticomunistas extremistas). Como un autor sovietico en la epoca escribio “Tu eres anti nazi o anti semita, alguna de las dos.” Cuando el ejercito rojo llego al este de Polonia, los polacos recibieron con jolgorio a los rusos, accion que imperdonable hasta hoy por los Polacos Ultranacionalistas. Los judios no eran estupidos, sabian cual era su enemigo y en ese momento no era necesariamente el “Tio Joseph.” Los Sovieticos era los potenciales salvadores de los judios y ellos lo sabian. Todo judio educado sabe cuan adeudado esta con Napoleon, es una lastima que no sientan lo mismo por Stalin. Joseph Stalin probablemente salvo a los judios del nazismo. Joseph Stalin probablemente salvo al mundo del nazismo. Acerca de los rusos Neo Nazis, con la caida del comunismo, floriecieron al mismo ritmo que el colapso economico y la busqueda de Chivos expiatorios comenzo. La guerra chechena empeoro la situacion, debido a las crueldades grabadas en camara acerca de soldados chechenos decapitando rusos y el terrorismo musulman atacando Rusia. “Negros” o gente del Caucaso padecen un odio generalizado a traves de Rusia. Recientemente ha habido ataques hacia Africanos, Asiaticos y mestizos. Las autoridades hacen poco y nada por impedir los asesinatos, ya que soportan el ideal detrás de estos hechos. El Neo nazismo es tan grande en Rusia que es dificil compararlo con el contexto de los Estados Unidos. En Agosto del 2007 ha habido alrededor de 50 asesinatos racistas de caucasicos, gente de Republicas de Asia Central, Activistas antifascistas y Extranjeros, 25 por ciento mas que el año pasado, que indica un aumento de ese tipo de violencia ideologica. ¿Podrias hacerte la idea de un movimiento Nazi tan grande y crimen organizado en Estados Unidos? Los facistas rusos sirven como “tropas de choque” para Vladimir Putin, echando a bajo la nocion de que el es un “Neo comunista” y probando lo que se ha sospechado que Putin es una de las formas del Fascismo Ruso. Distribuido junto con el video, hay un manifiesto clamando por la expulsion de todos los “asiaticos y negros” (Gente del Caucaso) de Rusia y curiosamente la expulsion de todas las republicas en el Caucaso como Ingushetia, Dagestan, Chechenia, Osetia del Norte, Cherkyo Kabardino, etc. Aquí se puede leer el manifiesto completo extraido del Centro Kavkaz de los Rebeldes Chechenos.

Declaracion del Partido Nacional Socialista de Rus

Nosotros Somos Parte de una Faccion Armada del Partido

1. Nuestro partido anuncia el comienzo de una lucha armada en contra de los colonizadores negros y todos los rusos oficiales que los soportan. 2. Consideramos la expulsion de los Caucasicos y los asiaticos del territorio Ruso como una necesidad primaria. 3. Sentimos que es necesario garantizarles la independencia a todas las republicas del Caucaso (Incluyendo Chechenia), junto con la expulsion de todas la poblacion caucasica que reside alli. 4. Demandamos la liberacion de todos los Neo Nazis Rusos que estan en prision y que frenen la persecucion de Maksim Martsinevich. 5. Demandamos al Vladmir putin que renuncie y entregue el poder al gobierno Nacional Socialista que debe ser liderado por Dmitry Germanovich, el lider de la Sociedad Nacional Socialista de Rusia. 6. Reconocemos el liderazgo politico de la Sociedad Nacional Socialista de Rusia, nosotros somos una celula armada operando independientemente. 7. No pararemos de luchar hasta que el poder este en manos del Gobierno Nacional Socialista.

Martsinevich es la cabeza de un grupo llamado Format 18, que fue encarcelado por generar Odio Etnico y Predicar la violencia. La violencia Nacional Socialista en Rusia esta fuera de control. Esta propagada en grandes proporciones en, Polonia, Reino Unido, Republica Checa, Eslovaquia, Hungria y Estonia. Hay mas violencia Per capita en todos esos lugares que en Estados Unidos. El crecimiento de la violencia Nacional Socialista esta amenazando Europa y es necesario hacer algo lo mas rapido posible.

Is There a New Anti-Semitism? A Conversation with Raul Hilberg

From an issue of Logos Magazine, Winter-Spring 2007, a conversation with Raul Hilberg, the Dean of Holocaust Studies. Most Jews are pretty nuts about the subject of the Holocaust, I suppose understandably so. They don’t make sense. Their behavior is more one of a crazy and irrational person than someone saying something sensible or meaningful. But if anyone has a right to be nuts about the subject, it’s Raul Hilberg. After all, he has been doing little us but immersing himself in Holocaust lore for 60 years, almost all of his life. His 1961 book, The Destruction of the European Jews, is considered to be one the best ever written on the subject, though I have not read it. I read a similar book by Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, and it was excellent, all 976 pages of it. An interview with Hilberg is always a joy to read. He has a calmness and reasonableness about him that is very attractive. Almost everything he says about the Holocaust makes sense. He points out that Jewish ownership over the word Holocaust is ridiculous. Super-Jews always freak out and scream anti-Semite if anyone else grabs their precious little word for any other reason than the approved one. Probably in rebellion to this idiocy, there are now Holocausts and mini-Holocausts all over the place. There’s a Holocaust in the animal testing labs. There’s one in Palestine. They’re everywhere. The word the Jews wanted to turn into a Judaic religious object, to be touched only by the Jews like the Talmud, is now a degraded and near-meaningless matter of the public domain. He also derides The New Anti-Semitism, for obvious reasons. Although a Zionist, he says some interesting things about Israel and praises Norman Finkelstein’s anti-Zionism. Strangely enough, he makes a case that the Nazis were not anti-Semites but something different altogether. He notes coldly that there are three solutions to the Jewish Problem: conversion, expulsion and extermination. That’s not something you say in polite company, but you just know it’s true. He also thinks that Holocaust Denial should not be criminalized and doesn’t worry too much about it. He has previously said that Deniers do scholars some favors by raising a lot of important questions about the Holocaust that scholars need to get cracking on. That the many Jewish expulsions of Europe began to occur not due to bad Jewish behavior as anti-Semites claim but began when all efforts at conversion of the Jews had failed seems to make sense. All in all, great read. If more Jews acted like Hilberg, people wouldn’t dislike them so much.

Excellent Piece on Stalin

On Socialist Methods & Stalin-Era Purges, by Mike Ely of the Western Maoist grouplet Kasama. I have the same issues with Kasama as I have with the rest of the Western Left, and there is no need to go into them at this time. I don’t even support Marxist revolution in the West. My attitude is we don’t need it. It didn’t work very well in Eastern Europe anyway. Nevertheless, Ely of Kasama, an organization which upholds Stalin as a member of the Marxist tradition that they follow, seriously condemns Stalin’s killings and repressions, for good reason I think.

The communist movement (justifiably!) denounces the beating of Rodney King, the killing of Oscar Grant, the shooting of Amadou Diallo, the assassination of Malcolm or King, the jailing of Peltier and Mumia, the holding of so-called “enemy combatants” without evidence or trial… These are outrages — and often the innocence of the victim is a part of that outrage.So what does it mean, if someone…can (with a wave of their hand) minimize the state execution of hundreds of thousands of people (without trial and often, it must be said, without evidence)? Is it that different because those were nominally socialist cops who pulled the triggers?

Indeed! I have always wondered about this, but I figured most Commies were simply so insane that all police repression in capitalist societies was pure evil, whereas all police repression in Commie societies was fine and dandy. This never made sense to me. Repression is repression, end of story.

There were in the 1930s quotas for arrests (just like there were quotas for other forms of production) — i.e. the cops in a particular locality were required to produce so many spies and reactionaries. Imagine what that produced? There was permission to torture signed at the highest level. Imagine what that meant for the emergence of “confessions” and new denunciations of new suspects for the machinery.

That there were actual quotas for arrests in the 30’s in the USSR is outrageous. Obviously, cops just rounded up anyone they didn’t like and called them a spy. The fact that torture was allowed means, obviously, that any confessions obtained are obviously tainted. About time Communists said this.

And I am saying that huge numbers of those who were caught up in this were not spies, or reactionaries, or saboteurs, or deserving of death or punishment.There was explicitly a policy (high in Stalin’s government) of “punishing ten to make sure one doesn’t go free.” There was a terrible ratcheting up of harshness, so that the punishment for a casual remark could be denunciation, imprisonment and worse. (Should someone disappear into prison for saying “I wish the Tsar was back”? Mao, by contrast, said that people should be allowed to make such remarks without fear.) There was in the 1930s USSR a conscious policy of “mopping up” — i.e. assuming that the time had come to remove everyone who had ever been suspect, or a problem, or had gotten some taint on their record (support for non-Bolshevik parties in their past, involvement with an internal opposition, travels or relatives abroad, history of “making trouble,” and so on.) And there was a policy of blanket blaming all kinds of industrial breakdowns, snafus, accidents, shortfalls, confusion, chaos, delay, and disagreement on conscious sabotage — to deflect anger and impatience from those in power. There was a conscious policy at the highest levels of using imprisonment and execution as the means of enforcing discipline within the government i.e. getting republic and enterprise officials to say “how high” when told to jump. (Molotov’s own wife was imprisoned after World War 2, held as a kind of hostage to his continued service.)

Incredible. The first sentence really hits you hard. Vast numbers of those arrested were not even spies, saboteurs or even reactionaries. In fact, many were die-hard Communist revolutionaries. That someone could go to prison for a simple casual remark is madness. Even Mao agreed. That this period was used to “mop up” anyone who was felt to be a troublemaker now or in the past shows the fraudulent nature of the purges. And any failures in production were seen through the insane paranoid lens of sabotage, when it often was not the case. And imprisonment was used as a discipline-enforcing measure in the party, even when the victims were completely innocent. Outrageous!

And the charge that the punished were agents and saboteurs were (in the main) fantasy, paranoia and conscious frameups.

Yes, the majority of those persecuted were not even guilty of the charges against them. How tragic.

The purges involved an overlay of several things:a) a determined terrorizing of the “middle management” (including especially communist leadership at the republic and enterprise level) to enforce an extreme responsiveness — in part as part of the preparation for war. b) an approach to solving political problems and disunity that rested heavily on police killing or disappearing those raising political disagreements. c) a runaway process of mutual denunciation and witchhunting that raged far outside any single central control (mutual denunciations, clique struggle by arrest, settling of old grievances and suspicions) etc. d) an acute high level line struggle over how to deal with the threat of Nazi invasion (with Litvinov, Bukharin and perhaps Tukachevsky on the side of continuing to seek alliance with Britain and France, and Molotov and Stalin deciding to deflect Hitler by seeking a “non-aggression pact.” It was a struggle analogous to the sharp fight between Lin Biao (on one side) and Mao with Zhou Enlai (on the other) over how to deal with the mounting threat of a Soviet strike on Chinese nuclear facilities.

That’s probably one of the best summaries of the purges I have ever seen.

Anyone who thinks that second kind of repression (recklessly using the full means of an established state in this way) is justified or should be imitated, has abdicated a responsibility to learn from this past, and has really announced their determination to become new oppressors. And even if you don’t think so, everyone else will!And I might add: that people who want to conduct mass campaigns of execution should declare themselves early and loudly — so they can be carefully kept far far away from revolutionary preparations and future state power.

Indeed. For Chrissake, let’s not do this again. If for only one reason, because no one will ever let us come into power again for the fear that we may turn our guns on them at some point. Bottom line is Communists just flat out need to quit killing people when they are in power. At the very least, we can begin to get rid of the “Commie murderer” meme that the Right loves so much. On the other hand, there is value in Stalin. See here later on in the post:

Stalin was the leader of the International Communist Movement for 40 years and helped solidify much of Communism’s advances during that time. In that time, the Soviet Union developed the world’s first socialist economy- something only barely glimpsed within Lenin’s time.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union developed the first planned economy, and struggled to develop the first collectivized mechanized agriculture (in the place of an extremely backward peasant society). In this they succeeded with great results.

The Red Army met and defeated the most powerful army in the world. 3.5 million highly mechanized Nazi troops invaded — confident of conquering the first socialist country. And these (previously invincible) armies were hurled back to defeat. In the end, after 27 million Russians died due to Nazi atrocities, it was the troops of Joseph Stalin that took the Nazi capital Berlin, and drove Hitler to suicide! Under Stalin the communist movement became truly international — with the Comintern (and its fraternal parties) appearing all over the world. While Stalin led the world movement, there were new seizures of power. When he died 1953, the communist forces were in power in a third of the world, and in his time at the leadership of the CPSU he led a series of important line struggles to uphold and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat and forge a road forward toward socialism. His struggles with the rightist, state-capitalist line of Bukharin, and the defeatist line of Leon Trotsky were important and historic contributions to communist practice (and theory).

The truth? From another post:

I think it’s really time to break out of the whole paradigm of “the Great Peerless Helmsman Comrade Stalin” vs. “the Murderous Bloodthirsty Tyrant Stalin” debate…Comrade Stalin laid somewhere in the middle of those two stereotypes.

The Left Supports Racial Separatism in the US

Just not for Whites! I dig this blog, but I have issues with Western Maoists guys for the usual reasons. White nationalists may be interested to note that they support ethnic secessionism in the US! Just not for Whites. They support the execrable Aztlan Chicano secessionist movement in the US and the Black secessionist movement in the US South, which aims to create a state out of the US Black Belt (map here). They support these absurd causes because supposedly Blacks and Hispanics are both oppressed minorities in the US, hence have the right to self-determination according to Marxist (specifically, Leninist and Stalinist) theory. I figure if you’re going to give Blacks and Chicanos the right to secede, why not give Whites the right to secede too? Some other questions remain unanswered. Would the Blacks and Hispanics have the right to throw all the Blacks and Hispanics out of the Black and Hispanic states? I assume these guys are completely hostile to White nationalism, but it’s interesting that they see both US Blacks and Hispanics are members of oppressed nations. I guess Whites don’t get to secede because they are not an “oppressed minority?” The independent Black state in the South would be a disaster. The whole place would probably turn into some combination of Detroit plus the Mississippi Delta. Being an oppressed minority in the US is the best thing that’s ever happened to US Blacks. We’ve gotten rid of slavery and Jim Crow, and racism has been declining for 45 years since the Civil Rights Act. Anywhere else on Earth, they would be worse off. Want to go back to Africa? Didn’t think so. Want to move to those wonderful Black countries in the Caribbean? Nope. How about moving to that wonderful state of Brazil, where they got rid of racism once and for all? Guess not. Blacks in the US and the rest of the West have it better than anywhere else on Earth. Granted, we could certainly treat them better, and that’s a task that anti-racists at their best moments continue to hammer away at. But Blacks and Whites in the US evolved in a symbiotic relationship. I don’t know about Whites needing Blacks, but I’m convinced that US Blacks need US Whites. They’d fall apart without us. An independent Black state in the South would be a massive fail. Segregation in the past did not work for Blacks. Ask how many Blacks want to go back to segregation? The independent Black state would in effect be a return to segregation. What happens when you pull all the Whites out of a city and return to an effectively segregated Black ghetto? No matter what it’s called, Oakland, East St. Louis, the Bronx, Harlem, South Central LA, South Side Chicago, Newark, Gary, Hammond, Baltimore, Washington DC, New Orleans, the result is much the same. A Black ghetto, with sky-high rates of crime and every other social pathology you can think of. We can argue on and on about why Black ghettos end up the way they are, but the fact is that they are what they are. When Blacks are more spread out and not living in heavily-Black communities, it seems obvious to me that they do better, though I haven’t seen any studies yet. For example, my city is But could you imagine what this city would be like if it was 6

On the Contradictions of Race Realism and Leftism

A commenter asks:

Robert, how do you square being ultra-left in the USA with being anti-cultural-Marxism? I mean, as a white male, don’t you sometimes feel like a 1940s-era Jewish Nazi?I mean, I understand your views on policy, and I agree with them to an extent, but how do you handle the fact that most of your political allies are destructive and antithetical to your professed worldview?

Easy! As far as economics and a general view of society, I’m a socialist, a Communist, a Marxist, etc. No, I do not believe that the rich get everything, the poor get nothing and everyone else, not to mention society, the environment and every non-domesticated non-human living creature gets screwed. I hate capitalism, and I use a Marxist analysis in evaluating many of the things that are happening in society. Marx did not have much to say about race. In a few places, he can be found quoted as an out and out racist, typical of the times. Lenin hadn’t much to say about it either. Even Stalin didn’t say much about it, other than condemning anti-Semitism. Mao talked a bit about race, but if he had 100 million Africans living in the Middle Kingdom, maybe he would not have been so PC. Under socialism, race usually doesn’t matter all that much for some reason. I’m not sure why that is, but that’s just how it goes. Some ethnic groups are incorrigible. The Hungarian Communists forced assimilation on the Hungarian Gypsies, and even outrageously forced sterilization on some of them. No one ever said they were bad Commies for doing so. The USSR and Mao’s China were quite brutal with minorities who acted up. Neither tolerated any amount of street crime. Cuba has the 6th highest incarceration rate in the world, and almost all of it is street crime, not political crime, often theft. The more you look at the history of the Eastern Bloc and China, the more you see what the disconnect really is, between the Cultural Marxism of the West, which has never ruled any state on Earth and between actually existing socialist societies, which were often quite different. However, Marxism *is* a science, or at least it is supposed to be. I would love if the Left and the liberals were right on race. I spent years believing that and more years desperately trying to prove them right. They are just wrong. The Left and the liberals are wrong on race. They are telling lies. The problem is that all race realism plays directly into the hands of the Right for the time being. So I can see why the Right opposes it. But as a science, we should be able to figure out a race-realist Marxism. Hell, we can come up with a theory for anything. My colleagues are just wrong on race in the West. But over in India, Nepal, the Philippines, Peru, Colombia, Palestine, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, where the real struggles are taking place, there is no discussion of race realism or Cultural Marxism. It’s just a matter of justice. The USSR and China had no need for Cultural Marxism. It’s a fetish of the West. The ultra-Left in the West is insane on race, but I don’t support their Western project anyway (revolution in the West). What am I supposed to do, man? I mean, I’m a Commie. I’m supposed to turn into a rightwing jerk just because the Left is nuts on race? Forget it. What can the Right offer me? I don’t agree with them on one single thing. Race is only a small part of things. Economics is much larger.

Race Realism In Cuba

Fascinating article, A Visit To Raul Castro’s Cuba, on Cuba today written by a Marxist, which does not at all deny the serious shortcomings of the system. While it seems tempting to blame Communism for all of these problems, the truth is that Communism is probably responsible for only some of the problems. First of all, the rations book only covers 4 The sidewalks are falling apart, but sidewalks generally were nice and clean in the East Bloc and China. Public facilities in general are not kept up well, but I don’t believe that was a problem in the East Bloc or China, where things were generally neat and clean. Cuba is an extremely hot and humid place, like the rest of the Caribbean, so that may enter into the lack of upkeep aspect. The problems with the ration books, deteriorating housing and sidewalks, however, is probably due to the US Embargo that costs Cuba $4 billion/year. What is very interesting is a section towards the end of the article under the heading, “Race and Marginality — The Sleeping Giants?” Though couched in the usual Leftist “see no evil” mindset of a baffled person who can’t explain anything racially other than by resorting to accusations of White racism, there is some blockbuster race realist stuff in this section. First of all, the Cuban Revolution was great for the Blacks and mixed race Cubans. In the great Batista Cuba of which the overwhelmingly White Cuban exile “gusanos” (or worms as I refer to them) dream and pine, there was an overt Jim Crow system, that, while not as bad as in the US, was still pretty bad. The Cuban exiles all lie about this and say that there was little racism in pre-Castro Cuba. Darker Cubans were out and out barred from most beaches in Cuba. In provincial towns, public parks were segregated into White and non-White sections. Non-White Cubans were pretty much barred from most professional positions, especially in the private sector. The Revolution got rid of all that and dramatically improved things for non-White Cubans. Nevertheless, the upper ranks of the Party and professional classes were mostly White. A new and refreshing pro-Black movement has emerged in the form of non-White hip hop music with an emphasis on police brutality themes. The suggestion is that as in much of the West, non-Whites in Cuba commit a vastly disproportionate amount of the crime, and are consequently profiled and then harassed by police and possibly beaten and manhandled when arrested. So in that sense Blacks and mulattos in Cuba behave much as those in the West do. One huge difference is that there is little violent crime in Cuba. There is quite a bit of theft though, in particular petty thievery. In addition, as in the rest of Latin America, most faces on Cuban TV are White. A protest movement has also emerged against this tendency. After the collapse of the USSR in 1990, Cuba went into a long phase called “The Special Period.” In a nutshell, Cuba lost 9 One result of this Period was social chaos and an increase in something called “marginalization.” As in the West and in Latin America, wherever you find good numbers of Blacks in a mixed-race society, the Blacks mysteriously tend to be overwhelmingly more likely to be marginalized in various respects. This was even true in Communist Cuba. “Marginalization” became a codeword, for poor, uneducated non-White Cubans. A number of theories developed to try to explain the behavior of the marginalized non-Whites. During the Period, non-White dishonesty, lack of upkeep and out and theft increased dramatically. Most of the people complaining about the “marginalization” theme were Whites. Whites were associated with a “rich culture” in which, no matter how much money they had, they were relatively honest, hardworking, tidy and non-thieving. Non-Whites were associated with a “culture of poverty” borrowed from Oscar Lewis’ seminal work that was associated with lack of upkeep and subsequent disrepair and dilapidation, a less vigourous work ethic, greatly increased dishonesty and tremendous thievery, usually of the petty variety. One episode that particularly outraged Cuban Whites was one in which poor non-Whites in Havana were given brand new state of the art housing in the city complete with a variety of new and working fixtures, hookups and whatnot. Quickly after they moved in, the non-Whites basically dismantled the brand-new complex of its hookups and everything that wasn’t nailed down, which they promptly sold on the Black Market for hard currency. Afterward, they were back living in a slum again. Cuban Whites were completely outraged and offended by this behavior. It was not stated in the article, but the suggestion was that as much as Cuban Whites struggle, they won’t dismantle the equivalent of a Cuban mansion and turn it into the equivalent of a Cuban hovel. What is fascinating about this is that this is exactly what Blacks did in Africa. In Zimbabwe, when Blacks took over the farms of the Whites, idiot Blacks dismantled and tore out everything not nailed down and sold it, or, if it was wooden, burned it as firewood. Working orchards and vineyards were destroyed in days or weeks, chopped up for firewood and sent up in smoke. Similar things occur in South Africa. Similarly, in the New South Africa, upkeep has gone down the tubes. Sure, the Blacks fix stuff when it falls apart, but often by the tried and true “n-word rigging” familiar to White Americans. That’s basically a half-assed, quick and dirty, off the cuff, makeshift fix of a broken thing that will work for a while but won’t last long. Crucially, routine maintenance that would keep things running much longer is simply put off for later which usually means never. This same dynamic seems to be operating in mostly non-White Cuba, while in the Communist East Bloc and China, things were at least kept tidy and neat looking. The Cuban experience of problems in upkeep suggests not so much a problem of Communism as a basic difference in temperament between Blacks and Whites. The dismantling of working apparatuses in favor of the quick fix of firewood or cash, leaving one with a hovel or ruined farm, reflected from Cuba to Zimbabwe, once again suggests not so much a problem of Cuban Communism as once a basic temperamental difference between major human races. Another problem in Cuba has been poor scores by the “marginalized” non-Whites of Cuba. Whites tend to dramatically outscore non-Whites in Cuban schools, particularly in the professional schools which are extremely competitive and held to high standards. A culture of poverty explanation has been advanced to try to explain why White Cubans are doing so much better in school than non-White Cubans. Yet we see this discrepancy everywhere on Earth where there are Blacks and Whites together. It is interesting the Cuba chooses a “culture of poverty” explanation. In the West, radical PC anti-racism is all the rage and these same things are blamed on omnipresent White racism, which seems even more dubious than the culture of poverty stuff. It’s even more fascinating, and actually disturbing for me as a Leftist, that Black and White behaviors show remarkable continuity with their racial cogeners around the world, under capitalism, socialism or Communism. * I am not trying to imply that Black temperament is inferior to White temperament. If it is in part genetic (though adjustable via culture) then it is simply the way that they have evolved. I’m sure many to most Blacks are perfectly ok with a lot of these behaviors. However, they are so opposite to standard White behaviors that these Black behaviors drive Whites up the wall and cause endless friction in multiracial societies. I also did not mean to imply that lack of upkeep or maintenance was in inferior trait. I practically wrote the book on Lazy myself. However, modern industrial societies do not seem to work very well when maintenance or upkeep is neglected.

Why The Left Hates Me

From a comment from on the post, Black Crime and Intelligence: An Intrepid Investigation. The commenter is actually a somewhat famous Black American novelist, P. Lewis, or Phil Henderson, who I admit I have never heard of. He’s obviously extremely intelligent, and he writes very well:

“The Cuban example shows that Black genes are not destiny and there is a way forward, out of the cave of genetic determinism.” This is a very strange site. You call yourself a leftist, and yet, you despise Gypsies without bothering to truly understand why; you obviously don’t like Jews; and concerning blacks, you actually believe in this eugenicist nonsense (which the Nazis also believed in). If you were a genuine revolutionary you would have understood that oppressed people obviously have deeply ingrained inferiority complexes/slave mentalities. These slave mentalities express themselves in fucked-up behavioral patterns such as lying, stealing, homicide, alcoholism, etc. And mind you, it isn’t just blacks or Gypsies: Albanians (who are white), Romanians (also white), so-called “white trash” of Eastern Kentucky and other nice parts of the USA, etc. exhibit these fucked-up behavioral patterns. But you haven’t done your homework and properly investigated the true source of these pathologies. Instead, you assume it is because we non-whites are genetically inferior–the same bullshit that racist reactionaries within the American academy spout. If you had bothered to do your homework you would have understood that “ghettos” are not the inventions of “blacks” or “Latinos” but the majority white society that confined them to these shitholes for various reasons, most of them being economic and racist. If you had bothered to read genuine revolutionaries such as Fanon or Paulo Freiere or Cabral you would have understood this. Instead, you chose to use the language of Professor Shockley and all the other fascist buffoons who came before him, many of whom were Nazi Germans, who concluded that “niggers” were genetically predisposed to criminal activity.

The part about Jews actually hurts my feelings because I actually like Jews, but people are always insisting that in fact I don’t and instead I really hate them instead. It’s confusing. I make no apologies about Gypsies. I definitely hate Gypsies, and for sure that makes me a racist. No problem. I’m an anti-Gypsy racist. The rest is standard Leftist tripe. Allow me to discuss my intellectual journey. For almost my entire life, I believed this stuff that P. Lewis wrote above. I still want to believe it. After all, I am a Leftist! I really do want to believe the Leftist line on race. It’s a very nice point of view, their hearts are warm and kind, and they really do have the best interests of various groups in their hearts. The race realists, on the other hand, are pretty much a nasty bunch of folks. They’re almost all on the Right, and typically they are on the Far Right. They are either out and out fascists, or, if they are conservatives, they are so far right that they are more libertarian than conservative. A lot of them, actually probably 9 So, my heart really is with the anti-racist Left in some respects. They’re good people, and they are trying to do the right thing. The race realists, on the other hand, are a bunch of bastards. Along with being rightwingers, of course almost all of them are thoroughly hostile to the Left in every way, shape and form. Problem is that the Left is completely nuts on race. P. Lewis’ account above is just flat out wrong. I spent over a decade researching this stuff, because I so desperately wanted to believe in it. I’ve probably read every book on race and IQ that had ever been written up until the mid 1990’s or so. I tried every theory that I could possibly come up with to account for the data, and sadly I watched every one of my theories go down in flames. After I had used up every theory I could possibly think of, I gave it up and threw in towel and resigned myself to the position the race realists. The Left has its heart in the right place, but on race, tragically, it’s selling us a bunch of lies. Feel-good lies, nice lies, kinder and gentler lies, sure. But lies nevertheless. The Right are a bunch of bastards like they always are, but on race, I’m terrified that they might be correct. The data that they have accumulated to support theories which make me feel terrible is just massive. The truth on race is awful, but it’s probably true. I’m not going to believe the Left’s lies on race anymore unless they can prove them with facts. Although the Left’s lies on race are very powerful and have taken society by storm, at some point, their defensive walls may come down and the ugly and horrible truth about race may emerge. My position is that the Left has to be prepared for the truth on race. If the race realists are right, why is this the end of the Left? So the races are not equal, so what? If anything, that means that the relative failures of various groups are not even their fault! How dare we punish them in any way, particularly economically, for their shortcomings! If anything, it’s an even better argument for socialism. If some groups were falling behind and it was their own damn fault for being willful and irresponsible fools, we could morally say, “Screw you, you’re on your own.” But what if it’s not even their fault? Then saying, “Screw you” is impossibly cruel. Some guy’s walking with a cane, you harangue him for using a cane, insist he doesn’t need it, take it away from him, smash it in front of his face, then throw him down in the gutter, kick him a few times, spit on him, and walk away. And as you walk away you call the cops to have him arrested for vagrancy. This is what the Right wants to do to the ethnic groups that fall behind. How cruel can you get? Marxism is a materialist science. If the race realists are empirically correct, then we socialists need to deal with that, and figure out a way to make a race realist socialism that respects everyone no matter their genetics.

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