Alt Left: Socialism for the Win!

Socialism beating all capitalist countries!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She also said something interesting about mutual intelligibility.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So next, language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: Repost: Interview With a Bhutanese Maoist Leader

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

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

Phenotypically, Nepalese are very unusual. They are on the border between Caucasians and Asians. Some more resemble Caucasians and some more resemble Asians. Most of the ones who moved into Southern Bhutan were more Caucasian types. Anyway, at some point, they become 6

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

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

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

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

I figure if you throw a bunch of humans on an island, after a while, the strongest will kill and or subject the weaker ones. Some total prick will rise up, call himself ruler – king – whatever, somehow gather up 9

This group has connections to Maoists in Nepal who now form a huge portion of the government (4

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

———— ——— ——— ——— –

Saturday, May 23, 2009

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

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

Comrade Sushil: Yes, from Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: From the Bhutanese refugee camps?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comrade Sushil: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: PFLP Funeral from 1976

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

Alt Left: Why We Fight (PFLP version)

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

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

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

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

The CIA supported Pol Pot.

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

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

Chavez was not a dictator at all. Venezuela under Chavez was one of the most democratic countries on Earth. Mugabe wasn’t really a dictator. The opposition always ran in every election, and Mugabe always got the most votes not counting fraud. Same thing in Russia. Putin always gets the most votes whether he steals a few or not. Same thing in Belarus. The opposition runs every time and Lukashenko always gets 75-8

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, Islamic countries are just not like that.

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

No North African country is like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Alt Left: Right and Left in Islamic and Catholic Societies

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

Malcolm X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European Style Fascism in the Middle East

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economics and Catholicism

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Vatican 2 and Liberation Theology began to spread out via the seminal documents written by Gustavo Gutierrez in Brazil, “A Theology of Liberation,” otherwise known as “exercising the preferential option for the poor,” it began to spread in Latin America. It started with local priests and especially Catholic lay workers in impoverished areas and then slowly spread. Even today, Catholic layworkers and especially seminaries are very leftwing, while the Vatican itself is not. A lot of seminaries are hotbeds of homosexuality, and the gay priests and lay workers are quite open about it. It is estimated that 1

Alt Left: Liberal in the Diaspora, Fascist at Home

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

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

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

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

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

A revolution…is not a picnic!

– Mao Zedong

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

Alt Left: It’s a Shithole, but It’s Their Shithole

Polar Bear: I have some respect for Haitian independence.

I have a lot of respect for Haitian independence. Good for them! A free man is a happy man, or if not, at least a great man.

A shithole but it’s their shithole. There’s beauty in a person being independent and into their own culture.

Exactly! It’s a shithole but it’s their shithole! Perfect. The ghost of Desallines lives!

There’s a famous quote from an Iraqi nationalist.

Outside of the homeland, there is nothing.

That’s so perfect. You have to love anyone who loves their land so much they will give their own life for it.

Americans lost all respect for this so long ago. All we’ve been doing is killing nationalists for defending their homelands for over a century now. Pathetic, especially considering our nationalist origins. We started out as an anti-colonial rebellion and then we turned into the worst neocolonial shits. Look what empire does to a land.

Fidel said something along those lines but it was more in terms of the Revolution. In terms of free speech, he said:

Inside the revolution, everything. Outside the revolution, nothing.

And that’s pretty much their philosophy. I’m on a Cuban mailing list and I get online publications that have Cuban writers and many Cuban citizens commenting. Pretty interesting stuff. The most interesting one is run by an exile. And they criticize, Hell, they slam, the Hell out of the system. But they still want to keep the system. They just want to make it work better is all. Anyone who says you can’t criticize the state in Cuba is insane. There are even out and out Contras in Cuba.

Some were in the press recently. The state pretty much left them alone and just attacked them in the media. But the comments from the citizens were amazing. Most of them were mad at the government for not putting them in jail! And there were a lot of spontaneous demonstrations organized against these people. Most people were calling them traitors.

I even love Saddam in a way, although he was a shit. There was a huge battle at the airport. A lot of Iraqis lost their lives because we used fuel-air explosives, which should be banned. An Iraqi man was there and he turned around and there was Saddam Hussein, standing right next to him. Saddam gave the man his automatic weapon. He told the man to use it and fight for his country if he wanted to. Saddam said:

Don’t do it for me. I’m nothing. I’m not important. Forget about me. Do it for the country. Do it for Iraq.

And then he disappeared. This guy didn’t even like Saddam but he was absolutely in awe of him after that. I liked how a farmer shot down a US helicopter with an automatic weapon. Saddam himself later went out to his field and congratulated him in person.

I also liked how a huge squadron of US helicopters, 25-50, took off towards Baghdad at night. They were halfway there when the dark land below them completely opened up on them. It was the Republican Guard. No one even knew they were there. All of the helicopters turned around. When they got back to the base, they were shot full of holes. I also liked how in the early days of the invasion, US convoys in the South were hit with horrible sandstorms. You could barely see in front of you.

Wave upon wave of Saddam Fedayeen swarmed across the desert in zero visibility to attack the convoys. And in the Southern cities where the Jews told us we would be welcomed with flowers, American convoys moved through silent streets at mid-day. Too silent. Keep in mind that these were Shia cities, repressed by Saddam. They got halfway through the city when every single rooftop in town opened up on the convoys. They were full of mostly ordinary citizens with automatic weapons. Some were Baath Party members, but a lot were just the local Shia. No bad how Saddam had treated them, they were still ready to fight the invaders. I guess they hate the Americans worse than Saddam.

I liked how eight days after the invasion, Saddam suddenly showed up on TV, supposedly 100 feet underground. No one knew where he was. He urged Iraqis to fight for the homeland. He also used an obscure word, hulagu, which sent Arabic speakers racing for their dictionaries. Arabic has a lot of old words that no one uses much anymore but educated speakers throw them out now and again and it sends speakers scurrying for their dictionaries. Hulagu is a reference to the Mongols who sacked Iraq centuries ago.

I especially liked how 12 days after the invasion, with the US supposedly in control of the capital, Saddam suddenly showed  up out of nowhere in the Adhamiyah Sunni neighborhood. A large crowd materialized and hoisted him on their shoulders cheering. It was all videotaped. Then he vanished again. The Americans had no idea where he was and they had no idea he was in that neighborhood. And they never knew until the video was released that he had been there. Arabs are sneaky fuckers. I wonder if that’s how the Jews got that way – living around those sneaky Arab fucks their whole lives.

Maybe it’s just a damned sneaky part of the world if you think about.

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

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

He wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think of all this?

Trotsky’s take on national socialism and fascism.

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Alt Left: Repost: An Easy Way to Raise the IQ’s of 100’s of Millions

Repost from the old site.

Get rid of iodine deficiency.

Amazingly, even moderate iodine deficiency causes IQ declines of 10-15 points if it’s in a pregnant woman or an infant. It looks like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, India, Ethiopia, Sudan, Guinea, Senegal and Sierra Leone all have moderate to severe deficiency.

It would be interesting to see a better rundown of the severity of the deficiency in each place so we could figure out how much collective IQ could go up with iodine supplementation. In India, 500 million (5

Yet another failure of Indian capitalism to provide for the very basics in human needs in India, and one more reason I support the Maoist revolutionaries in that country.

Many other nations have mild deficiencies. I don’t know what a mild deficiency does to your IQ, if anything. 1

Alt Left: Repost: Mao Messed Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-Counterrevolutionary Campaign of 1953. Mao said, “9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could go on but you get the picture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are a few other places outside Latin America:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: An Interesting Note from an Irish Nationalist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: Viewing the Kurds through the Left-Right Prism

Turkey itself is a fascist state, and probably 8

The Grey Wolves are at the extreme end of Turkish ultranationalist fascism. Basically Turkish Nazis. There are many outside of Turkey in Europe, especially Germany, but there are many more in Turkey, including vast numbers in the military. Even worse, I am convinced that there is more than a little Grey Wolf in 8

A lot of Kurds are Communists and Leftists, but not all of them. The PKK is Leftist and has 6

“Kurd” isn’t a racial classification in Turkey. Turks don’t do ethnic nationalism in a racial sense like that. Turkish nationalism is more assimilatory. Quit speaking Kurdish and give up Kurdish culture and speak only Turkish and embrace Turkish culture, and wa-la! A Kurd becomes a Turk. See how that works?

The PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) started out Marxist as a typical Marxist revolutionary group seeking independence. If you look at revolutionary nationalists all over the world, you will see that they come in two varieties – a hard left, socialist or Communist type; and a hard right type which looks like some form of fascism. Those are the two directions revolutionary nationalists seeking self-determination can go.

If a group is very repressed, they often go for Left revolutionary nationalism because this logically appeals to them. Examples are present in the West where the Hispanic and Black ultranationalists are basically Commies because they see themselves as repressed. White ultranationalists in the US are basically fascists because they are on top.

Fascism is about preserving the interests of the ruling class and the capitalists in a time of extreme pressure from the Left. It is “a popular dictatorship against the Left” and its basis is “palingetic nationalism” (MAGA, anyone?) – picture the Lazarus bird rising from the dead. Fascism promises a return to the blood and soil glories of the past during a time when the nation has badly deteriorated. The claim of resurrecting the greatness of the ancestors is very appealing.

The PKK were formed in 1986 out of a long history of Kurdish Leftism as a typical Left revolutionary nationalist independence group. Their leader, Abdullah Ocalan or Apo, was a Marxist. They’ve recently renounced Marxism but they are pushing some sort of Libertarian socialism that looks pretty communist.

The Syrian Kurds are Leftists of the Libertarian socialist type.

The Iraqi Kurds are divided into a more typical Left and Right, neither of which is extreme and both of which are frighteningly corrupt. The Right is more traditionalist and the Left is more modernizing. They’ve sold out their own people to the Turks and have let the Turks set up bases in their land and bomb their own people all the time. All for money apparently. Or possibly fear. Or probably both.

The Iranian Kurds are also Leftists.

The Iraqi, Syrian, and Iranian Kurds are already with the US, and we are with them. Just to show you the insanity of geopolitics, the same group we support in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, we label terrorists when they happen to be in Turkey, where we help Turkey kill them. When this group is fighting our enemies, they are good guys and get our support. When they make the mistake of fighting our friends, they are our worst enemies.

There are no good guys in geopolitics. There are bad guys and worse guys, and that’s it.

Antifa loves the Kurds because antifa are anarchists. The Syrian Kurdish project was seen by anarchists as close to anarcho-socialism (Libertarian socialism) or anarcho-communism. That’s why they support them.

People claim, falsely, that the Kurds and Turks have been fighting forever. They must either have short memories or they never bothered to open a history book. I’m not sure that the Kurds and Turks fought much during the Ottoman Empire. The fighting all started with the breakup of the empire and Ataturk’s ultranationalism. In the last 100 years, Turkey has literally massacred hundreds of thousands of Kurds. Of course, genocide is something the Turks do very well. Hitler is even said to have modeled the Holocaust on the Turks’ genocide of the Armenians.

Alt Left: The Fatal Flaws of Libertarianism

Rightwing Economics Can Only Go So Far before There’s a Left Reaction of Some Sort

We have Left revolutions constantly all over the world. Look at all the Left revolutions in Latin America recently. There were also quite a few in the Caribbean. There was recently one in Mexico.

All of these revolutions were precipitated by the Right being in power and pushing rightwing economics too far (the breaking point) which is what rightwingers always do. Sane people can only take so much rightwing economics, and as it gets more and more extreme, a typical Left reaction arises, getting more aggressive and even violent as the rightwing economics deepens. Marx laid this out exactly. It really is a law.

Libertarianism or Neoliberalism Always Only Benefits a Small Wealthy Minority, While the Poorer Majority Always Loses Money

People will just not tolerate rightwing economics very much. At some point it becomes so unfair and unequal that almost no one will put up with it. So Libertarians are pining for something that will never happen because frankly nobody wants it. Or better yet, no majority of any country will ever support. Libertarianism and any rightwing economics pushed too far automatically ends up benefiting only 20-3

The

In a lot of places, like in the US, everyone but the top

Libertarianism Can Only Be Imposed and Sustained By Force, Hence a “Democratic Libertarianism” Cannot Exist and the Non-Aggression Principle is a Pipe-dream and a Lie

I can’t believe Libertarians even think this is sustainable. Obviously they see themselves as the 20-3

Libertarianism Is a Luxury That Can Only Be Afforded by the Rich

I guess greed blinds people. Libertarianism and neoliberalism are luxuries of the rich. Of course the rich, the upper middle classes, and the business classes support it.

The Business Class Is Always the Same, 550 Years Ago as Today

You can read texts from the Italian Renaissance by early capitalists in Italy in the 1500’s arguing the government is basically useless from the point of view of a businessman, and frankly the less government, the better. Here we are, 500-600 years later, and the business classes are saying the same thing. Plus ca change…

Alt Left: Where Rightwing Economics Pushes Too Far (Always), There Inevitably Arises A Left Revolutionary Backlash

Of course in a number of places like Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Honduras, Ecuador the revolution was overthrown by mostly illegal means, but the Left is still very powerful in all of these places and no one likes the new rulers. Everywhere in Latin America where the Right is in power, the people are wretched if not up in literal arms. Nobody wants rightwing governments down there anymore. As we have seen in recent years pace Milton Friedman, rightwing regimes in Latin America can only be imposed by force anymore. The people have been lied to too many times and no one believes the rightwingers anymore.

The places that didn’t have one like Colombia, Peru, and Chile either have an armed Left or mass riots.

They almost had one in the UK. They had one in Greece, but the Left sold out.

They had one recently in Indonesia, and there may be one in the process in the Philippines.

Thailand had an aborted revolution via the Red Shirts, but it was thwarted.

They had a revolution in Nepal, but it was thwarted by the state putting in fake Communists.

The rest of the world is already more or less socialist so there’s no need for a revolution!

The Arab World, Central Asia, Africa, and most of Europe are already socialist, so there’s nothing to change.

The “rightwing populist” leaders coming to power in Russia, Poland, and Hungary are all socialists! Over there even the Right are socialist.

Neoliberal rightwing economics is dead all over the world, though its corpse is stirring violently.

Rightwing economics is only in power in the Baltics, parts of Latin America (Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Peru), the Caribbean (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and the Philippines. It is unpopular in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, and Honduras. Peru is more stable, but there are constant labor riots led by unions, and there remains an armed Left in the mountains. It is unpopular in Haiti and I don’t understand DR politics. Where the Left remains in power as in Venezuela and Nicaragua, it has 70-8

Hong Kong and Singapore are the Libertarian showcases, but neither is sustainable because they cannot be replicated worldwide, as all of their wealth is dependent on massive exploitation of the poorer countries and even surrounding areas. Housing is completely unaffordable for workers in both places as in all Libertarian countries. And Hong Kong is undergoing a revolution from the Left, as it is going Communist.

India is going neoliberal but they are doing via religion, so the foolish Hindus have had the blinders put over their eyes and are supporting it like the superstitious pinheads they are. Meanwhile India remains a socialist country as stated in its own Constitution, and where that lie has become too obvious, there is a Maoist revolution in the hinterlands to set things right.

Singapore is not as Libertarian as it seems. The state owns all land and almost all of the housing is public housing. National health care exists but it is a very poor model. A pro-Chinese Communist Party leftwing opposition party with Marxist roots is very popular. So as we can see, even the showcases are undergoing revolutionary reactions. There’s really no way around this. As rightwing reaction grows extreme, and equal and  opposite leftwing reaction forms in opposition to it. For every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction. It’s social science, but it may as well be physics, n’est pas?

Can the whole world become Singapore and Hong Kong? Well, of course not. Singapore and Hong Kong are only rich because so much of the rest of the world is poor. The Third World makes $1/hour so the Singaporeans and Hong Kongers can drive BMW’s. Is this really so hard to figure out.

We can’t all be rich, you know? It would be like Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average. It’s like saying the whole world could become the British Empire. It’s not even possible. Or it would be like having footraces where everyone comes in tied and there are no winners or losers. How likely is that to happen?

Alt Left: A Vignette of the Reasons for the Colombian Civil War

Claudius: How do you define working well? What distinguishes the top category from the bottom? Is present-day Colombia really worse off than Mexico?

Yes. Colombia is much worse than Mexico in our view. Colombia is so fucked up that they murder one civilian every other day or so. It’s deadly to be on the Left in Colombia. Colombia exists for the rich and only for the rich. Why do you think the Left took up arms?

The state has failed in Colombia. Genocidal fascists took over or maybe were running things all along. They never even did a land reform! There is no state in Colombia. Just an army and police structure that exists to support the rich and their dictatorship over the people.

Let me give you an example.

I read about a rural area in Colombia recently. The rightwing death squads (the government) rampaged through the area and confiscated all of the farmers of the small farmers. Just stole them at gunpoint. This goes on all over Colombia all the time. The rich own a lot of the land, but they never own enough, so they are always trying to steal more. A very similar situation was going on in Guatemala and especially El Salvador and was the direct cause of the revolutions there. The Colombian rich already steal every nickel in the country, but that’s not enough.  They have to steal even more. At gunpoint.

Any farmers who resisted would be beaten, tortured, arrested, imprisoned, or simply murdered. The state worked hand in hand with the death squads which are just the private armies of the rich. Really the police and the military are just the private armies of the rich too. Leaders and members of farmers’ and peasants’ associations got the same treatment above, usually worse. Many were simply murdered, especially the former. This was a slow process (it always is) but over 10-15 years,  the rich had taken over all the land and added it to their latifundias.

More than anything else, Colombia needs a land reform (one could argue that this is the basic underlying cause of the armed Left revolution in Colombia) but the Colombian rich will do anything to stop it, even kill hundreds of thousands of people as D’Aubussion suggested in El Salvador (200,000 in his case to prevent land reform or “socialism” as he called it).

All of the peasants shoved off the countryside moved into nearby large cities. All of these cities quickly developed large slums if they didn’t have them already. The slums were made up on displaced peasants, now relegated to proletarianism in the city. If you study Marx this is a classic method for the development of capitalism, and it is in fact how capitalism developed in England.

Back to Colombia. The seething slums lack water (water must be purchased on large containers in the city below and then carted back to the house), power, sewage systems (the sewage runs downhill in the gutters) or much of anything. The Colombian state of course does absolutely nothing for these people as they don’t want to part with any of the money of the rich to do so. A mysterious crime wave develops in the new slums and the US media is puzzled by what could possibly have caused this strange new crime wave.

In the slums, urban Communist guerrilla cells begin to form. One day you are shocked to see a 12 year old boy walking down a steep street in the slum.

“That’s it,” you think, “The revolution has finally come. I’m outa here!”

You had always known it was building because in a situation like this, how can a Communist revolution not develop? A Communist revolution is almost guaranteed in a situation like this.

There are still plots in the countryside owned by farmers. Guerrillas now invade the abandoned areas and take over a lot of the towns.

“We are the army of the poor,” say the guerrillas. “We are here to protect you from the rich, the death squads, the army, the police, and the state.”

The townspeople are happy to see them. Guerrillas in full uniform walk down the streets of these towns like it’s nothing. There are guerrilla checkpoints all over the countryside at the entrance to every town. The guerrillas recruit in the towns and many of the young people who saw their parents, siblings and relatives brutally thrown off the land or better yet murdered join the guerrilla, mostly out of sense of vengeance.

At night, armed guerrillas show up in  large forces at the haciendas of the rich, living on land stolen from the peasants.

“Hello,” the guerrillas say. “We are here to collect war taxes for the revolution.”

“But I don’t support the revolution, the landowner says.

“No matter,” say the guerrillas, “The country needs a  revolution, it is having one, it needs to be funded, and as a wealthy man, you are obligated to support the revolution. And if you don’t, we will arrest and incarcerate you for tax evasion or if you prefer kidnap you and hold you for ransom.

The rich landowner agrees. Once a year he and his rich neighbors drive to spots in the countryside where they meet bands of guerrillas. All of this is done in secretly. There they hand over war taxes for the year. Those that do not pay are kidnapped for ransom, but the guerrillas say they are just being arrested and imprisoned for tax evasion and will be released on payment of taxes.

Most just pay their taxes to keep the guerrilla off the land so they can live in peace. A few hold out, refuse to pay taxes, and are kidnapped for ransom. The rich usually pay to free their people, but the offspring of these rich men are furious at these taxes and kidnappings. They move to the city and become part of the fascist Right. Some even join the death squads to “kill the Communists.” If you ask them why they joined the fascist Right, they will say, “Well, it all started when the guerrillas kidnapped my father for  ransom. At that point, I had finally had enough of them. We need to exterminate these delinquents with a heavy hand!

Outside the city there is a military checkpoint. This is symbolic. It is there to keep the landless peasants in the slums holed up in the slums so they don’t try to take their property back. There are army checkpoints at the entrances of every city in the area. The military checkpoints start to be attacked by mysterious guerrillas who seem to appear out of nowhere, and the army takes casualties.

Interactions between the local urban poor and countryside peasants become at these checkpoints become increasingly hostile, as the soldiers suspect with good reason that these people are supporting and harboring guerrillas in the areas where they live. New death squads form in the cities, slowly murdering and torturing to death random poor people and especially leaders of community organizations which they army had now labeled as organizations of the guerrillas. In fact, a lot of them are the unarmed aboveground formation of the guerrillas.

Death squads return to the countryside, now picking off random peasants and leaders of community organizations on the basis of support for the guerrillas. In most cases it’s true. The people killed do in fact support the guerrillas. Hell, just about everyone out here does. The few that don’t are suspected to be army and police spies and are closely watched. Occasionally the guerrillas execute one of these people for the crime of spying for the enemy. In fact, they were usually doing just that, spying on the guerrillas for the army.

Intelligence shows that the guerrillas are coming from the urban slums and countryside towns, which are now full of guerrillas.

Back at intelligence headquarters, urban guerrillas have infiltrated this military structure and are busy giving fake intelligence to the army and especially telling the guerrillas what  the intelligence knows and about any upcoming operations.

The army launches operations only to find nothing but peasants and small towns full of civilians without a guerrilla in sight when in fact the guerrillas were seen everywhere there a few days ago. It is as if the guerrillas had vanished into thin air.

The army begins to suspect that the guerrillas always seem to be one step above them and seem to have precognition about the army’s behavior. The army suspects spies in its midst and conducts internal sweeps but finds nothing. Commanders grow increasingly frustrated and angry and begin to take it out on the locals in the guerrilla zones.

The officers look up and the cloud-covered jungle mountains surrounding the area of their operation and begin to wonder if the guerrillas are up there somewhere, hiding in the misty rainforest.

They are correct. That is exactly where the guerrillas are. Difficult operations are launched in these jungle mountains of Colombia but nothing is found. Soldiers get injured, bitten by insects, and come down with strange diseases during these jungle operations.

The operations end and the army retreats back to the valley. Now not just officers but rank and file soldiers are getting even more angry, and they take it out even more on the locals. Down in the valleys, mysterious new guerrilla formations with names no one has heard of seem to show up out of nowhere in response to the army’s abuse of the civilians. These formations start attacking the army, and the army takes casualties. The soldiers get even more furious and take it out on the people even more.

After every crackdown on civilians, more and even more young people join the  guerrillas. When asked why they join, they say,

Well it all started when the army invaded our home and killed my father at his dinner meal. He was a simple peasant. He wasn’t part of any armed guerrilla. I am here to get my revenge.

In some areas, deals are cut with the rebels. The army gets to control the city below but the guerrillas get to the control the towns above eight miles up the road. This is exactly where the guerrilla checkpoints start. In the other direction as you head towards the valley, army checkpoints start. The army and the guerrilla have cut a deal to let each control a bit of territory on the basis that they sign a ceasefire and stop killing each other. After a while of this, the army starts running short of weapons. It turns out a number of officers have been selling the army’s weapons to the guerrillas.

The revolution in Colombia has many causes but this is a good overview of some the main issues that are driving this civil war more than anything else. At the end of the day, it’s just another fight over land and bread. Ever heard that one before?

Alt Left: Why Mexico’s State Is Better Than Colombia’s State

Claudius: How do you define working well? What distinguishes the top category from the bottom? Is present-day Colombia really worse off than Mexico?

From the view of the Alt Left, we would support Mexico over Colombia. Here is why Mexico is better:

Mexico already had their revolution and it was a progressive socialist revolution, almost like a Communist revolution in some ways. The feudal system of the latifundias was destroyed. Free education and health care for all was put in. A system of ejidos was put in so no one would starve. They are communal land and if things don’t work out in the city, you just move out to the country and work on an ejido. At least now you have food to eat. Mexico nationalized the oil industry.

Mexico doesn’t systematically murder the Left. The largest party is the Party of the Revolution, which is officially a socialist part and is even a member of the Socialist International. They did steal an election from the Left in 1988. AMLO is pretty leftwing but there are no death squads running around murdering his supporters. Women’s, human rights, peasant, slum-dwellers, consumer, Indian, workers’, etc. organizations exist all over the country and no one murders them.

Alt Left: An Overview of the Early Years of the Cuban Revolution, 1954-1961

transformer: What do you think of this article Robert? I don’t trust right wing sources but how literate was Cuba back in 1959?

That website is falsely named. It is not an “intellectual” website dedicated to the intellect and the pursuit of knowledge. Sure, it is an erudite, bright, and educated website, but the only intellectuals it appeals to are hard rightwingers. It’s basically the philosophy of your average American conservative Republican. Those sites are run by ideologues, and they are not very honest.

I will try to take apart this argument as best as I can, but if you Google these questions, there are many leftwing websites who offer far better rejoinders than I offer here, especially with more facts, figures, and dates.

That argument is not good because there was vast poverty in the countryside along with terrible health and dental care. There was vast inequality in Cuba. There was quite a bit of wealth in the cities, particularly in Havana, but the conditions in the countryside were awful, pure 3rd World.

To give an example, I believe that there may have been no doctors in Cuba outside of Havana. All of the doctors and dentists lived in Havana serving people with money for cash so they could make a lot of money. The Mafia owned Cuba, and Havana was a sleazefest full of criminals, gangsters, and prostitutes.

Blacks had essentially no rights at all. They actually lived under a strict Jim Crow-like segregation that was as bad as what existed in the South. The Blacks in Cuba were fucked.

The whole country was owned by foreign, mostly US, interests, including the sugar cane and tobacco fields, the cigar and nickel industries and the casinos and bars. A few country-sellers latched onto the large US corporations that ran everything in Cuba and got their fair share of the loot.

But the Cuban people as a whole, meaning the Cuban state, barely saw a nickel of profits from any of those foreign-owned fields and industries. There also was little or no trickle down effect from the foreign-owned industry. Most Cubans felt that Cuba had once more become a colony of the US. After all, it was more or less owned by US companies, right?

Cuba used to be a colony of the US. We stole it from the Spanish after the Spanish American War. US rule was not popular. Jose Marti is known as the liberator of Cuba. He led an insurrection in 1898 in which Cuba gained its freedom. The Philippines was also rebelling at this time.

But after the US left, in 1911, a new law was passed called the Platt (?) Amendment that basically said that the US still ruled Cuba and had a right to intervene in Cuba’s affairs anytime it wanted to.

Even the most rightwing anti-Castro Cubans are not particularly pro-US, and if you bring up that amendment, they’ve all heard of it, and they act angry about. After all, most anti-Castro types are Cuban nationalists. Cubans are very nationalistic and proud people. That amendment remained in place until Castro won the revolution in 1959.

Batista’s army collapsed without even much of a fight because at one point in the revolution, even the middle classes in the cities went over to Castro. When the middle class supports a revolution, you are out of power. Previously the middle class had probably been mostly neutral.

Batista was also horribly corrupt and no one was happy about that. As Castro overran Havana, Batista and his government flew out to the US on airplanes. The US lifted them out. There are still quite a few pro-Batista Cubans in the Cuban community in Cuba. That’s why the Cuban exiles are not popular in Cuba.

A lot of Cubans in the countryside were not literate. Even schooling was bad out there. And Castro did run a literacy program that got the country to 9

Castro was middle or even upper-class himself. He was Galician of almost pure Spanish blood (Cuba is full of Galicians). He had just graduated from law school, and he was in fact an attorney. So he was a very smart guy.

Che was actually a physician! He graduated from medical school in Argentina and was granted a license to practice medicine. I’m not sure if he ever actually practiced medicine. He was also a very smart guy.

Che took a motorcycle tour around Latin America, and he was appalled at the poverty he saw there. He had grown up in Buenos Aires in a moneyed family, and this was a hidden secret about the continent for him. A book called The Motorcycle Diaries was later published using the notes he took as he traveled around South America.

He became radicalized by his bike tour. He heard about the Revolution in Cuba, and he went there to help them out pure idealism with stars in his eyes. Che was also White like Castro and came from old Buenos Aires money. He probably had Italian and Spanish blood at the least, like most Argentines.

He married in Cuba and had a couple of kids before he was murdered by the CIA in a hospital in Bolivia in 1967 after being arrested in the nation for rebellion. He was very good to his wife and young children. The wife and children are still alive. You can even go see his son if you go to Cuba and have the right connections.

His wife and kids remember him very fondly. Che was a selfless and altruistic man. There is a slogan in Cuba: “Be like Che.” It is very popular. It means to be selfless and idealistic and sacrifice for others, to not be selfish and greedy. The slogan is popular among university students in particular. If you go to Cuba, you will hear Cuban university students, male and female, saying that their philosophy is to “be like Che.”

There must have been something wrong with the Batista system because a lot of university students, teachers, etc. took part in the early demonstrations against Batista. At some point, the Left went to the mountains and took up arms.

Either before or after, Batista ran death squads that rampaged through Cuba’s cities, murdering teachers, students, and the unarmed Left in general. They murdered thousands of defenseless and unarmed Cubans this way.

The army would not even fight for Batista. That’s how corrupt he was. In fact, many of the anti-Castro Cubans fought with Castro in the mountains to get rid of Batista, but they turned on him when he went Communist. They felt betrayed. I don’t mind these exiles so much. I have spoken with some of their children. At least they fought with Castro. But they tend to be very bitter. They think they got double-crossed and backstabbed by Castro.

Castro was originally simply a social democrat, and the initial revolutionary program was a social democratic one.

However, it was a very nationalistic revolution, and they started seizing foreign-owned businesses very quickly. The Cubans offered to pay off the owners for the market value of the businesses over a 30-year period. That offer it still in effect. 10

So their businesses didn’t really get confiscated. Castro offered to pay full value for them, but these stubborn reactionaries turned down the offer. It’s their own damn fault they lost their businesses.

The seizing of the foreign-owned property went on for a couple of years and was extremely popular among the extremely nationalistic Cubans. So you can see that Castro’s revolution, like Mao’s and Ho’s, was also and perhaps primarily a nationalist revolution.

Castro went to New York soon after he took power, and he was greeted with large crowds of cheering supporters. Castro talked about how much he loved America and Americans. I believe he was sincere. A lot of the US ruling class – the rich and corporations – were very suspicious of Castro from the start. They didn’t trust him. They didn’t hate him. They were just very leery of him.

Castro asked for US support and aid to help rebuild the country, but the US had turned hostile  by then due to the business confiscations and refused to give him a nickel. This went on for a couple of years with each side getting more hardened until Castro finally turned to the USSR in desperation in 1961 for support since the US was flipping him off.

Castro’s argument was that he tried to have a relationship with the US, and we told him to go to Hell, so we forced him into the arms of the Soviets. He sealed an alliance with the USSR in 1961. The US promptly imposed a cruel embargo on Cuba which has been there ever since.

The embargo’s official justification was to cause so much poverty and misery in Cuba that the people would rise up and overthrow Castro. Here it is 60 years later, and we still give the exact same reason for the embargo. If the embargo is intended to cause the people to overthrow Castro, when is it going to start working? So far it’s been 60 years of utter failure, but we keep chasing the White Whale.

Over the next year, Castro grew increasingly radical, and by 1962, he abandoned social democracy, his originally ideology, and took up Marxism-Leninism. After Castro went Communist, a lot of his old comrades turned against him along with many others who were not happy with his turn to the hard Left. These contras took up arms, formed guerrilla bands in the mountains, and waged a brutal civil war that went on until 1970.

Yes, the Cuban government executed 10,000 people between 1959-1970, but almost all were for “rebellion,” typically armed rebellion. There have hardly been any executions since.

Alt Left: The West Is Complaining about Possible Election Fraud in Guyana

I am trying to see why they might be doing that, as the only time the West bitches about vote fraud is when their guy loses and the guy they didn’t want won. When their guy cheats and steals an election, there’s a mass blackout of the news in the controlled media and in the states of the West.

The basic rule is our guys get to lie, cheat, and steal all they want to, but if their guys do it, we’re going to flip out and declare some sort of a war against them. In fact, if their guys don’t lie, cheat, and steal, we will make up lies and say they do and most shitheads in the West, including almost all liberal Democrats (there’s nothing worse than a liberal Democrat) will believe every word we say because everyone in the West is as brainwashed as a North Korean.

The news has come out after an election in Guyana. The party seeking re-election won in a very close race with some very serious electoral problems. The counting stopped for no reason for days on end and there were more voters on the roles than people. I’m not sure if that adds up to fraud, but it doesn’t look real great.

On the other hand, we really need to know why the West is bitching so much. I mean what’s the reason. The only reason can be that we don’t like the guy who won and we want the guy who lost instead.

Let’s see if that makes sense.

The guy who won is a social democrat and a Leftie. He’s the guy we maybe don’t like. Incidentally, his party has been stealing elections forever, mostly in the 1960’s and 1970’s. I have heard that they knocked it off in recent years, but you never know.

The guy who lost is an out and out Marxist-Leninist. He’s the guy we maybe like.

It already hardly makes sense, right?

Guyana’s politics have been Hard Left for quite some time, but they suck up to the Empire, so no one really cares. This tendency goes back to Cheddi Jagan all the way back in the 1960’s, who was overthrown in a coup by the CIA and especially the British MI6.

The coup was accomplished in about the manner as the 1953 Mossadegh coup in Iran and the recent fascist coups in Ukraine and Bolivia – riots precipitated by outside intelligence (CIA, MI6) followed by an ousting of the president.

We also tried this exact same method last year in Nicaragua and have been trying it for a number of years in Venezuela. We seem to be doing thing in Iran at the moment. It failed and/or is failing in all three countries. We are also trying to do this in Iraq and Lebanon, but it’s failing there too. People are starting to catch onto this shit.

This is how these fake color revolutions work. The color revolutions tend to be more of the peaceful type of coups, but they often turn violent too. The whole ball of wax is called hybrid warfare.

What about the Oil?

There are now reports that Guyana has the 10th largest world reserves of oil. However, the area under discussion is in off the coast on the border of Guyana and Venezuela and is in dispute between the two countries.

Also Guyana recently extended its territorial waters 150 miles off shore. They did this illegally because it could only be done if there were territorial disputes. Guyana lied and said they had no such disputes. Actually they had one with Venezuela, so their 150 mile extension is null.

However, they explored out there anyway, and Exxon found this very large deposit that is the subject of the discussion around Guyana having oil reserves. However, ownership of this deposit is the subject of dispute, as noted. That case has now gone to the World Court. I don’t really know who has a better claim to the area, but they have been fighting over it since 1963.

Why don’t they just split it fifty-fifty and call it a done deal? For some reasons, countries never do this. Why are all geopolitical disputes based on a zero-sum game? Is it that it is simply human nature to boil every dispute among humans down to a zero-sum game. I mean that’s how lower mammals do it. You ever see lower mammals sitting down and hammering out peace treaties? Ok then.

Guyana signed a deal with Exxon for the development of this deposit. This deal is far too generous to Exxon, and Guyana will lose $55 billion over time as a result of this deal. Guyana is getting massively screwed over by this deal but the “left social democratic” party and the “Marxist-Leninist” party are apparently both on board with this nation-selling treason.

It really makes you wonder what it means anymore when a party says it’s leftwing, social democratic, or, Hell, even communist? Do those terms even mean a damn thing anymore in this world of neoliberalism uber alles?

But at the end of the day, the question remains:  Does Guyana even have oil in the first place? I mean forget the world’s tenth largest reserves? I want to know if they even have one barrel. The answer is: well, maybe.

Jews and Communism Redux

Polar Bear: What little Communist literature I’ve read seemed very pro-German, Ehrenberg?

I don’t understand. Ilya Ehrenberg was one of the most anti-German people who ever lived.

However, after the war, the USSR had excellent relations with East Germany. Communism was quite popular in East Germany, and nostalgia for the GDR is still a big thing there. A lot of people reminisce about the old days and are not happy with the new capitalism. A lot of West German Leftists left and moved to East Germany after the war. Incredible, isn’t it? People actually moving to a Communist country.

Of course Marx was extremely pro-German. He was a German man after all. Marx didn’t really consider himself to be a Jew. Neither did Trotsky. That’s just bullshit made up by anti-Communist antisemites, which is like 9

Polar Bear: No, I believe it was Engels. He was also very soft on Jews.

Ha ha ever read The Jewish Question by Marx (1843)? It’s hard to read but a lot of super-Jews really hate the paper. They think it’s antisemitic. I don’t think it really is. It’s anti-Jewish religion. He says there is no Jewish religion – all the religion is is capitalism and love of money ha ha. Good times, good times! Marx didn’t like Christianity either. He didn’t like any religion. I don’t think he disliked Jews ethnically. After all he was Jewish himself. Marx’s father was a rabbi!

Polar Bear: Maybe the great unifier early on was Jews.

There were not that many Communists from Marx’s death until the Russian revolution. The early pre-Soviet Communists were not particularly Jewish. Stalin was a bank robber. Lenin spent most of his time abroad in Germany. They were all wanted men.

Yes, there were a lot of Jews among the early Bolsheviks, but in 1917, 7

Hardly anyone wanted the old Royalists back. There were definitely pro-royalists all right though. Those were the Whites in the Russian Civil War. But they lost. Even the Russian Army and especially the Intelligence Services all went over to the Reds.

And the Whites killed a lot of Jews during the Civil War. The Reds probably hardly killed any. Even in the USSR, yes, Jews were prominent in some fields. The NKVD ended up being very Jewish in the 1930’s, but it was run by a Georgian named Beria.

Old Soviets said that ethnicity never mattered in the USSR. You were not supposed to care or talk about things like that. A lot of Jews just drifted into that position at that time for whatever reason. A lot of Russian Jews really hated the Czar, so quite a few of them took to Communism well. But the majority of the people in the USSR supported the Communists. How do you think they won the war?

And there were just as many Latvians as Jews among the early Bolsheviks. Does anyone  talk about evil Bolshevik Latvians? Of course not. It’s like the old adage: Maybe one out of ten Jews is a radical, but five out of ten radicals are Jews. Get it?

Polar Bear: Seems like a lot the men that married Jews ended up hating them.

I don’t know about that. I had a Jewish girlfriend for 5 1/2 years. She was kind of a bitch and she sort of talked down to me and yelled at me a lot to the point that even other women were complaining about how she treated me.

But she adored me and she was a real “stand by your man” and “live your life through your man” type. Almost like a Filipina or Thai woman in that sense. I never expected Jewish women to be like that maybe a lot of them are. They also have a reputation for being nurturing.

As an aside, there are a lot more “stand by your man” and “live your life through your man” types than you think. It’s fairly normal if she’s crazy in love with you. Maybe it helps to be goodlooking too, no idea.

The people who don’t like Jewish women are Jewish men ha ha. I’m not sure if Gentile men even care that much. There’s sort of a war going on between Jewish men and women, sort of like the war between Black men and women.

And I don’t know if it was a factor in Marr’s case.

I think Marr is hilarious. Guy married three different Jewish women, divorces all of them and then forms the Anti-Semitic League, the first openly anti-Jewish organization in modern history. Ha ha! I have no idea what effect his wives had on him. Maybe none. But it is pretty funny just to tell the story because it seems like his Jewish wives drove him so insane that he founded the first modern anti-Jewish organization.

Lulz all around!

Alt Left: None of Us Are Dindus: Ronald Biggs and the Sex Pistols, “No One Is Innocent”

I was thinking about Mithridates’ response to the Chmielnicki thread, which tragically implied that most if not all of the Jews killed in the peasant revolts of Eastern Europe pretty much had it coming for acting as tax farmers for the nobles and hence perfectly appropriate targets for an peasant revolt against feudalism. Sure, leave the Jewish women, kids, and old men out of it – except who ever does that in a war, especially 350 years go.

Anyway this made me feel very bad. Those Jews were killed in terrible ways and all my life I’ve been told that the Jews of Europe were dindus who dindu nuffin and just got picked on by mean Gentile antisemite Nazis. Turns out a lot of them asked for their own brutal fate. But that doesn’t make me happy. It makes me so sad. I don’t know but it just does.

And the first thing I thought is fuck this dindu crap. Fuck this we dindu nuffin shit.

What I mean by screw this dindu crap is: Goddamn it, none of us are dindus! You know how many of us dindu nuffins! Zero fucking percent, that’s how many!

Which reminds me of a song by the Sex Pistols. A man named Ronald Biggs helped participate in the Great Train Robbery in the UK in 1964. He hightailed it to Brazil. Brazil has no extradition treaty with the UK, so he’s been living it up down there laughing at the world and giving us all the finger the whole time. Well, good on him. I might do the same.

The Great Train Robbery? They stole lots and lots of money, so good on them. They became something of these Robin Hood type folk criminals, though if you research the case, they’re just dirty psychopaths and criminal scums as you might expect.

And though I wanted to love the romantic story myself because I’m kind of an asshole who hates all authority figures, when I read about it, I thought again. A man defending the money stash on the train was not killed, but he was very badly hurt. Maybe for a long time. Well, screw that. I’m not going to cheer on the Great Train Robbery anymore, thank you very much.

Also I read up on Biggs’ life down in Brazil, and of course, being a psychopath, he lived the typical life of a total psychopath down there in Brazil. Duh. And keep in mind this is Brazil, where psychopathy is virtually normal. He acted real bad down there, got into constant trouble, and was basically a huge dick. Which logically follows of course from him being a psychopath. Because, you know, psychopaths gotta psycho. It’s what they do.

Well, the Sex Pistols, after the first album, decided, just to be total assholes, which we already knew they were anyway, to go down to Brazil and record a song with Ronald Biggs. Biggs recorded a song with them called “No One Is Innocent.” Which is the fitting coda to this silly blog post in which I point out that none of us are dindus, even though we all think we are:

Fuck it, man! No one is innocent! We’re all guilty, dammit!

Which is awful damn Christian, now that you think about it, no?

God save the sex pistols they’re a bunch of wholesome blokes They just like wearing filthy clothes and swapping filthy jokes God save television keep the programs pure God save William Grundy from falling in manure

Ronnie Biggs was doing time until he done a bunk Now he says he’s seen the light and he sold his soul to punk

God save Martin Boorman and Nazis on the run They wasn’t being wicked God that was their idea of fun God save Myra Hindley God save Ian Brady Even though he’s horrible and she ain’t what you call a lady

Ronnie Biggs was doing time until he done a bunk Now he says he’s seen the light and he sold his soul to punk Ronnie Biggs was doing time until he done a bunk Now he says he’s seen the light and he sold his soul to punk

God save politicians God save our friends the pigs God save Idi Amin and god save Ronald Biggs God save all us sinners God save your blackest sheep God save the good Samaritan and God save the worthless creep

Ronnie Biggs was doing time until he done a bunk Now he says he’s seen the light and he sold his soul to punk Ronnie Biggs was doing time until he done a bunk Now he says he’s seen the light and he sold his soul to punk Sold his soul Sold his soul Sold his soul to punk

Jews As Tax-Farmers for the Royals and Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

From my comments on the Chmielnicki Rebellion:

RL: These impoverished Jews: Were they working as tax farmers and moneylenders for the Lords, or were only the rich Jews doing that? If they were not working as tax farmers and moneylenders, how were these poor Jews supporting themselves?

If they ended up targeting only poor Jews in the Chmielnicki rebellion (which I’m not sure was the case, as half the Jews in Poland were killed), weren’t these poor Jews a bit at fault for not joining the peasant rebellion?

Remember that Chmielnicki the horrible evil Nazi antisemite from Hell had actually called upon the Jews of Poland to come join him in his battle against the nobles. And all the Jews, rich and poor, blew him off. So basically they sided with the nobles, both rich and poor Jews did. Doesn’t seem very smart of them.

I think the problem with Jewish moneylenders was that it was pretty common for serfs to get totally underwater with their debts for obvious reasons, and the Jews were quite vicious about trying to get their money back. And when you can’t pay back your loans, you might get pretty angry at the guy who loaned the money who won’t get off your case now.

In response, Mithridates, one of my favorite commenters, responds:

Mithridates: I need to brush up more on my history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which at its greatest extent was quite massive in size and included much of Eastern Europe west of the steppes.

Re: the tax-farming bit, I imagine it was hierarchical, as in the rich Jews being the ones arranging the sweet deals in the noble’s castles, the less rich Jews serving as middle managers for the operation, and then the poor Jews being the ground-level lackeys who interfaced directly with (i.e. harassed and scammed) the lowly Slav peasant schleps, i.e. sold the them vodka and all sorts of misc. schlock and did whatever else they could to wring some extra kopeks out of them.

Oy vey, what a miserable situation indeed.

In the case of peasant revolts, I think the boss Jews knew where their bread was buttered. And toward the waning days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, things got real fun and dicey with the various Cossack revolts (which the rapidly-expanding Russian Empire probably lent a lot of covert support to).

Them Cossacks sure hated Jews and enjoyed killing them in batches, though funnily enough a few of the Cossack leaders might have been half-Jewish. Those were some wild times out on the fringes of civilization.

Dammit, Jews! Why do you always have to keep acting bad! Here I am, trying to be nice and condemn these horrible pogroms and be a good Judeophile, and then I learn that the Jews back then acted so terrible that a lot of them out and out deserved their fate. Damn! Here I am, trying not to be an antisemite, and you darn Jews keep trying to stop me and force me back to the dark side. What am I ever going to do about you folks?

Sigh.

So all the Jews in the peasant rebellions pretty much asked for it, as they were all tax-farming for the nobles. Well in case any were not, they should have been spared. And the Jewish women, kids, and old men should have been spared. And they should have killed the tax-farmer Jews cleanly. Line em up and shoot em. They had muskets then, right? I’m quite sure instead that they chopped them to pieces and all sorts of other horrible stuff.

On the other hand, it’s pretty hard to morally police a peasant rebellion.

Alt Left: Revolution (and Peasant Rebellion) Is Not a Picnic

Peasant rebellions have been going on forever and took place even during the Inca Empire! They probably took place before then but we don’t have good records.

The self-soothing notion of reactionaries that now that history is over (Yeah right.), peasant rebellions have ended for all of time because Communism is supposedly on the ash heap of history is ridiculous. These are like guys who are smugly smiling before a smiling squad thinking all the guns have blanks. I don’t think so!

Newsflash to reactionaries: Peasant rebellions took place long before Karl Marx even existed. Peasant rebellions are a natural feature of civilized man. You simply can’t get away with treating other humans like shit.

Reactionaries like to laugh and say now we can get away with treating the hoi-polloi as horribly as we wish, I suppose even denying us even food to eat, and we peons can’t do a thing about it because Karl Marx is buried for all of time. These arrogant pricks don’t get it.

#1 rule of human civilization: You really can’t get away with treating other humans like shit. A few rich people can’t get away with lording it over everyone else, stealing every nickel, and leaving the vast majority without a pot to piss in while the rich laugh all the way to the bank. Sorry. Homey don’t play that.

Corollary to the #1 rule: You hit a man enough times, and he might just start hitting back. I mean, most 5th graders can figure that out, but reactionaries think rules like that are like 2 = 2 = 5. They laugh at them.

Bad idea.

Here’s what happens in a typical peasant rebellion: The poor, oppressed, enslaved, helots, serfs, or whoever finally have enough of their oppression at the hands of elites, slaveowners, royals, lords, priests, citizens or whoever is fucking them over and they rise up against their brutal oppressors.

The problem is that peasants are usually so pissed off in these rebellions are none too smart, quite ill-educated, and they don’t bother with niceties.

The end result of a peasant rebellion is that the peasants try to kill every single one of their oppressors. In the Desallines Rebellion in Haiti, the Blacks rose up and killed every single White person in Haiti. All 25,000 of them. They didn’t spare a soul. This is a typical peasant revolt.

In the 20th Century, most peasant revolts were called “Communist revolutions.” Everyone acted like it was some new thing or some bizarre form of evil, but it was just the same old peasant rebellions, now with a newfangled theory behind them.

And logically, the Communist revolutions of the 20th Century tended to be quite bloody. The first thing they did was a land reform, and ion a number of cases, the landlords were simply killed. That’s how it went down in North Vietnam and China anyway. 10,000 were killed in North Vietnam.  They may have killed 3 million in China. Probably every single one of the Chinese ones was a horrible criminal, so they all deserved it, but still.

It was actually the local peasants who put these landlords on trial. The Communists simply captured the landlords and gave them to the peasants and said, “Here, you guys try ’em and convict them of whatever punishment you deem fit.”

Well, in most cases, the peasants voted to execute these bastards. The local Communist Party cadres were alarmed at the brutality of the peasants, and they reported this to their supervisors. So many landlords were getting killed that word came back around to Mao, (a diabolical, mass murdering monster, remember) who actually freaked out and thought things were getting out of hand. He put a stop to these killings. 300,000-3 million landlords were killed.

But remember what Chairman Mao said?

Revolution is not a picnic.

– Chairman Mao.

Differential Treatment of Captured Enemy Fighters by States and Guerrillas in Recent Wars

Jason: Don’t rightwing governments in Latin America do the same to rebels?

RL: They often execute them after they capture them, correct. Not always but there have been quite a few cases. El Salvador and Guatemala were two of the worst.

Jason: Honestly, both sides do. That’s just the way Civil War is done.

The rebels in Colombia, Peru, El Salvador, and Guatemala did not execute enemy soldiers that they captured. Neither does Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the PKK or the NPA in the Philippines. It’s mostly states that do that.

The rebels are usually very kind to captured soldiers, even allowing them to go over to their side. Or they release them to the Red Cross. They usually do this as a PR tactic as in look at how brutal this evil government army is, they run death squads and execute captured soldiers. We on the other hand, are complete humanitarians.

However, if the Salvadoran guerrillas captured notorious human rights violators or members of death squads, they would put them on trial and then shoot them.

Well, not always.

In Colombia, the FARC kept them as POW’s. The media called them hostages, but they were really just POW’s. They weren’t treated real great, but they didn’t kill them. Hezbollah and Hamas take them prisoner too, to use in exchanges for imprisoned rebels. The Colombian rebels used their POW’s for the same thing.

Capturing them live and keeping them alive, they are often worth their weight in gold because you can trade one captive Israeli for 1,000 Palestinians in prison. But with Hamas and the FARC, if the government tries to rescue the POW’s, the rebels shoot them.

The Syrian rebels tend to shoot their captives. The Iraqi guerrillas did too. The Iraqis also shot a few captured US soldiers. The Taliban shoot captured government soldiers too. ISIS always shoots their captured soldiers.

In Colombia and Peru, the governments tended to arrest and imprison captured rebels.

Saudi Arabia tended to capture guerrillas, arrest them, re-educate them, and release them. The Syrian government often arrests captured rebels, but it sometimes shoots them too. And the Syrians often kill them after they arrest them. Kurds in Syria and Iran tended to take rebels prisoner, even ISIS guerrillas!

During their civil war last decade, Egypt captured 1,500 guerrillas. They would take them out to the Egyptian desert and tie them to a chair with no food or water. As you can guess, that’s a quick death sentence. Jordan captures guerrillas alive but often badly tortures them.

Iran executes any rebels that it captures. I think Turkey arrests and jails captured PKK people. Early in the Chechen War, the guerrillas used to take Russian soldiers captive. Both sides captured fighters alive in the war in the Donbass in Ukraine. However there were some executions of prisoners by one Ukrainian formation. The rebels then executed any officers they captured from that group of soldiers.

The Indian government tends to shoot any rebels they capture. The Pakistani government sometimes shoots captured guerrillas. I saw a video where they shot dead about 20 of them. It was pretty sickening.

US forces in Iraq and Syria almost always took prisoners, but there were a few cases of execution of captured guerrillas, particularly ISIS captives. Trump just pardoned a Special Forces soldier accused of that, and that guy wasn’t the only one. Special Forces troops are bad when it comes to that, the worst in the US military.

They set up these things called “encounters.” They arrest the rebel, and then they shoot him and put a gun in his hand and say it was a shootout.

I don’t have any information on how governments treat captured guerrillas in Afghanistan, South Sudan, Somalia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Congo, Republic of Congo, Kenya, Tunisia, Libya, or Lebanon.

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