An Evaluation of the Nepalese Maoists

Repost from the old site.

The news has been pretty confusing for a long time coming out of Nepal. The Nepalese Maoists laid down their guns and gave up armed struggle for a variety of reasons, after a brutal civil war in which 13,000 people were killed, 10,000 of them by the security forces.

The Maoists decided to try to seek power by peaceful means. They seem to have won 4

One of the first things this new government did was to get rid of the Nepalese monarchy. The next agenda was to call for a Constituent Assembly, apparently in order to rewrite the Constitution. This was their program toward the end of the war – an end to monarchy, a constituent assembly, a true multiparty democracy with the right to dissent.

They were since thrown out of power by what boiled down to a military coup. They quit the government in disgust after that, and have since been trying to bring down the coup government that sprung up in their place, with no success. Incredibly enough, one of the parties that participated in the coup is a Marxist-Leninist Communist party which has completely sold out and is now pushing neoliberalism, alliance with US imperialism and an alliance with India, which has always had neocolonial designs on Nepal.

I’ve been reading quite a few interview with these guys, especially with their leader, Prachandra. He has taken the position that Marxists need to toss out Stalin, Lenin and even Mao, or at least not follow them to the letter. He says that they all had some good ideas too, but Marxism has moved beyond them. In particular, he takes the fascinating position that modern Marxists should support full democracy.

His argument is that in Nepal, the Maoists’ program will be so popular that they hope to get re-elected over and over. It is true that this party has managed to get huge support on the ground. He also says that socialism has to be completely democratic, with civil liberties for all.

One of Prachandra’s arguments is that with the world in such a death grip of imperialism these days, Communists have to adjust themselves to that reality and try to make some sort of peace with imperialism, at least in order to survive.

This has caused quite a rift in the International Communist Movement. Most non-Maoists haven’t had much to say about it, but the debate in Maoist circles has never quit. There are supporters of the CPN-M and opponents of them.

The opponents take the line that the CPN-M should not take part in parliamentary politics (“parliamentary cretinism”, according to Lenin) and instead should have a dictatorship of the proletariat and a people’s republic. Prachandra seems to take the position that the dictatorship of the proletariat is through.

If it really is over, we can say goodbye to some of the harshest criticism of Communists for being cruel and wicked dictators who denied basic civil liberties and deliberately killed millions of people. I feel this is an albatross off the neck of the movement. Capitalism does such a great job of killing people as it is. Why should Communists be killing anyone once they get into power. Leave the killing to the capitalists. They do it so well.

The CPN-M seems now to have split into two lines – a hardline faction wanting to go straight to a people’s republic (And dictatorship of the proletariat?) and the more moderate faction surrounding Prachandra and his followers.

Prachandra has made some disturbingly pro-imperialist statements, including saying he wanted to work with the World Bank and the IMF. But maybe in today’s Nepal, if you blow off the World Bank and the IMF, you are screwed.

The people around Prachandra also want a positive relationship with China, and have taken tours to China to see Chinese socialism (or socialism with Chinese characteristics) in action.

The hardline Maoist position that China has reverted to capitalism is not correct. Chinese villagers still live much better than Nepalese villagers, and the differences are in large part due to the achievements of Chinese socialism. The countryside still retains a cooperativist and collectivist nature, and in general, private ownership of farmland is not yet allowed, although this may be about to change.

This article from a couple of years ago shows us just how much the Maoists have achieved in Nepal in the course of their revolution.

At the time, CPNM controlled 8

In an extremely sexist nation, the Maoist army had a very large number of female fighters – 4

Prior to the revolution, land could not support the people, but due to the changes instituted by the Maoists, now it does. Previously, men had to migrate to other areas to work at day labor to survive.

The party has placed solar panels in many villages to wire them up for electricity, and has set up seven party radio stations that broadcast in different languages. Language rights is one thing that Communists have generally pushed better than most groups.

Nepali is the language of the feudal upper class (yes, Nepal still has a feudal to semi-feudal land tenure system) and languages other than Nepali are banned in Nepal for official purposes such as education. The Maoists have instituted mother tongue education and literacy classes. Literacy figures in Nepal are horrible – below 5

The Maoists have re-evaluated the many long-held Marxist tenets and are calling for a radical re-evaluation in Marxist thinking. Here’s hoping they succeed.

Some Interesting Zionist Propaganda

I cut out some of the more egregious and nonsensical Zionist propaganda here. You have to admit there is a lot of truth is this bit of Zionist propaganda. I don’t like Zionism one bit. It’s a ridiculous settler-colonial project that the civilized world has given up on 100 years ago. The main problem is that the Arabs and Muslims, while obviously the victims of this settler-colonial aggression, often act like such shits that it’s hard to side with them over the Zionists. You really ought to seize the moral high ground in a war.

The mass movement of Muslims into Europe has been a catastrophe all around. Europe needs to start limiting the number of Muslims moving there, imposing some restrictions on them, demanding that they assimilate before being given citizenship, etc. There are all sorts of things that could be done. Main thing is to quit making it worse. If you’re in a hole, quit digging. Many Muslims in Europe seem to be refusing to assimilate to modern Western Europe. This is unacceptable. Immigrants must assimilate.

Furthermore, in general, Europe’s Muslims appear reactionary in the sense that they reject modernism in Europe and wish to turn back the clock. This is unacceptable. Europe is part of the modern, Judeo-Christian secular Western project. Islam seems to reject this project in its entirety. That’s not a problem if they want to sit over in their sandboxes and reject modernism, but if they need to Europe, they need to embrace modernism, grin and bear it and shut up about it, or take off back to their sandboxes.

A lot Left Anti-Zionists are actually anti-Semites. They support Islam in Europe and elsewhere because it’s the front line in the war against the Jews, oh, I’m sorry, I mean the Zionists. This is ridiculous. Talk to the Arabs and Muslim Left about how progressive Islamists are.

A lot of White nationalists are behind the Islamists too for the same reason. They’re the leading edge of the anti-Jewish, I mean anti-Zionist (!) resistance battalions. Nonsense. How would these White nationalists like it if huge numbers of these wonderful Muslims moved in next door to them. Mass Muslim immigration has not proven beneficial to Western White states.

The Nobel Prizes list is most interesting. I so want to be a Jew! Otto Weinberger must have been wrong. It’s not true at all that Jews lack the capacity for genius. That’s ridiculous. I don’t know what was wrong with Weinberger, maybe he was just another self-hating Jew. He wouldn’t have been the first.

All European Life Died at Auschwitz

By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez

I walked down the street in Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a terrible truth – Europe died in Auschwitz….We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world.

The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.

And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance and lastly, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.

They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the Third World, drowning in filth and crime.

Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts.

And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.

We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, a people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.

Nobel Prizes, Jewish and Muslim

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1.2 billion or 2

Literature: 1988 – Najib Mahfouz

Peace: 1978 – Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat 1990 – Elias James Corey 1994 – Yaser Arafat 1999 – Ahmed Zewai

Economics: (zero)

Physics: (zero)

Medicine: 1960 – Peter Brian Medawar 1998 – Ferid Mourad

TOTAL: 7

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is 14 million or about 0.

Literature: 1910 – Paul Heyse 1927 – Henri Bergson 1958 – Boris Pasternak 1966 – Shmuel Yosef Agnon 1966 – Nelly Sachs 1976 – Saul Bellow 1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer 1981 – Elias Canetti 1987 – Joseph Brodsky 1991 – Nadine Gordimer World

Peace: 1911 – Alfred Fried 1911 – Tobias Michael Carel Asser 1968 – Rene Cassin 1973 – Henry Kissinger 1978 – Menachem Begin 1986 – Elie Wiesel 1994 – Shimon Peres 1994 – Yitzhak Rabin

Physics: 1905 – Adolph Von Baeyer 1906 – Henri Moissan 1907 – Albert Abraham Michelson 1908 – Gabriel Lippmann 1910 – Otto Wallach 1915 – Richard Willstaetter 1918 – Fritz Haber 1921 – Albert Einstein 1922 – Niels Bohr 1925 – James Franck 1925 – Gustav Hertz 1943 – Gustav Stern 1943 – George Charles de Hevesy 1944 – Isidor Issac Rabi 1952 – Felix Bloch 1954 – Max Born 1958 – Igor Tamm 1959 – Emilio Segre 1960 – Donald A. Glaser 1961 – Robert Hofstadter 1961 – Melvin Calvin 1962 – Lev Davidovich Landau 1962 – Max Ferdinand Perutz 1965 – Richard Phillips Feynman 1965 – Julian Schwinger 1969 – Murray Gellmann 1971 – Dennis Gabor 1972 – William Howard Stein 1973 – Brian David Josephson 1975 – Benjamin Mottleson 1976 – Burton Richter 1977 – Ilya Prigogine 1978 – Arno Allan Penzias 1978 – Peter L Kapitza 1979 – Stephen Weinberg 1979 – Sheldon Glashow 1979 – Herbert Charles Brown 1980 – Paul Berg 1980 – Walter Gilbert 1981 – Roald Hoffmann 1982 – Aaron Klug 1985 – Albert A. Hauptman 1985 – Jerome Karle 1986 – Dudley R. Herschbach 1988 – Robert Huber 1988 – Leon Lederman 1988 – Melvin Schwartz 1988 – Jack Steinberger 1989 – Sidney Altman 1990 – Jerome Friedman 1992 – Rudolph Marc us 1995 – Martin Perl 2000 – Alan J. Heeger

Economics: 1970 – Paul Anthony Samuelson 1971 – Simon Kuznets 1972 – Kenneth Joseph Arrow 1975 – Leonid Kantorovich 1976 – Milton Friedman 1978 – Herbert A. Simon 1980 – Lawrence Robert Klein 1985 – Franco Modigliani 1987 – Robert M. Solow 1990 – Harry Markowitz 1990 – Merton Miller 1992 – Gary Becker 1993 – Robert Fogel

Medicine: 1908 – Elie Metchnikoff 1908 – Paul Erlich 1914 – Robert Barany 1922 – Otto Meyerhof 1930 – Karl Landsteiner 1931 – Otto Warburg 1936 – Otto Loewi 1944 – Joseph Erlanger 1944 – Herbert Spencer Gasser 1945 – Ernst Boris Chain 1946 – Hermann Joseph Muller 1950 – Tadeus Reichstein 1952 – Selman Abraham Waksman 1953 – Hans Krebs 1953 – Fritz Albert Lipmann 1958 – Joshua Lederberg 1959 – Arthur Kornberg 1964 – Konrad Bloch 1965 – Francois Jacob 1965 – Andre Lwoff 1967 – George Wald 1968 – Marshall W. Nirenberg 1969 – Salvador Luria 1970 – Julius Axelrod 1970 – Sir Bernard Katz 1972 – Gerald Maurice Edelman 1975 – Howard Martin Temin 1976 – Baruch S. Blumberg 1977 – Roselyn Sussman Yalow 1978 – Daniel Nathans 1980 – Baruj Ben Acerraf 1984 – Cesar Milstein 1985 – Michael Stuart Brown 1985 – Joseph L. Goldstein 1986 – Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini] 1988 – Gertrude Elion 1989 – Harold Varmus 1991 – Erwin Neher 1991 – Bert Sakmann 1993 – Richard J. Roberts 1993 – Phillip Sharp 1994 – Alfred Gilman 1995 – Edward B. Lewis 1996 – Lu Rose Iacovino

TOTAL: 129!

Jews Versus Muslims

The Jews are not brainwashing children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non Muslims. The Jews don’t hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, or blow themselves up in German restaurants. There is not one single Jew who has destroyed a church. There is not a single Jew who protests by killing people.

The Jews don’t traffic slaves, nor do they have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels. Perhaps the world’s Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems. Muslims must ask what can they do for humankind before they demand that humankind respect them.

General Eisenhower Warned Us

It is a matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps, he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead.

He did this because he said in words to this effect:

Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses -because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.

Recently, the UK debated whether to remove the Holocaust from its school curriculum because it ‘offends’ the Muslim population which claims it never occurred. It is not removed as yet. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.

It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the 6 million Jews, 27 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, raped, burned, starved, beaten, experimented on and humiliated while the German people looked the other way.

Now, more than ever, with Iran, among others, claiming the Holocaust to be a myth, it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.

How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center never happened because it offends some Muslim in the United States?

Transcript of My Latest Interview July 7, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it Godfrey Feder?

No.

He was their economist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There weren’t any Gentile capitalists who financed Communism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are no moderate pro-White movements!

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

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

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

Break

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

Isn’t he a Jew though?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s correct, exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But they are occupying another people’s land.

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

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

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

The Military-Industrial Complex.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

But you support rational criticism of the Jews.

Right.

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

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

The only people who think Jews are important are:

1. Jews. 2. Anti-Semites.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you think that is for racial purity reasons?

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

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

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

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

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

Has that happened in Europe at all?

In the UK, about 1

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

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

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

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

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

Yes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some people think that those traits are genetic.

Yes! I don’t agree with that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

India Has No Right to Exist

In the India Is a Shithole piece, James Schipper suggests that India has been free of significant civil strife:

Another thing for which India deserves credit is that, despite being one of the most multinational states in the world, it has managed to avoid serious internal conflicts. In terms of national composition, India should not be compared with the US but with Europe, which is of course divided in about 40 different states.

This is not true. Kashmir has been on fire since 1968 or so. There are now 500,000 troops locking the place down, and every day, another young Kashmiri or two at least is killed.

India was born in blood and sin, like the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Israel and various settler-colonial states.

The difference is that the Indian state, incredibly, attacked her very own people from the start of the Indian state enterprise, and has been at war with them ever since. In this sense, India is an utterly failed state like Myanmar or Indonesia, two other former colonial states who have been battling insurgencies from the start from parts of the former colony who never wanted to join the new state.

India has about as much right to exist in its current form as Myanmar does. India is a failed state. It’s has failed to properly rule or provide for its people, and tens of millions of its citizens never consented to join the new state in the first place, but were dragged in kicking and screaming amidst slaughters.

Parents who can’t raise their children get their kids taken away. India’s children are its nations and peoples, whom it can’t and won’t care for because its ruling class is negligent and doesn’t care, like a crack-addicted Mom. Hence, India has no right to rule the peoples of the Northeast, Kashmir and Punjab and the Indian state in its current form should be dissolved as surely as Israel should be.

The Northeast has been in rebellion, often armed rebellion, nearly from Day One. There have been scores of armed groups fighting the state in that region, and many are still active. Bottom line is that India has no right to rule the Northeast, and as India is a cesspool anyway, why should the NE people be forced to live in a sewer? Let them secede and negotiate their way to modernity.

There is now a huge Maoist rebellion going on the East. There are easily 100,000 Maoists, and they have millions of supporters.

There was a huge rebellion in the Punjab a while back. It’s over, but it was nasty.

There is a continuous low level conflict going on with India’s Muslims, who regularly set off horrible bomb attacks on India’s Hindu cities. The Hindus are now responding by bombing India’s Muslim cities. Further, there have been many cases of inter-religious violence, mostly pogroms of Muslims by India’s Hindus and sometime riots by put-upon Indian Muslims. These pogroms started with the birth of the Indian state and the splitting of Pakistan, and to be honest, have never stopped.

In addition, there have been hundreds of killings of Christians in the East by Hindus, including burnings of churches and entire towns, pogroms, etc. This is ongoing as I write this.

Alt Left: India Is a Shithole*

This article sums up what modern India is all about, written by a fairly progressive fellow named Sean Kelley. I’ve been studying India for a while now, and the more I study it, the angrier I get. India, quite simply, sucks. Sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks and then sucks some more. I don’t know how long this suckiness has been going on, maybe forever. When the British first showed up, they were appalled. They tried to civilize the place, but the small-c conservative Indians kept objecting to getting civilized.

What sucks? India sucks. What about it sucks?

First of all, the state.

The Indian state has sucked from Day One, birthed in blood-soaked imperial and neo-colonial sin like America, Australia and Israel, with even less of an excuse as a long-abused colony themselves. Now, via alliances with imperialist America, the UK and Israel, India seems to be aping the worst aspects of its former imperialist and colonialist master. Like a crime victim going on a killing spree. Of all the ways to react.

The lousy nature of the Indian state is of course rooted in Indian society, as all states are rooted in the cultural formations of their societies. The Indian state sucks because Indian society sucks.

Why does Indian society suck? It’s hard to sum it up. First of all, you have one of the most callous and uncaring ruling classes, with the usual upper middle class allies, found on Earth.

Missing the good old days? Go to India. Nostalgic for debt slavery and bondage, feudalism (the real deal, not the semi-feudal modern kind), slavery (child and adult), child labor, shit in the streets like the Middle Ages Europe pre-Black Plague? Go to India. It’s all there in spades.

Even more appalling is that no one in India gives a damn. The bourgeois either live in denial or could care less if the lower classes live, die, or flop, gasping, somewhere in between.

The poor are too stupid and/or ignorant to know better, and many think that their savage and inhuman abuse, like something out of 1400’s England, is actually religiously ordained by God Himself. Sure, the bourgeois sold the poor this rope to hang themselves with or gave it to them, but they wrapped it up all up in one of the most barbaric cultural-religious systems known to modern Man, Hinduism, to give it the staying power of superglue.

The article makes clear that neoliberalism has ruined India beyond its prior Hellishness. Which is possible, since you don’t need to read Milton to learn that Hell can always get worse.

The pollution and the filth.

The pollution and filth is destroying India and turning it into an actual open cesspool/sewage ditch/garbage dump. One that traverses the whole country. It’s not only nauseous to breathe or look at the filth that surrounds you without respite, but it’s actually literally sickening. A visit to India means a continuous low-level infectious illness from all the filth drowning out your world.

Worse, Indians don’t care. See that guy shitting on the sidewalk? Pay no attention to him. OK, he’s getting up and walking away now. No problem, just don’t step it. The rich pay the trash collectors to keep their neighborhoods clean, and the Hell with everyone else. A callousness reminiscent of Anglo-Irish absentee landlords in 1820’s Ireland.

The one good thing about neoliberalism is a decline in bureaucracy. You gut government so there’s not much left. Bureaucracy means too many idle government slackers wasting time and messing around when they should be working. It could also mean an insanely underfunded state, which is probably the case with India.

The government doesn’t give a damn about anything but the rich. The state exists only to suck up to the rich or in its human form to move up classwise and become part of the elite class. The state cares nothing about workers, consumers, the environment – Hell, about anything relating to the people.

Everyone who works for the state is a crook, and they are all on the take. Schools and hospitals in rural areas are empty. Doctors and teachers collect salaries and never show up for work.

Nothing works. The electric grid is down most of the time, but you pay at the end of the month anyway even if you got little or no energy use out of the system that month. The roads are nightmarish, traffic is horrifyingly dangerous, and everything is so congested it makes Los Angeles look like a breezy Sunday drive in the country. The ports don’t work either – they look like something out of 1900. Let’s see, the ports don’t work, the roads don’t work, and bureaucracy stifles everything. How is this neoliberal paradise economy supposed to function anyway?

It’s tough in this neoliberal paradise to even purchase a product. Getting a hotel room is a pain in the rear end. Buying a new SIM card for your cellphone is a nightmare best avoided.

The one thing that everyone raves about in India is the trains. Nearly all Indians will insist that the trains are wonderful. Maybe 5-10 years ago they were, but not anymore. The traffic has maybe tripled since that time, and almost no new cars or lines have been added as you would expect neoliberals to do. The lines are Hellish, and customer service is probably better in Hell itself. Worse, no one cares. Even worse than that, Indians think Indian Train Hell is Paradise itself.

Malnutrition effects 5

The starvation and malnutrition levels are actually worse than in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Kelly echoes this by saying that he’s been in 50 countries the world over, and even Ethiopia was less of a shithole than India. That’s a powerful indictment. To the Africans’ credit, most Africans, despite their IQ’s, will readily admit to you that their country is a shithole. They don’t like it, and they want change. Good for them.

The first part of getting out of a hole is not just to stop digging but to realize that you’re in a nasty hole in the first place and would prefer to climb out rather than digging your way towards China and sure death.

Indians not only won’t stop digging, they think that trying to dig your way to China is some kind of a cultural-religious noble endeavor. Any Samaritans stopping by to toss them a rope or offer a hand are showered with abuse for refusing to acknowledge that the Indian’s deep dug pit is actually the greatest civilization created by man. Predictably, most sane folks throw down the rope, say the Hell with em, and walk on.

The Indian keeps digging as the water fills in around his muddy and beaten feat. Hunger gnaws at his belly. In response to his dim and plunging prospects, he can think of nothing to do but shout, “Glory to Bharat!” while cursing Muslims, Christians and those nasty British. With every breath, the water’s creeping higher.

You wonder why I support the Indian Maoists. Of all of the people in India, only the Maoists seem to have a bat’s chance in Hell of negotiating some kind of a future lessening of the mess above. Everyone else is cheerily on board for stasis or worsening.

*About the title, I would like to sincerely apologize to all of the actual shitholes in the world. They were just poor innocent holes, sitting there in the ground minding their own business until some mean person came along and filled them up with shit.

I am truly sorry, shitholes, I didn’t mean to compare you with India.

The End of the Mahdi Rebellion

General Gordon Brown, Governor of Sudan, dies on the steps of his palace at the hands of the Mahdi Army.

The year is 1885. It is winter, January 25th. The Mahdi Rebellion against the Egyptians, and really, the British, is over. General Charles Gordon, governor of Sudan, had only arrived a year prior. He died on the steps of his palace, fighting off the Mahdi warriors alongside his assistant, both firing pistols at the encroaching jihadis. His assistant was knocked unconscious.

When he came to, Gordon was dead, and his head had been cut off. When the head was placed at the Mahdi’s feet, he ordered it placed on a tree branch, where people would mock it as they walked by, children would throw stones at it, and hawks would circle it above.

The Mahdi Rebellion was one of the major Muslim jihads of the modern era. The Mahdi was a Sudanese Muslim who declared that he was the “Mahdi” or messianic redeemer of Islam. The Mahdi Army in Iraq is a recent reincarnation.

It was really an anti-Western jihad and an anti-colonial rebellion, as the British were controlling Egypt. The Sudanese Muslims actually defeated the British here, though the assembled army was not the actual British army, but more a collection of laggards, incompetents and mercenaries – 7,000 Egyptian soldiers. “Perhaps the worst army that has ever marched to war,” Churchill called them.

Gordon has several million rounds of ammo, artillery, cannons, thousands of men, but it fared him little well against the surging Mahdi warriors besieging Khartoum. In the winter, the Blue Nile receded, leaving muddy flats exposing the palace. The city was besieged, and food was running out. The civilians and troops were waylaid by cholera and starvation. After nearly a year of siege, Khartoum fell, and Gordon lay dead.

The Mahdi then ruled Sudan for the next 11 years until the British took it back under the fake cover of an Egyptian claim to the Sudan. This time the real British army invaded the Sudan. The Mahdi fought hard, but they were cut down with machine guns. A fake colonial entity called the Anglo-Egyptian administration administered the frank colony of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan until 1956.

Sudan got its independence in 1956, and the South immediately rejected joining the Sudan, a rejection which would culminate in decades of war. I figure that Sudan has so fucked up the business of running of a state that “Sudan” has no right to exist. Break it up into as many pieces as you wish, I say. Hardly anyone but the Arab Muslim ruling class around Khartoum wants to be part of the shithole called Sudan anyway.

There has to be some way away from this inviolability of borders crap, and it collides with the right to self-determination anyway. States are like parents, and the nations within them are like children. If you can’t manage your kids, they are taken away from you and given to someone who can. If you can’t manage the basic tasks of running a state, your right to run the state should be revoked, and the nations within should have the right to decide their destiny.

Making Sense of Kosovo

Repost from the old site.

Updated March 25, 2008:

Via Joachim Martillo, we have Backgrounder on Kosovo/Kosova.

This is one of Martillo’s pieces that I am going to support in full.

Almost the entire Western Left, and part of the libertarian Right, seems to be opposed to independence for Kosovo. This is a most sorry state of affairs and has a rather shameless history. I am very happy that Martillo has come out in favor in independence for Kosovo, no matter how problematic it may be. I am afraid he did so only because he is a Muslim, but no matter.

A background in the Balkan Wars of the 1990’s is helpful, if not essential, in understanding the declaration of independence by Kosovo.

It is also important to understand where the Workers’ World Party, of which Sarah Flounders is a member, is coming from. I don’t know a lot about them, but this Wikipedia article is a good primer.

WWP is a Trotskyite split dating from 1958. They split from the Socialist Workers Party, a standard Trotskyite group.

Their reasons were: the candidacy of Henry Wallace for President in 1948, support for Mao’s revolution in China and defense of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

The SWP opposed all of these.

Mao is opposed by all Trotskyites, mostly on human rights grounds but also on the usual ultra-Left basis of not being socialist enough. Wallace’s candidacy, a revolutionary candidacy in the US in that an explicitly socialist candidate actually ran for office and got lots of votes, was probably opposed on ultra-Left reasons that he was not a Communist.

The invasion of Hungary would have been opposed on the basis that the USSR was “Stalinist”.

Trotskyites have always had a reputation of not being very pragmatic. In some ways, they are the ultimate splitters.

The WWP retains some Trotskyite leanings in that they are highly critical of Stalin. However, after Stalin died, they supported the USSR. Many Communist parties chose sides after the Soviet-China split, but the WWP continued to call for a union of all socialist countries, no matter what their ideology. In this sense, they are somewhat unique.

They also started supporting all states that were seen as resisting US imperialism. This led to difficult stances such as supporting Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

It is in this context that they opposed the breakup of Milosevic’s Communist Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s and thereafter supported Milosevic on the basis that he was a Communist. In this they reflected the views of most Communists and Leftists the world over – they supported the fascist Milosevic just because he was a Communist.

WWP is also behind International ANSWER Coalition, which led many antiwar marches. Ramsey Clark has unfortunately been associated with this group. I do not think much of the WWP.

Fascism is a nasty virus, and like many viruses, it can grow in most any human being and certainly can unfold in any society. This is what makes it such a dangerous and deadly enemy. In many ways, Russia is now a fascist state. Even Communist Vietnam has fascist tendencies of various types. It can even be argued that break away from Iran and take most of Iran’s oil wealth with them. Iran should not be expected to put up with that. A similar situation exists in Angola with Ahwaz, the Basque Country, Catalonia, Corsica, Brittany, Wales, Scotland, the here and here), Burma (separatists here , here, here, West Papua nor to its rule over Aceh, and its criminal performance in suppressing these rebellions cements those negations.

India never had any right to rule Kashmir and certainly does not now. Palestine at least ought to declare Kosovo-style independence. This blog has always supported the struggle of the Sahrawis in Spanish Sahara. The island of Bougainville deserves support for its separatism from Papua New Guinea.

In Russia, the republics of the Caucasus deserve support in their drive for independence. This includes the Chechens, the Ingush, the Dagestanis, Karachevo-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria. The Tuvans seem to deserve the right to secede also.

The situation of the Mari, Chuvash , Bashkirs , Udmurts and Tatarstan are much more difficult because none of these republics exist on Russia’s borders. States should not be forced to carve out enclaves inside their own borders. All secessionists need to cleave off lands on the borders of existing states or even split existing states. The notion of independent islands wholly surrounded by a single state is preposterous.

In India, the nations of the northeast were never part of India and their secessionist movements should be supported. Nor can India ever be said to have existed at all until 1949, as under the British it was merely a collection of 5,000 separate princely states with ever-shifting borders.

In China, the cause of Taiwan and Tibet is clearly moral and East Turkestan also seems to have a valid cause. Abkhazia and South Ossetia should be allowed to cleave off from Georgia, and they already have anyway, de facto, though Russia is supporting these movements for only the most cynical reasons. The Tamils of Sri Lanka deserve support, despite their terrible tactics.

I have much more of a problem in supporting Islamist separatists in the Philippines and in Thailand. First, their tactics are horrible. In both cases, Islamists, as they always do in wars, are simply massacring non-Muslim civilians in countless numbers.

The Koran provides justification for mass murder of non-Muslims in wartime, so this is typical behavior of most Muslims when they go to war with non-Muslims. The historical antecedents are too painful and numerous to count. Furthermore, the war against the non-Muslims often takes near-genocidal proportions.

There are examples in this century from Indonesia (Muslims massacred animists in West Papua and Christians in slaughtering Christians in the 1840’s-1860’s) and Iraq (more mass murders of Assyrians in Iraq in the mid-1800’s) and the worst of all in India around 500 years ago, when Muslim invaders murdered up to and possibly more than 50 million Hindus in the worst genocide that the world has ever seen. Quoting Will Durant:

The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

This continues a tradition set in the early days of Islam, when invading Muslims often committed massacres of non-Muslims in various places they conquered. Notable examples occurred in Palestine and in Iran. The only conclusion is that when Muslims fight wars with non-Muslims, they are frequently genocidal conflicts, and this genocidalism is sadly sanctioned by language in the Koran itself.

As such, it is difficult to support a bunch of Islamist murderers in the Pattani region of Thailand and in Mindanao in the Philippines. In Mindanao, Muslims are only 2

Hawaii deserves to go free, but the movement has no support except among Hawaiians, about 2

In most cases, like baby birds from the nest, these colonies need to be tossed out on their own. Most are welfare cases anyway that take in far more from the Western state they are umbilically attached to than they donate in services. In other words, to the colonizer, they are a gigantic money drain.

This begs the question then of why these colonies even exist, since the logic of colonialism, which is all about the loot, demands that money-losing colonies be cut adrift. In some cases, there are imperial reasons, in others, there is simply the logic of colonialism. Once a nation becomes a colonist, the power rush is as addicting as crack. It’s a tough habit to break.

Two essential rights are at stake here.

First is the right to self-determination. This has even been ratified by the UN.

The other is a totally phony “right of a state to be secure within its borders”, which was dreamed up by states after World War 2 in their paranoia over national secessionism. This principle has no standing, as state borders have been shifting forever, and many states have only the most dubious standing for drawing their borders wherever they did.

It’s clear that the only progressive stand worth taking is in favor of self-determination. However, we should make exceptions in certain cases as above, and only real nations should have the right to secede. The right to secede should not be granted on economic or purely political grounds (such as the rightwing state of Zulia in Venezuela the rightwing Sarah Flounders’ article below entitled Washington Gets a New Colony in the Balkans is fairly typical of the criticism of the Kosovo declaration of independence.

While the USA does a lot of evil in the world, the breakup of Yugoslavia may at least initially have been a project of the German government, which for historical reasons was much more interested in an independent Slovenia than the USA was.

Neocons like Joshua Muravchik fairly quickly saw a possible opportunity to cultivate a pro-Israel Muslim population (either Slavic or Albanian) in a divided Yugoslavia. Finding such a Muslim population has been a holy grail of Zionism since Herzl created the character of Reshid Bey in Old New Land (Altneuland).

Sorting out the various claims about Kosovo requires awareness of the changing boundaries of the region. Here are two maps of the Ottoman Vilayet of Kosovo:

The first map of the Ottoman vilayet (province) of Kosovo, from 1875-1878. Kosovo is now much reduced in size from this vilayet.

The second map of the vilayet of Kosovo, from 1881-1912, shows shifting boundaries once again. Kosovo today is much smaller than this vilayet.

Claiming that Kosovo is the historical center of Serb culture is somewhat tendentious. The Ottoman Vilayet of Kosovo was larger than present-day Kosovo, and its borders shifted during the 19th and early 20th century.

Territory that had been Ottoman Kosovo is today divided among Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Greece. Kosovo regions that were in some sense the historically important Serb centers have for the most part been incorporated into Serbia, Montenegro or Macedonia. Here is a current map of Kosovo:

A current map of Kosovo, much shrunken from its former vilayet. When Serbs scream about Kosovo, you really need to ask which one they are talking about.

Ethnic Albanian Kosovars could probably legitimately argue that they rebelled from the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 in order to achieve independence or union with Albania, whose independence European Great Powers endorsed in 1913, but the Serbian government opportunistically used to rebellion to expand Serbia at their expense.

The Serb obsession with controlling all of Kosovo results from the development of a nationalist mythology that focuses on the Battle of Kosovo (Косовски бој, Kosova Savasi, Bitka na Kosovu, Beteja e Kosovës, or Schlacht auf dem Amselfeld).

The mythology has little connection to the facts. Lazar’s army (the “Serb” side) included Croats, ethnic Albanians (who were mostly Orthodox at that time period) and probably Bosnians. Murad’s army (the “Turkish” side) included a large contingent of Serbs.

The population composition of Kosovo/Kosova in the 14th century and later is disputed. It was not unusual for a close relative of someone with a Serb name to bear an Albanian name. Later Serb literature refers to Albanized Serb populations, but the description is dubious. Bilingualism was simply common, and the ethnic boundaries that exist today really only came into existence in the 19th century.

The following paragraphs are propagandistic:

Yugoslavia was born with a heritage of antagonisms that had been endlessly exploited by the Ottoman Turks, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and interference by British and French imperialism, followed by Nazi German and Italian Fascist occupation in World War II.

The Jewish and Serbian peoples suffered the greatest losses in that war. A powerful communist-led resistance movement made up of all the nationalities, which had suffered in different ways, was forged against Nazi occupation and all outside intervention. After the liberation, all the nationalities cooperated and compromised in building the new socialist federation.

There simply is not much evidence of Ottoman exploitation of ethnic or religious antagonism either from Ottoman or non-Ottoman sources. The Ottoman rulers generally tried to discourage local Balkan hostilities because they were administratively costly and interfered with tax collection.

The omission of any mention of Czarist Russian imperial interference shows bias.

Terminology like Jewish and Serbian peoples is questionable. Yugoslavia contained Jewish populations of Ashkenazi ethnicity and of Ibero-Berber refugee ethnicity. The term “Jewish people” comes from Zionist propaganda. While there is a Serb ethnicity, there is no Serbian ethnicity because people of many different ethnicities live within the territory of Serbia.

The implicit attempt to connect Jewish and Serb losses during WW2 is misleading. Serb politics in the lead-up to WW2 had clear fascist and Nazi currents.

While many Serb political leaders wanted to work with Germany, the German government rebuffed them because too many Germans and Austrians blamed Serbs for WW1 and the subsequent dismantlement of the pre-WW1 German and Austrian Empires.

German and Austrian hostility toward Serbs increased during WW2 and probably influenced German policy toward Serbia during the 1990s.

The situation of Kosovo before NATO intervention was a mess. It has remained a mess, and there is no particular reason to believe that independence will lead to improvement.

Kosovo’s ‘independence’ Washington gets a new colony in the Balkans

By Sara Flounders Published Feb 21, 2008 8:13 PM

In evaluating the recent “declaration of independence” by Kosovo, a province of Serbia, and its immediate recognition as a state by the U.S., Germany, Britain and France, it is important to know three things.

First, Kosovo is not gaining independence or even minimal self-government. It will be run by an appointed High Representative and bodies appointed by the U.S., European Union and NATO. An old-style colonial viceroy and imperialist administrators will have control over foreign and domestic policy. U.S. imperialism has merely consolidated its direct control of a totally dependent colony in the heart of the Balkans.

Second, Washington’s immediate recognition of Kosovo confirms once again that U.S. imperialism will break any and every treaty or international agreement it has ever signed, including agreements it drafted and imposed by force and violence on others.

The recognition of Kosovo is in direct violation of such laws – specifically U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, which the leaders of Yugoslavia were forced to sign to end the 78 days of NATO bombing of their country in 1999. Even this imposed agreement affirmed the “commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Serbia, a republic of Yugoslavia.

This week’s illegal recognition of Kosovo was condemned by Serbia, Russia, China and Spain.

Thirdly, U.S. imperialist domination does not benefit the occupied people. Kosovo after nine years of direct NATO military occupation has a staggering 60 percent unemployment rate. It has become a center of the international drug trade and of prostitution rings in Europe.

The once humming mines, mills, smelters, refining centers and railroads of this small resource-rich industrial area all sit silent. The resources of Kosovo under NATO occupation were forcibly privatized and sold to giant Western multinational corporations. Now almost the only employment is working for the U.S./NATO army of occupation or U.N. agencies.

The only major construction in Kosovo is of Camp Bondsteel, the largest U.S. base built in Europe in a generation.Halliburton, of course, got the contract. Camp Bondsteel guards the strategic oil and transportation lines of the entire region.

Over 250,000 Serbian, Romani and other nationalities have been driven out of this Serbian province since it came under U.S./NATO control. Almost a quarter of the Albanian population has been forced to leave in order to find work.

Establishing a colonial administration

Consider the plan under which Kosovo’s “independence” is to happen. Not only does it violate U.N. resolutions but it is also a total colonial structure. It is similar to the absolute power held by L. Paul Bremer in the first two years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

How did this colonial plan come about? It was proposed by the same forces responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia and the NATO bombing and occupation of Kosovo.

In June of 2005, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed former Finnish President Marti Ahtisaari as his special envoy to lead the negotiations on Kosovo’s final status. Ahtisaari is hardly a neutral arbitrator when it comes to U.S. intervention in Kosovo.

He is chairman emeritus of the International Crisis Group (ICG), an organization funded by multibillionaire George Soros that promotes NATO expansion and intervention along with open markets for U.S. and E.U. investment.

The board of the ICG includes two key U.S. officials responsible for the bombing of Kosovo: Gen. Wesley Clark and Zbigniew Brzezinski. In March 2007, Ahtisaari gave his Comprehensive Proposal for Kosovo Status Settlement to the new U.N. Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon.

The documents setting out the new government for Kosovo are available here. A summary is available on the U.S. State Department’s Web site. An International Civilian Representative (ICR) will be appointed by U.S. and E.U. officials to oversee Kosovo.

This appointed official can overrule any measures, annul any laws and remove anyone from office in Kosovo. The ICR will have full and final control over the departments of Customs, Taxation, Treasury and Banking.

The E.U. will establish a European Security and Defense Policy Mission (ESDP) and NATO will establish an International Military Presence. Both these appointed bodies will have control over foreign policy, security, police, judiciary, all courts and prisons. They are guaranteed immediate and complete access to any activity, proceeding or document in Kosovo.

These bodies and the ICR will have final say over what crimes can be prosecuted and against whom; they can reverse or annul any decision made. The largest prison in Kosovo is at the U.S. base, Camp Bondsteel, where prisoners are held without charges, judicial overview or representation.

The recognition of Kosovo’s “independence” is just the latest step in a U.S. war of reconquest that has been relentlessly pursued for decades.

Divide and rule

The Balkans has been a vibrant patchwork of many oppressed nationalities, cultures and religions. The Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia, formed after World War II, contained six republics, none of which had a majority.

Yugoslavia was born with a heritage of antagonisms that had been endlessly exploited by the Ottoman Turks, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and interference by British and French imperialism, followed by Nazi German and Italian Fascist occupation in World War II.

The Jewish and Serbian peoples suffered the greatest losses in that war. A powerful communist-led resistance movement made up of all the nationalities, which had suffered in different ways, was forged against Nazi occupation and all outside intervention. After the liberation, all the nationalities cooperated and compromised in building the new socialist federation.

In 45 years the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia developed from an impoverished, underdeveloped, feuding region into a stable country with an industrial base, full literacy and health care for the whole population.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Pentagon immediately laid plans for the aggressive expansion of NATO into the East. Divide and rule became U.S. policy throughout the entire region. Everywhere right-wing, pro-capitalist forces were financed and encouraged.

As the Soviet Union was broken up into separate, weakened, unstable and feuding republics, the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia tried to resist this reactionary wave.

In 1991, while world attention was focused on the devastating U.S. bombing of Iraq, Washington encouraged, financed and armed right-wing separatist movements in the Croatian, Slovenian and Bosnian republics of the Yugoslav Federation. In violation of international agreements Germany and the U.S. gave quick recognition to these secessionist movements and approved the creation of several capitalist mini-states.

At the same time U.S. finance capital imposed severe economic sanctions on Yugoslavia to bankrupt its economy. Washington then promoted NATO as the only force able to bring stability to the region.

The arming and financing of the right-wing UCK movement in the Serbian province of Kosovo began in this same period. Kosovo was not a distinct republic within the Yugoslav Federation but a province in the Serbian Republic. Historically, it had been a center of Serbian national identity, but with a growing Albanian population.

Washington initiated a wild propaganda campaign claiming that Serbia was carrying out a campaign of massive genocide against the Albanian majority in Kosovo. The Western media was full of stories of mass graves and brutal rapes. U.S. officials claimed that from 100,000 up to 500,000 Albanians had been massacred.

U.S./NATO officials under the Clinton administration issued an outrageous ultimatum that Serbia immediately accept military occupation and surrender all sovereignty or face NATO bombardment of its cities, towns and infrastructure. When, at a negotiation session in Rambouillet, France, the Serbian Parliament voted to refuse NATO’s demands, the bombing began.

In 78 days the Pentagon dropped 35,000 cluster bombs, used thousands of rounds of radioactive depleted-uranium rounds, along with bunker busters and cruise missiles.

The bombing destroyed more than 480 schools, 33 hospitals, numerous health clinics, 60 bridges, along with industrial, chemical and heating plants, and the electrical grid. Kosovo, the region that Washington was supposedly determined to liberate, received the greatest destruction.

Finally on June 3, 1999, Yugoslavia was forced to agree to a ceasefire and the occupation of Kosovo.

Expecting to find bodies everywhere, forensic teams from 17 NATO countries organized by the Hague Tribunal on War Crimes searched occupied Kosovo all summer of 1999 but found a total of only 2,108 bodies, of all nationalities.

Some had been killed by NATO bombing and some in the war between the UCK and the Serbian police and military. They found not one mass grave and could produce no evidence of massacres or of “genocide.”

This stunning rebuttal of the imperialist propaganda comes from a report released by the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte. It was covered, but without fanfare, in the New York Times of Nov. 11, 1999.

The wild propaganda of genocide and tales of mass graves were as false as the later claims that Iraq had and was preparing to use “weapons of mass destruction.”

Through war, assassinations, coups and economic strangulation, Washington has succeeded for now in imposing neoliberal economic policies on all of the six former Yugoslav republics and breaking them into unstable and impoverished mini-states.

The very instability and wrenching poverty that imperialism has brought to the region will in the long run be the seeds of its undoing. The history of the achievements made when Yugoslavia enjoyed real independence and sovereignty through unity and socialist development will assert itself in the future.

Sara Flounders, co-director of the International Action Center, traveled to Yugoslavia during the 1999 U.S. bombing and reported on the extent of the U.S. attacks on civilian targets. She is a co-author and editor of the books: Hidden Agenda:U.S./NATO Takeover of Yugoslavia and NATO in the Balkans.

Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

References

Durant, Will. 1972. Story of Civilization, Vol.1, Our Oriental Heritage, p.459. New York.

“Kipling On the Front Lines,” by Alpha Unit

Mowgli, the little boy raised by wolves and befriended by Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther, first came to life during a winter in Vermont in the imagination of Rudyard Kipling.

Kipling was in Vermont because that’s where his wife’s family lived; the couple had taken up residence there and started their own family. It was American hubris, however, that soured Kipling on living in the United States.

The focus of all the dissension was British Guiana, which was in a border dispute with Venezuela. Richard Olney, the American Secretary of State, declared that the United States had a right to mediate all disputes in the Western Hemisphere. Because of the Monroe Doctrine, you know.

In other words, the United States ruled the Western Hemisphere.

This didn’t sit well with the British, including Kipling. Anti-British sentiment in America, followed by family troubles, sent him back to England.

It was a period when both Britain and the United States were settling their weight upon all kinds of native peoples around the world. Someone observing the actions of both nations might have been amused by Kipling’s distaste for American interference in Britain’s interference in South America.

“If anybody’s going to be interfering in South America, it’s going to be us,” Secretary Olney would have told him.

Kipling, who actually memorialized the imperialist ambitions of both nations, remains a figure of contradictions.

He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907, though other writers have mocked his abilities, particularly as a poet. People still argue about whether he was pro- or anti-imperialist. Many know of his poem The White Man’s Burden, for which he has been denounced – and celebrated, as a satirist.

Does anyone concerned with world affairs today, particularly heads of state, really care what Kipling may or may not have advised his fellow Whites roughly a century ago?

I’m guessing that the answer to this question is “No.” The fact that people still debate Kipling’s views is a testament to two things: the power of art, in this case literature; and the power of the idea of race.

Kipling is long gone, but there are people who seem to have some kind of stake in whether or not his views on race and empire were justified. It reminds me of the debate we have had from time to time in America over whether kids should read some of the works of Mark Twain.

Kipling’s Kim has been compared to Huckleberry Finn, in fact. Both novels tell the coming-to-maturity tale of a “loose” boy with father issues, traveling with a beloved adult male. Both novels have come under scrutiny for alleged racism – which informs the question of their appropriateness for developing minds.

School children should be taught literature. Adults wrangle over which works are to be presented to them, and how they are to be presented, because adults supervise the indoctrination of children.

They wrangle for another reason, though. The issue of race is intimately wrapped up in another issue: self-esteem.

When I say self-esteem, I mean the popular concept of having a healthy, positive self-image. Who doesn’t want kids to have a healthy, positive self-image – especially “minority” kids, those long deemed to be most in need of it?

So for quite some time, at least here in the US, we’ve been giving historical figures – be they Presidents or novelists – the PC litmus test. If someone reads anything by Kipling other than The Jungle Book (both parts), will he be contaminated by White Supremacist ideology?

We’ve decided we must be very careful about that sort of thing going into the heads of young people.

And so educators and other interested parties have put long-dead authors such as Kipling onto the front lines of their ideology wars.

“The Indian Independence Movement,” by Kumar Sarkar

A nice, short analysis of the Indian independence movement, written by Kumar Sarkar, the nom de guerre of an Indian Maoist revolutionary. Most Indian and Nepalese revolutionaries use noms de guerre due to state repression in their homelands. This is a good piece, nice and short, well-written by a smart guy, from a Marxist perspective, that you might enjoy if you are interested in the subject.

I believe that India was deindustrialized in the 18th – early 19th centuries. Following that, colonialism succeeded in preventing the growth of a national bourgeoisie capable of leading a democratic revolution and industrialization. Emerging bourgeois forces were not independent, and they compromised with Brahminic ‘feudalism’ instead of smashing it, as it happened in Europe during the ‘classical’ bourgeois democratic revolution.

The product was a predominantly comprador bourgeoisie, often still with feudal roots and a strange mixture of bourgeois-Brahminic feudal ideology. The non-comprador elements never gained any real strength.

Thus, the democratic revolution failed to take place, probably nipped in the bud that was once about to show itself, in Bengal. Casteism, discrimination against Muslims, which is an extension of casteism, Brahminic land relations and social order remained virtually intact.

The so-called nationalist movement that started in 1905 in Bengal against its partition was a deformed phenomenon from the beginning, without the support of the Muslims, and in fact often directed against them. This was repeated all over the sub-continent till 1947 with its abortive end and partition of India.

The role of Nehru, Krishna Menon, Subhas Chandra Bose, etc. cannot be understood with the European model of Marxism. The political philosophy of Bose and that of the so-called ‘socialist group’ within the Congress have not been researched yet. Nehru’s individual pro-Marxist attitude ended after his association with Gandhi. The class base of these people remains to be investigated and can only be understood in the background described above.

Tory Map of the World

Click to enlarge and read the type.

Pretty darned hilarious! The Tories are the conservative party in the UK, more or less aligned with the Upper Classes and their views and prejudices. In particular, as this map indicates, they are characterized by some pretty blatant racism and a creepy fondness for the British Empire. They also have a Nordicist bent in that they don’t like Southern Europeans too much.

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Great Book About Africa

Racism, Guilt and Self-Deceit, by Gedahlia Braun (a fake name).

I once looked up who he really is, but I’ve forgotten the name. He taught philosophy in Africa for many years. This guy is straight up right about Africans in so many ways that it is incredible. This is how Race Realism ought to be but almost never is. The saving grace in his analysis is a lack of hostility towards Africans. In fact, he likes Africans very much, especially African women. Apparently he has been involved with a number of African women.

According to standard PC thinking, this is a racist book and the author is a racist. Racism is about about hostility towards a group. It’s beyond me how you can be racist towards a group of people whom you like, as long you don’t discriminate against them. However, to be fair, Braun does support segregation and apartheid in South Africa, so in that sense at least he is a racist.

But he’s an awfully mild one. If you’re average White racist was like this guy, the antis would really have their work cut out for them. A Stormfront type makes a nice, fat juicy target. In contrast, guys like Braun are as hard to pin down and get a handle on as a mercury blob.

Furthermore, almost all race realists have animosity towards Blacks. Braun is one of the first race realists that I have run across who seems to actually like Blacks.

The fact that he supports colonialism, segregation and Apartheid, though, is disturbing, since most race realists end up favoring getting rid of an anti-discrimination laws at least. Many also supported colonialism, segregation and Apartheid. Once again we see the disconcerting connection between race realism and support for forms of discrimination and domination of Blacks. Will race realism typically lead to such backwards qualities, and if so, why?

I figure this guy is just telling it like it is. He has lived in Africa for many years, and over that time, developed some interesting views about African culture and thought processes. What’s wrong with that? He lived there, he observed things with an open mind, and these are his conclusions. He’s entitled to them. Who are we to slam him, call him racist and liar? Why do we get to saddle that high horse anyway?

There’s more truth in what Braun writes than in 100 PC anti-racist tomes, most of which are full of laughable anti-scientific, untestable or non-falsifiable joke-theory.

One area that I disagree with him is in trying to draw parallels between Africans and US Blacks. 20 IQ points difference is a Hell of a lot, plus US Blacks have been heavily de-Africanized culturally during their centuries here. Braun discusses an impoverished concept of love (compared to the Western view of romantic love) common to Africans, suggests it may be related to IQ, and then leaps to the idea that US Blacks may experience the same conceptual impoverishment to a lesser degree.

Well, it’s an interesting theory, so I decided to test it out. I don’t know what the average IQ of the Blacks on the Internet is (Is it higher than average?) but the Black women you meet on the Net seem to have a very Western view of romantic love that is about the same as White women’s. Do Black women in the ghetto feel the same way? I’m not sure, as I haven’t had much dealings with these people.

But looking at other groups with average IQ’s of 85-87 (US Black IQ is 87), the females at least in these groups seem to subscribe strongly to the Western version of romantic love. So US Black IQ should be high enough that their views of love should be about the same as the rest of ours, assuming the full concept is IQ-dependent.

The book costs money, and I have not read it, but I’ve read a number of Braun’s other pieces, and the guy is fantastic.

Obama, US Imperialism, and the US Colony of Haiti

In the comments thread on Alpha Unit’s latest piece, finally Lafayette Sennacherib hits it on the head and cuts through the crap:

I’ve read a lot of criticisms of both the Red Cross and especially Doctors Without Borders re ‘impartiality’. I can’t link to anything offhand, but I wouldn’t assume they’re saints; all these NGOs are heavily compromised by US govt funding.

As to what seems to be criticisms here of the reaction of the Haitians. The criticisms seem to be based uncritically on the media presentation, which reminds me of the coverage of New Orleans post Katrina – ‘black gangs looting etc’.

I, ME PERSONALLY, knew there was a desperate shortage of water in Haiti within 12 hours. How long do you think it was before US intelligence knew that?

Greg Pallast points out that FEMA has had EVERYTHING ready in Florida since Katrina – bottled water, medical supplies etc – all ready to go practically at a moment’’s notice ; they could easily (well, with some effort anyway) have organised drops of bottled water all over the country withing 12 hours. All those that needed water desperately are dead now, within the first 48 hours.

More than a week later we’re just hearing on the MSM that “aid is beginning to get through to limited areas.” We still don’t hear about bottled water being dropped by helicopter.

Instead we hear about the US takeover of the airport, planes carrying aid being turned away, tens of millions of dollars being spent to send aircraft carriers and destroyers, and ten thousand troops on the way.

We get the excuse that they can’t send out the heavy digging equipment because of ’security concerns’ i.e. they’re demonising the Haitians as violent animals like they did to New Orleans, as an excuse to let them die, to cull the population in preparation for a US invasion, to have a solid base to fuck up Cuba and Venezuela and fuck up all those coloured people who thought they were going to have schools and health-care and all that.

The history of what the US has done to Haiti over the years is readily available for those who care to check it out – this ‘aid effort’ is the coup de grace.

I have to say the blatant racist gloating in some of the comments here is particularly nauseating, and just downright cowardly. Kicking people while they’re down is not very attractive, but hey that’s the way our culture is going. Maybe I’m old fashioned.

Good show, LS, good show! I really appreciate LS’ comment. He really hit it on the head regarding how Haiti is nothing more than a particularly disgusting and despicable colony of US imperialism. ATM, Haiti is a US, French, Canadian and even UN (!!!) colony, all apparently for to serve the ulterior motives of imperialism and multinational corporations.

Aristide was the best hope that Haiti ever had, and the US overthrew him because he dared to raise the minimum wage! When the gangsters supported by the US, France, Canada and the UN (!!!!) took over, the first thing they did was to rescind all of Aristide’s progressive programs. They then destroyed (!!!) all of the health clinics and schools that he had built. Threat of a good example and all of that.

LS makes completely clear here that Obama is just another US imperialist President. I’m not sure he’s much better than Bush in the foreign policy area. He’s negotiated with Colombia to allow 8 (!!) new military bases in Venezuela (mostly to threaten Venezuela and to a lesser extent Bolivia and Ecuador, he supported the coup in Honduras and probably gave the go-ahead for it, and he’s continuing Bush Administration ultra-imperialism WRT to Haiti.

As far as imperialism goes, Obama is just a Black man in White face. US Blacks generally oppose US imperialism, but Obama is as establishment as they come.

WRT to the endless racist arguments of “Haiti as an example of what niggers* do naturally,” fine, but let’s take a look at something. The racists say that Haiti is “the only all-Black state in the Americas.”

Fair enough, but deceptive. For really, most of the Caribbean, excepting mulatto Cuba and Dominican Republic is Black as the night. The whole region is Black, top to bottom, east to west. Yet the region more or less functions, or at least we don’t see the Haitian style clusterfuck. Black IQ’s are generally the same throughout the region. So, without the particular nightmare of Haiti’s history, including US and French imperialism in spades, Haiti would have probably ended up like any other Caribbean nation.

The racists go on and on about how wonderful the Dominican Republic is, and how much the DR’s hate Haitians (They even enslave them, just like we used to!). Look, DR people are mulattos, with an emphasis on the Black. Does a little bit of White really change and civilize Blacks all that much? According to the racists here, yes. Yet these are the same racists who apply one-drop rule to any White with a taint of Black poison in him.

The racists don’t make sense. Either adding White to Blacks is the greatest thing since sliced bread, or it’s hopeless as they’re already nigger-tainted as it is.

Tulio hits on the head in the comments section. Haiti is a particularly clusterfucked place and race doesn’t have a lot to do with it, otherwise every other Caribbean island would be just as nigger-fucked as Haiti.

Borg points out that Haitians tend to act pretty good once they get here. Indeed they do (Not that I argue bringing lots of them over here!). I would gather that in one generation, they even gain 15 IQ points just from living in the US. We don’t have a tremendous amount of problems with Haitians in the US. Puerto Ricans and Dominicans are much more of an issue. The reason may be screening. Haitians are rigorously screened, and only the best are allowed in. Puerto Ricans are completely unscreened, and DR folks mostly came here as illegals.

The racists are going on and on about how lazy the Haitians are. I don’t want to go into an examination of Black “shiftlessness,” but that’s one thing that Haitians can’t be accused of. In Haiti, the line is clear. You don’t work, you don’t eat. Often, even if you do work, you don’t eat. The social programs that we know of here in the US are nonexistent in Haiti.

One of the reasons, the US, France, Canada and the UN overthrew Aristide was because he initiated a free lunch program for the poor of Haiti. Threat of a good example! Haitians work their asses off, all day, every day, if they have a job. Even if they don’t have a job, survival is a fulltime job in Haiti. As we might expect, Americans note that Haitian immigrants have a strong work ethic. In fact, Haitians in the US are scathing in their attitudes towards US Blacks, whom they regard as disgusting layabouts.

I’m not trying to defend the bad behavior of so many Haitians, but there’s a lot more going on in Haiti than just TNB**

*Used sardonically. **Typical Negro behavior, sardonic phrase synonymous with “ghetto.”

Israeli Scumbags

Just doin’ what comes naturally!

Fuck you, Israelis. And fuck all you idiots who support this shit. That includes the USraeli government and US Democratic Israeli Party and the US Republican Israeli Party. Fuck both of you Jewish-owned political parties and fuck the Jewish-owned US government. And fuck most US Jews, since the majority of US Jews support this crap. Fuck you, Jews.* I got some news for you arrogant weenies. This country’s called America, not Jewmerica. Got it, punks?

Honestly, it’s beyond me how any progressive person could support this sort of shit. It’s blatantly fascist behavior. Or at least rightwing behavior, since the Right generally supports colonialism and oppression of minorities. Only the Left has taken a principled, no-compromise stance against imperialism, colonialism and the oppression of minorities. We’ve even taken the most progressive stance on Earth in favor of oppressed minorities – in many cases, we grant them the right to self-determination.

The Israelis are arguing their usual crap in this case, that the Palestinians were in a “closed military zone” and had been ordered  to leave, but refused, so they got their asses bulldozed. Every time an Israeli official opens up his mouth, he’s probably lying. So listening to them is trying because you have to research every damn thing they say to figure out if it’s a lie or not.

Truth is that the “settlements” are only one part of the story. Israel owns and has jurisdiction over fully 6

In that “closed military zone” there are many thousands of Palestinians living there on their land, just as they have always lived on their land. But Israel conquered and illegally annexed and settled the conquered land in 1967, and that’s why it’s a “closed military zone.” So,  Palestinian homes in 6

Same goes for many Bedouin villages inside Israel. After Israel conquered much of Palestine in 1949, 9

Even inside the

These projects are uncontroversial across the political spectrum, with even the Zionist “Left,” such as the Labor Party (a party with socialist roots) completely in favor of this racist crap. Even in the cities, Arabs are not allowed to build new buildings. They can’t even add on to their existing homes, so most Arabs simply build or expand illegally since this is the only way to build. These structures and add-ons are routinely torn down by Israel in what are once again uncontroversial activities, supported even by Labor.

This goes to show you that there is not a whole lot of moral space between the Israeli Right and the Israeli Left. Much of the Israeli political spectrum is devoted to frankly fascist parties of both the right and left. Only Meretz deserves some praise, though I’m not up on their project, and lately they’ve been losing elections. I’ve long been a fan of Hadash, the Israeli Communist Party, though.

*There are definitely some American Jews who most emphatically do not support this crap. For our dear humanist Jewish brothers and sisters, we throw a great big shout out.

Business As Usual

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

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

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

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

Can you imagine this in the US?

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

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

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

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

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

I can’t see any liberal supporting Israel.

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

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

Anyone?

Death Tolls For Western Imperialism, Colonialism and 3rd World Capitalism

Repost from the old site.

Global Avoidable Mortality blog looks pretty interesting, and I have mucked around there a bit.

The part about 500 million dead Muslims post-1950 looks pretty interesting, but I haven’t looked into that yet.

More Polya here.

Total excess mortality per year as of 2004:

Iraq        122,000

Afghanistan 359,000

India       2.2 million

Pakistan    478,000

Bangladesh  288,000

In Iraq and Afghanistan, those are the excess deaths that are probably occurring due to Coalition activities (especially in Iraq). In Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, the excess deaths are probably due to the lack of socialism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1947 INDIA SPRINGS FROM THE HEAD OF MARS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Muslims from a crowd into a nation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1950 INDIAN INTERVENTION IN NEPAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IRISH AND INDIAN NATIONALISM – A COMPARISON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patriots of Ireland , your cause is mine.

and in 1920 said that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although they achieved a growth in GDP of

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later, in 1962, he observed:

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

THE STRUGGLE FOR INDIA & NEPAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did this happen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE UML AND THE STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROGRAM

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

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

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

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

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

A prominent UML commentator summed up the results:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The principle driving this demand is that:

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

It also complains that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy and capitalism have been turned upside down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The desire of the UCPN(M) was:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bhattarai, B. Monarchy versus Democracy.

Chauduri, N.C. The Continent of Circe.

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

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

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

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

Maxwell, N. India’s China War.

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

Muni, S.D. Maoist Insurgency in Nepal.

Rimal, B. Challenging Globalization.

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

Thapa, D. A Kingdom Under Siege.

Yami, H. Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis.

PERIODICALS & JOURNALS

Himal – Southasian

Kantipur Times

Le Monde

Nepal Telegraph

Nepali Times

The Worker, Journal of the UCPN(M)

UML/GEFONT PUBLICATIONS

One Union

Study & Research

Trade Union Rights

World of Work

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Tobin September 2009

Libertarianism – The Enemy of all Non-Human Life on Earth

As several posts on Occidental Dissent make clear, libertarianism (and its mainstream congener, neoliberalism) is utterly incompatible with the preservation of any non-human and non-domesticated or non-utilitarian life forms. Libertarians like to throw up weird scenarios whereby preserving wildlife, wild spaces and wild places would somehow be more economically viable than exterminating them, exploiting them, and devastating them. The problem is that this never works out in praxis. Even when we environmentalists produce reports showing that preserving forests and meadows is worth way more than chopping them down or ruining them with cattle, 10 Since neoliberalism is just libertarianism, neoliberalism also can never support environmentalism. Market-driven environmental policies must be some kind of a cruel joke. They can never work. In strict economically rational terms, it is either never or almost never economically rational to save species, habitats or places. Destruction and extermination is where the money is, and in neoliberal theory, maximum return is the only variable we are allowed to consider. Libertardarians now argue that humans (I guess maybe those of White European stock) now care enough about environmentalism that we can zero out government, privatize everything, and everything will still be hunky dory for the bighorns, the spotted owls and timber wolves. Yeah right. In the first place, this would only work with White people, because only Whites can be environmentalists at the moment, and only more advanced Whites in North America and Europe need apply even here. That’s because Whites in Latin America and Russia have proven to be utterly capable of taking care of the environment. Native Americans and Siberians can probably preserve things too, but they don’t run any states. Let’s test out the libertarian theory on most liberal-minded of the more progressive Whites on Earth, the ultra-liberals in California (though not a White state anymore, nevertheless, California is one of the most pro-environmental states in the nation). The argument that humans now care enough about species to preserve them is proven wrong here in the West. Even here in ultra-liberal California, the glorious salmon are nearly extinct. The striped bass fishery in the Delta and Bay has also been ruined. The vast herds of Tule Elk that roamed all over the valleys and coastal areas of our state have been decimated and only exist on miniscule preserves that look like petting zoos. Fishers and spotted owls are being driven extinct by the timber industry as we speak. A lot of CA endangered species are not real celebrities, but salmon would seem to have quite a bit of worth. Yet the salmon fishery in CA and up and down the West has been decimated. And even the ultra-liberal CA senators like Dianne Feinstein insist that we have not creamed the salmon enough, and need to take them out once and for all now. Feinstein’s mostly doing this for one of her rich Jewish buddies, Stewart Resnick of Beverly Hills. So much for liberal US Jews! The notion that humans (Anywhere!) now value wildlife enough to be trusted with preserving them in a libertarian society is seriously wrong, and we can prove it right here in California. In the 3rd World, humans are so bestial, venal, animalistic and backwards that they indeed are well on the way to extrerminating everything non-human, non-domesticated and non-utilitarian in sight. An excellent argument in favor of White superiority (which I agree with) is, as I noted above, that Whites are really the only humans on Earth (who run states) that care about non-human life enough to preserve it.* Virtually every other race and ethnic group of man will gladly exterminate every single non-domesticated species and non-utilitarian species in its land at the drop of a hat. Preserving species is something only Whites can do. And it’s something that only White governments can do, the White private sector haven proven endlessly to have failed at this endeavor. *I honestly wish that non-European states were capable of not exterminating everything in sight, but I doubt it. The Middle East is an environmental catastrophe. The only environmentally decent place is Israel, but that’s populated by White people. The only environmentally progressive place in Latin America is Costa Rica, but once again, that’s a White country. It seems that all Arabs and mestizos can do is destroy. Asians seem like a nightmare in environmental terms. They aren’t even capable of tender feelings towards cats and dogs, which they massacre for sport and food, so how can they possibly be trusted with non-domesticated things. The Japanese have been some of the worst scofflaws in international fishing and their bestial exploits in whaling have earned them the scorn of the planet. True, in some ways, Koreans and Japanese seem to want to preserve what’s left on their lands, but environmentally, those places are pretty much human-nuked anyway, mostly by overpopulation. A preservationist impulse isn’t worth much if there is nothing left to preserve. The hunter-gatherers of Southeast Asia never had the caretaker mindset of American Indians, instead opting for the more primitive mindset of “kill everything that moves.” The extinction process in SE Asia is very advanced and the state does very little to stop it. Environmental consciousness is extremely low. Probably Vietnam is one of the more standout states. China is just now starting to develop an environmental ethic, but it doesn’t seem to be very advanced, and in a lot of ways, environmentally, China looks like America 1890. I’m amazed that anything non-human and non-bovine is still walking around in India, where the extinction process is quite advanced, the state is extremely weak, and poachers are everywhere. Russians have always been some of the most backwards and barbaric of the Whites, and environmentally, that’s still the case. Since the collapse of the USSR things have really fallen badly apart. Market hunters and poachers stalk the land. In Siberia, the poacher harvest of salmon is the same size as the legal harvest. The Amur Leopard and the Siberian Tiger are hanging on by their bare claws, and I expect them to go extinct soon. Africa has to be one of the worst places on Earth to be a species of wildlife. Africans are primitive people, and primitives tend to kill anything that moves, usually for food. The only reason that there were still huge wildlife populations 50 years ago is due to White colonists, who forbade the Africans from wiping out the animals. With decolonization, Africans quickly set work slaughtering anything that moved. That they had not done so in centuries past was due only to the crudity of their weapons. You can’t kill many animals with a spear. In 1965, Africans with firearms were a threat the animal population of the continent. The large megafauna were only saved when the former White colonists were called back in by concerned Africans to save the animals. Many of the large animal populations still exist, but poachers and bush meat hunters take a devastating toll. I don’t see anything positive in the future. Africans don’t seem to be capable of not exterminating animals. One argument is that non-Whites do these things because they are poor. Equatorial Guinea now has a PCI of $21,000/year. Anyone seen any nice environmental initiatives coming out of there? Has the wealth of the Japanese prevented them from killing whales? Has Korean wealth prevented them from waging mass pogroms against dogs and cats? Has the relative wealth of Brazil and Argentina prevented environmental devastation in these places? The Gulf Arab countries are extremely wealthy, but my understanding is that they are environmental wrecks. So much for the “they do it because they are poor” line.

New Article About the Peopling of India

A new article has come out in Nature Magazine dealing with the Peopling of India, a subject I have dealt with quite a bit on this site. The Indian nationals who hate the Aryan Invasion concept have been jumping up and down for joy over this article. I’m not sure where these people are coming from, but generally, it’s a silly, anti-scientific and reactionary place. Their argument is usually that the Aryan Invasion could not have taken place since our Hindu texts say that it never happened. Well, there is not much to say to such a powerful scientific argument like that! Those who oppose the Aryan Invasion theory are generally Far Rightwing Hindu nationalists or Hindutvas. They also tend to be associated with the higher castes, especially the Brahmins. One argument is an Indian nationalist one. This crazy line says that there was no Aryan invasion – instead this was a lie made up by the evil British colonialists to “divide the people of India.” As Hindutva fascism claims (falsely) to be a national unification project, as all such projects do, they rail against the “outsiders who divide our people.” Problem with this argument is that the Indians themselves and the Hindus in particular had done a mighty fine job dividing up the Indian people themselves into many thousands of insane, cruel, backwards and anti-human caste structures. Another crazy Indian nationalist argument is that there was no caste until the evil Brits came. Or there was caste before then, but it was nothing. The evil Brits came and made caste so much worse. This argument is favored with high castes, typically Brahmins. It’s dubious. Caste was probably much worse before the British came. The British, civilized folks that they were, hated the animalistic, bestial, primitive caste system and tried to eliminate as part of the necessary mission of civilizing the Indians. This article notes that caste is as old as India, and that the British did not hoist it upon the unwilling heads of the innocent and pure Indians. Another crazy Indian nationalist line is that there was no race structure in India. Race was invented in India by those evil Brits again. The Brits divided the peaceable, loving, brotherly and Kumbayaa-singing Indian people into two races, a northern race that appeared European or Aryan and a southern race that they called Dravidian. There does seem to be something to the concept of a somewhat bimodal race structure in India. The people of the South are darker and have a different physical type than the Northern Indics, who look more Iranian or even European. Some say that the Dravidians are the remains of a Mediterranean Caucasian Race that moved into India 13-17,000 years ago. That seems reasonable to me. This article turns that on its head and argues that all Indians are a mixture between North Indians and South Indians. The South Indians are more Asiatic types and the North Indians are a more European type, yet all of the Indian people are thoroughly mixed between the two. This also seems reasonable. Articles about the piece, especially from the reactionary Brahmin-controlled Indian media, are crowing about “the death of the Aryan invasion theory.” But the Nature piece proclaims no such thing. The Nature article claims that the South Indians came to India 70,000 YBP. The only remaining pure members of the South Indian group are the Negritos of the Andaman Islands. This part is reasonable enough. The piece also claims that the North Indians (or Aryans) came to India 45,000 YBP. This much is a real shocker, and I do not know what to make of this. 45,000 YBP, there were no real Caucasoid types anywhere. Further, skulls from even north India dated at 24,000 YBP look like Aborigines. So these North Indians must have looked like Aborigines at first. In fact, all Indians looked something like Aborigines until 8,000 YBP when they started transitioning to Caucasian types. Anyway, there was an Aryan invasion. Or at least, a group of Indo-Aryans moved down from Kazakhstan into Iran, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, the Caucasus, Pakistan and North India about 3,500 YBP. They all speak related languages that we can provably trace back to the Russian steppes. We can follow their movements archeologically as they moved down from Kazakhstan into North India. Now whether or not these folks were “invaders” is open to question. Perhaps they were “migrants.” Maybe they were “undocumented workers.” Maybe they were going on an extended vacation down South. I haven’t the faintest idea. But there was clearly a movement of Indo-European speaking Indo-Aryan folks down from Kazakhstan into Central and South Asia 3,500 YBP. That’s a fact of history, and no sane person questions that. Nor does this paper call that into question. Another argument that Indian nationalists are making is that Indians are a unique race, a separate race, not part of any other race. If you look at the data, that’s an interesting argument, but skull and genetic data (see Cavalli-Sforza for instance) show that Indians are a member of the Caucasian race, though they are one of the most divergent members of that group. One interesting finding is that Gujaratis seem to form their own separate minor race in India and differentiate from all the others. I can’t explain that, but it may have something to do with stories about Scythians moving into that area 1,200 YBP. One of the more sensible dissections of the article is here by Razib of GNXP Science Blogs. Razib is sounding a lot more sensible since he got his better writing gig at Science Blogs. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

Settlers are Not Innocent Civilians

Retrospectively, I support the American Indians for heroically defending their lands against the White settler-colonial imperialist invaders. Defending the homeland against the invaders of all types is the sort of nationalism that is progressive and that everyone should rally around. Not only that, but it is acceptable for the nationalists defending their homelands to kill the settler-colonial fascist invaders and colonists, including the so-called “innocent civilians” in their midst. So it was right and proper for Amerindians to kill White adult settlers, for Uighurs and Tibetans to kill Han adult settlers, for Palestinians to kill Jewish adult settlers, for Sarahwi in Spanish Sahara to kill Moroccan adult settlers, for West Papuans to kill Indonesian adult settlers, on and on. I leave child settlers off the target list since they don’t have the ability to leave and go home.In this framework, settlers are not “innocent civilians” at all. The Chinese fascist regime deliberately flooded Tibet and Xinjiang with Han settlers, who colonized these lands, monopolized the economy, relegated the natives to minority status, and oppressed the natives. This is sheer ethnic warfare of the most barbaric fascist type and it is what was behind the recent ethnic riots in Urumqi, Xinjiang, in China’s West. The situation with the settler-colonialism of the fascist Jews in Palestine is well-known and needs no elaboration here. Fascist Indonesia invaded the sovereign state of West Papua in 1965 after the Dutch colonists fled. Since then, they have committed genocide against the natives, most of whom are Melanesians or Papuans and are ethnically unlike the Malays of Indonesia. They have stolen the resources and flooded the land with fascist Malay settler-colonists. The West Papuans are very poorly armed, often defending themselves with bows and arrows. The West has supported fascist Indonesia to the hilt in this conflict, probably because big US corporate interests have made alliance with the Indonesian fascist elite in plundering the land of West Papua for valuable natural resources. Spanish Sahara was decolonized and immediately declared its independence in 1953. It was immediately invaded on very hazy and spurious grounds by Morocco. This blatant invasion and conquest of territory by armed imperial force, similar to the case of West Papua, has been supported to the hilt by every single US regime ever since. The implication is that 65 years after the Great War Against Fascism, fascist regimes the world over continue to find a warm and fuzzy place to call home in the corridors of Washington, DC. This is due to the fact that monopoly capital will always support fascism, and any state dedicated to monopoly capitalism as the US is will always support fascist regimes around the world, and probably has no choice about the matter. As long as monopoly capital rules the US, we are probably stuck with fascist-lovers in the White House. The Algerian revolutionaries (I get a lot of my ideology from Frantz Fanon) targeted the pied noir settler-colonialists, and most of them fled.

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