Alt Left: Neuveau Fascism in South America and Europe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vamos are Argentine fascists?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Estonia and Latvia, support for the economic Right has been disastrous and has almost destroyed both countries. The Economic Right has little power in Russia and Belarus, with only 10-2

Alt Left: Socialism for the Win!

Socialism beating all capitalist countries!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: The Syriza Party in Greece: Anatomy of a Sellout

Interesting abstract from Academia. All papers on Academia can be downloaded and reprinted for free. Syriza was the radial left hope for Europe in the wake of the 2008 Depression in which Greece was hit perhaps worst of all. The Right says it was because of Greece’s tax and spend policies, but Greece’s taxes are not high, nor is it’s social democracy particularly robust. The true problem is massive corruption of the political classes at all ends of the spectrum combined with an absolute failure of the wealthy classes to pay as much as one nickel in taxes. In other words, The Latin American Disease (in part) because Latin America suffers from exactly these problems more than anything else.

Syriza had a very powerful voice in opposition to the Austerity Regime demanded by the EU out of Germany (Germany basically runs the EU and lays down the law). There were two ways out of the debt crisis. Either go into crisis austerity and sell off a good portion of their public lands and enterprises, or simply default on their debt and start all over again. Perhaps both would have been equally painful, but I think default would have been best.

As is, a good portion of Greece’s public lands and public enterprises (the health care system, national parks, electric grid, hydropower, a number of actual islands of the country itself) were sold off the lowest of capitalist parasites. Anyone think the national parks, electric grid, health care system, hydropower, and even the very islands of the nation itself will be any better off now that they are in the hands of a lot of greedheads? They’re not. Nothing good ever happens with any of these sell-offs of private enterprises.

Worse, the selling off of the very partrimony of Greece itself was combined with the worst austerity, elimination of health care and all social programs for the masses combined with massive job losses so the masses of unemployed could not count on any state help now that they could not pay their bills. In other words, the Greeks got the worst of both worlds. Austerity and selloff and they gained nothing at all other than emptied pockets and rifled and ransacked goods.

No one could pay for medical care or hospital beds either. Many people were thrown out of their homes because they could not pay the rent and shantytowns of former workers and even middle class people sprung up all over Greece. Some political parties, even the far Right Golden Dawn to their credit, stepped in to try to provide the social help that the state would not.

This was followed by the election of Syriza, which campaigned on not paying the debt and opposing austerity. As soon as they got in power, they quickly changed their tune. I don’t think they sold out so much as they did not have the guts to go through with the program. No doubt there were massive pressures on them to go through the standard austerity model. At any rate, Syriza did not default on its debt like Argentina and Iceland did (to little effect on their economies), and they implemented austerity with full force. They sold out the masses completely.

As they stayed in power, they moved more and more to the right. Now that they are out of power, they have moved even further to the right. There is a new rightwing government called New Democracy in charge about which I know little, except I assume they’re not real great. Syriza is now utterly unable to offer an alternative to ND, while ND has apparently completely failed in the COVID epidemic as most rightwing governments everywhere did, no doubt leaving many corpses in its wake.

We have the standard Latin American model here where the Right (call it the Conservatives in Colombia or ARENA in El Salvador) “the right wing of the oligarchy” is absolutely toxic, but the Left (call it the Liberals in Colombia, the AD and APRA “social democratic” traitors in Venezuela and Peru), etc. are simply the “liberal wing of the oligarchy,” which in practice means virtually no change at all.

AD in Venezuela has combined with the fascist Right to overthrow the Chavistas, backing every coup attempt of various flavors against the government. For all intents and purposes, they’re not much different from Guaido. AD was always just a party to split up the loot from the oil rents from the state oil company amongst the oligarchs and the upper middle class management of the company.

This is very discouraging and it sounds like Thatcher’s TINA (There is No Alternative) response to neoliberalism. Perhaps there is no alternative to neoliberalism and austerity in the EU model, which has always been based on neoliberal orthodoxy. Note that debt cannot exceed

If the situation in the EU is TINA, then Brexit is the way to go. Greece and a few others have been threatening to do that, but the NATO fascist military alliance (NATO has always been run by the US) is the imperialist glue that holds the EU economic community together. A neoliberal economic community held together by a fascist imperialist army. What else is new? Straight out of Milton Friedman (“Neoliberalism cannot be imposed democratically; it must be imposed by dictatorship”) himself. It is very hard to leave NATO. Notice even the Brits didn’t do that. NATO may be an abusive spouse for many of the nations inside the alliance, but if so, most NATO countries are Stockholmed wives.

I don’t know what to say except that this is yet another sellout of the Left.

For all of their faults, the governments of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Argentina have refused to go this route. At the moment, Peru is also challenging this model. The penalty has been repeated coup attempts in most these countries, economic wars, and sanctions, but at least they didn’t sell out. I still think this sort of resistance is the way to go, painful or not.

Our existences have dignity or they are worthless. The EU model is the death of dignity. At least with the Pink Tide, those nations can hold their heads up amidst the ruins and say

At least we are free. We may be poor but at least we are free.

You know that’s got to be worth something.

Outside of the homeland, there is nothing.

– A famous Baath Party intellectual from Iraq

Whatever beefs I had with Saddam, and I had plenty; Hell, at least he was a nationalist in a time when such patriots are scarce and viewed as traitors to the International Globalist Elite based on multinational corporate rule over the rule of actual states. Governments are increasingly irrelevant now that billionaires and corporations have more money and power than many actual countries.

SISP Conference 2021, Online, 9-11 September 2021

SYRIZA back in opposition (2019-2021): Towards a new political direction?

Grigoris Markou

Postdoctoral researcher, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Abstract

SYRIZA’s spectacular rise to power through a radical political proposal and a strong populist discourse has been the field of study of a large number of political scientists in recent years. Alexis Tsipras (Syriza’s leader) in opposition and in power expressed a strong inclusionary populist discourse, placing popular classes at a central position and opposing the political and economic establishment of the country and Europe.

SYRIZA, during its second term began to change its physiognomy, abandoning gradually its radicalism and embracing a typed of “political realism” and consensus, while it began to soften its populist intensity and passion. After the end of its rule (2019), it became clear that SYRIZA’s populism had nothing to do with the populist intensity and passion of the previous years.

SYRIZA (2019-present) continued to maintain some populist slogans and a kind of anti-elitism (e.g. “the many” against “the establishment”), but to a lesser extent.

Furthermore, a huge gap has been created between the party and the popular classes. SYRIZA can’t persuade, mobilize and lead the people against the right-wing government of New Democracy in a period of intense social discontent with the management of the pandemic and the economy by the Greek government and at a time when popular demands for democracy, justice, and labor protection are emerging.

In this presentation, I will present the main characteristics of SYRIZA’s political discourse after its defeat in the 2019 national election, attempting to find if the party continues to express a populist discourse or not through discourse analysis while underlining its new political direction. Furthermore, I will examine the reasons the rapid transformation of the party in a more mainstream and “realistic” direction.

Alt Left: The Republican Right Resembles the Latin American Oligarchic Right More than Anything Else

From a discussion I am in on Academia: Instead, so much of what is found out there on the Internet is rhetoric, propaganda & misinformation. And, of course that has fed into the Trump cult and others who seem to have reverted to a kind of feral being that can no longer be reasoned with and/or who cannot engage in a civil conversation.
These people remind me of nothing so much as the Latin American Right, and in fact, the US Right is now very much like the oligarchic Right of Latin America. I can’t think of any other rightwing movements elsewhere in the world that resemble the US Right.
Of course, the Right in Canada, the UK, and Australia are similar but much less virulent.
There is no evidence of this sort of a Right anywhere on the Continent, nor in the former USSR, nor in the Middle East.  The ferocious unreasonableness of the US Right resembles the Lebanese Right and Gulf politics, but both are much more sectarian and even bigoted and racist.
It is absent in Central Asia except among Shahis and the Iranian opposition.
It also looks something like the armed Syrian Islamist opposition in terms of its wild irrationality and addiction to lying as a matter of course.
It is absent in South Asia.
It is not present in SE Asia. It is not present in the Philippines or Indonesia, nor does it exist in China, although the anti-Communist Chinese around the Epoch Times resemble the US Right a lot.
Really, the US Right is a fascism of the Latin American oligarchic authoritarian type. It’s all about the money, the loot, and class politics reign supreme.The extreme hatred of liberalism, the Left, social progress of any kind, and even democracy is also typical of the Latin American Right. I hate to use the f word but Trumpism is US fascism, period. Sinclair Lewis said when fascism came to America it would look exactly like this. That was 85 years ago.

Alt Left: The Entire US Moved 10 Points to the Left between 2016-2020

Found on the Internet:

Not too long now. Arizona, Texas and Florida are going to be firmly Blue in the not too distant future.

Guess what, the fantasy of the Demorats will be in their grasp, total control.

I guess the poster doesn’t like Democrats, but other than that, I’m afraid the poster is correct. If we do get total control as he puts it, I hope we don’t abuse it. We don’t like the Republicans when they act anti-democratic, so we shouldn’t do it either. Two wrongs and all that.

Arizona’s barely blue as it is and heading blue fast. In 10 years, Arizona will be as blue as Virginia.

Texas is barely red (2-3+ red) and teetering on the edge. It is slowly getting more and more blue with time. The thing is, the Republicans lose Texas and it’s all over. They will never win the Presidency again. If all of those electoral votes go blue, there’s no way they can cobble together 270 electors under the present political calculus. It’ll be code blue for the Republican Party. This is why the Republicans in Texas are so frantically trying to seal in a minority rule dictatorship for as long as they can.

And on a national level, that’s what’s with all of the vote suppression, the slowing down of the mail, and ultimately the attempted coup de etat in the capital on January 6. Not to mention that Trump tried everything he could to overturn the results of a democratic election and install himself instead in an electoral coup. That’s why Republicans packed the stolen Supreme Court with ultra-rightwing freaks, so the court could rule in hack rulings to allow a Republican minority rule dictatorship. That’s why they are packing the lower courts with the same.

That’s why the Florida Legislature overturned the amendment passed by the people enfranchising 775,000 felons and enabling them to vote.

 

That’s why Georgia just passed a law allowing the Republican legislature to throw out any county vote commissions that they want. These are the people who count and certify the votes. If they don’t like the outcome of the democratic vote in some county, they can simply fire the commission and put in their own Republican hacks and overthrow the Democratic win by declaring the Republican the winner even when he lost. That’s why the Republicans are working overtime to gerrymander as many legislative and House of Representatives seats as they can based on the latest census which was fraudulently counted by the Trump Administration.

All of this boils down to righting authoritarian rule or a rightwing dictatorship, basically along the Latin American model. Generally speaking, nowadays rightwing authoritarian regimes or dictatorships are referred to as fascist. Fascism means a rightwing dictatorship in current parlance.

So we see now that the Republican Party is now an openly fascist political party, modeling itself on the rightwing fascist minority rule parties in Latin America.

Back to Arizona and Texas. Both states are being swarmed with Californians. This is what is tipping both states blue. Almost no new conservatives are moving into either state.

Let’s look at Florida again. Florida is the ultimate purple state. Looking at polls, Florida strikes me as a very rightwing state. It doesn’t seem to be getting bluer or redder but if all those felons voted, Florida would be bluer.

An infusion of retiring mostly liberal northerners is balanced out by continuous infusions of rightwing Latin Americans, especially Cubans, Venezuelans, and to a lesser extent Nicaraguans. The continuous Latin Right infusions keep it purple, otherwise it would have gone blue some time ago. Also, the Cubans are moving to the Right, mostly the younger ones. They moved 16 points to the Right under Trump. In addition, the retirees, though they come from the liberal Northeast, may not be as liberal as you think because the type of retiree who moves to Florida is often attracted to the low state taxes, so Northeastern retirees may be more Republican than the ordinary Northeasterner.

Screw the votes. They’re all being stolen now anyway with voting machines since 2003 when voting went digital with Karl Rove and Jack Abramoff’s Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Since 2003, we have seen one bizarre poll failure after another and all of the failures are in one direction – Republican. Both pre-election and the even more accurate exit polls have been going off.

Prior to 2003, pre-election and exit polls had been so accurate that some people were suggesting that we do away with elections and just decide electoral contests on polling numbers. Then suddenly all of the polls started failing all over the country, and they’ve kept failing for 17 years. There’s no way that this is happening by chance, especially with all of the failures only going towards the Republicans. The only conclusion is that Republicans have been engaging in massive electoral fraud since 2003 by stealing elections with voting machines.

I calculated national polls for all 50 states and then plotted them against the 2016 results. The results were stunning. The entire country went 10 points blue from 2016-2020. Even the reddest states like Wyoming and West Virginia went ~10 points blue and of course, so did the bluest states. Some states like Ohio and Florida are reliably purple for decades for whatever reason.

But not even one single state got redder from 2016-2020.

The Republicans will either have to become a rightwing dictatorship and engage in minority rule (apparently that is the goal with all as outlined above) or they will have to move to the left with the rest of the country if they want to be relevant at all. Since 2000, the US electorate has moved on average 5-10 to the left. The only reason this has not shown up in voting is due to election fraud. The Republican Party either have to move left or die.

The problem is that that the Republican Party cannot move to the left. That’s because if Republicans move to the left, they won’t really be Republicans anymore. The Republican Party is one of the most rightwing major parties on Earth. It’s an outlier on a world scale. Most of the world is basically socialist in some way or another or at least social democratic.

Oligarchic political parties that represent the aristocracy instead of the people like the Republican Party are anti-democratic by their very nature because few majorities (other than Americans, oddly enough) anywhere wish to vote for a party that represents the aristocrats instead of the people. Which begs the question of why Americans routinely vote for aristocratic rule and reject democratic rule. Do tens of millions of Americans literally think they are aristocrats? Is that it?

Alt Left: The People Choose Democracy over Aristocratic Rule in Latin America

Down in Latin America, once the Left takes over the state, they prove to be so popular with the poor majority that the oligarchic parties of authoritarian Right shrink to ~2

The Right literally cannot win in places that have tasted socialism like Nicaragua and Venezuela. The only way they win is by cheating, election fraud/rigging, and coups of various kinds – electoral, lockout, economic, legislative, judicial, and military. Or they run as Leftists and then turn hard right the minute they get in like Lenin Moreno in Ecuador.

In other places, people seem to be rejecting aristocratic rule.

A majority in Colombia seems poised to elect a fairly leftwing politician.

A literal Marxist, a Palestinian Chilean, has been leading polls in Chile for some time now.

A Marxist just barely won the Presidency in Peru.

The rightwing coup in Bolivia was overthrown, and the Left won handily again.

Argentina has been electing the leftwing Peronist Fernandez dynasty for some time now. The only way the Right won last time was because rightwing banksters on Wall Street deliberately crashed the economy so the Right got in on the protest vote.

In Paraguay, the last democratic election elected a Leftist, a former priest. He was overthrown in a legislative coup, and it’s been a rightwing dictatorship ever since.

Honduras elected a leftwinger, and a moderate one at that, in its last democratic election. The US immediately sponsored a coup, and it has been a rightwing military dictatorship ever since.

The Left has been winning in various Caribbean islands for some time.

Haiti has been under one form or another of rightwing dictatorship ever since US Special Forces removed President Aristide at gunpoint in a military coup. Aristide’s party, Lavalas, was extremely popular and got 9

The fascist Bolsonaro is now unpopular, and the moderately leftwing Workers Party is now ahead in the polls. The PT was removed in a judicial coup via lawfare with the help of the US FBI (I knew there was a reason I hated feds). The President and Vice President were literally put in prison on completely fake charges. This is the only Bolsonaro got in. However, Brazil definitely has a significant base for fascism as in Colombia for whatever reason.

Lopez Obrador or AMLO for short won the recent election in Mexico, a country long marred by extreme election fraud. He’s the most leftwing president in some time. However, he has governed from the Center. Nevertheless, the Mexican oligarchy (with deep ties to the Catholic Church) nevertheless has been threatening a coup ever since he took office.

The Right only won in Ecuador last time around because Lenin Moreno banned the leftwing party and exiled its leader, Correa. The government has stated that he will be jailed if he returns. The charges are faked. The Right only won last time around because the election was grossly unfair. There was no actual election fraud in terms of altering the vote, but the campaigning leading up to the election was grotesquely unfair.

Alt Left: Fascist States around the World in the Past Century

I will be leaving World War 2, where many such regimes were created in  Europe, out of this discussion because I don’t understand it well.

A discussion of fascism is very important because the Republican Party is already a fascist political party in the sense of a rightwing authoritarian party along Latin American oligarchy lines.

The Type of State the Republicans Are Aiming At

Similar regimes were installed in Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Iran, Turkey (a Mussolinist + Nazi extrerminationist model), Greece, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Zaire, Kenya, Liberia, Indonesia (a classic Mussolinist model), Philippines, South Korea, Brunei, Taiwan, South Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, Gabon, Angola, and South Africa, not to mention the many such regimes installed in Latin America, where the rightwing authoritarian or dictatorship regime has become a classic model. Many of these had a fake democratic facade over what was basically a dictatorship.

Nazi extreminationism with an ethnic component has been installed in Turkey and possibly Azerbaijan. Those models are governing to this day in the fake Croatian and Serbian states inside Bosnia. The present Croatian and Serbian regimes have overtones of WW2 like fascism, as does Hungary under Orban. Nazi-style exterminationist regimes, albeit with Communists and leftwingers substituted for Jews, have been installed in Iran, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan in the past.

One could argue that Israel is now a Mussolinist style fascist government, albeit with a facade of democracy in which various fascist parties compete to rule the fascist state.

Rightwing Authoritarian Models in Latin America in the Last Century

It’s not so much the Nazi, National Socialist or classic fascist models of World War 2, although Trump and Berlusconi do resemble Mussolini, and Berlusconi created a classic Mussolinist fascist state in Brazil along the lines of the previous years of Operation Condor in Pinochet’s Chile, Velasco’s Argentina, the generals’ Brazil, Salazar’s Paraguay, the Uruguayan dictatorship, and Banzer’s Bolivia.

Somewhat different but similar “kill the Communists” regimes were created in Ecuador in the 1980’s, Fujimora and Belaunde’s Peru, Venezuela in the late 80’s, Uribe and many others’ Colombia (where it has become the only form of the state and Uribismo is almost a classic fascist Mussolinist model), Somoza’s Nicaragua, Bautista’s Cuba, Trujillo’s Dominican Republican, Rios Montt’s Guatemala, and ARENA, D’Aubisson, and Duarte’s El Salvador, Haiti under the Duvaliers, where it became a model followed to this day, and the present government of the generals in Honduras.

The model has not yet been installed in much of the Caribbean, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Mexico, and the Guyanas, but it’s been generalized as the classic model in Latin America in general for over a century now. There are rumblings now to create another rightwing authoritarian regime in Peru and Mexico.

Counterrevolution is ongoing in Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela and has succeeded recently in Ecuador, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, and Haiti. There were recent rumblings in Argentina, where the large landowners (who were never broken up as there was no land reform)  were making threats of a coup if their riches were touched. There were failed attempts recently in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Another attempt is ongoing in Venezuela and Nicaragua.

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

Alt Left: Full Democracy in the US Will Be a Boon for the Democrats and a Catastrophe for the Republicans

I do believe there are parties, groups, and individuals, in fact 10’s of millions of them, right here in the US who very much support democracy in the US itself. Those would be people associated with the Democratic Party and the Left in the US.

Few if any persons on the Right in the US support democracy, although there are a few. The reasoning is simple.

Full democracy implemented in the US, something we have never had and never even tried to have, would help the Democratic Party and the Left in the US quite a bit. So of course they support it. But they supported it even when majorities were voting Right to be fair.

Full democracy in the US, which as I noted we have never had one day of in this silly blighted land, would be a disaster for the Republican Party.

The country is far to the left of the Republican Party. Since 2005, Democrats have held a +1

But that probably cannot be done because it goes against the basic foundations of the Republican Party itself. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, but they would have to turn their back on over 100 years of Republican Party policy and go all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt.

Hell, at this point, a return to Richard Nixon or Eisenhower would be wonderful, but the party is too far gone to even do that. Instead of moving left with the electorate as they should if they wish to survive, every year they get increasingly rightwing to the point where the Republican is an actual anti-democratic rightwing authoritarian party. They now don’t support democracy at all. They support some form of Latin American style rightwing hard or soft dictatorship. It’s transformed itself into an actual Latin American-style fascist political political party.

Survival against All Odds Via Computerized Election Theft

The only reason the Republicans have been winning all of that time is because they’ve been stealing elections. No way on Earth could fifteen years of +1

The only possible explanation for the massive and unprecedented failure in in pre-election and election precinct level polling is that the Republicans have been engaged in massive election theft via computer voting machines for the last 20 years. In fact, Karl Rove is on record admitting that the Republicans have been stealing elections via computer voting machines. He said he it’s within a few points, they can try to steal it because no one notices but if it’s more than that, they don’t even try.

2020 was the most brazen election theft in US history. Republicans tried to steal elections in Wisconsin and Michigan where they were down by 8-10 points and they almost won in both cases. So this shows that the Republicans are getting very desperate. Even if Democrats are ahead by 8-10 percentage points, Republicans will still try to steal it and no one in the Democratic Party or the media will ban at eye.

They will just blab on endlessly about poll failure. In this sense, the US Democratic Party fully deserves every terrible thing that has happened to it and in a larger sense, US Democrats deserve every shitty rightwing thing that has happened and will happen to this country for being so stupid and obtuse to refuse to recognize this obvious election theft being conducted right under their noses. I have no sympathy for the US Democratic Party. They can burn it to the ground for all I care, and while they are at it, burn every one of those corporate media companies to the ground too.

The system is too far gone for reform. I’m at the “burn it to the ground and start all over again from scratch” point now. Otherwise known as creative destruction. That’s an almost Maoist point of view. Sometimes things are just too far gone for petty reformism. You need to raze it all to the ground and start all over again with a complete political and cultural revolution.

Alt Left: Why The Republican Party is Now Literally a Latin American-Style Rightwing Authoritarian or Fascist Political Party

Fascism: A Popular Palingetic Dictatorship against the Left

This is if we define fascism as any rightwing dictatorship or rightwing authoritarian system. I think it’s a good argument that any rightwing dictatorship is basically a fascist political system if we define fascism according to its excellent new definition of “a popular dictatorship against the Left.”

It also tends to have nationalist or ultranationalist palingetic properties in many cases, palingetic referring to a project along the lines of the mythic bird rising from the ashes that seeks to restore the blood and soil glory of the ancient nation before it was destroyed by insurgent anti-nationalists, typical liberals or minorities.

Trumpism, Erdoganism, and Hindutvadism: Three Fascist Ideologies

Viewed through this mirror, you can see how Trumpism, Erodgan’s Ottoman Islamism, and the BJP Hindutva regime in India are all classic fascist political parties. Note the strong support by the middle classes of all three projects, in particular the Hindutvadi one. Religion is wedded to religious bigotry in all three nations – Christianity (albeit in a mild form deeply associated with regressive Judaism) in Trump’s case, a religio-nationalist Islam in the case of Turkey and a religio-nationalist Hindusim in the case of India.

In the latter two cases, religious minorities are associated with treasonous insurgents who needed to be eliminated from the body politic, which they are seen as literally poisoning. In Trump’s case, the prejudice is not so much religious as it as against liberals and liberalism and apparently even democracy, the twin enemies of fascists everywhere dating all the way back to 1930’s Germany. Liberalism and democracy makes the nation soft and allows the national enemies, who happen to be minorities and liberals, to worm their way into the body politic and eat away at the nation itself like termites.

Alt Left: Rural Land Reforms: An Overview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A land reform was definitely done in Iran.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The land reform was incomplete in Venezuela.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: Capitalism Will Always Tend Towards Fascism: Does that Mean It Is Fatally Flawed?

DiscoCat: The Far Left has an explicit goal of ending capitalism. The Far Right does not. This is why when forced to choose between the Far Right and the Far Left, liberals, capitalists, industrialists, and plutocrats will always choose the Far Right.

It is precisely for this reason that the wealthy industrialists and plutocrats in Germany supported Hitler’s chancellorship campaign in 1931. They didn’t give a flying fuck about his nationalism, bigotry, warmongering, and antisemitism. Most of the plutocrats probably thought Hitler’s ravings were just harmless antics to galvanize his base. Whatever it takes to rile up the mindless cattle and garner their support. All they cared about is that he would let them keep their ownership of the factories and protect their interests from socialists and communists.

The plutocrats will always support fascism as a bulwark against socialism if they feel the latter’s gaining popularity among the masses. They usually don’t like fascism but they’re driven to support it by pure self-interest and pragmatism.

Thank you very much for this comment! And by the way, welcome to the site if you are new here!

I have felt this way a long time myself. I think it goes deeper than this though. Many of the leftwingers that got overthrown by fascists were just liberals who did some tinkering around the edges. Arbenz in Guatemala and many others such as Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic were overthrown for trying to do a land reform. The leader of Honduras and Aristide in Haiti were overthrown by fascists for literally raising the minimum wage! That’s all they did. And Bill Clinton helped overthrow Aristide and Hitlery Clinton herself literally overthrew the leader of Honduras and installed a fascist coup that very quickly murdered 1,000 social activists.

This has happened many times. The new Peruvian leader has promised to do only very mild reforms and he’s already being called a Communist. The mild reformer of the PT, Lula, was overthrown in a judicial coup that was assisted by the FBI! I told you Feds are crap. Feds are the worst pigs of them all.

So I disagree where the poster says all of these people go fascist for fear that the Left will end capitalism. It appears that any threat to their profits at all is enough to cause the capitalists to put in a fascist regime. So I think the comment should be amended from fear of the overthrow of capitalism to the fear of any loss of profits and income at all.

A while back, I told my mother that down in Latin America, it is routine for the Right to murder trade unionists and union leaders. She shook her head and said, “That’s because down there, if you’re in a union, they think that means you’re a Communist.” I would point out that that was all done with the help of the US, especially the CIA.

The US has been murdering union members in Latin America for 60 years now, and probably even longer if you consider the Banana Revolt in the Uraba of Colombia in 1921. And every one of our Latin American interventions from 1910-1950 was done on the basis more or less of “kill the trade unionists,” among other things. The Sandinistas of Nicaragua are named after Augusto Sandino, the leader of Nicaraguan guerrillas who fought the US Marines in Nicaragua for many years.

That’s exactly correct. I’d like to add that not one thing has changed. Social activists including union members and leaders, are murdered every day in Colombia for years now.

Alt Left: The US Imperialist Regime Change Playbook: Engage in Violent and Seditious Activities Towards the Targeted Government, Provoke Repression, and then Impose Sanctions, Fund Contras, or Sponsor a Fascist Coup to “Restore Order and Democracy”

In Venezuela and Nicaragua, the US staged violent riots with armed insurgents that attempted to overthrow the government, and then slammed sanctions on the governments when they cracked down on the seditious traitors. Obviously when you crack down on seditious traitors, it’s hard to be real democratic about it, as you start to throw lots of traitors in jail, shut down their treasonous organizations and political parties, forbid the seditious political parties and politicians from running for office again, and often have to start censoring the media because of the frankly murderous lies that the opposition yellow press prints, which actually results in getting a lot of people killed.

During these seditious coup attempts, the reporting is completely dishonest in the US and about as fake as you can get. Outrageous acts of murder committed by the putschists are breathlessly reported by the treasonous local and overseas US press and having been committed by the government, working people into a fever pitch. Opposition fascist liars flood social media, riling everyone up.

But do you see how they provoke repression? This is the imperialist playbook. Provoke repression with illegal and seditious activities, and then scream dictatorship when the law enforcement arms of the state try to restore some order. Wave after wave of sanctions were slammed on the Nicaraguan government by Democrats and Republicans both. When it comes to support for imperialism and alliance with the forces of violent revolutionary fascism and reaction around the world along with rightwing and fascist dictatorships in power, support for fascist states and forces is a bipartisan affair.

The US supports the fascist opposition in Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, Belarus, and Ukraine. The US supports the fascist states of Turkey, Israel, India, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Brazil, Honduras, and Haiti and opposes the anti-fascist forces fighting against them. Face it, America loves rightwing dictatorships and fascist governments and opposition forces.

Alt Left: The Nicaraguan Violence of 2017 Was Actually a US-Sponsored Fascist Coup Attempt

I was following the fascist coup in Nicaragua in 2017, which was written up as some righteous civil disturbances and riots against a brutal and vicious leftwing Sandinista dictatorship run by Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario. Really it was just a fascist coup attempt by the 2

There was one report after another of outrageous murders and attempted murders by the government. They all shocked me in their depravity.

The government had set an opposition radio station on fire, killing everyone inside!

Whoops. It turns out that the fascists had set a government radio station on fire, killing 10 government employees inside.

There were regular riots at the universities, where rich brats were said to be barricaded inside against murderous government forces inside.

I did some research and it was actually..

Whoops! The fascist students who had taken control of the university and were attacking the government forces and supporters.

Everything I read turned out to be the exact opposite of the way it was reported.

Government forces set a house on fire, killing a family of four inside!

Whoops! It turned out that this took place in an opposition controlled neighborhood where government forces were not present and were instead five miles away. Opposition rioters had raided a two story house full of Sandinista supporters and set it on fire, killing a family inside.

Roadblocks with armed insurgents were set up all over the country. People coming by were questioned, and government supporters and employees were taken out of their cars, beaten, tortured, and sometimes killed.

Finally, there was a fake human rights report issued by Amnesty International that got everything wrong and attributed almost all of the violence and deaths to the government, when really it was the other way around, and 8

Slowly but surely, the government took the country back. When it was all over, 300-400 people were dead. The government was pretty reasonable considering that they were dealing with an attempted by armed mobs of rioters representing only 2

Most other countries would have been much more brutal. Nicaragua didn’t even arrest that many people, and most of those traitors have already been released. Out of 4,000 opposition organizations, four were shut down by the government for the obvious role they played in the sedition. The US reacted with outrage to this and said that the Sandinista government, which typically got favorable ratings of 70-8

The openly seditious media was allowed to continue to publish, even though most of them should have been shut down. The openly treasonous political parties that engaged in an attempt to overthrow the government by force were not shut down and were allowed to continue to run for office. I would have shut them all down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could go on but you get the picture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are a few other places outside Latin America:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: How GloboHomo Fits in With Dependency Theory, the Cultural Left, the US Empire and the Needs of US Corporations

Brian: Identity politics is a bulwark against socialism, even against mild social democracy. It works by preventing an awareness of common cause among those who aren’t near the top of society. It’s used domestically, in the U.S., to stymie any sort of labor movement, and abroad it serves to keep vassal states weak and dependent.

Yeah this is perfect. Why is the US pushing gay rights all over the world, especially in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, places where homophobia is at a high level? Why does the US push feminism and women’s rights so strongly in Afghanistan? Why is Soros pushing radical feminism and gay rights all over Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia?

And appallingly, why does Soros refuse to fund this same radical feminism in Israel, where his primary loyalty lies? Gosh, that’s straight out the Protocols! Weaken the Gentile states but keep the Jews strong so we can continue to lord it over the Gentiles, our economic and cultural competitors.

What’s the point? It’s clear the most Afghans do not like such things. Also we push the same Cultural Liberalism or Cultural Left crap.

I call it GloboHomo because of its emphasis on a strong push for gay rights in homophobic countries and the fact that the Cultural Left is part of the US Empire and the corporate-Empire-Deep State globalization project, which benefits elites, the rich, and corporations but doesn’t benefit your average person at all. Note that an essential aspect of globalization is anti-nationalism and neoliberalism.

The US has always hated nationalism because when nationalists come to power, they get tired of being exploited, raped and ravaged US colonies who get 10 cents on every dollar US corporations take out of their nations and instead advocate for a national economy where they manufacture their own things, grow crops for food instead of export, and nationalize large US corporate interests so the nation can use it’s national resources to help its own people instead of having them stolen by US corporate carpetbaggers.

The part about growing food for consumption not export is very important because the US Empire’s (also the project of the entire West) is to stop countries from making their own stuff and growing their own food. Why? Because we wish to keep them in a colonial dependency because that way we can exploit them maximally and extract the highest profit from their countries while giving them as few of the profits as possible.

The US typically makes alliance with a comprador elite, oligarchy, or ruling class along with an upper middle class sector attached to it. This class also represents most of the business interests of the nation. The US allows this top 2

This allows them to benefit from not making their own stuff or growing their own food by allowing them to run the import and distribution models that import and distribute US food and manufactured products. The top 2

In fact, the US pushed neoliberalism all over the world, in particular in Latin America, in the 1980’s and 1990’s. These were referred to in Latin America as The Lost Decades for the negative economic growth during those times. The so-called Pink Tide that so enraged the US and led to fascist coup after fascist coup was the logical result of the disgust Latin Americans felt for The Lost Decades foisted on them by the US.

During this period when the US pushed neoliberalism, generally only the top 2

Why do we want nations to grow for export and not for internal consumption?

Because that way we can make money off the agricultural sector by profiting from the import of these foods from the nation. We don’t want them growing their own food because then they wouldn’t grow so much profit-rich crops for export and would instead grow for consumption, which US corporations can’t make a profit off of.

Also, if people grow for consumption, they would eat their own food instead of being forced to import most of their food from US farmers and food manufacturing corporations. I would also note that the US imported US manufactured food is usually not very good for you, being high in salt, sugar, simple carbohydrates and fat and low in protein and complex carbohydrates. Canned processed food usually isn’t’ particularly good for you for a variety of reasons.

Why do we not want nations to make their own stuff?

Because then they would not need to import all of their manufactured goods from US corporations!

Thing is, when nations grow their own food and make their own manufactured products it’s very difficult for the US to go in and exploit that country and make super-profits. Sure there are still a level of profits to be made – note the trade between the US and Europe – but the profits are not nearly at such a high level.

Alt Left: Updated: How the Armed Colombian Left (the FARC and the ELN) Came to Be

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is possible that Gaitan, like Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, was a patsy for an assassination carried out by the US Deep State in the case of the former and by the FBI itself in the case of Ray.

Gaitan suffered from schizophrenia, could not fire a gun properly, the gun in his hand was not capable of firing accurately, and he was standing quite a distance away from Gaitan while the murder occurred at a short distance. Further, Sierra was not seen anywhere near the assassination. The first time  he was spotted, he was in between two police officers.

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

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

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

The Bogotazo led eventually to La Violencia, a truly crazy 10 year period from 1954-1964 in which Liberals and Conservatives, which ideologically are both simply fascist parties, with the Liberals masquerading as social democrats to the extent that they are even members of the Socialist International, massacred each other in huge numbers for no particular reason at all.

The Liberals and Conservatives typically trade off running the country. Although they hated each other to the point of slaughtering hundreds of thousands of each other, the odd thing is that despite their names, ideologically and in governance, there is little difference between. They are both far rightwing parties of the oligarchy.

The armed Left in the form of the ELN, which was created in 1964, theorizes that La Violencia was simply a way for the elite to slaughter the politically active working class.

After La Violencia ended in 1964, a small group of people tired of being massacred settled in some property in West-Central Colombia and declared themselves a semi-autonomous republic. They were also heavily armed. They said that and armed themselves mostly to keep from being massacred. And they did set it up as a “Communist republic” but it was only a small patch of land of no particular consequence and the group’s numbers never numbered greater than 200.

They named this place Marquetalia. Manuel “Sure Shot” Marulanda, the leader of the FARC for the next 40 years, was one of the founders of this commune. The Colombian government became very alarmed that 200 people had called themselves Communists and settled some lands that they freaked out and called for Uncle Sam to come help.

This was under the “liberal Democrat” Johnson Administration. The US also became very alarmed and we sent several generals and a troop of Green Berets down there.

At this time, the Green Berets were advising the Guatemalan government in putting down a Left insurgency that began there in 1960. They put it down via massacres of the civilian population. There’s nothing noble about the Green Berets. They’re simply the US government version of a Latin American death squad.

Anyway, a significant army detachment was mobilized and Marquetalia was attacked with US advisors by their side. There are suggestions that the US and Colombia even used chemical weapons against the commune.

The Marquetalians fought back but were defeated, suffering many casualties. The survivors retreated into the mountains of Colombia. These are really mountain jungles as the mountains are covered in a jungle-like near-rainforest and it’s impossible to find anyone or anything in there.

There they decided that all peaceful attempts at change, including setting up a semi-autonomous commune, were impossible, so they could either sit in the villages and wait for the government to come murder them or they could take up arms so they could at least fight back when the army and death squads came.

The group was called the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and they are still active to this day, 56 years later. At one time around 2000, they controlled ~5

The ELN (National Liberation Army) was formed at the same time, in 1964, in Eastern Colombia under obscure circumstances that I’m not aware of.

The original philosophy was Liberation Theology and their leader was Camilo Torres, the original “priest with a machine gun.” Liberation theology can be thought of as “Jesus with a machine gun” and in fact there are murals in Latin America showing exactly this. The idea is that Jesus supported “the preferential option for the poor” and that even armed struggle to achieve this goal was not only valid but very Christian.

One of the original theorists was an educator named Paulo Friere in Brazil who published a famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed – also published in the same year that the ELN and the FARC were formed in 1964 -along these lines, advocating a liberation theology component to be the focus of the curriculum in Latin America. Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez could be considered the father of Liberation Theology. He wrote a book called The Theology of Liberation around this same time.

To this day, although the ELN are Leftists, they are still officially a Christian organization and they have many supporters among the Catholic clergy in Colombia, as does the officially atheist FARC.

Alt Left: How the US Staged Fascist Coups in Many Countries the World Over in the Last 70 Years

After World War, the Cold War was started and the murderous Dulles Brothers Installed the Policy known as Containment. This was implemented between 1946-48. As part of this policy, the US overthrew nationalist, social democratic, and even liberal democratically elected governments all over the world as part of the “War on Communism.” We replaced them with rightwing dictatorships. Although it is arguable, in general all rightwing  authoritarian regimes or dictatorships are probably fascist. Rightwing dictatorship = fascism.

These regimes were found most of Central America in Guatemala after 1954, in El Salvador and Honduras since forever, and in Nicaragua under the Somozas.

They were found in all of South America at one time or another. We can see them in the generals after 1964 in Brazil, the democratic facade duopoly regimes in Venezuela in Colombia (especially after 1947 and again in 1964, Ecuador, Peru until the generals’ revolt in 1968, Bolivia under Banzer after 1953, Paraguay under Strausser, Argentina and Uruguay under the generals in the late 80’s and early 90’s, and Pinochet in Chile.

They were also seen in the Caribbean in Cuba under Bautista, the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, and Haiti under the Duvaliers.

In Southeast Asia, they were found in Thieu in South Vietnam, Sihanouk in Cambodia, the monarchy in Laos, the military regimes in Thailand, Suharto in Indonesia, the Sultan in Brunei, Marcos in the Philippines, and Taiwan under Chiang Kai Chek.

In Northeast Asia, a regime of this type was found in South Korea from 1947-on.

They were found South Asia with Pakistan under Generals like Zia, in Central Asia in the Shah of Iran, and in a sense, the Arab World with Saddam (Saddam was installed by the CIA), King Hassan in Morocco, the Gulf monarchies, and Jordan. Earlier, they were found in the monarchies in Libya and Egypt that were overthrown by Arab nationalists. Also, Israel played this sort of role with a democratic facade.

We also found them in the Near East in the military regimes in Turkey (especially Turgut Ozul) and for a while in Greece under the colonels in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

NATO formed the backbone of a “rightwing dictatorship” in the background of Western Europe (especially Italy), where Operation Gladio NATO intelligence essentially ran most of those countries as a Deep State behind the scenes. These regimes were found in Spain under Franco and in Portugal under Salazar along with its colonies.

These regimes were not so much in evidence in Africa except in South Africa and Rhodesia and most prominently, Mobutu in Zaire and Samuel Doe in Liberia.

The fascist forms of these rightwing dictatorships varied, most being nonracist fascism but a few being racist fascists (Turkey), and others being Mussolinists (Suharto in Indonesia with his “pangesila”)

Alt Left: The Nature of Latin American Rightwing Dictatorships (Fascist Regimes) in Latin America

The Venezuelan elite are classic Latin American elite fascists, a somewhat distinct type. Most of the elite down there has this “Latin American fascist” orientation.

It’s generally not race-based, but the ruling elite tends to be lighter-skinned than the darker masses, even in Haiti. Instead, it’s more like the “rightwing authoritarianism” or “rightwing dictatorships” that we saw so many of in the Cold War in Latin America and elsewhere.

Alt Left: How the Cold War Against Communism Ended up Being a War against Nationalism, Social Democracy, and even Liberalism

All of these liberal Democrats signing on to this media war on Venezuela need to recognize that the corporate media is using the Venezuelan example as part of a “war on socialism” to discredit the very word socialism and everything associated with it.

Remember when Trump said before Congress that the US will never be a socialist country? Here, socialism refers to social democracy in either in name/action, which exists in 9

Remember how the entire Congress, including the vast majority of Democratic Congressmen, gave that fascist a standing ovation when he said that? And liberal Democrats dare to claim that they are on the left! They’re not on the left of anything, except maybe the left wing of Republican Party.

The corporate media and the US money/government elite (The Deep State, basically) despises anything that even smacks of socialism, especially social democracy which they truly hate because it is most likely to be implemented. This started during the Cold War but it was already going on in the Depression, when US fascists nearly staged a military coup against FDR, who they said was a Communist.

But during the Cold War the demonization of anything smacking of socialism, no matter how mild, really got under way with two bloodthirsty killers, the Dulles Brothers, who initiated the policy of Containment and created the CIA out of the wartime US intelligence agency, effectively turning the US into a militarized, national security state.

In other words, they initiated what boils down to the US Deep State or the foreign policy establishment of the United States. Note that the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about is absolutely part of this Deep State too, as it and the national security state are each part of each other.

It was during this era when the US overthrew countries all the time for the tiniest movements towards social democracy and a lot of times simply for implementing social liberalism, the ideology of the US Democratic Party!

For instance, Aristide in Haiti was overthrown for the simple reason that he raised the minimum wage.

The US Democratic Party gave complete support to both of these coups, without a single dissenting member. My “liberal Democrat” father, actually a “Cold War liberal,” a truly awful group of people, gave his complete support to the fascist coup that overthrew Aristide. Why? Because Time Magazine told him it needed to be done. My father foolishly believed that Time Magazine was a liberal or at least Centrist project though it’s never been either.

So the Democratic Party supports raising the minimum wage, sure, but overseas, if you do it, the Democratic Party will call you a Communist and overthrow you in a fascist coup! Disgusting or what?

Nationalist, Social Democratic, and even Liberal Governments Overthrown by the CIA in the Last 70 years

Arbenz in Guatemala was overthrown in 1954 simply for implementing a mild social democracy. About

Juan Bosch came to power in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and started to implement a mild social democracy. The US media demonized him as a Communist, and soon LBJ staged a fascist coup to overthrow him.

The Mossadegh government in Iran was elected in 1953 for electing a nationalist who nationalized British Petroleum’s oil and set about to implement a mild social democracy with nationalist overtones. He was overthrown by the US and UK and a fascist monarch called Reza Shah was installed and held power for the next 26 years.

A leftwing government was elected in Guyana around 1970, and the Western media went into hysterics. In reality, he was just a social democrat. The “liberal” UK soon overthrew him in a fascist coup.

The US waged economic war against Manley’s government in Jamaica in the late 80’s and early 90’s. He was never anything but a social democrat.

The Left took power in Brazil in 1964 after they won an election. In truth they were just social democrats. They were quickly overthrown in a fascist coup by generals in the military a year later.

A social democratic government that contained a few Communists was elected in 1960 in Iraq. The CIA overthrew that government in a bloody coup and installed Saddam Hussein with specific instructions to get rid of and crack down on the Communists.

Patrice Lumumba in the Congo came to power in 1964. I believe he was never anything more than a social democrat. Nevertheless, the Western media went insane, calling him a Communist. A year later he was overthrown with the help of US intelligence. It is a proven fact that Donald Rumsfeld, then working for the Defense Intelligence Agency, helped set up his arrest and subsequent execution by being tied to a tree and shot.

Alt Left: Rightwing Authoritarianism Via Coup in Latin America: Some Recent Attempts and Successes

The following Latin American countries have recently had attempted or successful fascist coups and most are at the moment by rightwing authoritarian states or dictatorships.

Brazil: legal or judicial coup (lawfare) to remove a Leftist president on false legal grounds. Immediately started killing Leftists in the streets as soon as they got in. These are actual, real deal, Mussolini-style fascists in the European tradition. Most Latin American fascists are quite different from that.

Paraguay: Parliamentary coup to remove a Leftist president on a completely false basis by the rightwing Legislature.

Bolivia: Armed coup with rioting to remove a Leftist president over fake election fraud – the military and police were heavily involved.

Ecuador: Coup by devious lying – the conservative ran as a Leftist allied with the Leftist president who could not run anymore. As soon as he got in, the first he did was turn to the Right, say he had never been a Leftist, and attack the Left, harassing, arresting, and issuing arrest warrants for most of the Left he claimed to be a part of. False criminal charges were filed against the former President, so he can’t come back.

Colombia: The Left is kept out of power permanently by a death squad rightwing dictatorship with a democratic facade that stays in power simply by committing mass murder against the unarmed Left. Why do you think the Left in Colombia took up arms? All legal avenues for change were blocked and the army (with US Special Forces help) was running around the country looking for Leftists so they could murder them. The Left said we can either sit here in our villages and wait for the army to come out and kill us or we can pick up a gun so at least we have a hand when they come to kill us so we can shoot back.

Nicaragua: Armed coup of Venezuela/Bolivia type (mass rioting) attempted. Smashed by the Sandinistas.

Venezuela: Ongoing coup attempt for 22 years now ever since Chavez and the Bolivarians took power. So far all attempts of coups of all sorts – including economic, lawfare, parliamentary, rioting, assassination, military revolt, currency manipulation – have failed.

Haiti: Permanent fascist regime installed by the US. The very popular Lavalas Party, which won 9

Honduras: Democratically elected Leftist president overthrown by a military coup greenlighted by Hitlery Clinton and led by the rightwing army. After they seized power, 1,000 unarmed Leftists were murdered by quickly formed death squads.

Mexico: A Leftist President won the election, and already the light-skinned wealthy elite is making a lot of noises about taking him via a coup, and in fact a vague coup attempt seems to be forming. Many of the upper middle class and middle class Mexicans support this effort.

Now I will look at the US and show how the Republican Party, a fascist party since 2002 at least, is modeling its fascism or rightwing authoritarianism on the model implemented by the Latin American elites.

US: The fascist US Republican Party seems to be modeling its fascism or rightwing authoritarian politics on the reactionary and fascist Latin American elite. I urge everyone to watch Latin American politics very closely because whatever you see down there, you’re going to see here sooner or later.

That means the appearance of death squads. That sounds insane, but that is always a feature of these states the Republicans are modeling themselves on. And did you notice that the US capitalists and conservatives quickly went fascist in the face of a serious threat from the Left (Sanders, the Squad, Occupy Wall Street, BLM/antifa riots this summer)? Remember what I said in the previous post – when the capitalists face a serious threat to their money and power from the Left, they most always go fascist in a last ditch attempt to keep their money and stuff.

Alt Left: The US Has Always Supported Fascism Except for a Few Years in the 1940’s

America loves fascists, that’s the bottom line. And it’s worse America loves fascists, that’s the bottom line.

And it’s worse than that. Capitalists love fascism. Capitalists have never opposed any fascist state or rightwing dictatorship. Nor have any conservatives ever opposed a single fascist state or rightwing dictatorship.

Now that does not mean that the US is a fascist country, at least in its domestic policies.

Its foreign policy is a lot harder to figure. The US been supporting fascism overseas ever since US corporations started migrating overseas, first in Latin America, in search of greater profits, as capitalism demands that they must do. We may well be a fascist country at the moment. Trump is a fascist and the Republican Party is now a full-fledged fascist party, whereas before this aspect of itself was somewhat submerged, hidden, or put on the back-burner.

But the US has always been a pro-fascist country. We supported fascism from 1910 all the way through the 1930’s. The New York Times praised Hitler when he took power. Corporations in the UK felt the same way. He was killing and imprisoning the Left, and making the country safe for wealth and capital. Which is all any capitalist ever wants.

It is only when fascism became racialized, expansionist, and colonial in part due to rage at not being invited to the party when the European powers were racialized and expansionist as part of the divvying up, enslavement, and looting of the word outside of Europe by the European powers.

Japan and Germany were left out of this block party, so they decided, “Hey it’s our turn now. You guys have your colonialism, now we will have ours.” As the West continued to hold all of its colonies, the Axis powers were correct. Indeed we had to be forced into the war by the Japanese attack that we literally provoked and forced them into.

World War 2 was the only time in history that the US has ever used its military might to attack fascism, mostly because fascism had been getting rather out of hand, uncontrolled, chaotic, and destructive.

Right before the war, the US was pro-fascist, and no sooner was the ink dry on the surrender papers when the US started recruiting former Nazis, Mussolinists, and fascist Axis collaborators in Eastern Europe, but also in Italy, Greece, and Turkey. We immediately hired these Nazis to be our army for the dirty war we declared on the Soviet Union probably a day after the Yalta Agreement.

And no sooner were the Japanese fascists defeated that we started funding and training the Japanese fascist collaborators in South Korea to fight communism. The truth is that no one hates Communists more than fascists. Fascists think they should be killed on sight. More non-fascists are a bit more squeamish or at least not as extremist. So we recruited this brutal and amoral fascists to be dirty-fighting (Nazi-like) soldiers in our war against Communism. The first fascist armies funded by the West started operations in the Baltics and Ukraine only a few months after the Armistice.

So we only fought fascism for four years, from 1941-1945. Before that until 1910, we had supported it. And from 1945-on, the US supported any and all fascist countries or guerrillas everywhere on Earth.

After 1989, US liberal Democrats said this fascist dirty war was the lamentable but sadly necessary policy of the Cold War. Now that the Cold War was over, we didn’t need to be so evil anymore, and now we could go back to being the shining city on the hill.

Except the fascist Cold War didn’t end in 1989. It’s still going on to this day in the sense that it has reverted to the pre-World War 2 policy of supporting rightwing authoritarians and attacking any and all manifestations of the Left. All of the Left countries that were targeted in the Cold War remained targets after Gorbachev.

So the Cold War was never about fighting the evils of Communism in the form of the USSR. The Cold War was simply another phase of the fascist war on the Left everywhere on Earth that the US has waged since 1910. The enemy was never the USSR. The enemy was always socialism, or in many places, even social democracy or social liberalism.

So while we have traditionally not been a fascist country, we have always been a pro-fascist country. We didn’t practice it, but we supported itself everywhere it appeared on Earth.

Alt Left: Repost: Whites Act a Lot Different When They Are in the Majority as Opposed to the Minority

This is actually a somewhat rewritten repost of an old post that people are still commenting on.

Whites can actually act pretty good when they are a majority. Blacks are actually treated quite well here in the US by the majority Whites in my opinion. We US Whites probably treat Blacks better than anybody else. Obviously that wasn’t always the case, and that’s unfortunate, but no one is convicted for life of anything, and redemption is always possible. In fact, were there no redemption, we humans would still be acting like complete animals.

But when Whites get in the minority as in Latin America, South Africa, and Rhodesia, they didn’t act very good. And that’s to say the least.

And in Latin America, there is pretty much no such thing as race. It’s a deracialized continent. Nevertheless, look at how White those vicious Latin American fascist elites are.

Nevertheless, I would like to point out that those elites get a lot of dark-skinned people to do their dirty work for them. The death squads in Central America were populated with lower middle class mestizos. The fascist street mobs in Nicaragua and Venezuela are quite dark-skinned. They look very mestizo. However, the ones in Venezuela were said to be criminals who were hired by the rich to riot in the streets.

And there are progressive Whites all over Latin America. Very leftwing light-skinned people are or were in top positions of government in Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Cuba, Jamaica, and Uruguay. The leftwing governments in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Argentina, and Cuba are full of Whites.

The leadership of the FMLN, URNG, FARC, ELN and Shining Path guerrillas  is or was often White. The same was true with the leadership of the guerrillas in Argentina, Uruguay, and Honduras in years past. Many of the rank and file in the FARC and ELN are White.

Typically the guerrillas in Latin America have or had a White leadership and a mestizo (and in some cases mulatto or zambo as in Colombia) rank and file. Sort of like the fascist Latin American White elites, right? The leadership is all White, but the rank and  file street fighters are mestizos.

The Whites lead, the mestizos follow. This is Latin America.

Alt Left: I Despise Conservatism

It might seem otherwise but it’s actually true. I hang out on places like Daily Kos. All of the people I follow on Twitter are progressive or liberal Democrats. To me, the Republican Party is the enemy, especially this blatantly fascist latest version. Thing is though, don’t be fooled. They’ve always been like this.

None of this surprises me because I’ve been around Republicans and American conservatives (one of the worst of the breed) my whole life.

I’ve been on the Left my whole life. People keep telling me I’m a conservative, so I’ve been researching conservatism all over the world. I more or less hate it everywhere. It always the same garbage, against everything I stand for. I know I take a lot of anti-SJW points on here and I don’t write many liberal articles, but that’s because my audience has been mostly conservatives and Republicans forever.

Most liberals hate me and don’t even ask about the people further left, who seem to want me dead. Liberals come here for a bit and then freak out and run away, screaming,  “Racist! Sexist! Misogynist! Homophobic! Transphobic! Bigoted! Conservative!” It’s sad because I’m probably left on the vast majority of issues and I’m only conservative on some social issues, and even then, I’m not as conservative as a Republican social conservative. But liberals and Democrats are party-liners nowadays, as bad as Communists.

So I’ve never had much of a liberal audience, and hence there’s no audience for me to write for. But I’m definitely a man of the Left. And the Republican Party is absolutely fascist in its present orientation, Trump’s presidency has been a horrorshow that doesn’t even seem real because it’s so beyond anything I’ve experienced. And right now, of course Trump is trying to steal an election. Really the Republican Party is trying to overthrow a liberal winner of an election with a coup.

That’s what the Latin American Right does. I said the other day that our breed is starting to resemble them. The Latin American Right believes in minority rule forever and they also believe that the Left has no right to rule their countries, no matter how many elections they win. They’re simply not allowed to win.

If they lose an election, they typically scream fraud when there never is any, or they foment a military (Honduras), legislative (Paraguay), judicial (Brazil), or economic (Venezuela) coup of some sort or another. The Latin American Right is absolutely fascist in character and behavior.

There is absolutely zero evidence for any of the crazy voter fraud (actually election fraud) allegations levelled by the Republicans. I’ve studied them all in depth. For one thing, there’d be a vast blue shift in the difference between the outcome and the exit and pre-election polls. Instead there were a mere two blue shifts.

And there were 39 red shifts, many of large percentages. There is no way on Earth you could possible have 39 red shifts, often of a significant number of points, in any election. Poll failure, especially massive failure of all the polls – mass poll failure, does not occur. The polls are not rigged for the Democrats. In particular, exit polls pretty much never go off. They can’t. Any time you have mass shifts in outcomes versus exit polls, the only explanation is fraud.

In a number of states, the Republicans stole up to 10 points. They’ve never been this brazen before. I’d tell you if the Democrats cheated and they didn’t. The Republicans are projecting. They’re the ones who engage in election fraud via the voting machines that they own and run.

The latest appalling news is that the legislatures of 17 Republican state governments (many stolen with voting machine election fraud, particularly in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin. They had a lot of help from gerrymandered districts that make it almost impossible for a Democrat to carry them.

Outrageously, the Supreme Court approved these blatantly anti-democratic gerrymanders. The Republicans have been engaging in mass voter suppression for 20 years now. When you have mass voter suppression, you do not have democracy. When you have gerrymandered districts that the opposition can never win, you do not have democracy. When you have continuous election theft via electoral fraud with voting machines for two decades, you do not have a democracy.

I don’t know why Democratic morons keep screaming about saving our democracy. Supposedly we just rescued our democracy this time around. Like Hell we did. We simply made a dent in the rightwing authoritarian government we have had for at least 20 years in this country. America has no democracy. We are an authoritarian state – a dictatorship in a sense. Americans need to quit insisting we have a democracy here. That went away a long time ago.

The trick now is to get it back, which is the project I support. I support bringing democracy back to the US and rescuing it from this rightwing corporate dictatorship. And for that we need to do some extreme things like pack the Supreme Court, expand the lower courts and pack them too, add DC and Puerto Rico (if they wish) as new states, etc. I don’t want to fill the judges’ seats with unfair partisan Democrats. Then we will be replacing their Republican dictatorship with a Democratic dictatorship. I will settle for fair-minded justices who are committed to bring back our democracy and sustaining it going forward.

Alt Left: America Is Now an Exact Replica of a Latin American Rightwing Authoritarian State

The US is now a Latin American country. This is the perfect model of a Latin American extreme rightwing regime. The only thing missing is the death squads. I’m sure they’ll be coming along soon enough now.

Otherwise it’s a complete replication, all the way down to a very White rightwing ruling class who lord it over the browner proles.

Corrupt/stolen elections? Check.

Corrupt judiciary? Check.

Culture of lies? Check.

Culture of extreme militarism? Check.

Culture of violent anti-Communist fanaticism? Check.

Both an armed Left (leftwing guerrillas = antifa) and right (death squads/brownshirts/guarimbas = Proud Boys) engaging in violence against each other? Check.

Bread and circuses in the ruling class controlled media? Check.

Distracting the workers with fake divisive issues like abortion? Check.

Threats of rightwing coups, military or otherwise? Check.

A rightwing that literally believes that the Left has no right to rule? Check.

Frequent street violence and rioting? Check.

Sense of living in an alternate reality of nothing but lies? Check.

State rule by big capitalists? Check.

Increasingly militant, radical, and even armed Left? Check.

Increasingly radical and even militant educational sector, especially at the university level? Check.

Fake leftwing parties that only mask the rightwing authoritarian state = Democrats? Check.

Politicized, very rightwing military? Check.

Increasingly incendiary political discourse on both sides? Check.

Economic war waged against left governments in order to destroy the economy? Check.

Extreme and irrational conspiracy mindset on the part of the Right? Check.

Extreme rightwing that pretends to be populist and pro-worker in order to get elected? Check.

Frequent death threats against politicians? Check.

Belligerent, pro-imperialist foreign policy? Check.

Police/surveillance state? Check.

Absence of legal leftwing newspapers, newsmagazines, TV/radio stations? Check.

Alt Left: Communism/Socialism Isn’t the Cause of Latin America’s Problems; It’s the Solution

Transformer: Robert, I was arguing with this libertarian about the vicious cycle of inequality in Latin America and this was his response:

“Land monopoly is the core problem in Central America. Communism is the main reason the problem was not solved.”

I would like your response to his statement please. I personally disagree with his statement.

I think the reason the problem is not solved is because of a deeply poisonous rightwing reactionary elite as well as backward cultural traditions and attitudes that are obstacles to genuine land reform. Moreover, I think American foreign policy support for the rightwing oligarchy as well as the CIA aligning with these interest to overthrow democratic governments that try to correct the problem is a huge obstacle also.

Here.

I am not a supporter of Communism, and I think it is a far leftwing version of far rightwing libertarianism that you write about. Like you, I believe a free market economy with sensible regulations and a social safety net is the best solution. Pure capitalism and pure socialism are both two sides of the same coin.

My response: Sure, he’s wrong. That’s another one of their fake arguments. What the Hell is “land monopoly?” Your arguments of the cause of the problem are absolutely spot on perfect. That’s exactly the cause of all the mess right there in a small paragraph.

First of all, Communism barely exists in Latin America (only Cuba is Communist) so how in the Hell could it be the cause of all of the problems down there? This Libertarian is incoherent and dishonest, like all of them. He’s not only got the wrong cure, but like most rightwingers, he’s not even diagnosing the illness properly. All physicians know that without diagnosis there can be no treatment. As in medicine, so in political economy.

Communism especially of the Chinese variety would work very well down there. The Sandinistas, Evo Morales Movement Towards Socialism, Correa in Ecuador, the Worker’s Party (PT) government in Brazil, Father Aristide in Haiti, AMLO in Mexico, the FMLN government in El Salvador, the Kirchners in Argentina, and the priest who was running the Left government in Paraguay were all on the right track.

I also like very much what the Chavistas are doing in Venezuela. It’s not Communism at all. It’s something completely different, Socialism of the 21st Century. It also works very well when it’s not being sabotaged. Even with continuous coup-mongering and sabotage by the fascist opposition, the Chavistas had great success for many years.

Yes, it’s crashed now because the fascists and the US have really upped the ante. This time they think they can finally pull off the coup they have been trying to have for 18 years now. Yes, things are very bad in Venezuela now, and there are various reasons for that, but it’s not the model that is the problem. The model is the same as Chavez’ very successful one.

Not only that, but Maduro has gone much to the right of Chavez. He keeps caving in to the  fascists and putting in their proposals, but they keep trying  to overthrow him with a coup anyway. He’s being played. He needs to stop talking to the coupmongers. According to the insane law of cause and effect the right claims here, it must be the rightwing economic reforms Maduro has done that has crashed the economy. See how dumb it is to mess around with cause and effect. Just because to events parallel each other doesn’t mean they are causing each other.

The economy is crashing due to manipulation of the monetary system, some dumb mistakes by Maduro (not floating the currency), low oil prices, and lately US sanctions which are now nearly a blockade.

I also think the Cuban model has worked very well down there. The Sandinista model, to the right of both the Cuban and Venezuelan models, works extremely well. The instability recently was due to a violent coup attempt by the fascist opposition. Now they are under sanctions, so that might be hurting them too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: Socialism, Communism and Neoliberalism in High and Low-IQ Societies

Clavdius Americanvs: I don’t believe socialism is necessarily better for low-IQ societies, but it definitely helps redistribute the misery so things are more bearable for the general populace.

Socialism and even Communism is always better for low-IQ countries. There’s not even any debate about it. I suppose you can say that neoliberalism functions somewhat in the West, but it doesn’t work at all in low-IQ countries. It’s just fails spectacularly, however, the top 2

Clavdius Americanvs: I really don’t think socialism at the moment is a great idea for low-IQ countries. But it can arise if the ruling capitalist class is entrenched old money and not very permeable. Latin America used to have a race-based CASTE system for Christ’s sake! Entrenched old money isn’t really capitalist at all – it’s feudalism masquerading as a free market. I don’t believe Latin America is capable of anything else.

Well this is all neoliberal capitalism ever turns into – something that looks a lot like feudalism. Libertarians can’t figure out this law of capitalism and keep pining for this just and proper pure capitalism that never exists. Take the non-aggression principle. They can’t figure out that aggression is at the very heart of capitalism. No aggression, no capitalism.

Will capitalist countries ever allow socialist or communist countries to exist? Of course not. They try to overthrow them, often with violence, as soon as they show up. In the US, overthrowing socialist and even social democratic countries is a bipartisan affair, with even left Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders joining in with glee. Ocasio-Cortez is right. The Democratic Party is a center-right party and we don’t have a left party in the US. When was the last time? Henry Wallace? How did that work out? A party coup that put Truman in instead.

Clavdius Americanvs: I foresee any regime, even a socialist one, to eventually become feudal simply with a new ruling class not descended from the old one.

Probably not and it never happened in any Communist countries that I can think of. Many social democratic countries simply went corrupt and put the old ruling class in and continued calling themselves socialists. This happened in Venezuela, Peru, and Mexico.

Down in Latin America even the rightwing parties often call themselves socialists or have leftwing words like Labor, Liberal, Progressive, People’s, Popular, Workers, Revolutionary, etc. in their names because that’s often the only way to get elected. Rightwing parties down there even campaign on leftwing themes. All rightwing parties down there, even the death squad parties, campaign on helping the poor and alleviating poverty. Of course they never do it, but they have to say it or they won’t have a chance.

Clavdius Americanvs: The only hope is a secular rise in IQ for the countries so they can all produce more under capitalism.

I don’t think that will work either. The highest IQ countries are either Communist or “National Socialist” as in South Korea and Japan. I’m not sure what Taiwan is. Hong Kong is about ready to go Communist. Vietnam is Communist. All of Europe is nominally socialist or social democratic. It doesn’t look like even high-IQ countries want neoliberalism. Now if you talk about a market instead of “capitalism,” we can talk. After all, I am a socialist and I support a market myself.

Clavdius Americanvs: Afterwards, they can go the European route and turn into social democracies when they can afford it.

No one goes this route anymore – capitalism -> social democracy. Obviously the US is headed that way and Europe formerly did, as did Indonesia, with the Philippines heading that way slowly. And almost all poor countries nowadays are socialist or social democracies in name if not in form. No poor country wants to start out capitalist anymore. Neoliberalism is a luxury good, only affordable by the rich.

Clavdius Americanvs: Only with higher average IQ’s can entrenched ruling classes be otherthrown.

What happened in Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Laos, Cambodia, Eritrea, South Yemen, and Cuba?

Clavdius Americanvs: A population needs to be smart enough to produce and become aware of its social contract with the government. I doubt most leftwing participants in Latin America or any low IQ country really understand what they are signing up for in terms of a social contract.

Of course they do. Why do you think they all vote for the Left. Even at this late date, 7

Clavdius Americanvs: Low-IQ peasants just don’t want to starve or be beaten by armed thugs of their aristocratic overlords. They are somewhat aware of what they can get, but have no clue as to what they are giving up.

What they are giving up never worked for them anyway and probably never will.

Alt Left: US-Style Individualistic (Laissez Faire Neoliberal or Neoclassical) Economics Tends to Fail Most Everywhere Outside the US Because Everyone Hates It

The only country in Latin America where an actual US-style neoliberal system took hold along with the typical class-cucked citizenry that goes along with it is Chile, and the neoliberalism had to be put in at gunpoint by a vicious dictatorship that murdered 15,000 Chileans after a CIA coup overthrew the Democratically elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende.

Neoliberal scholars such as Milton Friedman said that neoliberalism in these places would always have to be enforced at gunpoint by a rightwing dictatorship because otherwise a majority would never vote for it. The admission that a majority would never vote for such a system ought to be a profound tell – how good could this system be if no majority in these parts of the world would ever vote for it?

After Pinochet left, the neoliberal culture continued, but really it only infected the upper 1/3 of the population who benefited from Pinochetism, while the lower 2/3 hated it.

Chile to this day remains one of the most unequal countries on Earth with class conflict and hatred so thick that it breaks out into street violence all the time. In recent months the country has been shaken by leftwing insurrectionist riots against the rightwing government, a logical outcome, but it was already like this somewhat for 30 years after Pinochet left. Chile is a place like the Philippines where the classes hate each other so much that they pretty much want each other dead, literally. The class hate is so thick you can cut it with a knife.

Neoliberalism also caught on somewhat in the UK under Thatcher and later Conservative governments, probably the closest to a US rightwing style government on Earth. Even long after Thatcher left, she caused such cultural change that the top 1/3 of the population went over to neoliberalism.

The bottom 2/3 of course did not (see Chile above – a 1/3 benefit, 2/3 are harmed equation is typical of neoliberalism), and Thatcher was burned in effigy amidst violent riots in the poorer urban areas when she died.

Thatcher was also an extreme anti-environmentalist, and it is not yet known if the Earth accepted or rejected her body when it was placed inside of its body. One wondered the same thing about Reagan, the vicious anti-environmentalist. When he died, I wondered, “Will the Earth even accept his body when it is interred?”

Neoliberalism caught on in Ireland, where it did the usual damage. It’s not known why the population opted for this.

It caught on in the Baltics because they hate Russia and Communism so much that they are almost psychotic. Of course, like all such people, the Baltics tend to be quite fascist. In an extreme reaction against anything slightly smelling of Communism, including the mildest forms of socialism, the Baltics went to extreme neoliberalism in a knee-jerk, unthinking way.

The more neoliberal a country was the more it got ruined by the 2008 economic crash (and the more socialist it was – like China – the more it was protected), and the Baltics were devastated by the crash. Latvia was hit worst of all. 1/3 of the population fled its ruined economy, including almost all of the educated and skilled classes. Latvia remains in neoliberal ruins to this day.

Russia went neoliberal under Yeltsin, who opened fire on the nation’s Parliament when it defied him, murdering 600 people, including many legislators. In 1996, the Communist Party actually won the election, but Yeltsin stole it with the help of the US and suitcases literally packed with cash.

Russia was stripped bare and sold for 10 cents on the dollar to the worst capitalists, mostly of a (((certain type))) with the help of bankers in Germany and in the the US, where a (((certain type of people))) also delighted in the looting of their ancient enemy (see (((Jeffrey Sachs))) and (((the Chicago Boys))), back for another round after the Chile debacle), 15 million people died premature deaths. and the nation’s paternity stolen by a (((venal capitalist ruling class))) that was indistinguishable from (((Organized Crime))).

The huge reaction against the neoliberal rape of the land was the main thing that brought the nationalist Putin into power to try to repair the damage and heal the rape victim.

Neoliberalism has been imposed in Europe and many other parts of the world via austerity via bankers and the IMF and the World Bank, but austerity was hated everywhere it was put in – in Europe, Latin America, the Arab World, and even in Africa – and it caused mass riots and even the overthrow of quite a few governments everywhere it was imposed. It was the violent reaction to this austerity that directly led to the Pink Tide in Latin America that US bipartisan foreign policy has now rolled back.

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