Alt Left: The US Opposes Al Qaeda, Except When We Support Them

In addition to running the Al Qaeda Armies in Libya and Syria to overthrow Qaddafi and Assad, we also run the Al Qaeda Army in Yemen to overthrow the pro-Iran Houthis, in Turkey to support Al Qaeda Syria, and in Iran to overthrow the government. In every one of these places, the Al Qaeda Army is actually the (((Al Qaeda Army))) because they have Israeli support, especially in Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Yemen. So it’s not even Al Qaeda. It’s more (((Al Qaeda))).

However, we oppose the Al Qaeda Armies in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Somalia, Mozambique, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and the Sahel because in those places, they are attacking our allies.

Any of it make sense? Of course not! The USA sucks. The whole West is basically fascist.

Yes, both of those branches of Al Qaeda are funded and armed in part by the US and also by (((Israel))), (((France))), the UK, (((UAE))), Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar. There were intelligence agents from all of those countries literally embedded with Syrian Al Qaeda. We know this due to an interview with a top Al Qaeda leader in a cave by an East German journalist.

10 US intelligence agents were trapped by Assad’s army in Aleppo when his army conquered the city. That’s why the US was freaking out at the end. Assad even published every one of their names, ranks, everything. I think they were actually DIA, but they’re just as bad the CIA. Assad allowed them to be smuggled out. The DIA was involved in faking that (((Sarin gas attack in Damascus))) that never even happened. This was proven by the UN recently.

The DIA was also deeply involved in the rouge Ukrainian warlord oligarch was shot down hat airliner in the Ukraine to frame Russia, which has been covered up by the West ever since, including a fake judgement against Russia by NATO-run Netherlands, complete with literal faked forensic evidence. They scattered parts of what they said were a Buk missile as the site where the plane went down. Actually only one part and we don’t know how they linked it to a Buk.

We have literal eyewitness reports that a rogue element of Ukraine, a governor of a state who acts like a dictator – (((Kolomoisky))) is the culprit.

A lot of the really nasty foreign false flags, etc. are actually run by the DIA because it is US military and they are really good at actual military stuff. The CIA, not so good. Anyway, the DIA takes orders from the CIA. They’re both ratfuck agencies.

For instance, the people involved in recent paramilitary operations in Venezuela were active duty US military, often Marines or especially Special Forces, who are great at doing dirty work. One of these guys was recently caught in Venezuela with maps of oil refineries and huge cache of bomb material. There have been mysterious explosions that took out the entire Venezuelan electrical system that coincided with a US military mission to fascist Brazil (remember I keep telling you we love fascists?).

I am certain that US military – Special Forces or DIA – was involved in those explosions. There are regular sabotage attacks carried out against the oil industry and the electric sector by the Venezuelan opposition (You know, the “democratic” opposition), the same opposition which also tried to assassinate Maduro. Colombia was invoked in that assassination attempt and I know for a fact that the Pentagon was deeply involved.

You understand why I hate it when people say, “Support the troops?” Seriously, fuck the Pentagon. They’re no better now than they were in Vietnam and I came directly out of that protest movement. I walked door to door with my father for the antiwar “Clean Gene” Gene McCarthy antiwar campaign in the Democratic primary in 1968.

Alt Left: Fascism, In Its Many and Varied Forms, Continues to Rampage Across the Planet

Rambo: Your friend there is wrong, Highbrow. Fascism is NOT dead. Just look around the world. Trying my best not to spout clichés, it’s very much alive and well. Maybe that’s what Highbrow has been trying to remind people of.

Yes, and fascism now is taking dramatically different forms than it has in the past. In general, fascism is political process set up by capitalists when they are facing a serious threat from the Left. Any rightwing authoritarian regime or dictatorship against the Left, especially a popular one, can only be seen as fascist.

Therefore, there were many fascist regimes in the world in the last 75 years. States in bold house current fascist regimes. States in normal print indicate past fascist regimes:

In Latin America in Guatemala until 1995, El Salvador until 1992, Honduras, Nicaragua until 1979, Haiti, Colombia, Brazil, Peru under Fujimori in the 1990’s, Ecuador, Bolivia under Hugo Banzer in the 1950’s and briefly last year, Argentina under Videla and Uruguay under the generals in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Paraguay, and Chile under Pinochet, but also in Spain under Franco until 1975, Portugal under Salazar until 1974, Croatia and Serbia after the Balkans War, Greece under the generals in the late 1960’s, Ukraine, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Pakistan under Zia in the 1980’s, India, Iran under the Shah until 1979, Liberia under Samuel Doe in the 1980’s, Zaire under Mobutu, South Africa under apartheid, Rhodesia under Ian Smith, Morocco under the king, Brunei under the Sultan, the Philippines, Vietnam under Thieu and Diem, Thailand Burma under the generals, Indonesia under Soekarno, South Korea under Singhman Rhee in the 1950’s until 1980, Taiwan in the 1950’s until 1980 and China in the late 1940’s under Chiang Kai Chek, and Fiji.

Incipient fascism is creeping in the US, the UK, Israel, Poland, and Hungary.

There is presently strong fascist opposition in Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Belarus, Lebanon, and Hong Kong.

Pro-fascist democracies exist in the Dominican Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Georgia in particular and frankly, in the entire EU and NATO because the EU and NATO are supporting the fascist opposition in Latin America, the fascist government in Ukraine, and the fascist opposition in Belarus these days.

There are arguments that the Taliban is fascist, but I’m not buying it. I’m also not buying arguments about “Islamo-fascism.” Nor do I think China, North Korea, Belarus, or Russia are fascist.

Alt Left: About Those Fake Peace Breakthroughs Between Israel and the Arab World

First of all, all that is happening is normalization. Most if not all of those countries had no relationship with Israel at all. In fact, they all refused to even recognize that Israel even existed. Most of them were officially at war with Israel since 1947! Syria and Lebanon are still officially at war with Israel. No peace treaty was ever signed.

So all these countries did was recognize that Israel existed! And in some places, ended the state of war that had been going on for over 70 years. They also vowed to set up embassies in each other’s countries. In some cases, there are now regular flights between the two countries.

None of this is remarkable and hostile countries all over the world recognize each other, have embassies, flights, etc.

Now the Emiratis have taken this to the next level, but they’re just into it for the money. All they care about is money. Getting in with the Jews is seen as an obvious way to increase their wealth.

All of these countries had to be threatened and bribed to make these moves. All of these happened after the Abrahamic Accords, the worst peace deal by far ever offered by Israel. In fact, there were no accords at all. The US and Israel just laid out a fake peace plan and said, “Here it is. Here are the new accords!” No Palestinian signed that document. So it’s not an accord at all, as no opposing sides agreed to anything.

The Emiratis and Bahrainis were bribed by Trump with billions in military aid to normalize relations with Israel.

Morocco was bribed by the US recognizing Morocco’s outrageous annexation of Spanish Sahara. Didn’t take much to get them to go over.

Sudan was bribed by taking them off the fake “state sponsors of terrorism” list, which is nothing but a fake enterprise anyway made of lies and sleazy scams. So all of these regimes had to be bribed big-time to even recognize Israel’s existence in the first place.

In addition, all of these regimes are dictatorships!

Sudan is a military dictatorship and the people have demonstrated against normalization.

Bahrain and UAE are dictatorships. There have been large demos in Bahrain against normalization, but the police have broken them up.

Morocco is a royalist dictatorship run by a king. There have been large demos in Morocco against normalization.

Surveys of Arab countries show that ~two-thirds or more of their populations oppose normalization of relations with Israel. The lowest I saw was 5

There was a small conference in Kurdistan of Iraqi leaders advocating normalization of relations with Israel. The Kurds have been with Israel forever now. There were a few Iraqis there, but most of the traitors were Kurds. When word got out, the Iraqi government exploded and issued arrest warrants for everyone who attended the meeting and spoke. It is illegal in Iraq to advocate for normalized relations with Israel. This is rather typical. In Algeria it is illegal for Algerians to travel to Israel. Similar travel bans may exist in other places.

A Requiem for Arabia’s Jews

A Requiem for Arabia’s Jews

I wish I could tell you who wrote this. It was written by a young Palestinian Lebanese man and posted on Academia. Once anything is posted there, it’s pretty much community property and in the public domain, so I grabbed it and am republishing it here. It required a pretty heavy-duty edit which I just finished. People writing English as a second language are often very hard to edit because their English is being translated from their native tongue.

What sounds fine in our language ends up sounding strange, odd, awkward, or weird in our language. And it’s not always easy to figure out how to fix it up! In a number of cases, the meaning of some particular sentence simply cannot be discerned, and one has to guess at the best possible approximation.

As I was editing this, I came close to closing out the application a number of times, especially towards the end. Each paragraph near the end had its own monstrosities that appeared daunting to say the least. In this edit, I took it upon myself to rephrase some of the less well-constructed phrases with my own style, so you are also reading a bit of Robert Lindsay at the same time you are reading the unknown author.

There is actually a social science that deals with all of this called Translation Studies. It’s not Linguistics per se. I think it’s an off-growth of English and Literature Departments. I haven’t read much of this material, but I imagine they go over everything I wrote above and then some.

Famous books that have been translated multiple times, like The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky and especially Remembrance of Things Past by Proust have been the subject of long articles comparing the various translations and trying to figure out which are better and which worse. A similar enterprise has gone on for much longer with the translations of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey because English speakers have been translating these for a lot longer than the former two. It’s amazing how hard it is to translate good prose from one language to another. It’s an art form.

The author has a point. The expulsion of the Arab Jews was a tragedy not nearly on the level of the expulsion of the Palestinians, but it is still a potent enough crime. The Jews are hypocrites about this, but they’re that way about everything, so no surprise there. They yell about the  expulsion of the Jews, in numbers about the same as the number of Palestinians expelled. Of course, being Jews, they want ample (((compensation))) for their losses, (((with interest))) if you can believe it. The gall of them. What chutzpah. But it figures. Of course they want (((interest))), right?

But the real problem here is the usual (((hypocrisy))). (((Pay))) us for our losses, scream the Jews. Fair enough, perhaps they deserve it, but only in the dollars of the day, not the inflated dollars of today. They lost the value of 1948 dollars, not 2021 dollars, no matter what  they would be worth if they held onto them.

But how about fair play. Oh yeah, Jews don’t play that game! How about paying the Palestinians for all of their losses in 1948 at the hands of the Jews. While there have been proposals to pay off the Palestinians in return for renouncing their beefs, right to return and resist oppression and the crimes committed against them; in other words, pay them off to make the problem go away, these will never fly because of all those nasty strings attached, like giving up your basic human rights. But generally speaking, with the Jews, it’s “Give us back all the stuff you took from us! Oh, about the stuff we took from you? Sorry, pal, you’re SOL!” The usual Jewish bullshit, in other words. For this reason, all the yelling about paying back the poor Mizrachi Jews leaves me a bit cold.

But there is another much more important question and it hinges on the notion that the expulsion of the Arab Jews was such a huge tragedy after all. Because almost 10

It’s another matter for the Palestinians. The Palestinians were also thrown off their lands and got all their stuff taken. But many if not most Palestinians, at least many of those in Gaza and the West Bank anyway, have a desire to go back to the homes they were thrown out of. “I threw you off your land, you went away angry, you’re miserable where  you are now, and you’re desperate to get your land back” is a tragedy of a much greater magnitude than the one of the Arab Jews above.

Of course, bring this up to Jews and you get the usual (((barrage of lawyerly diversion, bluster, threats, and accusations of anti-Semitism))). As far as the latter goes, natch.

“They threaten to beat us to death,” said Yahya Ya’ish and repeated the sentence while he leaned forward to look deep into my eyes. I do not know whether he did so to see if I believed him or to see whether I was credible. I recoiled imperceptibly. I did it to escape his forceful, inquisitive stare as well as his smell – a smell of fear.

We sat in the office of the director of the Yemen Observatory for Human Rights, a leading human rights organization. Yahya Ya’ish brought a joint letter from the few remaining Jews in Rayda, the last Yemeni town with an indigenous Jewish population. The Jews of Rayda requested the human rights center to assist them in obtaining protection against the repeated assaults, harassment, and threats that they have been suffering under for almost a year.

I must admit, now with shame, that I did not quite believe Ya’ish’s story, credible as it sounds. He aroused all my Arab anti-Jewish stereotypes. He looked exactly as a Jew looks in Arabic caricature. He had unkempt black hair with long curly sideburns, dark skin with black unruly beard, a prominent nose, and black, skewed, penetrating eyes.

I do not know if my suspicion was due to deep-seated prejudices derived from a childhood in which Israelis and Jews were one and same in my father’s Palestinian family or whether it was due to some experiences in my school where wild young classmates celebrated the days when the news reported that Israelis were killed.

I know not whether it was also due to deep-seated hatred for all those times when I and my family lived through the Israeli bombings, which often struck indiscriminately at my birth country, Lebanon. My distrust of Yai’sh’s credible report could also have been because I had lost my credulity having heard through the years my share of exaggerated stories of persecution; first from refugees and asylum seekers when I worked as interpreter and later as a human rights activist from Arab dissidents.

Yahya Ya’ish is a descendant of Yemen’s legendary chief rabbi, Ya’ish Bin Yihya, who died two years ago at the age of 81 years and left one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities without spiritual guidance. Along with a few families, he is among the last Jews in Yemen, once a home to one of the Arab world’s oldest and most populous Jewish communities. Now there are only 300 to 400 Jews left in the country.

In 1948 there were 60,000 Jews among the approximately 2.5 million Yemenis. Nearly 48,000 Jews ‘went away’ to Israel in the years just after the establishment of Israel. Today there are approximately 400 Jews out of a population of approximately 22 million Yemenis. Ya’ish told me that he and his family, but especially a cousin, has been subjected to systematic persecution by their fellow citizens in Rayda.

He reported that Rayda’s Jews were being harassed on the streets and threatened with death if they did not convert to Islam or leave the city. Many of the Jews’ neighbors refuse to do commerce with them. Ya’ish’s voice became especially anxious when in his sad tale of the daily humiliation, he recounted his greatest fear -“‘They threaten us to intrude upon our women (yet’aradu li-sharafina).”

During an earlier trip to Rayda in 2007, I noted that Jewish women wore the black abaya covering their bodies from head to toe and were secluded, while the men who sat and chewed qat, an addictive narcotic plant, claimed that according to Jewish law they were allowed, like their Muslim neighbors, to several women at once.

In this traditional culture to molest somebody’s woman is the worst calamity a man can be exposed to. Ya’ish feared,

If they molest our women, we will not be able to control the reactions of the young among us. They know it is not helpful to turn to the authorities. We have tried for years. Instead of providing us protection, they defended their own clansmen. If our young men hit back, it will be the end with us. This will give the Muslims an excuse to beat us all to death.

What Ya’ish feared happened the 11th of December 2008, just a few days after I met him. Moshe Ya’ish bin Yahya, brother of the Rabbi Ya’ish Yahya bin Yahya and a relative of Ya’ish, was murdered in cold blood in bright daylight in the middle of the street (Amnesty International, 19.12.2008).

The perpetrator of the heinous crime was a pilot in the army. In the court, which was filled with members of his tribe, he admitted without repentance to his action and added,

I had written and warned the Jews in Rayda several times before. I have warned them that they must either convert to Islam, leave the country, or I kill them.  (Daily Star, 23.12.2008).

He refused to accept the claim made by his advocates appointed the state that he is insane. He cried in court, “You are helping the Jews against me’.

The Rayda attack in itself does constitute something unique. Racist violence occurs everywhere. What makes the incident special is the Yemeni government’s response. In the wake of the attacks, President Ali Abdallah Saleh, the ruler of the country since 1978, declared in a magnanimous gesture designed to impress Yemen’s Western donors that he will take Rayda’s Jews under his personal protection but in the capital Sanaa, not in their city.

President Saleh’s apparent rescue of the Jews is anything but an expression of the Arab leader’s generosity. When Rayda’s Jews endured systematic harassment which occurred with the authorities’ knowledge and participation and refused to travel to Sanaa or out of the country to the United States and Israel like most other Jews have felt compelled to do in the last 50 years, it was not because they were patriotic heroes more connected than others to their Yemeni homeland.

Rayda’s Jews held out because they wanted to keep their houses, land, and other possessions. Apart from their own possessions, many of the remaining Jews purchased, acquired, or inherited the property of those Jews who had left. The Jews, who ‘went away’, nourished a hope that the remaining family members might be able to sell their possessions without a huge loss of their value, as usually happens when a population is driven away. This means that the remaining Jews, as Ya’ish informed me, are making a stand for the land and houses belonging to the rest of the Jewish community.

The persecution of the Jews of Rayda is also motivated to some extent, according Ya’ish’s report, by their neighbors’ hope to ‘inherit’ their property once they flee the country. It is a known phenomenon from similar cleansings of Jews in both Europe and the Arab world and for that matter from Israel’s expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. Ya’ish reported clearly, “If the state or anyone else buys our lands and houses at a reasonable price, we will not stay a single day longer in Yemen.”

By ordering the Jews moved under his own direct protection to Sana’a, President Saleh made himself guilty of the Jews’ persecution and not their rescue. President Saleh was aware of it. He made the same grandiose gesture when in 2005 another Jewish community was driven away from their home town in Sa’ada, located in the northern part of Yemen’s mountains.

Sa’ada had been ravaged by a civil war between a Shiite splinter group inspired by Iran and Hezbollah, called the Houthi, who let their rebellious anger transfer to Saada’s unarmed Jews. The Houthi rebels claimed that the Jews committed fornication and alcoholic orgies in Sa’ada, the most backward and traditionalist region of the country! Sa’ada’s Jews were moved into a ‘tourist town’ in the capital. Of the several hundred Jews who were moved from Sa’ada to Sana’a to become the President’s special guests, there are now fewer than 250 Jews left.

When President Saleh allowed the Sa’ada Jews to be driven away from their home town which they inhabited in 3000 years, he caused them to be driven from their houses, land, and trades without a guarantee of return and when his only gesture was to house them in of a fenced residential camp two miles from Sana’a Airport, it was an indirect way of throwing them out of the country.

Rayda’s Jews will face in the same dilemma as the tourist town’s Jews. Should they choose to continue to live in a fenced housing for soldiers, which requires a special permit from the Interior Department for foreign visitors to enter at the only entrance, without a glimmer of hope of returning to their homes or receiving compensation from the state for their lost property, or should they instead join their compatriots in the U.S. and Israel and emigrate forever from Yemen?

The result either way will be to exorcise the Yemeni Jews in all practical respects. The few Jewish families left soon found will soon find their way to the airport. With only a few Jews left as in Lebanon, Iraq, or Egypt, there will no longer be any real Jewish life left in Yemen. It will be a sad, unnoticed, and unrecognized end of a thousand-year-old residence that created a wealth of culture such that Yemen became one of the major lands in Jewish history in terms of importance.

With the exorcism of Yemen’s Jews will come the sad end of one of the Arab World’s most shameful chapters: the tacit, planned, and decades-long ethnic cleansing of the Arab Jews. This particular end of the chapter is particularly shameful because it did not happen under the exceptional conditions of war and sectarian conflict that characterized the previous expulsions. These conditions were used by Arab governments to show how they could not prevent the expulsions for fear of stoking the wrath of the enraged population.

The exorcism of the Arab Jews was not caused only by the wars between Israel and the Arab states. Ask around the Arab World about what happened to the Jews of that country. “The Jews went away,” they will say vaguely. True enough, many Arab Jews left due to Zionist propaganda and many were driven out by terrorism committed by Israel such as the grenade attacks on Jews in Iraq and the bombing of Jewish targets by Israel in Egypt in 1949-1950.

In part, Jews left because for centuries they were treated as dhimmis, second class people under Sharia, or Islamic law, for centuries, although this ended for the most par a century ago with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Most left as a direct result of the wars, when mass hysteria and suspicion of the Jews as an Israeli fifth column swept the Arab lands. Sadly, this view of Jews as traitors to the homeland was stirred up by Arab rulers to distract the population from their humiliating defeat by the Jews in the newborn Jewish state of Israel that arose from the ruins of Arab Palestine.

Palestinians were driven away by the Jews too. 700,000 Christian and Muslim Palestinians were driven away by the Israeli forces in 1947-48. The Israeli exorcism of the Palestinians was matched by a concurrent exorcism of almost as many Jews from the Arab lands, with the proviso that the Jewish exodus occurred more gradually over a period of 50 years.

The Jewish communities of the Arab World, which for had developed complex and fascinating cultures in the lands of their birth in Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, were were for the most part dissolved. By driving away the Jews, the Arabs not only hurt their own communities, but they also played into the propaganda of Zionism that said that Jews could only be safe in Israel. Israel needed mass Arab Jewish immigration to achieve universal legitimacy, in part to rid the land of its reputation as a homeland for European Ashkenazim only.

But what about the exorcism that continued after the 1948 war? What about the Arab governments’ passive or active involvement in this exodus to drive the Jews from their lands? And perhaps worst of all, what of the silence of Arab historians and intellectuals about the tragic loss of a millennia-old Jewish residence in their lands, where a huge population of 900,000 Arab Jews lost over 9

How can I as a Palestinian reconcile the expulsion of my parents during Israel’s ethnic cleansing when one million Palestinians remain peacefully in Israel with the expulsion of 900,000 Arab Jews, where only 6,500 Jews are left to live among 300 million Arabs?

In Israel, there arose a school history that obfuscated if not outright denied the Zionists’ exorcism of Palestinians in 1948, and there have always been brave Israeli intellectuals who have spoken in favor of the Palestinian cause and condemned the Israeli government’s crimes against human rights. But how is it that Arab intellectuals can pour so much condemnation on Palestinian exorcism in poetry, prose, and film, while allowing the concomitant tragedy of the exorcism of the Arab World’s Jews – a wound to the the heart of the Arab psyche and the world’s consciousness – to pass with nary a mention?

What do they expressions of solidarity that Arab intellectuals and masses have been trained practitioners of when it they are only practiced in solidarity with themselves? Is there only one possible solidarity for the Arabs, that of the aggression by the Satans, the U.S. and Israel? Strange how mention of the two unites so many Arabs and gets them shouting spiritually superior cries against the residue left and sets off so much flag burning by angry gangs of Arabs in the streets of the Middle East.

Why should massive protests against U.S. and Israeli aggression close London and Tehran, Paris and Cairo, Rome and and Istanbul, while not a word is heard about genocide in Darfur or starvation in Zimbabwe?

When were there were more than a few pre-cooled saved souls protesting in European cities against Burma’s inhuman regime, systematic persecution of gays in Iran, and the systematic oppression of women in Saudi Arabia? Or Arab compassion selective, as in: “My pain is the greatest, my enemy the worst, and my crime the least”

Ancient Arabs believed that poets should celebrate their own particular culture, whether their people were “ashamed or proud, peaceful or aggressive, radical or conformist,” and they should also celebrate the surrounding cultures, even if they were neither noble nor courageous. Arab spokesmen of old performed their role well and produced some of the world’s most beautiful poems.

But modern Arab spokesmen have a different responsibility than celebrating their own strains and opponents. They should in their books, articles, and movies hold up a mirror which reflects both the good and bad in Arab life and history. With few exceptions, such as Hazem Saghieh, Wadah Sherara, George Tarabishi and Sadek al-Azem, most Arab intellectuals fail at this brave task.

But even these courageous intellectuals never commented on the tragedy of the exorcism of the Arab Jews. Until the Arabs get their Orhan Pamuk or their Avi Shlaim, one who tells the hard truths, convenient or not, they will continue to reside in the dishonest half of the universe.

A showdown with the Arabs’ most shameful aspects of their history will help to reconcile them with themselves and possibly with their neighbors, and may help to preserve what is left of religious and ethnic diversity in their countries. Only by coming to terms with their own expulsion of the Jews from the Arab lands will the Arabs avoid reliving the failure, oppression and and resulting revenge on the innocent to correct their own errors. Until then they must live with the shame of silence.

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: 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.

5

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: Sunni Hatred and Paranoia of the Shia and Iran: One of the Stupidest Forms of Bigotry On Earth

Almost all Sunni morons, even Pakistanis, believe that Iran wants to control the Middle East. The extreme versions say Iran wants to conquer all of the Sunni Arabs and rule over them. Almost all Sunni Arabs actually believe this crap. This thinking is especially prominent in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Gulf (except possibly Qatar), Lebanon, to some extent in Jordan, and Egypt and Sudan to a somewhat weak extent.

Further west in Africa, the Sunnis do not give two shits about Iran. Nor do the rest of the African Sunnis. Nor do they Turks although they hate and persecute their own Shia. Nor do the Muslims of the Caucasus, Russia, and the Stans. In Afghanistan it is particularly stupid because Afghanistan is largely Iranic culturally and even linguistically, particularly in the West. Some of the bigger warlords such as Ismail Khan over there in the west in Herat were actually openly pro-Iran.

Shias are persecuted pretty brutally in Pakistan. Sunni Salafists regularly attack their rallies with suicide bombers, killing many people. The jihadi group LET, which fights in Kashmir, is viciously anti-Shia.

No one quite knows where this comes from but it seems that anyplace where there are lots of Shia, they Shia are hated by the Sunnis.

They are persecuted by Sunni majorities in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, but not in Yemen or Syria, although there are vicious anti-Shia groups there. Sunni minorities in Lebanon and Iran and particularly in Iraq are very anti-Shia. However, the Iranian Sunnis are not treated right at all, although they have 28,000 mosques in Iran. W

hen you get over to North Africa, there are just not any Shia to hate. What’s a Shia? That’s what the North African says.

Palestinians were typically anti-Shia and especially anti-Iran historically because Arab nationalist idiots hate Iran for no good reason, as I elaborated above. Hamas caused a lot of controversy in Palestine for being so close to Iran since they were Sunnis, but they are not stupid. Recently they supported the Sunni Syrian opposition, which enraged the Syrian government. At the same time, Palestinians in Syria formed pro-government militias and fought on the side of the government, though a few went over to the jihadi opposition.

ISIS took over a large Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus for a time and the Palestinians were smeared as ISIS supporters because of this. But most Palestinians in that camp disliked ISIS. The camp is called Yarmouk, and is one of the worst hellholes in Syria. I think there may be delays in rebuilding because of government suspicion that residents sided with ISIS. So Hamas was aligned with Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, the Houthis, the Iraqi Shia, and Iran, and then like complete tools they let their bigotry get the best of them and supported the Sunni jihadis in Syria. However, Syria and Hamas have patched up their relationship.

This is especially odd considering how poorly the Shia have been treated. Before the rise of Hezbollah, the Sunnis in Lebanon would not let the Shia work at any job more respectable than a trash collector. They were like Dalits in India. Imagine that you were in the Jim Crow South and the Whites were all possessed by paranoid fantasies that the Blacks were going to declare war on the Whites, conquer them and rule over the Whites, treating them as inferiors. Crazy, right? This is how Sunnis feel about Iran. They’re all nutcases. It’s also projection, see?

But the Palestinians have become very pro-Iran these days since only Iran has stepped up to the plate to support the Palestinians and only the Shia are supporting the Palestinians at all. The Sunni Arabs would much rather kill the Shia than fight Israel, though the latter obviously is more important and the former has no importance at all.

The only significant help the Palestinians are getting is from the Shia Houthis in Yemen, the Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria, a Shia-led regime in a majority Sunni country, Shia Iran, and pro-Iranian militias in Iraq that are now formally part of the Iraqi Army itself.

They have gotten help from Jordanians who massed at the border and tried to break through, but those were probably mostly Palestinian refugees, as they make up 7

It is true that large majorities in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Sudan, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Kuwait, and Qatar support the Palestinians, and there is also a lot of support for them in Turkey and Pakistan. These supporters are mostly Sunnis. But the average person does not rule in the Arab World and dictatorships are the rule. It is these dictatorships that have been selling out and making peace with Israel lately, the most outrageous of which has been the UAE, which has apparently gone full Zionist. They’re simply traitors.

However, the Saudis and Emiratis have brainwashed their populations, which used to strongly support the Palestinians but who know repeat the programmed lie that “the Palestinians are not our problem.

A while back, mobs stormed the Israeli border with Syria in the Golan and quite a few of them were killed. These were probably mostly Sunni Syrians though there may have been a lot of Palestinian refugees among them, as there are quite a few in Syria.

There was some anti-Shia sentiment when Islamic Jihad was formed because this Sunni group took inspiration from the Iranian revolution.

There was a rumor that the original Sunni leader converted to Shiism and this caused something of a scandal. The Sunnis are all absolutely terrified that Iran is going to conquer and dominate them and in the process force them to convert to Shiism. The truth is almost zero Sunnis ever convert to Shiism.

Shiism is simply not a proselytizing religion, whereas Sunnism is. One of the main complaints of the Houthis was that Saudi Arabia was sponsoring Wahhabi preachers to come into the north of Yemen and convert the Shia to Sunni Wahhabism. This roused up quite a bit of anger amid the Shia and it was a major reason for the Houthi Revolution. Once again you can see that Sunnis are projecting with their terror of the Shia forcibly converting them to Shiism.

Hamas has aligned very closely with Iran, but so have the Salah-al-Din Brigades, the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades rejectionists who took up arms in various formations, and the PFLP. I have heard that there is a portrait of Soleimani in every home in Gaza.

Alt Left: Israel Versus Egypt and Lebanon

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

Egypt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Egypt, an anti-US and anti-Israel Muslim Brotherhood (Ikwan) government that won with 7

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

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

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

Hamas never talks about being Ikwan-Palestine because the Ikwan has always been unpopular in Palestine. Palestine is actually one of the more secular Arab states, a longstanding trend. 2

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

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

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

Lebanon

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

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

Opinion polls in Lebanon recently showed that 8

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

Alt Left: The Chameleon-Like Nature of Fascism

I wrote this in objection to a paper under review right now on Academia by a Left professor of Somatic Psychology, a PhD and a very smart man, who quotes Wilhelm Reich, a Jewish pro-sex and anti-fascist writer, as saying that fascists are out of touch with their bodies. Presumably antifascists are in touch with their bodies and not repressed. Apparently sexual repression and being out of touch with your body is part of the genesis of fascism. I don’t agree. Here is my response, in part.

I think that quoting Reich on fascism is not the greatest idea. He’s not the best person to ask about fascist theory. The modern intellectual descendants of Reich (the Cultural Left) don’t have a very good view of fascism.

Further, Reich was an extreme sexual libertine who may have molested his sister and raped his maids as a boy. Reich’s sexual libertinism was rejected by all Communists in the last century and is still condemned in existing Communist countries. So Reich’s critique is ill-formed, as the Communists were just as bad as the fascists when it came to Reich’s libertinism.

Fascists are sexually repressed? I don’t know. I’ve run into some MAGA women lately who are ridiculously libertine to the point of being degenerate or depraved. They’re about this far from becoming out and out porn stars. Yet fascists they are. A friend used to be an actor in the porn industry. He told me that the industry is full of conservatives. I’m aware of a few pornstars who were basically White Supremacists.

Donald Trump’s fascism was nearly a “pornographic fascism.” He cavorted with pornstars, cheated on all of his wives, made lewd remarks about his own daughter and the teenage underage daughters of his friends, reportedly attended sex orgies, and may have raped a 13 year old girl and forced a 12 and 13 year old girl to have sex with each other. He’s as libertine as Reich, yet he’s a fascist.

Better definitions are coming out of serious scholars of the Left. There area number of modern scholars who are trying to pin down exactly what fascism is. Almost all are operating from the Left. Among these superb modern theorists of fascism are David Neiwert who blogs at Daily Kos, the authors of a blog called Three Way Fight (not sure if it’s still up), along with excellent political scientists working out of the universities.

Better older analyses of fascism also come from Lenin and especially from Trotsky, who wrote some of the best essays on fascism ever written.

A “popular dictatorship against the Left” seems to be the best definition. “Palingetic nationalism” is another, referring to the bird that rises from the ashes in mythology. Fascism appeals to “the everyman,” “the man on the street” – “the shirtless ones” of Peronist fame. That’s the appeal – to your “basic man” and “basic woman.” It also appeals to strong primitive drives of aggression, violence, projection of failures onto outsiders, expansionism, often imperialism, an opposition to liberalism and democracy. It also opposes equality and in favor of hierarchy.

Fascism involves a reverence for sacred violence bordering on the religious, a worship of “the greatness of the ancestors,” a dialogue to restore “the glory days of yore” from the ruins of the “degenerate present”, ruined by liberals, democracy, anti-nationals, nation-haters, and traitors.

Fascism has historically supported a return to traditional values and a rejection of degenerate modernism, but as we can see in the “pornographic fascism” of Donald Trump, that’s not necessarily the case anymore.

Fascism also always advocated a return to traditional male female role models, but that need to be a hindrance to basic equal de jure rights for women, as seen in the many successful MAGA women and the many often-religious MAGA men who love and cherish their wives.

Fascism has typically targeted minorities and has been racist. People think that fascism is inherently anti-Semitic, yet many early Zionists such as Jabotinsky were open fascists and supported the fascist movement in Europe. Some of the early Israeli guerrillas were Jabotinskist fascists.

I’d argue that Israel has been fascist from Day One, but certainly with the coming of Sharon and Netanyahu, the ideological descendants of Jabotinskyist fascism, Israel became literally a fascist country. Jacobinsky is the hero and spiritual founder of the Likud Party. He was an early Zionist who wrote a book in 1921 called The Iron Wall. He and his followers were strong supporters of the fascist parties in Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s. Some of the early Zionist guerrilla organizations were Jabotinskyist fascists.

In Lebanon, the Gemayalist Phalangists named after a general named Gemayal, are an actual literal fascist party. Even their name is fascist as phalange is a popular name for fascist parties. They are Christian Maronites who see themselves as transplanted Europeans, descendants of “Phoenicians,” who despise Arabs and Islam. They are also the most pro-Israel party in Lebanon. This founder of this party had photos of Hitler in his school locker when he was in high school and the party’s ideology is modeled on the classic European fascism of the 30’s.

Israeli fascism is not anti-Semitic at all, and many White Supremacists actually support Israel as the model for the racist state they wish to set up. Many dislike Jews in the Diaspora who are seen as anti-national, but have no problem with the fascist Jews in Israel and see them as fellow fascists.

A number of the anti-immigrant Right parties in Europe are pro-Israel, including the National Front in France, the AfD in Germany, and the neo-Nazi party in Austria! They often like Israel because of its strong anti-Muslim orientation. Along the same lines, the Muslim-hating Hindu nationalist fascists ruling India in the form of the BJP party, are very pro-Israel.

The pro-fascist Spanish and Italian conservatives, remnants of former large fascist movements in those countries, are pro-Israel. The fascist Saudis, Bahrainis, Egyptians, Moroccans, and Ermiratis are now pro-Israel. They’ve always been Rightists so it’s no surprise. So philosemitic fascism is absolutely possible and even existing.

Arab nationalists have always been quite fascist despite their Leftist trappings. Saddam was a fascist, as was Hafez Assad. Some think Bashar Assad is a fascist. The North African leaders, all Arab Nationalists, were fascists in the sense that they tried to destroy the Berbers’ identity and make everyone into an Arab. The Assads and Saddam also attacked Kurds and Assyrians, in both cases in attempts to turn everyone into an Arab. Saddam also attacked Turkmen. And he discriminated against Iraqis of Iranian background in the South so much that he threw hundreds of thousands of them out of the country.

The Moroccan fascists are even expansionists, having invaded Spanish Sahara. The Indonesian fascists committed genocide in East Timor and Aceh and in the entire country against Communists when they unleashed a genocide in 1965 that murdered 1 million Communist in less than a couple of months. It was as bad as the Rwandan genocide.

All of these are examples of “Muslim fascists,” so fascism and Islam are quite compatible.

There seems to be a view in the West that fascism must be White Supremacist and of course it must be anti-Semitic.

None of the above were White Supremacists. They were all non-Whites, and none were self-haters.

Also as you can see above, fascism need not be anti-Semitic.

I also listed a number of fascist and anti-Islamic movements, rightwing dictatorships along with the post-fascist conservatives in Spain and Italy. The former fascist followers of Mussolini and Franco simply melted into the rightwing movements of both countries. In Spain it was the Conservative Party, a party with fascist roots.The Francoists simply changed clothes and melted into the Conservative Party. Francoism is still extremely popular, mostly in the form of anti-separatism, these days. I’ve been to their very popular websites.

Burlusconi in Italy has inherited the descendants of fascism in Italy. A fascist and racist separatist and somewhat White Supremacist movement has formed in Northern Italy. They are White Supremacists in the sense that  they claim the are Celts or “pure Whites” and they despise Southern Italians as de facto “niggers.”

A friend in Italy told me that fascism was still very popular in Italy to this very day, although it was also widely hated as the Left in Italy is often Far Left or almost Communist. There are cities in Sicily were the leftwingers are all Communists and the rightwingers are all fascists. They engage in street battles all the time.

My friend told me that the Red Brigades, an anti-fascist Far Left group of Communists that attacked the state, was extremely popular in Northern Italy, particularly in Vicenzia Province where he lived. His sister was a strong supporter of the Red Brigades, and she came from a normal middle class background in Trieste.

Fascism is said to be anti-Muslim, yet we have Islamic fascism in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Brunei, Morocco, and probably the Taliban in Afghanistan. Turkey and Azerbaijan are classic fascists of the 1930’s type, however they have married this to Ottoman imperialism and Islamic jihadism, particularly the genocidal variety that held sway in Turkey from 1880 until 1940.

That the Taliban are a new sort of fascism was an argument of the Leftists at Three Way Fight. I’m not sure I agree with that. Other Muslim fascists used to rule in Indonesia,  Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Iran. Above I listed more Muslim fascists in the Arab World, who might better be described as rightwing dictatorships.

Fascism is chameleon-like and changes shape endlessly to mirror and capture whatever times it is in. I can even see chameleon-like fascists adopting yoga, meditation, and bodywork, the “Left” body psychology mechanisms the author refers to. Hitler was a vegetarian and a good animal rights supporter, if terrible in so many other ways.

This aspect of fascism of what makes this political mercury blob so hard to pin down. Indeed, many fascists pose as anti-Nazis and anti-fascists and accuse anti-fascists of being fascists! I’ve seen this with my own eyes.

Problem is the Modern Left starts talking about fascism, and it immediately degenerates into propaganda and nonsense where we push views that line up whatever biases our Left formation is pushing du jour. The Cultural Left, which is almost devoid of intelligence or intellectual honesty of any sort, in particular cannot be relied upon, as almost everything coming out of there is propaganda and a lie in some form or another. For instance, the Cultural Left argues that White Supremacists, anti-feminists (or what feminists would call misogynists), homophobes, and transphobes are all “fascists.”

That’s utter nonsense as none of this Identity Stuff has anything to do with the Left in the first place, as the Left is only about economics and many Communists of the last century were in fact social conservatives described under the epithets above. Many of the antifascist fighters fighting in the Allies in World War 2 were White Supremacists, racists (in particular, racist against Blacks), “misogynists” (or at the very least strong sexists), and virulent homophobes. Trannies didn’t exist back then, but they would have been hated much worse than gays.

The very racist White Southern Democrats of that time absolutely despised Hitler, Mussolini, and the rest of the European fascists along with the Japanese, who were promoting a sort of “fascist militarism.”

The Cultural Left would have us believe that Stalin, Mao, Castro, Hoxha, Deng, Ho Chi Minh, the Bulgarian Communists, etc. were all fascists because they were social conservatives. Homosexuality was banned as a bourgeois vice in the Eastern Blog. The Shining Path executed homosexuals and cocaine abusers (another bourgeois vice). The Khmer Rogue were terribly racist. I don’t think anyone will deny that they were Communists.

Even Strasserites are Communists, granted they were odd ones. Further, Strasser had no biological race-based objection to Jews. He had an economic objection. And he wasn’t the best anti-Semite. He kept asking the others why they were so overboard on the Jewish Question.

Stalin wasn’t the best on women’s rights.

The Bulgarian Communists had opinions on race that would be considered Nazism nowadays.

As noted, homosexuality was banned in all of the Communist World. Castro put them in labor camps. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation even today doesn’t have the best policy on gays nor on Jews for that matter. I’m pretty sure they are Communists.

Trans people were not even acknowledged by any Communist country ever.

We have to completely rethink our view of fascism.

It is perfectly possible to have a libertine fascism in a porn-drenched society, which is what we just went through with Trump. MAGA folks are not repressed at all in my observation. They’re not out of touch with their bodies. The Sex Revolution of the 60’s which I was a part of took care of that.

MAGA fascism even allowed for equal rights for women. MAGA women do not appear to be discriminated against legally. A lot of them made a lot of money and held high positions.

Fascism has always been homophobic, yet the Nazi brownshirts were full of homosexuals, and I’ve talked to many gay MAGA types.

I assure you that there are gay MAGA folks. I’ve talked to a number of them. Mitch McConnell is a lifelong homosexual. He’s as fascist as they come. The first brownshirts were full of homosexuals. The Republican Convention welcomed an open fascist, the founder of Ebay, to their convention. They gave him a standing ovation.

I’m aware of Neo-Nazis to this day who are open homosexuals. James O’Meara was one. A number of White Supremacists have been outed as closeted gays. One was murdered by his young Black boyfriend. A friend used to be involved in these groups and he told me that was a LOT of homosexuality in this scene.

Brazilian fascist integralism was multi-racial and formally anti-racist, populist to the core. But Bolsonaro does not come from this milieu; he represents an actual throwback in some ways to classical European fascism of the 1930’s.

Fascism has traditionally been racist, but Black and Indian fascism is a real thing. I believe that fascism knows no color. The Tonton Macoutes of Haiti were black fascists. The Black Hutu government in Rwanda was fascist, as was Mobutu in Zaire and Samuel Doe in Liberia.

A fascist indigenist Indian rights activist is running for President in Ecuador. He’s pulled support from Cultural Left morons who support his Identity Politics while overlooking his fascism, a typical error of IP types, who are the a scourge of the Left.

Obviously modern fascism opposes transsexualism, but that’s not necessarily the case into the future. Caitlin Jenner, a fully-transitioned transwoman, is MAGA.

In the future we may see even forms of fascism that offer equal rights to gays and maybe even transsexuals.

Black Admixture and Presence in North Africa

James Schipper: Many people believe that the Moors, that is Northern Africans, are black. Of course, the Moors are the Berbers and Arabs, who are definitely not black. Before the Arab conquest of all of Northern Africa, there were various people white peoples there and they were all Christianized.

The Romans possessed all of Northern Africa. They didn’t refer to that part of their Empire as black. Were the inhabitants of Carthage black? Was Cleopatra black?

If we look at the inhabitants of the 5 Northern African countries today, we will find that they vary between white and brown. Anwar Sadat could be described as brown, and el-Sisi could easily be Italian or Portuguese. This is surprising since the Arabs imported so many slaves from black Africa.

I believe moor just meant “dark.” And the Berbers were quite probably darker than the average Spaniard. They average 1

Egypt has quite a bit of Black blood. 3

Libya also has a lot of Black blood, especially in the south. The south of Algeria is very Black, as is the south of Morocco. Most of those countries get a lot Blacker as you get into their southern regions.

The Sheltering Sky is an excellent movie by Bernardo Bertolucci, adopted from a novel by the great Paul Bowles.

In the movie, a European couple go to Tangier. The husband gets sick of some disease, maybe cholera, and dies. The wife becomes lost and takes up with a camel caravan heading south. They head down into lower Morocco, Algeria, and Niger. In the movie, that area is very Black. It’s also deeply Islamic. The photography and the movie in general is spectacular. Highly recommended.

Anyone here read Paul Bowles?

I read a book of his short stories. They’re too much! He was basically gay and his wife Jane Bowles was basically lesbian. Nonetheless they stayed married for a long time. Jane Bowles only wrote one novel and a book of short stories, but they are both said to be excellent. He spent his time picking up teenage Moroccan boys to have sex with.

William S. Burroughs lived in Tangier too for quite some time. In fact, that was where he wrote the famous Naked Lunch. Anybody read it? It’s bad, man!

Burroughs also spent his time smoking hashish and picking up teenage Moroccan boys to have sex with. This behavior is somewhat tolerated in Morocco because women are not accessible to most men, hence there is a lot of situational homosexuality. Nevertheless, the neighbors didn’t take kindly to Burroughs having sex with all those teenage boys, and they used to yell and throw things at him when he was out in the street.

There’s a lot of situational homosexuality in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Syria. Homosexuality is very much proscribed in the region, especially in the Shia parts of the Middle East. Nevertheless, in many Sunni countries, if you keep it on the “down low,” people look the other way.

Bowles spent a lot of time smoking hashish, or kif, as it is called. I had some kif for a while and I was selling it, of course. What else does a drug dealer do with any dope he gets? It was a light green powder, unlike most hashish which comes in blocks that have the consistency of extremely hard chocolate. You carve off pieces of the stuff with a knife and put it in a  “hash pipe.” I had a special hash pipe like the kind they use in Morocco.

The stuff’s practically legal in Morocco. If you go to the Atlas Mountains in the north where the Berbers grow the stuff, you will find it everywhere. Photos of Berbers in that part of Morocco show that they are very White.

The  Bowles’ both lived in Morocco, mostly in Tangier. This was during a time when Tangier was an “international city” under some sort of “international administration.” As such, there was not much police presence, and it was a haven for drug users and addicts, smugglers, and other low level criminals, street people, beatniks, fugitives, etc. It was a pretty shady place!

The Beats, including Ian Summerville, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Burroughs, used to go to Tangier in the 1950’s to visit Paul Bowles. Most of those men were either gay or bisexual. Burroughs and Ginsberg were gay, Kerouac was definitely bisexual, and Ian Summerville looks suspect to me. The Beats were gay as Hell! Far gayer than the hippies, most of whom looked down on homosexuality.

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”)

Intelligence Agencies in the Middle East Rated

The Mossad is one of the best spy agencies on Earth, near unparalleled. But I had no idea that Iran’s intelligence was this good. I’m shocked at how good they are.

Lebanese military intelligence is ok; at least they keep up on matters. Actually they are excellent in terms of internal matters. Superb.

Hezbollah’s intelligence is much better than Lebanese military intelligence. In fact, all of Hezbollah almost acts as an intelligence agency all the time, as they are locked into a conflict with Israel. Hezbollah has probably one of the finest intelligence apparatuses in the Arab World, and they definitely engage in external operations too. They are very secretive and have been very hard to penetrate. Even Mossad cannot seem to penetrate them, and sadly, Lebanon is swarming with Israeli spies.

Iraqi intelligence under Saddam was said to be excellent. Of course they were utterly brutal also. I’m not sure how good they are under the new regime. They have not yet been able to put down the ISIS insurgency in Iraq, although they have done very good work.

However, my source closes to the Iranian government tells me that the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad now is a joint headquarters manned by not just Iraqi intelligence but also Iranian and even Russian intelligence, which is probably military intelligence, not the GRU. The GRU seems to work mostly domestically. It’s interesting that Iran and Iraq have gotten so close to Russia. Even under Saddam,  most work was internal.

PMF pro-Iranian militia intelligence. These groups are are part of the Iraqi military. Their intelligence is excellent, as are their fighting capabilities. It is these militias that put down the ISIS insurgency in Iraq. Without the help of Iran and these groups, ISIS would have conquered Baghdad and probably all of Iraq. Iran essentially put down the ISIS insurgency in Iraq and did excellent work fighting ISIS and  Al Qaeda in Syria.

Syrian intelligence was always said to be excellent under both Bashar and his father. I believe they are still very good. Of course they are absolutely brutal. Most work is internal.

Saudi and UAE intelligence are ok. They at least know the scoop on what is really going down around them. For instance, both agencies reported that Israel attacked the Beirut harbor, which is of course correct. However, they repeated the Israeli lie that Israel was targeting a Hezbollah missile depot at the harbor. They both mostly work internally, however they were both working in Syria and Yemen and may still be there. In Syria, they were working with Al Qaeda and to some extent with ISIS in terms of ferrying ISIS fighters from Syria to Yemen.

Egyptian intelligence has always been among the best in the Arab World. However they mostly work internally. Nevertheless, they have not been able to put down the ISIS insurgency in the Sinai. They are also very brutal.

Iranian intelligence is surprisingly good. And it looks like they are good at external operations too with this attack inside Israel. They have operated in Europe for a long time eliminating enemies of the regime.

Moroccan intelligence is good at internal work.

Jordanian intelligence is also good at internal work. Brutal too.

Qatari intelligence was active in Syria, embedded with Al Qaeda.

The PLO and Hamas governments in Palestine. PFLP intelligence used to be pretty good. The Shin Bet seem to operate pretty unimpeded in the West Bank, and after any attack, they quickly roll up the actors. So PLO counterintelligence is obviously not good enough to stop Israel and its spies. Hamas intelligence is a lot better.

Israel has found it very hard to even get Mossad or Shin Bet spies into Gaza in the first place and a few of these teams  have been rolled up and even killed by Hamas once they got inside. One team was given away at a Hamas checkpoint when they  spoke Arabic with Hebrew accents. Hamas executes Palestinians in Gaza fairly regularly for spying for Israel.

No idea about the intelligence capabilities of Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait are, although Qaddafi’s intelligence agency was said to be very good.

 

Alt Left: Arab Sunnis Hate the Shia Vastly More than They Hate Israelis

3,000 rioters employed by the CIA as part of an anti-Iran group overthrew the Lebanese government over this Israeli Beirut nuke attack false flag. Those were Hariri’s Sunnis. They are deep in with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have been working very closely with Israel for a very long time now. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are close allies of Israel from way back. They both hate the Shia and Iran. The Gulf Arabs hate the Shia far more than they hate those Jews squatting on Arab land. Shows you where their priorities are.

This is true for most Arab Sunnis in the Middle East outside of Africa. The Sunnis of Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, UAE, Bahrain, Bahrain, and Kuwait have sold out the Palestinians a long time ago. The popular masses in these places all hate the Shia far more than the Jews, and most of the governments are presently allied with Israel.

ISIS is considered to be an Israeli ally. Syrian Al Qaeda had Israeli advisors embedded with them. The Syrian Sunnis are split; however, many of them hate the Shia far more than they hate Jews.

The Jordanians are split too, as many are Palestinians. But the Jordanian Bedouins don’t care about the Jews and hate the Shia far more.

The Yemeni Sunnis hate the Shia so much that they are genociding their own people because some of them have allied with Iran. That’s how much they hate the Shia.

The Saudis treat their Shia minority like subhumans.

The Bahrainis treat their Shia majority the same.

he Kuwaitis hate Iran.

The Egyptian government completely hates Iran and has sold out the Palestinians completely.

The Sudanese don’t care anything about the Palestinians anymore. They hate Iran far worse.

The Libyans, Tunisians, Algerians, and Moroccans are very pro-Palestinian, though their governments have all sold out to Israel. None of those people care about Iran. There is a distance factor. The further away you get from Iran, the less Arabs care about it. Iran-hatred is unique to Arab Muslims. There are historical reasons for Middle Eastern Arab hatred of Iran and these same historical reasons mean that the North African Arabs don’t care much about Iran.

Most other Sunnis don’t care about the Shia very much except in Pakistan, where they really hate the Shia for unknown reasons.

The Turks also completely hate the Shia, and their own Shia are treated like garbage. This goes back to Ottoman Sunni chauvinism. Part of the problem is that the Turkish Shia are Alevis, related to the Alawis of Syria, and they practice a very New Age form of Shia Islam that is nearly secular.

The Alevis and Alawis are often despised as heretics, converts, apostates and non-Muslims by the Sunnis due to their very secular beliefs. The twirling dervish dancing comes out of Alevism and there are deep Sufi roots in Alevi Islam extending down to the Sunni Kurds and even the Iraqi Sunnis. Saddam’s Sunnism was heavily inflected with Sufism. Even Iranian Shiism has a strong Sufi component. Sufism is also quite big in Afghanistan and even in Pakistan.

However, Turks also completely despise Israel.

Nevertheless, Turkey has a very strong alliance with the Azeri Shia.

The Kurds have completely sold out to Israel and the US a long time ago although the US is probably one of their worst enemies.  Sunni Kurds don’t seem to care much of anything about the Shia for whatever reason. The Syrian and Iraqi Arabs dislike Kurds. The Turks absolutely hate Kurds. The Iranians hate Kurds too. Really nobody on Earth likes the Kurds except Israel and the US fake love. The Kurds have been sold out by everyone they ever allied with.

Even a lot of Palestinians hate Iran. Even Hamas, which has a close relationship with Iran, has prominent Shia hatred, which is why they supported ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria against the Shia government. However, the Palestinians have close relations with both Iran and Hezbollah at the same time, so they are the most pragmatic of the ME Arabs.

Alt Left: Social Democracy Only Works in Homogeneous Societies Is Often but Not Completely True

RL:

The US and a handful of other countries are literally the only countries on this planet that regard social democracy with outrage and want nothing to do with it.

A commenter responds:

Mithridates: Yeah, I suspect much of this attitude stems from the ethnic divisions within the US that no one is ever allowed to talk about in any sort of frank or intellectually honest manner. Of course the Pluto/Mammon-worship inherent in the American mythos is a influential factor as well.

But let’s explore the first:

Basically, Ethnos A, the group responsible for most of the country’s productivity, is forced at gunpoint to redistribute a portion of their wealth to Ethnos B (and C in some regions), and a good portion of Ethnos B takes that money, pisses it away on all sorts of stupid instant gratification fuckery and doesn’t add much of anything to the country’s overall productivity; in fact, a sizable minority of Ethnos B behaves in public like zoo animals.

And then A’s gets called horrible bigots if they object to this, and especially if they object to being forced to live within shouting distance of B’s.

Most of the countries with working social democratic economic arrangements tend to have been ethnically homogeneous for most of the period when these systems were in place. And now these countries have tried the mass immigration experiment, and the same sort of shitty results is happening in those places that we here in the US have been experiencing for many decades now.

Natural Law says that humans are extra-clever social primates who are predisposed to be open to sharing among others they consider to be kin. There’s a certain other Ethnos I won’t mention by name or even a single-letter set of punctuation marks that exemplifies this principle very clearly.

Anyway, expecting all members of an Ethnos to consider the entire planet’s population of clever hominids to be a part of their kin group is quite an aberrant expectation; only weird ideologies can invert what to everyone else is a common sense understanding of Natural Law principles. And finally, loving one’s own kin does not necessarily mean hating other kin-groups.

Of course everyone has always known that this is the dirty little secret for Americans’ hostility to socialism. This is why all of the American White Nationalists are also hardline economic Rightists, Republicans and Libertarians despite this being bad for most Whites. Race trumps economics for a lot of folks. Whereas in Europe, most of the nationalist groups, even the White nationalists, are explicitly socialist.

You’d be pissed to, eh?

Actually I am fully aware of this argument, but I’m not pissed at all. For one thing, I have never been part of the wealthy White group, so Whites with money can go pound sand. They are my class enemies. I think in terms of economics. Screw race. Do the rich Whites want to help the poorer Whites? Of course not. So why should I support them. Also I know quite a few low-income Whites who use those redistributive programs that Whites hate so much.

On the other hand, I am not a typical White person. I am very hard to the Left; in fact, I am an out and out socialist.

Many countries have health care for all despite being ethnically diverse. However, in a lot of these countries, public health care and education is simply underfunded, so the dominant group, whoever they may be, simply goes to private hospitals and schools. India is an excellent example of this as is much of Latin America.

All of the Arab World has social democracy under the rubric of Islam, or in the case of Lebanon, ethnic peace, and Lebanon is unstable for ethnic/religious reasons. And some Arab countries with prominent religious of ethnic minorities are very unstable or at war.

All of North Africa has social democracy except Morocco, although minority Berbers are dealt with by denial of their existence and roping them into the main group, Arabs. Ethiopia has tremendous ethnic diversity and some religious diversity, but they have a good working socialist system. Eritrea is the same but the main divide there is religious rather than ethnic.

Zimbabwe has a good working system although it has many tribes. Argentina and formerly Bolivia and Ecuador has or had working social democracies, although all three countries had serious instabilities; in all cases the rich objecting to sharing with the poor and with a racial element in Bolivia. A number of countries in Latin America do have social democracies, but they don’t work very well because the rich don’t want to share with the poor.

In a number of those countries such as Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Haiti,and Mexico also have an ethnic element in that the dominant rich group tends to be Whiter or lighter-skinned though not usually White per who don’t want to share with the poorer, darker, folks who are more mixed with Indian and in some cases Blacks.

A number of countries in Latin America have homogeneous populations, but the rich still don’t want to share with the poor, so that doesn’t solve everything. And historically speaking, most nations were quite homogeneous, nevertheless the rich still shared just about fuck all with everyone else and needed an actual revolution to be convinced to do so.

Russia and China has very good working social democracies although they have many minorities, although China and to some extent Russia has some ethnic warfare. Ukraine has a good system despite minorities and ethnic warfare. Vietnam, Cambodia, Bhutan, and Laos have good systems despite having anywhere to a couple to many ethnic minorities. Malaysia has a working social democracy and it has a large ethnic divide. Japan has minorities with an excellent social democracy.

Most of the former Soviet republics probably still have working systems although most have large minority populations.Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran have social democracies and minority groups. However, in Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran are currently embroiled in ethnic separatist wars.

Most of the countries with non-working systems are not only rightwing but also quite poor. Hong Kong is an exception. The government is very rightwing, but there are not ethnic problems. It’s all one ethnic group, but the rich ones hate the poor ones, just as it was traditionally.

Some are just poor. Most of Africa has social democracy, but it often doesn’t work well due to poverty. To some extent this is true in Pakistan, Mongolia, Yemen, Moldova, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Burma, and Thailand. It is also true in Ecuador, Guatemala, most of the Caribbean, Chile, and Paraguay. In these places, social democracy doesn’t work more due to poverty than to diversity.

Alt Left: The U.S. Is Recycling Its Big Lie about Iraq to Target Iran

A superb article. People need to get this through their damned heads: Iran does not have a Goddamned nuclear weapons program! The CIA even said so itself in its last word in the subject in 2007. Yet this evil government of ours keeps insisting that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

This is literally the reason for the entire sanctions regime, the targeting and war threats against Iran, the bombing of pro-Iranian Iraqi Shia militias in Iraq, and the assassination of Hajj Qassem Soleimani.

How many Moronicans believe these big fat lie? How many Eurotrash believe this lie. It must be a large majority of both of them.

After all, the entire MSM in the West – every single newspaper, magazine, and TV and radio news show, along with all Western governments insists that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. Not even one media outlet anywhere in the West will admit the obvious truth that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons and hasn’t had one for a minimum of 30 lies.

Guess (((who))) cooked up this big, fat lie in the (((US media))). Guess (((why))) the entire media and every state in the West keeps repeating this lie? I’ll tell you why. (((This))) is the reason why. (((These people))) want Iran invaded and destroyed because it is the only country left other than Syria which is a sworn enemy of (((their state))).

Guess who the US, UK, France, and Germany take orders from. (((This)) is who they take orders from.

Granted the US is also out to destroy Iran because the Shia-haters in Jordan, UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Sudan, Morocco, and Turkey all hate Iran simply because they are profoundly bigoted Sunnis with a homicidal hatred and paranoia of Shia Muslims.

In addition, US imperialism has had a hard-on for Iran ever since the Embassy Takeover in 1979. We never got over it. And the rule of US imperialism is simply “never forgive, never forget.” Exactly the same motto as (((some people))). Coincidence? For the crime of standing up to the US and shouting “Death to America! Death to Israel!” for 40 years, US imperialism wants Iran gone.

In addition, Iran has no central bank. US imperialism demands that all countries have central banks.

In addition, Iran is selling its oil in currencies other than dollars. This threatens the “petrodollar,” one of the essential pillars of US imperialism. The use of the dollar in international trade has indeed been declining in the past 10 years. It’s down to 6

As long as most international trade is conducted in dollars, US imperialism can charge full steam ahead. But when that number goes down below 5

And this World Dictator and Most Powerful Nation on Earth nonsense is one thing that America wants to keep perhaps more than anything else. The US will do most anything, start wars, kill millions of people – it matters not- to retain those positions.

As Lenin said, power does not give up without a fight which was one reason that he said the electoral road to socialism could never happen and why he called people who supported it “parliamentary cretins.” It’s not so much that he opposed it, as he simply thought it would not work.

It is instructive to note that every single country that has gone off the dollar has been either attacked, subjected to heavy sanctions, had coups, color revolutions, or armed insurgencies unleashed upon. Sometimes more than one or all of the above.

  • Iraq went off the petrodollar. It was invaded soon after.
  • Libya went off the petrodollar. It was quickly attacked.
  • Syria went off the petrodollar. It had an insurgency unleashed upon it.
  • Iran is going off the petrodollar. It’s been subject to many threats and vicious sanctions.
  • North Korea went off the dollar. Result was totally brutal sanctions, many deaths, and endless military threats.
  • Venezuela is going off the petrodollar. Result: sanctions, economic warfare, and coup attempts with lockout strikes, use of armed forces, violent street demonstrations and now with an entire fake alternate facts government set up led by a man who was never elected President even one time.
  • Russia and China are going off the dollar. Result: sanctions, tariffs, and hybrid warfare was launched on both countries and both have been designated as top US enemies. A color revolution is being attempted in Hong Kong.

See how this works?

The U.S. Is Recycling Its Big Lie About Iraq to Target Iran

Sixteen years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, most Americans understand that it was an illegal war based on lies about non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” But our government is now threatening to drag us into a war on Iran with a nearly identical “big lie” about a non-existent nuclear weapons program, based on politicized intelligence from the same CIA teams that wove a web of lies to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In 2002-3, U.S. officials and corporate media pundits repeated again and again that Iraq had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that posed a dire threat to the world. The CIA produced reams of false intelligence to support the march to war and cherry-picked the most deceptively persuasive narratives for Secretary of State Colin Powell to present to the UN Security Council on February 5th 2003.

In December 2002, Alan Foley, the head of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) told his staff,

If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.

Paul Pillar, a CIA officer who was the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, helped to prepare a 25-page document that was passed off to Members of Congress as a “summary” of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq.

But the document was written months before the NIE it claimed to summarize and contained fantastic claims that were nowhere to be found in the NIE, such as that the CIA knew of 550 specific sites in Iraq where chemical and biological weapons were stored. Most members read only this fake summary, not the real NIE, and blindly voted for war. As Pillar later confessed to PBS’s Frontline:

The purpose was to strengthen the case for going to war with the American public. Is it proper for the intelligence community to publish papers for that purpose? I don’t think so and I regret having had a role in it.

WINPAC was set up in 2001 to replace the CIA’s Nonproliferation Center or NPC (1991-2001), where a staff of 100 CIA analysts collected possible evidence of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons development to support U.S. information warfare, sanctions, and ultimately regime change policies against Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya and other U.S. enemies.

WINPAC uses the U.S.’s satellite, electronic surveillance, and international spy networks to generate material to feed to UN agencies like UNSCOM, UNMOVIC, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which are charged with overseeing the non-proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

The CIA’s material has kept these agencies’ inspectors and analysts busy with an endless stream of documents, satellite imagery, and claims by exiles for almost 30 years. But since Iraq destroyed all its banned weapons in 1991, they have found no confirming evidence that either Iraq or Iran has taken steps to acquire nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.

UNMOVIC and the IAEA told the UN Security Council in 2002-3 they could find no evidence to support U.S. allegations of illegal weapons development in Iraq.

IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei exposed the CIA’s Niger yellowcake document as a forgery in a matter of hours. ElBaradei’s commitment to the independence and impartiality of his agency won the respect of the world, and he and his agency were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

Apart from outright forgeries and deliberately fabricated evidence from exile groups like Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC) and the Iranian Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), most of the material the CIA and its allies have provided to UN agencies has involved dual-use technology which could be used in banned weapons programs but also as alternative legitimate uses.

A great deal of the IAEA’s work in Iran has been to verify that each of these items has in fact been used for peaceful purposes or conventional weapons development rather than in a nuclear weapons program.

But as in Iraq, the accumulation of inconclusive, unsubstantiated evidence of a possible nuclear weapons program has served as a valuable political weapon to convince the media and the public that there must be something solid behind all the smoke and mirrors.

For instance, in 1990, the CIA began intercepting  Telex messages from Sharif University in Tehran and Iran’s Physics Research Centre about orders for ring magnets, fluoride, and fluoride-handling equipment, a balancing machine, a mass spectrometer, and vacuum equipment, all of which can be used in uranium enrichment.

For the next 17 years, the CIA’s NPC and WINPAC regarded these telexes as some of their strongest evidence of a secret nuclear weapons program in Iran, and they were cited as such by senior U.S. officials. It was not until 2007-8 that the Iranian government finally tracked down all these items at Sharif University, and the IAEA inspectors were able to visit the university and confirm that they were being used for academic research and teaching as Iran had told them.

After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the IAEA’s work in Iran continued, but every lead provided by the CIA and its allies proved to be either fabricated, innocent, or inconclusive. In 2007, U.S. intelligence agencies published a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran in which they acknowledged that Iran had no active nuclear weapons program. The publication of the As George W. Bush wrote in his memoirs, “…after the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?”

But despite the lack of confirming evidence, the CIA refused to alter the “assessment” from its 2001 and 2005 NIE’s that Iran probably did have a nuclear weapons program prior to 2003. This left the door open for the continued use of WMD allegations, inspections, and sanctions as potent political weapons in the U.S.’s regime change policy toward Iran.

In 2007, UNMOVIC published a Compendium or final report on the lessons learned from the debacle in Iraq. One key lesson was that “complete independence is a prerequisite for a UN inspection agency” so that the inspection process would not be used “either to support other agendas or to keep the inspected party in a permanent state of weakness.”

Another key lesson was that “proving the negative is a recipe for enduring difficulties and unending inspections.” The 2005 Robb-Silberman Commission on the U.S. intelligence failure in Iraq reached very similar conclusions, such as that“…analysts effectively shifted the burden of proof, requiring proof that Iraq did not have active WMD programs rather than requiring affirmative proof of their existence.

“While the U.S. policy position was that Iraq bore the responsibility to prove that it did not have banned weapons programs, the Intelligence Community’s burden of proof should have been more objective…

“By raising the evidentiary burden so high, analysts artificially skewed the analytical process toward confirmation of their original hypothesis – that Iraq had active WMD programs.”

In its work on Iran, the CIA has carried on the flawed analysis and processes identified by the UNMOVIC Compendium and the Robb-Silberman report on Iraq.

The pressure to produce politicized intelligence that supports U.S. policy positions persists because that is the corrupt role that U.S. intelligence agencies play in U.S. policy, spying on other governments, staging coups, destabilizing countries, and producing politicized and fabricated intelligence to create pretexts for war.

A legitimate national intelligence agency would provide objective intelligence analysis that policymakers could use as a basis for rational policy decisions. But as the UNMOVIC Compendium implied, the U.S. government is unscrupulous in abusing the concept of intelligence and the authority of international institutions like the IAEA to “support other agendas,” notably its desire for regime change in countries around the world.

The U.S.’s “other agenda” on Iran gained a valuable ally when Mohamed ElBaradei retired from the IAEA in 2009 and was replaced by Yukiya Amano from Japan. A State Department cable from July 10th, 2009 released by Wikileaks described Mr. Amano as a “strong partner” to the U.S. based on “the very high degree of convergence between his priorities and our own agenda at the IAEA.”

The memo suggested that the U.S. should try to “shape Amano’s thinking before his agenda collides with the IAEA Secretariat bureaucracy.”  The memo’s author was Geoffrey Pyatt, who later achieved international notoriety as the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine who was exposed on a leaked audio recording plotting the 2014 coup in Ukraine with Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.

The Obama administration spent its first term pursuing a failed “dual-track” approach to Iran in which its diplomacy was undermined by the greater priority it gave to its parallel track of escalating UN sanctions. When Brazil and Turkey presented Iran with the framework of a nuclear deal that the U.S. had proposed, Iran readily agreed to it.

But the U.S. rejected what had begun as a U.S. proposal because by that point, it would have undercut its efforts to persuade the UN Security Council to impose harsher sanctions on Iran. As a senior State Department official told author Trita Parsi, the real problem was that the U.S. wouldn’t take “yes” for an answer.

It was only in Obama’s second term after John Kerry replaced Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, that the U.S. finally did take “yes” for an answer, leading to the JCPOA between Iran, the U.S., and other major powers in 2015. So it was not U.S.-backed sanctions that brought Iran to the table but the failure of sanctions that brought the U.S. to the table.

Also in 2015, the IAEA completed its work on “Outstanding Issues” regarding Iran’s past nuclear-related activities. On each specific case of dual-use research or technology imports, the IAEA found no proof that they were related to nuclear weapons rather than conventional military or civilian uses.

Under Amano’s leadership and U.S. pressure, the IAEA “assessed” that “a range of activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device were conducted in Iran prior to the end of 2003,” but that “these activities did not advance beyond feasibility studies and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities.”

The JCPOA has broad support in Washington. But the U.S. political debate over the JCPOA has essentially ignored the actual results of the IAEA’s work in Iran, the CIA’s distorting role in it, and the extent to which the CIA has replicated the institutional biases, reinforcing of preconceptions, forgeries, politicization and corruption by “other agendas” that were supposed to be corrected to prevent any repetition of the WMD fiasco in Iraq.

Politicians who support the JCPOA now claim that it stopped Iran getting nuclear weapons, while those who oppose the JCPOA claim that it would allow Iran to acquire them.

They are both wrong because as the IAEA has concluded and even President Bush acknowledged, Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program. The worst that the IAEA can objectively say is that Iran may have done some basic nuclear weapons-related research some time before 2003, but then again, maybe it didn’t.

Mohamed ElBaradei wrote in his memoir, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times that if Iran ever conducted even rudimentary nuclear weapons research, he was sure it was only during the Iran-Iraq War which ended in 1988, when the U.S. and its allies helped Iraq kill up to 100,000 Iranians with chemical weapons.

If ElBaradei’s suspicions were correct, Iran’s dilemma since that time would have been that it could not admit to that work in the 1980s without facing even greater mistrust and hostility from the U.S. and its allies and risking a similar fate to Iraq.

Regardless of uncertainties regarding Iran’s actions in the 1980s, the U.S.’s campaign against Iran has violated the most critical lessons U.S. and UN officials claimed to have learned from the debacle in Iraq.

The CIA has used its almost entirely baseless suspicions about nuclear weapons in Iran as pretexts to “support other agendas” and “keep the inspected party in a permanent state of weakness,” exactly as the UNMOVIC Compendium warned against ever again doing to another country.

In Iran as in Iraq, this has led to an illegal regime of brutal sanctions under which thousands of children are dying from preventable diseases and malnutrition and to threats of another illegal U.S. war that would engulf the Middle East and the world in even greater chaos than the one the CIA engineered against Iraq.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is a freelance writer, researcher for CODEPINK and author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The Doors, “The End” Live at Isle of Wight Festival

The Doors, “The End,” at the Isle of Wight Festival in the UK, 1970. From the album, Live at The Isle of Wight Festival 1970, not released until 2018, believe it or not!

Of course this is one of the greatest songs ever written, that’s obvious to anyone who’s ever heard it. This is the live version. I usually don’t like live versions better than album versions, but I’m familiar with the album version very well, and this live version was something special. He’s making a lot of stuff up here and there’s a lot of improvisational jamming but if ever a chaotic song was written about the beauty of chaos and entropy, this is it.

So this live version is really something special. I’ve heard this was a great concert, sort of the British version of Woodstock. Don’t know anyone who was there, though. The hippie movement was pretty big in the UK too, by the way.

It wasn’t just a US phenomenon. It was happening all over the most of the West to the best of my understanding. There were absolutely hippies in France, Sweden, and especially Denmark and Germany. Much of the rest of Europe was part of the Eastern Bloc, and they were not friendly to the movement.

Outside of the West, I’m not sure how big the movement was, but I suppose one can argue that some places in the world are just naturally “hippie,” so to speak. Aspects of Indian, Nepalese, and Moroccan culture absolutely come to mind.

The Beats headed to Tangier in Morocco, and India and Nepal were flooded with hippies in search of enlightenment and paradise. In a way, these were precisely the places to go. For when the hippies went to India and Nepal (or Afghanistan for that matter), after all, they were only going home again, to the Subcontinent, where the roots of the movement were birthed long ago.

There were definitely hippies in Peru in the 1970’s though, I can tell you that much. And no doubt in other parts of Latin America.

If anyone has any anecdotes about the hippie movement outside the West, let me know in the comments.

Pot-Haters Are Insane, Every Single One of Them

SHI: LOL what percentage of your hippie generation were drug users? Like 10

Not 10

That’s the weird thing about pot. There are no people who don’t use it but don’t care if others do. If you don’t use it you absolutely hate it with the most insane and intense passion. The cops were all completely insane about pot, too. My neighbor across the street was a cop.

My parents’ generation absolutely hated pot in the worst way, and almost none of them smoked it or even tried. Pot was called “drugs.” If you smoked pot, it meant you were “into drugs” and that was one of the worst things you can possibly be.

I actually like it a lot better now that drug use has become much more normalized, and so many people have either experienced it or have had close ones who did. With familiarity comes sanity. Estrangement doesn’t usually lead to rationality. The greater the estrangement, typically the greater the emotionality and irrationality.

The pot-haters caused so much pain in my life. So much rejection and hate, firing me from jobs, arresting, jailing, and threatening to kill me by cops, and just this huge Grand Canyon of Hate between the “drug users” – people who smoked weed – and everyone else. Also pot use was all tied in with use of all the other drugs like cocaine, heroin, speed, downers, psychedelics, etc.

To the dope-haters it was literally all the same thing. A joint = 20 years of hardcore heroin addiction. There wasn’t even

There are still some pot-haters out there, mostly women. I meet women on dating sites who won’t date me because I smoked pot six years ago. I had a psychiatrist recently who diagnosed me psychotic since I said I was a current pot user – as in, I had used it five years ago. If you are a “current user” even five years ago, according to him, you are automatically psychotic.

I had an MD who told me that pot caused amotivational syndrome, even if you used it only once a year! That’s how deranged the pot-hating kooks are and have always been. There’s good reasons to oppose the use of this drug, but the pot-haters never utilize any of them. They’re almost all insane. Pot haters are crazy, period and there are few if any exceptions. There is something weird about that drug that drives the most bizarre wedge of irrationality between humans.

We may be getting towards a more normal view of the drug such as exists in Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Nepal, etc. Pot is a drug of the East. And that’s always been part of the problem. I hate to use an SJW word, but the concept is actually valid. We hated pot because of Orientalism. This concept is much-abused by the Stupid Left, but I wouldn’t say it doesn’t exist.

Then it was a drug of the Blacks and the Mexicans – in other words, of the niggers and the spics. Use was so stigmatized in my parents’ years that the only Whites who did it were more or less criminals or lowlifes like me slumming it up in the ghetto.

Cannabis has also been fairly normalized in parts of Latin America such as Jamaica, Mexico, and Colombia. Not sure about the rest of the continent.

Parts of the world where cannabis is naturalized or normalized seem to have a much more level-headed and sane view of the drug. Where it’s stigmatized it just seems to cause mass psychosis in large parts of the population who despise the drug.

I really don’t like the pot-haters at all, sorry.

Homosexuality in the Arab World: A Rundown

Polar Bear: I don’t get why Jews are the most gay-friendly Semites. Was homosexuality intended for the Gentile sheep? Perhaps the overcrowed urban areas in Europe or Jewish ghettos made Jews gayer than Arabs.

I’m not for Muslims throwing gays off rooftops like eagles dropping turtles to break their shell/closet. Maybe that’s the Semites’ natural state though, with the newly imported Jew going against the dominant culture of most the Middle East.

Ha ha, there is more homosexuality there than you think. Gay men who go to the Arab World say it is full of homosexuality.

Syria

I read about a gay man going to Syria, and he said men were hitting on him everywhere. There is still a lot of male homosexuality in Syria. A Grinder search found a lot of men, even in ISIS-occupied Raqqa! However, Syrian police regularly arrest gay men. They beat them up and order them to fuck each other while the cops watch, laugh, and mock them.

Lebanon

Gay male Syrian refugees were found in Beirut where they were living many men to a house and complaining of a lot of homophobia in Lebanon. Hezbollah regularly beats up gay men.

Gay men are regularly murdered in Palestine. No one is ever arrested.

Kuwait

Another gay man went to Kuwait and said the same thing. And he fucked some guy on the beach at night, apparently a regular thing.

Saudi Arabia

A Kuwaiti friend told me that “half of Saudi men are gay” and that this is a big problem in Saudi culture, with the women complaining about it a lot. A man went to Saudi Arabia and said that there were actually gay bars there that were accepted as long as everything was on the down low. Even straight guys walk down the street arm and arm though, so it’s easy for gays to fit in.

Lesbianism is a huge problem at the girls’ schools with love affairs and wild breakups disturbing the environment a lot. Lesbian affairs among the Saudi princesses or sheikhas are quite common.

The Arab World is all about propriety or appearance. For instance a wild out-of-control gay male wedding in Saudi Arabia got busted for getting too loud and out of hand. A number of men were dressed as women at that event. They got prison terms.

Although Saudis supposedly execute gays, not much is done about them in truth.

Oman

The leader of Oman is regularly rumored to be a gay man. Whether he really is or not is not known.

Iraq

In Iraq, gay men are regularly murdered and prosecutions are nonexistent. The Shia in Iraq in particular hate them. There was a controversy when Ayatollah Sistani issued a fatwa that said that the punishment for male homosexuality was death. Shia death squads have been running around murdering gay men in Iraq, often in horrible ways, for some time.

Egypt

In Egypt there is a lot of homosexuality. Gay men go there and say that teenage boys hit on them in the boats you rent on the Nile. One gay man visited an older gay male couple who lived discreetly in Cairo. As long as they kept it on the down low, no one cared.

Up to ~2

There were arrests of a large wild gay male party on a boat on the Nile. Once again it had gotten very wild and out of hand. There was a very public and raucous trial in which many of these men were sentenced to a few years in prison. It’s all about propriety. Gay male behavior is permitted as long as it is on the down low. When it gets loud and open, there are crackdowns. You have to keep it on the down low.

Morocco

North Africans are Berbers, not Semites. There is a lot of male homosexuality in Morocco. Novelist William Burroughs and his entourage lived in Tangier for a while, regularly buying teenage boy prostitutes. The locals didn’t like it but nothing was ever done. The writer Paul Bowles also lived in Morocco most of his life, and he lived an open gay life there. No one seemed to care much.

~2

More Answers to the Citrus Questions

Sam writes:

Must be the Persian Lime, as the other main lime is said to be called just “lime” in the US. A factoid. Navel Oranges come from a mutation of a single plant in Brazil. All the rest are cuttings. I’m guessing since these are crossings that all citrus varieties come from cuttings. Let’s hope they don’t start having fungus problems like bananas. I can’t remember the name, but I remember when I was young bananas tasted better. All of that breed were killed off by fungus. They didn’t seem to rot as fast either. Bananas rot super fast now. I think the present breed is succumbing to fungus also and will not be around too long. If you ever want to read about breeding plants and crossing them, Luther Burbank is good to read about. He wasn’t an academic, so academic types hate him, but he was a great plant breeder. He has made a stupendous amount of edible useful plants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Burbank He’s got a lot of books at the internet archive. A couple. https://archive.org/details/lutherburbankhis00willrich https://archive.org/details/lutherburbankman00wick

Yes! Sam is correct! The other lime is indeed the Persian lime. Another part of the question asked where this Persian lime first appeared and when. Curiously, it did not first appear in Iran where one might expect to have shown up. Instead, the Persian Lime made its first appearance in…drum roll…Morocco! I am not sure when it first appeared, but it was in the recent past. The other main citrus that appeared only in recent yeas is the grapefruit. It shows up first in the Caribbean around 1700! All of the others except the Persian lime go much further back than that.

“Problems” and “Solutions”

Discuss Severaid’s quote and my examples given below, agreeing, disagreeing or expanding on the notion.

The chief cause of problems is solutions

– Eric Sevareid

I think this guy is onto something.

Examples:

War on Terror – Solution was all out war on “terrorism” – really just disobedient Muslim states and some international guerrilla/terrorist groups.

The “solution” did not solve the problem at all, and in fact it made it much worse and introduced quite a few new problems.

The “solution” to the “Muslim terrorism problem” did nothing to alleviate the problem, and the problem only expanded massively, in the process destroying much of the secular Muslim world and replacing it with ultra-radical, armed and ultraviolent fundamentalists. Several new failed states were created out of functioning but authoritarian secular regimes.

A wild Sunni-Shia war took off with no end in sight. A new Saudi-Iran conflict expanded to include all of the Sunni world against Iran and some Shia groups.

The policy was incoherent – in places (Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Libya) secular nationalists were overthrown and replaced with radical fundamentalist regimes (Iraq, Palestine) or failed states teeming with armed fundamentalist actors (Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Mali). In other places, fundamentalist regimes were overthrown and secular nationalists were put in (Egypt).

We alternately attacked and supported radical groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. An awful Russia-Turkey conflict took off on the Middle east with the US and NATO siding with Al Qaeda and ISIS supporting Turks. The US attacked and armed fundamentalists to attack Shia Iranian, Hezbollah and Houthi armies waging all out war on Al Qaeda and ISIS. In Yemen we actively attacked the Shia who were fighting Al Qaeda while supporting Al Qaeda and fundamentalist Sunnis with intel and weaponry.

Some Kurds were called terrorists and support was given to those attacking them. Other Kurds were supported in their fight against ISIS. In actuality, all of these Kurd represented the same entity. There really is no difference between the PKK, the YPG and the rulers of the Kurdish region. Meanwhile, Kurds fighting for independence were supported in Iran and Syria and attacked in Turkey though they were all the same entity.

Billions of US dollars and thousands of US lives were wasted for essentially no reason with no results or actually a worsened situation. Russia, one of the most effective actors in the war against Al Qaeda and ISIS, was declared an enemy and attacks on them by our allies were cheered on.

A horrible refugee crisis was created in Europe.

Muslim populations in the West were substantially radicalized.

Instead of ending Islamic terrorism, Islamic terrorist, conventional and guerrilla attacks absolutely exploded in the Middle East and to a lesser extent in Europe, Canada, Australia and the US. It also exploded in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Thailand, the Philippines and of course Syria and Iraq. There was considerable fighting and terrorism in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Morocco and Jordan. The Palestinians ended up much better armed than before and the conflict exploded into all out war on a few occasions.

Terrorism and guerrilla war exploded in Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Somalia and Kenya with some new attacks in Niger, Mauritania, Chad and Uganda. Somalia took a turn for the worse as a huge Al Qaeda force set up shop there and the country turned into the worst failed state ever with nothing even resembling a state left and the nation furthermore split off into three separate de facto nations.

The “solution” failed completely and simply ended up creating a whole new set of problems that were vastly worse than the original problem for the which the solution was directed.

Technology: Technology itself could be regarded as a lousy fix to many problems.

Slavery in the Muslim World: The Tradition Is Not Yet Dead

From here.

Bottom line is, yes, slavery has been present in the Islamic World from Day One. In fact, one can make a case that slavery was an inherent and even emblematic aspect of Islam since its inception. It only left the Muslim World due to pressure from the West when the West emancipated its own slaves in the late 1800’s. Officially, most of the Muslim World dumped theirs. Yet the practice continued. Saudi Arabia only outlawed slavery in 1962. An advertisement for a castrated Black slave for sale recently appeared in a Saudi publication. Mauritania only outlawed slavery a few years ago, and the ban is hardly enforced.

As societies collapsed, the peculiar institution experienced a recrudescence. Libyan ports now export many slaves destined for Europe. Syrian teenage girls in Jordanian refugee camps are trafficked to brothels in Amman and sold to visiting Gulf men for $140-175 for a “temporary marriage.” In Northern Nigeria, even before Boko Haram kidnapped scores of teenage Christian girls, Muslim men had been importing concubine slave girls from the north to serve as “fifth wives.” The abuse and rape of female domestics in the Gulf who are little more than slaves of their owners has been documented for years.

Worst of all is the migrant labor scam that the Gulf states have been running for decades involving workers from South Asia, especially Pakistan and India,  and Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines. For all intents and purposes, work which is tied to contracts with the employer is little more than slavery, let’s face it. Gulf employers of these men have referred to them as slaves. They are housed in the most miserable conditions in a very wealthy country and worked to exhaustion and sometimes to death in ferocious heat with little protection or rest. A number of deaths have occurred to poor working conditions. Some poor countries to the east have forbidden their workers from going to the Gulf to work. There has been a bit of a crackdown, but it was mostly fake. Kuwait gave its “slaves” rights recently, but the Emir has not yet signed the bill. Qatar is worried about its reputation as the Olympics are coming soon, but its response instead of cleaning up its act has been to cover the whole mess up and beat up and detain the protesters. Any progress elsewhere in the Gulf has been frozen in recent years. Instead we get the predictable fake backlash whereby the Gulf states say that critics of their Slave System are “Islamophobes.”

The progress for serious progressive change for alleviating remaining vestiges of slavery in the Arab World seem dim at the moment as the region undergoes a retrenchment, a backlash and a hardening of reaction.

The link between Islam and slavery goes back from the start, so ISIS is not doing anything new. The fact that the formal Muslim states of the world continue to refuse to clean up their mess is most discouraging, but it too may be blamed on tradition.

“Spoils of war,” snaps Dabiq, the English-language journal of Islamic State (IS). The reference is to thousands of Yazidi women the group forced into sex slavery after taking their mountain, Sinjar, in August last year. Far from being a perversion, it claims that forced concubinage is a religious practice sanctified by the Koran.

In a chapter called Women, the Koran sanctions the marriage of up to four wives, or “those that your right hands possess”. Literalists, like those behind the Dabiq article, have interpreted these words as meaning “captured in battle”.

Its purported female author, Umm Sumayyah, celebrated the revival of Islam’s slave-markets and even proffered the hope that Michelle Obama, the wife of America’s president, might soon be sold there. “I and those with me at home prostrated to Allah in gratitude on the day the first slave-girl entered our home,” she wrote. Sympathizers have done the same, most notably the allied Nigerian militant group, Boko Haram, which last year kidnapped an entire girls’ school in Chibok.

Religious preachers have responded with a chorus of protests. “The re-introduction of slavery is forbidden in Islam. It was abolished by universal consensus,” declared an open letter sent by 140 Muslim scholars to IS’s “caliph”, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, earlier this year. “You have taken women as concubines and thus revived…corruption and lewdness on the earth.”

But while IS’s embrace of outright slavery has been singled out for censure, religious and political leaders have been more circumspect about other “slave-like” conditions prevalent across the region. IS’s targeting of an entire sect for kidnapping, killing and sex trafficking, and its bragging, are exceptional; forced labor for sexual and other forms of exploitation is not.

From Morocco, where thousands of children work as petites bonnes, or maids, to the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan where girls are forced into prostitution, to the unsanctioned rape and abuse of domestics in the Gulf, aid workers say servitude is rife.

Scholars are sharply divided over how much cultural mores are to blame. Apologists say that, in a concession to the age, the Prophet Muhammad tolerated slavery, but—according to a prominent American theologian trained in Salafi seminaries, Yasir Qadhi—he did so grudgingly and advocated abolition.

Repeatedly in the Koran the Prophet calls for the manumission of slaves and release of captives, seeking to alleviate the slave systems run by the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Jewish Himyarite kings of Yemen. He freed one slave, a chief’s daughter, by marrying her, and chose Bilal, another slave he had freed, to recite the first call to prayer after his conquest of Mecca. His message was liberation from worldly oppression, says Mr Qadhi  – enslavement to God, not man.

Other scholars insist, however, that IS’s treatment of Yazidis adheres to Islamic tradition. “They are in full compliance with Koranic understanding in its early stages,” says Professor Ehud Toledano, a leading authority on Islamic slavery at Tel Aviv University. Moreover, “what the Prophet has permitted, Muslims cannot forbid.”

The Prophet’s calls to release slaves only spurred a search for fresh stock as the new empire spread, driven by commerce, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Persian Gulf.

To quash a black revolt in the salt mines of southern Iraq, the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad conscripted Turkish slaves into their army. Within a few generations these formed a power base, and from 1250 to 1517 an entire slave caste, the Mamluks (Arabic for “chattel”), ruled Egypt.

A path to power

Their successors, the Ottoman Turks, perfected the system. After conquering south-eastern Europe in the late 14th century, they imposed the devshirme, or tribute, enslaving the children of the rural poor, on the basis that they were more pagan than Christian, and therefore not subject to the protections Islam gave to People of the Book. Far from resisting this, many parents were happy to deliver their offspring into the white slave elite that ran the empire.

Under this system, enslaved boys climbed the ranks of the army and civil service. Girls entered the harem as concubines to bear sultans. All anticipated, and often earned, power and wealth. Unlike the feudal system of Christian Europe, this one was meritocratic and generated a diverse gene pool. Mehmet II, perhaps the greatest of the Ottoman sultans, who ruled in the 15th century, had the fair skin of his mother, a slave girl from the empire’s north-western reaches.

All this ended because of abolition in the West. After severing the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 19th century, Western abolitionists turned on the Islamic world’s, and within decades had brought down a system that had administered not just the Ottoman empire but the Sherifian empire of Morocco, the Sultanate of Oman with its colonies on the Swahili-speaking coast and West Africa’s Sokoto Caliphate.

With Western encouragement, Serb and Greek rebels sloughed off devshirme. Fearful of French ambitions, the mufti of Tunis wooed the British by closing his slave-markets in 1846. A few years later, the sultan in Istanbul followed suit.

Some tried to resist, including Morocco’s sultan and the cotton merchants of Egypt, who had imported African slaves to make up the shortages left by the ravages of America’s civil war. But colonial pressure proved unstoppable. Under Britain’s consul-general, Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Egypt’s legislative assembly dutifully abolished slavery at the end of the 19th century. The Ottoman register for 1906 still lists 194 eunuchs and 500 women in the imperial harem, but two years later they were gone.

For almost a century the Middle East, on paper at least, was free of slaves. “Human beings are born free, and no one has the right to enslave, humiliate, oppress or exploit them,” proclaimed the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam in 1990. Early jihadist groups followed the trend, characterizing themselves as liberation movements and, as such, rejecting slavery.

But though slavery per se may be condemned, observers point to the persistence of servitude. The Global Slavery Index (GSI), whose estimates are computed by an Australian NGO working with Hull University, claims that of 14 states with over

The criteria and data used by GSI have been criticized, but evidence supports the thrust of its findings. Many Arab states took far longer to criminalize slavery than to ban it. Mauritania, the world’s leading enslaver, did not do so until 2007. Where bans exist, they are rarely enforced. The year after Qatar abolished slavery in 1952, the emir took his slaves to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

Government inspections and prosecutions are rarities. “The security chiefs, the judges and the lawyers all belong to the class that historically owned slaves,” says Sarah Mathewson of London-based Anti-Slavery International. “They are part of the problem.”

No labor practice has drawn more international criticism than the kafala system, which ties migrant workers to their employers. This is not slavery as IS imposes it; migrants come voluntarily, drawn by the huge wealth gap between their own countries and the Gulf. But the system “facilitates slavery”, says Nicholas McGeehan, who reports for Human Rights Watch on conditions in the desert camps where most such workers live.

The Gulf’s 2.4m domestic servants are even more vulnerable. Most do not enjoy the least protection under labor laws. Housed and, in some cases, locked in under their employer’s roof, they are prey to sexual exploitation.

Irons and red-hot bars

Again, these workers have come voluntarily; but disquieting echoes persist. Many Gulf nationals can be heard referring to their domestics as malikat (slaves). Since several Asian governments have suspended or banned their female nationals from domestic work in the Gulf out of concern for their welfare, recruitment agencies are turning to parts of Africa, such as Uganda, which once exported female slaves. Some domestic servants are abused with irons and red-hot bars: resonant, says Mr McGeehan, of slave-branding in the past.

Elsewhere in the region, the collapse of law and order provides further cover for a comeback of old practices. Syrian refugee camps in Jordan provide a supply of girls for both the capital’s brothels and for Gulf men trawling websites, which offer short-term marriages for brokerage fees of $140-270 each. Trafficking has soared in Libya’s Mediterranean ports, which under the Ottomans exported sub-Saharan labor to Europe. Long before Boko Haram kidnapped girls, Anti-Slavery International had warned that Nigerian businessmen were buying “fifth wives”—concubines alongside the four wives permitted by Islam—from neighboring Niger.

Gulf states insist they are dealing with the problem. In June Kuwait’s parliament granted domestic servants labor rights, the first Gulf state to do so. It is also the only Gulf state to have opened a refuge for female migrants. Qatar, fearful that reported abuses might upset its hosting of the World Cup in 2022, has promised to improve migrant housing.

And earlier this year Mauritania’s government ordered preachers at Friday prayers to publicize a fatwa by the country’s leading clerics declaring: “Slavery has no legal foundation in sharia law.” Observers fear, though, that this is window-dressing. And Kuwait’s emir has yet to ratify the new labour-rights law.

Rather than stop the abuse, Gulf officials prefer to round on their critics, accusing them of Islamophobia just as their forebears did. Oman and Saudi Arabia have long been closed to Western human-rights groups investigating the treatment of migrants. Now the UAE and Qatar, under pressure after a wave of fatalities among workers building venues for the 2022 World Cup, are keeping them out, too.

Internal protests are even riskier. Over the past two years hundreds of migrant laborers building Abu Dhabi’s Guggenheim and Louvre Museums have been detained, roughed up and deported, says Human Rights Watch, after strikes over unpaid wages. Aminetou Mint Moctar, a rare Mauritanian Arab on the board of SOS Esclaves, a local association campaigning for the rights of haratin, or descendants of black slaves, has received death threats.

Is it too much to hope that the Islamic clerics denouncing slavery might also condemn other instances of forced and abusive labor? Activists and Gulf migrants are doubtful. Even migrants’ own embassies can be strangely mute, not wanting criticism to curb the vital flow of remittances. When Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, visited the UAE this week, his nationals there complained that migrant rights were last on his list. Western governments generally have other priorities. One is simply to defeat IS, whose extreme revival of slavery owes at least something to the region’s persistent and pervasive tolerance of servitude.

Obama Comes to His Senses on Syria?

From here.

This is very interesting stuff. Read closely.

Here is the face-saving formula used by US Secretary of State Kerry in London today to signal that the United States is finally jettisoning the absurd and Utopian demand that Syrian President Assad’s immediate removal from power be a precondition for negotiating a political settlement for Syria.

Kerry stated: “Our focus remains on destroying ISIL and also on a political settlement with respect to Syria, which we believe cannot be achieved with the long-term presence of Assad,” Mr. Kerry said. “But we’re looking for ways in which to try to find a common ground. Clearly, if you’re going to have a political settlement, which we’ve always argued is the best and only way to resolve Syria, you need to have conversations with people, and you need to find a common ground.” which we’ve always argued is the best and only way to resolve Syria, you need to have conversations with people, and you need to find a common ground.”[i]

If Assad must depart in the long term, this implies that his short-term and medium-term presence is feasible. This opens the space needed for serious diplomacy and negotiations, which Europe is demanding to stop the Syrian civil war, the driving force behind the refugee crisis. It is expected that a number of European nations will soon end economic sanctions against Syria, re-open their shuttered embassies, and begin cooperating with the legal Assad government.

“Privately, I’m told, Obama agreed to — and may have even encouraged — Putin’s increased support for the Assad regime, realizing it’s the only real hope of averting a Sunni-extremist victory. But publicly Obama senses that he can’t endorse this rational move. Thus, Obama, who has become practiced at speaking out of multiple sides of his mouth, joined in bashing Russia – sharing that stage with the usual suspects, including The New York Times’ editorial page.”[ii]

This suggests that Obama’s public posturing in regard to Putin may represent a charade or dog-and-pony show. The same may apply to Obama’s repeated refusals to meet with Putin on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in just over a week’s time. Obama may be using this issue as a way to dupe the warmonger Republican opposition.

Here we have a very interesting situation. Parry is excellent, and his sources are usually CIA, often dissident, anti-neocon CIA, so the referenced source may be US intelligence.

This actually makes a lot of sense. The US, Israel, Europe and the Sunni Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Jordan and Turkey have long been demanding the removal of Assad a precondition for ending the war. This doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Why does Assad have to go? Because so many Syrians love Al Qaeda and ISIS so much, so therefore Assad has no legitimacy? Who is to take his place? The only people who can take his place are Al Qaeda/ISIS types. The FSA types could take his place, but they only represent 1

Nobody in Syria much likes the opposition. The last poll taken showed that the rebels only had 1

The FSA is not much liked either. They are regarded as pro-US, pro-EU, pro-Israel dupes who will sell out Syria to the US, the West, Israel and the Gulf. In other words, they’re a bunch of traitors who are out to make Syria into one more US Sunni Arab colony like Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain. Most Syrians wouldn’t be too happy to be ruled by a bunch of traitors.

So there’s no one for Assad to negotiate with. Negotiating an end to the war means negotiating with Al Qaeda/ISIS. Good luck with that. The FSA has no legitimacy and no support.

Apparently the US/EU/Israel plan is to replace Assad with some FSA-type Sunni Arab dupe who could be easily controlled by the US/EU/Israel. This is a long-standing plan, hence the long-standing demand that “Assad must go.”

So as you can see, there’s nothing to negotiate. There’s no one to replace Assad. Anyway, in a free and fair election, Assad would win by a mile, so Assad is the choice of the majority of Syrians.

Apparently the US is finally caving on its longstanding demand that Assad must go. Now we say that Assad must go in the longterm. That means apparently that he can stay in the short-term and midterm. This is a very serious cave-in by the US.

The US doesn’t want to defeat ISIS in Syria at all at the moment. Perhaps we want to defeat them in Iraq, but sometimes I even wonder about that. Sure, we bomb them here and there, but it doesn’t amount to much.

I do think that the US might like to defeat ISIS in the longterm, but surely not now. For now, ISIS is very useful to put pressure on Assad. Probable US goals were:

  1. Take out Assad.
  2. Put in government of pro-US, pro-Israel Sunni Arab dupes.
  3. Possibly try to defeat ISIS.

Notice there’s nothing in that list about defeating Al Qaeda and their minions who along with ISIS make up 9

But the US has a longstanding habit of using various forces, arming and funding them and then turning around, selling them out and arming and funding their enemies to wage all-out war on them. We’ve been doing this crap forever. Just ask the Kurds. This bullshit is called “realpolitik.” Ask Henry Kissinger how that’s supposed to work.

Anyway, it looks there is a complete collapse in the US strategy of keeping ISIS alive enough to threaten Assad, arming and funding Al Qaeda and pals, and demanding Assad’s ouster. It looks like the game-changer was Russia entering the Syrian conflict in a huge way.

And apparently Obama has secretly given the go-ahead for Putin to go into Syria on the basis that US policy has collapsed, and Obama realizes that the best policy is to support Assad against the forces of medievalist terrorism.

However, Obama cannot come out and say this. The Republican Party is still full-throated committed to support for Al Qaeda (and even possibly ISIS) and overthrowing Assad with apparently no plan at all to deal with the Holocaust that would follow. The US “free press” is of course 10

So Obama can’t come out and say he is supporting Russia’s efforts to defeat terrorism and support Assad in Syria because the neocons in Neocon Central (the Republican Party) and the neocon-controlled press will massacre him.

So Obama cleverly gives Putin the go-ahead to go into Syria and do his stuff, while publicly he blasts away at Putin with the usual anti-Russian bluster that the neocons of him. As usual, observed reality as reported in the controlled press is not at all what is really happening behind the scenes. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain…

General Middle East Sitrep August 10, 2014

HOLY LAND Hamas proposal for a port included a “port of Gaza” run by the EU or NATO at Cyprus. Ships would be searched and then sent on their way or escorted to Gaza. Israel almost agreed except that many Israelis marry there so maybe that is why they nixed it. Security risk to Israel is very low. EGYPT In Sinai, the Salafist-jihadis have been on a campaign to kill tribal chieftains for the past year. This is similar to a project the Taliban waged in West Pakistan in the Tribal Areas. Many Sinai tribal chiefs have stated that their tribes want no part in the Salafi war against the Egyptian state. These are the men who are being killed. By decapitating uncooperative tribal leadership, Salafis hope to control the tribes. El Arish has been a hot point for this fighting. Also, heavy fighting recently between Egyptian forces and Salafis around El Arish left about 20 Salafi casualties. El Arish has seen its population explode in recent years as it has been flooded with Gazans. It is now for all intents and purposes a Palestinian city. Not only is El-Sisi hostile to Hamas, but Egyptian public opinion has turned anti-Hamas and anti-Palestinian or at least anti-Gazan. Gazans in Egypt are made to feel very much not welcome, and many are returning to Gaza. Egyptians resent the whole mess, feel that it is not their problem, and they are being dragged into it. LIBYA Libya is in total and utter chaos. Basically a failed state. I have few details. TUNISIA Significant Salafi-jihadi activity in Tunisia in the southwest near the Algerian border. The group has a Tunisian name. Relationship with Al Qaeda in the Maghreb uncertain. MOROCCO ISIS is actively trying to recruit in the Maghreb, especially Morocco. Officials are worried.

India As an Imperialist Country

Creaders writes:

The man white ally with India. The white man is always covering India. White man media do not report the real truth about India and all India transgression was forgotten. India is a key player against China. But I will honestly say its not a NATO style alliance but a low level type. India invade Diu, Daman, Goa, Dadra and Nagar Haveli from Portugal, no white man newspaper ever bark. India invade Hyderabad, white man keep quiet. India invade Kashmir, white man keep quiet. India invade Sikkim, white man keep quiet. When India invade Kashmir, India say Kashmir ruler like India but so I don care if they people hate India. When India invade Hyderabad, India say Hyderabad people like India, but I don care the ruler hate Indian. When India annex Manipur and Sikkim, both people and ruler hate India. India say fuck it, I just want your land, never mind if you hate me. In fact, Indian just know how to talk and talk. They are liars and can come out any reason to harm you. white man keep quiet. India invade China, white man keep quiet. China arrest India’s aggression in 1962 Sino-Indian war, white man say China is aggressor and send arm to India. India is really a crap nation.

I thought US imperialism was bad until I heard about Indian imperialism. India is obviously one of the imperialist countries. Even worse, like the early United Snakes, Zionist Israel, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, it has been conquering and annexing land since the day of its birth. I suppose one could argue that many new nations engage in a “nation-building project” that involves some sort of conquering of other people’s land to annex their lands into the new nation. However, if we look around the world, we do not see a lot of examples of new imperialist countries engaging in nationalist conquests upon independence. In the modern era, the examples are not many: Nazi Germany: program of conquest, annexation and colonization in WW2. Imperial Japan: program of conquest, annexation and colonization in WW2. Fascist Italy: program of conquest, annexation and colonization in WW2. Indonesia (independence in 1949): Program of conquest and annexation of Aceh, East Timor and part of New Guinea now called Irian Jaya. There was also a project of settling colonized lands with settlers in order to subdue the natives. A number of genocides ensued. This project was led by an openly fascist political party pushing a fascist project called Pangasinan. Pakistan (independence in 1948): Attempted to annex Kashmir by force (uncertain if Kashmiris wanted to be annexed by Pakistan). Annexed Balochistan by violence soon afterwards after Balochis voted not to join Pakistan. Israel (independence in 1949): Its very birth was created by invasion, conquest, ethnic cleansing and displacement of natives. Colonization of new land by settlers followed. The following years, more and more land was conquered, more natives were thrown off the land, and more settlers were moved onto new conquered land. The project continues to this day. Russia (newly independent in 1991): Invaded and conquered Chechnya which declared independence from the new Russian nation. Later invaded other Caucasus republics attempting to break away from the new nation. Armenia: Invaded and conquered part of Azerbaijan called Nagorno-Karabagh on an uncertain moral basis but strategically because it was full of Armenians. Later conquered “buffer zones” of Azeri territory similar to Israeli “security buffers.” Georgia: Invaded South Ossetia when South Ossetia refused to join the new country called Georgia. Morocco: Invaded and conquered Spanish Sahara after the region was decolonized. It then settled the area with 200,000 settlers. Sudan: Upon independence in 1954, launched a war against South Sudan that continued for decades and killed 2 million people. Eritrea: Soon after achieving independence in 1991, Eritrea attacked Ethiopia and tried to annex border land. It also attacked Djibouti and tried to annex part of that country. Ethiopia: After independence, Ethiopia immediately annexed Eritrea. This led to a 30 year war which Eritrea finally won and achieved independence from Ethiopia. Somalia: The new nation of Somalia attacked Ethiopia in 1977 and attempted to conquer the Ogaden region and annex it to Somalia. Libya: In 1978, Libya attacked Chad and attempted to annex a strip of land called the Aouzou Strip. However, India seemingly takes the cake. Soon after independence, India quickly invaded Hyderabad, Diu, Daman, Goa, Dadra, Nagar Haveli, Sikkim, Manipur and Kashmir. All of these places had decided that they did not want to be part of India, but India invaded them anyway. Sikkim was actually a separate country, but India invaded it anyway and annexed the place. Many people died because of India’s imperial conquests. The Manipur conflict lasted many years and the Kashmiri conflict continues to this day. Many other areas in the Northeast also refused to join India in the beginning and all were attacked sooner or later. In the midst of this wild imperial conquest spree, apparently India received 10 When you talk to Indians (generally high-caste Indians) one thing you will note is the fanatical nationalism many of them have. Many don’t know their country’s history, but if you recite it to those who know about it, almost 10 Of late, radical Indian ultra-nationalism has been married to Hindu fanaticism in the form of Hindutva ideology. This is a marriage of fascist ultra-nationalism and with radical religious fundamentalism. The result has been a potent movement that looks fascist in many respects. This nascent fascist movement has taken high caste and middle class Indians by storm. We should not sit idly by and watch this fascist movement form while we twiddle our toes. Instead we should watch this dangerous movement very closely. It threatens not only India itself but parts of the rest of the world too.

Does Multilingualism Equal Separatism?

Repost from the old site.

Sorry for the long post, readers, but I have been working on this piece off and on for months now. It’s not something I just banged out. For one thing, this is the only list that I know of on the Net that lists all of the countries of the world and shows how many languages are spoken there in an easy to access format. Not even Wikipedia has that (yet).

Whether or not states have the right to secede is an interesting question. The libertarian Volokh Conspiracy takes that on in this nice set of posts. We will not deal with that here; instead, we will take on the idea that linguistic diversity automatically leads to secession.

There is a notion floating around among fetishists of the state that there can be no linguistic diversity within the nation, as it will lead to inevitable separatism. In this post, I shall disprove that with empirical data. First, we will list the states in the world, along with how many languages are spoken in that state.

States with a significant separatist movement are noted with an asterisk. As you can see if you look down the list, there does not seem to be much of a link between multilingualism and separatism. There does seem to be a trend in that direction in Europe, though.

Afterward, I will discuss the nature of the separatist conflicts in many of these states to try to see if there is any language connection. In most cases, there is little or nothing there.

I fully expect the myth of multilingualism = separatism to persist after the publication of this post, unfortunately.

St Helena                        1
British Indian Ocean Territories 1
Pitcairn Island                  1
Estonia                          1
Maldives                         1
North Korea                      1
South Korea                      1
Cayman Islands                   1
Bermuda                          1
Belarus                          1
Martinique                       2
St Lucia                         2
St Vincent & the Grenadines      2
Barbados                         2
Virgin Islands                   2
British Virgin Islands           2
Gibraltar                        2
Antigua and Barbuda              2
Saint Kitts and Nevis            2
Montserrat                       2
Anguilla                         2
Marshall Islands                 2
Cuba                             2
Turks and Caicos                 2
Guam                             2
Tokelau                          2
Samoa                            2
American Samoa                   2
Niue                             2
Jamaica                          2
Cape Verde Islands               2
Icelandic                        2
Maltese                          2
Maltese                          2
Vatican State                    2
Haiti                            2
Kiribati                         2
Tuvalu                           2
Bahamas                          2
Puerto Rico                      2
Kyrgyzstan                       3
Rwanda                           3
Nauru                            3
Turkmenistan                     3
Luxembourg                       3
Monaco                           3
Burundi                          3
Seychelles                       3
Grenada                          3
Bahrain                          3
Tonga                            3
Qatar                            3
Kuwait                           3
Dominica                         3
Liechtenstein                    3
Andorra                          3
Reunion                          3
Dominican Republic               3
Netherlands Antilles             4
Northern Mariana Islands         4
Palestinian West Bank & Gaza     4
Palau                            4
Mayotte                          4
Cyprus*                          4
Bosnia and Herzegovina*          4
Slovenia and Herzegovina*        4
Swaziland                        4
Sao Tome and Principe            4
Guadalupe                        4
Saudi Arabia                     5
Cook Islands                     5
Latvia                           5
Lesotho                          5
Djibouti                         5
Ireland                          5
Moldova                          5
Armenia                          6
Mauritius                        6
Lebanon                          6
Mauritania                       6
Croatia                          6
Kazakhstan                       7
Kazakhstan                       7
Albania                          7
Portugal                         7
Uzbekistan                       7
Sri Lanka*                       7
United Arab Emirates             7
Comoros                          7
Belize                           8
Tunisia                          8
Denmark                          8
Yemen                            8
Morocco*                         9
Austria                          9
Jordan                           9
Macedonia                        9
Tajikistan                       9
French Polynesia                 9
Gambia                           9
Belgium                          9
Libya                            9
Fiji                             10
Slovakia                         10
Ukraine                          10
Egypt                            11
Bulgaria                         11
Norway                           11
Poland                           11
Serbia and Montenegro            11
Eritrea                          12
Georgia*                         12
Finland*                         12
Switzerland*                     12
Hungary*                         12
United Kingdom*                  12
Mongolia                         13
Spain                            13
Somalia*                         13
Oman                             13
Madagascar                       13
Malawi                           14
Equatorial Guinea                14
Mali                             14
Azerbaijan                       14
Japan                            15
Syria*                           15
Romania*                         15
Sweden*                          15
Netherlands*                     15
Greece                           16
Brunei                           17
Algeria                          18
Micronesia                       18
East Timor                       19
Zimbabwe                         19
Niger                            21
Singapore                        21
Cambodia                         21
Iraq*                            21
Guinea-Bissau                    21
Taiwan                           22
Bhutan                           24
Sierra Leone                     24
South Africa                     24
Germany                          28
Namibia                          28
Botswana                         28
France                           29
Liberia                          30
Israel                           33
Italy                            33
Guinea                           34
Turkey*                          34
Senegal                          36
Bangladesh                       39
New Caledonia                    39
Togo                             39
Angola*                          41
Gabon                            41
Zambia                           41
Mozambique                       43
Uganda                           43
Afghanistan                      47
Guatemala                        54
Benin                            54
Kenya                            61
Congo                            62
Burkina Faso                     68
Central African Republic         69
Solomon Islands                  70
Thailand*                        74
Iran*                            77
Cote D'Ivoire                    78
Ghana                            79
Laos                             82
Ethiopia*                        84
Canada*                          85
Russia*                          101
Vietnam                          102
Myanmar*                         108
Vanuatu                          109
Nepal                            126
Tanzania                         128
Chad                             132
Sudan*                           134
Malaysia                         140
United States*                   162
Philippines*                     171
Pakistan*                        171
Democratic Republic of Congo     214
Australia                        227
China*                           235
Cameroon*                        279
Mexico                           291
India*                           415
Nigeria                          510
Indonesia*                       737
Papua New Guinea*                820

*Starred states have a separatist problem, but most are not about language. Most date back to the very formation of an often-illegitimate state.

Canada definitely has a conflict that is rooted in language, but it is also rooted in differential histories as English and French colonies. The Quebec nightmare is always brought up by state fetishists, ethnic nationalists and other racists and nationalists who hate minorities as the inevitable result of any situation whereby a state has more than one language within its borders.

This post is designed to give the lie to this view.

Cyprus’ problem has to do with two nations, Greeks and Turks, who hate each other. The history for this lies in centuries of conflict between Christianity and Islam, culminating in the genocide of 350,000 Greeks in Turkey from 1916-1923.

Morocco’s conflict has nothing to do with language. Spanish Sahara was a Spanish colony in Africa. After the Spanish left in the early 1950’s, Morocco invaded the country and colonized it, claiming in some irredentist way that the land had always been a part of Morocco. The residents beg to differ and say that they are a separate state.

An idiotic conflict ensued in which Morocco the colonizer has been elevated to one of the most sanctioned nations of all by the UN. Yes, Israel is not the only one; there are other international scofflaws out there. In this conflict, as might be expected, US imperialism has supported Moroccan colonialism.

This Moroccan colonialism has now become settler-colonialism, as colonialism often does. You average Moroccan goes livid if you mention their colony. He hates Israel, but Morocco is nothing but an Arab Muslim Israel. If men had a dollar for every drop of hypocrisy, we would be a world of millionaires.

There are numerous separatist conflicts in Somalia. As Somalians have refused to perform their adult responsibilities and form a state, numerous parts of this exercise in anarchism in praxis (Why are the anarchists not cheering this on?) are walking away from the burning house. Who could blame them?

These splits seem to have little to do with language. One, Somaliland, was a former British colony and has a different culture than the rest of Somalia. Somaliland is now de facto independent, as Somalia, being a glorious exercise in anarchism, of course lacks an army to enforce its borders, or to do anything.

Jubaland has also split, but this has nothing to do with language. Instead, this may be rooted in a 36-year period in which it was a British colony. Soon after this period, they had their own postage stamps as an Italian colony.

There is at least one serious separatist conflict in Ethiopia in the Ogaden region, which is mostly populated by ethnic Somalis. Apparently this region used to be part of Somaliland, and Ethiopia probably has little claim to the region. This conflict has little do with language and more to do with conflicts rooted in colonialism and the illegitimate borders of states.

There is also a conflict in the Oromo region of Ethiopia that is not going very far lately. These people have been fighting colonialism since Ethiopia was a colony and since then have been fighting against independent Ethiopia, something they never went along with. Language has a role here, but the colonization of a people by various imperial states plays a larger one.

There was a war in Southern Sudan that has now ended with the possibility that the area may secede.

There is a genocidal conflict in Darfur that the world is ignoring because it involves Arabs killing Blacks as they have always done in this part of the world, and the world only gets upset when Jews kill Muslims, not when Muslims kill Muslims.

This conflict has to do with the Sudanese Arabs treating the Darfurians with utter contempt – they regard them as slaves, as they have always been to these racist Arabs.

The conflict in Southern Sudan involved a region in rebellion in which many languages were spoken. The South Sudanese are also niggers to the racist Arabs, plus they are Christian and animist infidels to be converted by the sword by Sudanese Arab Muslims. Every time a non-Muslim area has tried to split off from or acted uppity with a Muslim state they were part of, the Muslims have responded with a jihad against and genocide of the infidels.

This conflict has nothing to do with language; instead it is a war of Arab Muslim religious fanatics against Christian and animist infidels.

There is a separatist movement in the South Cameroons in the nation of Cameroon in Africa. This conflict is rooted in colonialism. During the colonial era, South Cameroons was a de facto separate state. Many different languages are spoken here, as is the case in Cameroon itself. They may have a separate culture too, but this is just another case of separatism rooted in colonialism. The movement seems to be unarmed.

There is a separatist conflict in Angola in a region called Cabinda, which was always a separate Portuguese colony from Angola.

As this area holds 6

The Cabindans do claim to have a separate culture, but language does not seem to be playing much role here – instead, oil and colonialism are.

Syria does have a Kurdish separatist movement, as does Iran, Iraq, and Turkey – every state that has a significant number of Kurds. This conflict goes back to the post-World War 1 breakup of the Ottoman Empire. The Kurds, with thousands of years of history as a people, nominally independent for much of that time, were denied a state and sold out.

The new fake state called Turkey carved up part of Kurdistan, another part was donated to the British colony in Iraq and another to the French colony in Syria, as the Allies carved up the remains of the Empire like hungry guests at a feast.

This conflict is more about colonialism and extreme discrimination than language, though the Kurds do speak their own tongue. There is also a Kurdish separatist conflict in Iran, but I don’t know much about the history of the Iranian Kurds.

There is also an Assyrian separatist movement in Iraq and possibly in Syria. The movement is unarmed. The Assyrians have been horribly persecuted by Arab nationalist racists in the region, in part because they are Christians. They have been targeted by Islamo-Nazis in Iraq during this Iraq War with a ferocity that can only be described as genocidal.

The Kurds have long persecuted the Assyrians in Iraqi Kurdistan. There have been regular homicides of Assyrians in the north, up around the Mosul region. This is just related to the general way that Muslims treat Christian minorities in many Muslim states – they persecute them and even kill them. There is also a lot of land theft going on.

While the Kurdish struggle is worthwhile, it is becoming infected with the usual nationalist evil that afflicts all ethnic nationalism. This results in everyone who is not a Kurdish Sunni Muslim being subjected to varying degrees of persecution, disenfranchisement and discrimination. It’s a nasty part of the world.

In Syria, the Assyrians live up near the Turkish and Iraqi borders. Arab nationalist racists have been stealing their land for decades now and relocating the Assyrians to model villages, where they languish in poverty. Assad’s regime is not so secular and progressive as one might suspect.

There is a separatist conflict in Bougainville in New Guinea. I am sure that many different tongues are spoken on that island, as there are 800 different tongues spoken in Papua New Guinea. The conflict is rooted in the fact that Bougainville is rich in copper, but almost all of this wealth is stolen by Papua New Guinea and US multinationals, so the Bougainville people see little of it. Language has little or nothing to do with it.

There are separatist movements in the Ahwaz and Balochistan regions of Iran, along with the aforementioned Kurdish movement. It is true that different languages are spoken in these regions, but that has little to do with the conflict.

Arabic is spoken in Khuzestan, the land of the Iranian Arabs. This land has been part of Persia for around 2,000 years as the former land of Elam. The Arabs complain that they are treated poorly by the Persians, and that they get little revenue to their region even though they are sitting on a vast puddle of oil and natural gas.

Iran should not be expected to part with this land, as it is the source of much of their oil and gas wealth. Many or most Iranians speak Arabic anyway, so there is not much of a language issue. Further, Arab culture is promoted by the Islamist regime even at the expense of Iranian culture, much to the chagrin of Iranian nationalists.

The Ahwaz have been and are being exploited by viciously racist Arab nationalists in Iraq, and also by US imperialism, and most particularly lately, British imperialism, as the British never seem to have given up the colonial habit. This conflict is not about language at all. Most Ahwaz don’t even want to separate anyway; they just want to be treated like humans by the Iranians.

Many of Iran’s

There is a separatist movement in Iran to split off Iranian Azerbaijan and merge it with Azerbaijan proper. This movement probably has little to do with language and more to do with just irredentism. The movement is not going to go very far because most Iranian Azeris do not support it.

Iranian Azeris actually form a ruling class in Iran and occupy most of the positions of power in the government. They also control a lot of the business sector and seem to have a higher income than other Iranians. This movement has been co-opted by pan-Turkish fascists for opportunistic reasons, but it’s not really going anywhere. The CIA is now cynically trying to stir it up with little success. The movement is peaceful.

There is a Baloch insurgency in Pakistan, but language has little to do with it. These fiercely independent people sit on top of a very rich land which is ruthlessly exploited by Punjabis from the north. They get little or no return from this natural gas wealth. Further, this region never really consented to being included in the Pakistani state that was carved willy-nilly out of India in 1947.

It is true that there are regions in the Caucasus that are rebelling against Russia. Given the brutal and bloody history of Russian imperial colonization of this region and the near-continuous rebellious state of the Muslims resident there, one wants to say they are rebelling against Imperial Russia.

Chechnya is the worst case, but Tuva reserves the right to split away, but this is rooted in their prior history as an independent state within the USSR (Tell me how that works?) for two decades until 1944, when Stalin reconquered it as a result of the conflict with the Nazis. The Tuvans accepted peacefully.

Yes, the Tuvans speak a different tongue, but so do all of the Siberian nations, and most of those are still with Russia. Language has little to do with the Tuvan matter.

There is also separatism in the Bashkir Republic and Adygea in Russia. These have not really gone anywhere. Only 2 Adygea speak Circassian, and they see themselves as overrun by Russian-speaking immigrants. This conflict may have something to do with language. The Adygean conflict is also peripherally related the pan-Caucasian struggle above.

In the Bashkir Republic, the problem is more one of a different religion – Islam, as most Bashkirs are Muslim. It is not known to what degree language has played in the struggle, but it may be a factor. The Bashkirs also see themselves as overrun by Russian-speaking immigrants. It is dubious that the Bashkirs will be able to split off, as the result will be a separate nation surrounded on all sides by Russia.

The Adygean, Tuvan and Bashkir struggles are all peaceful.

The conflict in Georgia is complex. A province called Abkhazia has split off and formed their own de facto state, which has been supported with extreme cynicism by up and coming imperialist Russia, the same clown state that just threatened to go to war to defend the territorial integrity of their genocidal Serbian buddies. South Ossetia has also split off and wants to join Russia.

Both of these reasonable acts prompted horrible and insane wars as Georgia sought to preserve its territorial integrity, though it has scarcely been a state since 1990, and neither territory ever consented to being part of Georgia.

The Ossetians and Abkhazians do speak separate languages, and I am not certain why they want to break away, but I do not think that language has much to do with it. All parties to these conflicts are nations in rebellion announced that they were not part of the deal.

Bloody rebellions have gone on ever since, and language has little or nothing to do with any of them. They are situated instead on the illegitimacy of not only the borders of the Burmese state, but of the state itself.

Thailand does have a separatist movement, but it is Islamic. They had a separate state down there until the early 1800’s when they were apparently conquered by Thais. I believe they do speak a different language down there, but it is not much different from Thai, and I don’t think language has anything to do with this conflict.

There is a conflict in the Philippines that is much like the one in Thailand. Muslims in Mindanao have never accepted Christian rule from Manila and are in open arms against the state. Yes, they speak different languages down in Mindanao, but they also speak Tagalog, the language of the land.

This just a war of Muslims seceding because they refuse to be ruled by infidels. Besides, this region has a long history of independence, de facto and otherwise, from the state. The Moro insurgency has little to nothing to do with language.

There are separatist conflicts in Indonesia. The one in Aceh seems to have petered out. Aceh never agreed to join the fake state of Indonesia that was carved out of the Dutch East Indies when the Dutch left in 1949.

West Papua is a colony of Indonesia. It was invaded by Indonesia with the full support of US imperialism in 1965. The Indonesians then commenced to murder 100,000 Papuans over the next 40 years. There are many languages spoken in West Papua, but that has nothing to do with the conflict. West Papuans are a racially distinct people divided into vast numbers of tribes, each with a separate culture.

They have no connection racially or culturally with the rest of Indonesia and do not wish to be part of the state. They were not a part of the state when it was declared in 1949 and were only incorporated after an Indonesian invasion of their land in 1965. Subsequently, Indonesia has planted lots of settler-colonists in West Papua.

There is also a conflict in the South Moluccas , but it has more to do with religion than anything else, since there is a large number of Christians in this area. The South Moluccans were always reluctant to become a part of the new fake Indonesian state that emerged after independence anyway, and I believe there was some fighting for a while there. The South Moluccan struggle has generally been peaceful ever since.

Indonesia is the Israel of Southeast Asia, a settler-colonial state. The only difference is that the Indonesians are vastly more murderous and cruel than the Israelis.

There are conflicts in Tibet and East Turkestan in China. In the case of Tibet, this is a colony of China that China has no jurisdiction over. The East Turkestan fight is another case of Muslims rebelling against infidel rule. Yes, different languages are spoken here, but this is the case all over China.

Language is involved in the East Turkestan conflict in that Chinese have seriously repressed the Uighur language, but I don’t think it plays much role in Tibet.

There is also a separatist movement in Inner Mongolia in China. I do not think that language has much to do with this, and I believe that China’s claim to Inner Mongolia may be somewhat dubious. This movement is unarmed and not very organized.

There are conflicts all over India, but they don’t have much to do with language.

The Kashmir conflict is not about language but instead is rooted in the nature of the partition of India after the British left in 1947. 9

The UN quickly ruled that Kashmir had to be granted a vote in its future, but this vote was never allowed by India. As such, India is another world-leading rogue and scofflaw state on a par with Israel and Indonesia. Now the Kashmir mess has been complicated by the larger conflict between India and Pakistan, and until that is all sorted out, there will be no resolution to this mess.

Obviously India has no right whatsoever to rule this area, and the Kashmir cause ought to be taken up by all progressives the same way that the Palestinian one is.

There are many conflicts in the northeast, where most of the people are Asians who are racially, often religiously and certainly culturally distinct from the rest of Indians.

None of these regions agreed to join India when India, the biggest fake state that has ever existed, was carved out of 5,000 separate princely states in 1947. Each of these states had the right to decide its own future to be a part of India or not. As it turned out, India just annexed the vast majority of them and quickly invaded the few that said no.

“Bharat India”, as Indian nationalist fools call it, as a state, is one of the silliest concepts around. India has no jurisdiction over any of those parts of India in separatist rebellion, if you ask me. Language has little to do with these conflicts.

Over 800 languages are spoken in India anyway, each state has its own language, and most regions are not in rebellion over this. Multilingualism with English and Hindi to cement it together has worked just fine in most of India.

Sri Lanka’s conflict does involve language, but more importantly it involves centuries of extreme discrimination by ruling Buddhist Sinhalese against minority Hindu Tamils. Don’t treat your minorities like crap, and maybe they will not take up arms against you.

The rebellion in the Basque country of Spain and France is about language, as is Catalonian nationalism.

IRA Irish nationalism and the Scottish and Welsh independence movements have nothing to do with language, as most of these languages are not in good shape anyway.

The Corsicans are in rebellion against France, and language may play a role. There is an independence movement in Brittany in France also, and language seems to play a role here, or at least the desire to revive the language, which seems to be dying.

There is a possibility that Belgium may split into Flanders and Wallonia, and language does play a huge role in this conflict. One group speaks French and the other Dutch.

There is a movement in Scania, a part of Sweden, to split away from Sweden. Language seems to have nothing to do with it.

There is a Hungarian separatist movement, or actually, a national reunification or pan-Hungarian movement, in Romania. It isn’t going anywhere, and it unlikely to succeed. Hungarians in Romania have not been treated well and are a large segment of the population. This fact probably drives the separatism more than language.

There are many other small conflicts in Europe that I chose not to go into due to limitations on time and the fact that I am getting tired of writing this post! Perhaps I can deal with them at a later time. Language definitely plays a role in almost all of these conflicts. None of them are violent though.

To say that there are separatists in French Polynesia is not correct. This is an anti-colonial movement that deserves the support of anti-colonial activists the world over. The entire world, evidenced by the UN itself, has rejected colonialism. Only France, the UK and the US retain colonies. That right there is notable, as all three are clearly imperialist countries. In this modern age, the value of retaining colonies is dubious.

These days, colonizers pour more money into colonies than they get out of them. France probably keeps Polynesia due to colonial pride and also as a place to test nuclear weapons and maintain military bases. As the era of French imperialism on a grand scale has clearly passed, France needs to renounce its fantasies of being a glorious imperial power along with its anachronistic colonies.

Yes, there is a Mapuche separatist movement in Chile, but it is not going anywhere soon, or ever.

It has little to do with language. The Mapudungan language is not even in very good shape, and the leaders of this movement are a bunch of morons. Microsoft recently unveiled a Mapudungan language version of Microsoft Windows. You would think that the Mapuche would be ecstatic. Not so! They were furious. Why? Oh, I forget. Some Identity Politics madness.

This movement has everything to do with the history of Chile. Like Argentina and Uruguay, Chile was one of the Spanish colonies that was settled en masse late. For centuries, a small colonial bastion battled the brave Mapuche warriors, but were held at bay by this skilled and militaristic tribe.

Finally, in the late 1800’s, a fanatical and genocidal war was waged on the Mapuche in one of those wonderful “national reunification” missions so popular in the 1800’s (recall Italy’s wars of national reunification around this same time). By the 1870’s, the Mapuche were defeated and suffered a devastating loss of life.

Yet all those centuries of only a few Spanish colonists and lots of Indians had made their mark, and at least 7

Because they held out so long and so many of them survived, they are one of the most militant Amerindian groups in the Americas. They are an interesting people, light-skinned and attractive, though a left-wing Chilean I knew used to chortle about how hideously ugly they were.

Hawaiian separatism is another movement that has a lot to do with colonialism and imperialism and little to do with language. The Hawaiian language, despite some notable recent successes, is not in very good shape. The Hawaiian independence movement offers nothing to non-Hawaiians (I guess only native Hawaiians get to be citizens!) and is doomed to fail.

Hawaiians are about 2

There are separatists in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, but I doubt that language has much to do with it. Like the myriad other separatist struggles in the NE of India, these people are ethnically Asians and as such are not the same ethnicity as the Caucasians who make up the vast majority of the population of this wreck of a state.

This is another conflict that is rooted in a newly independent fake state. The Chittagong Hill Tracts were incorporated into Bangladesh after its independence from Pakistan in 1971. As a fake new state, the peoples of Bangladesh had a right to be consulted on whether or not they wished to be a part of it. The CHT peoples immediately said that they wanted no part of this new state.

At partition, the population was 98.

I don’t know much about the separatist struggle of the Moi in Vietnam, but I think it is more a movement for autonomy than anything else. The Moi are Montagnards and have probably suffered discrimination at the hands of the state along with the rest of the Montagnards.

Zanzibar separatism in Tanzania seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with language, but has a lot more to do with geography. Zanzibar is a nice island off the coast of Tanzania which probably wants nothing to do with the mess of a Tanzanian state.

The conflict also has a lot to do with race. Most residents of Zanzibar are either Arabs or descendants of unions between Arabs and Africans. In particular, they deny that they are Black Africans. I bet that is the root of the conflict right there.

There were some Talysh separatists in Azerbaijan a while back, but the movement seems to be over. I am not sure what was driving them, but language doesn’t seem to have been a big part of it. Just another case of new members of a fake new state refusing to go along for the ride.

There were some Gagauz separatists in Moldova a while back, but the movement appears to have died down. Language does seem to have played a role here, as the Gagauz speak a Turkic tongue totally unrelated to the Romance-speaking Moldovans.

Realistically, it’s just another case of a fake new state emerging and some members of the new state saying they don’t want to be a part of it, and the leaders of the fake new state suddenly invoking inviolability of borders in a state with no history!

In summary, as we saw above, once we get into Europe, language does play a greater role in separatist conflict, but most of these European conflicts are not violent. In the rest of the world, language plays little to no role in the vast majority of separatist conflicts.

The paranoid and frankly fascist notion voiced by rightwing nationalists the world over that any linguistic diversity in the world within states must be crushed as it will inevitably lead to separatism at best or armed separatism at worst is not supported by the facts.

"Joys of Muslim Women," by Nonie Darwish

Some of this stuff is a bit over to the top, and I edited out about 1 Some of the stuff I removed: that Muslims are preparing a jihad against the West, apparently to convert us to Islam? I don’t agree with that. They think some of us are attacking Islam, so they are counterattacking. Another line said that in 20 years, there will be enough Muslims in North America to elect the President and Prime Minister of the US and Canada. No way is that true. It isn’t really true that non-Muslims are supposed to be killed or subjugated by Muslims, though there is a bit of truth to that. Under Muslim rule, non-Muslims are clearly subordinate. But where Muslims are the minority, that is not the case. Muslims are supposed to try to convert and increase their numbers so they can be a majority. Apparently conquest in the name of Islam – aggressive jihad – we have not seen that much in recent years. One exception is Southern Sudan. There have been some genocides of non-Muslims too – Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians in Anatolia, Catholics in East Timor. In areas with a Muslim majority trying to secede from the state, it’s typically “kill the non-Muslims.” This is the case in the Southern Philippines, Thailand, the Moluccas, Chechnya and Kashmir. There have been localized massacres of non-Muslims in India, Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Muslim jihad is a complicated subject, and saying they want to kill us or convert us is a bit ridiculous, though that was more or less what was going on South Sudan, and there have been some cases of that in Iraq and Pakistan recently.

Joys of Muslim Women

by Nonie Darwish

In the Muslim faith a Muslim man can marry a child as young as 7 year old, consummating the marriage by 9. The dowry is given to the family in exchange for the woman (who becomes his slave) and for the purchase of the private parts of the woman, to use her as a toy. To prove rape, the woman must have (4) male witnesses. Often after a woman has been raped, the family has the right to execute her (an honor killing) to restore the honor of the family. Husbands can beat their wives ‘at will, and the man does not have to say why he has beaten her. The husband is permitted to have 4 wives and a temporary wife for an hour (prostitute) at his discretion. The Shariah Muslim law controls the private as well as the public life of the woman. In the Western World (America), Muslim men are starting to demand Shariah Law so the wife can not obtain a divorce and he can have full and complete control of her. It is amazing and alarming how many of our sisters and daughters attending US and Canadian Universities are now marrying Muslim men and submitting themselves and their children unsuspectingly to Shariah law. Ripping the West in Two. Author and lecturer Nonie Darwish says the goal of radical Islamists is to impose Shariah law on the world, ripping Western law and liberty in two.

Ripping the West in Two

Nonie Darwish recently authored the book, Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law. Darwish was born in Cairo and spent her childhood in Egypt and Gaza before immigrating to the US in 1978, when she was eight years old. Her father died while leading covert attacks on Israel. He was a high-ranking Egyptian military officer stationed with his family in Gaza. When he died, he was considered a “shahid,” a martyr for jihad. His posthumous status earned Nonie and her family an elevated position in Muslim society. But Darwish developed a skeptical eye at an early age. She questioned her own Muslim culture and upbringing. She converted to Christianity after hearing a Christian preacher on television. In her latest book, Darwish warns about creeping sharia law – what it is, what it means, and how it is manifested in Islamic countries. Westerners generally assume all religions encourage a respect for the dignity of each individual. Islamic law (Sharia) teaches that non-Muslims should be subjugated or killed in this world. Peace and prosperity for one’s children is not as important as assuring that Islamic law rules everywhere in the Middle East and eventually in the world. While Westerners tend to think that all religions encourage some form of the golden rule, Sharia teaches two systems of ethics – one for Muslims and another for non-Muslims. Building on tribal practices of the seventh century, Sharia encourages the side of humanity that wants to take from and subjugate others. While Westerners tend to think in terms of religious people developing a personal understanding of and relationship with God, Sharia advocates executing people who ask difficult questions that could be interpreted as criticism. It’s hard to imagine, that in this day and age, Islamic scholars agree that those who criticize Islam or choose to stop being Muslim should be executed. Sadly, while talk of an Islamic reformation is common and even assumed by many in the West, such murmurings in the Middle East are silenced through intimidation. While Westerners are accustomed to an increase in religious tolerance over time, Darwish explains how petro dollars are being used to grow an extremely intolerant form of political Islam in her native Egypt and elsewhere. It is too bad that so many are disillusioned with life and Christianity to accept Muslims as peaceful…some may be but they have an army that is willing to shed blood in the name of Islam…the peaceful support the warriors with their finances and own kind of patriotism to their religion.

Cavewomen and Wormboys

Repost from the old site. A fellow named Zsidozas comments on the Race, Gender and Masculinity/Femininity post. My comments follow:

Zsidozas comments: A personal story – as a White American male I’ve encountered much hostility from White females because I am not an effete and feminized White American male like so many of the others are these days. I am more aggressive, dominant, and masculine than the majority of White males for sure, but I try to temper this by my strong orientation toward reason, rationality, and learning. So yeah, I’ve encountered problems with White women because many view me as an overly aggressive, pushy, and angry asshole/jerk/brute/prick/Viking/Neanderthal, of which I am not at all, but they only view me that way because I am quite a bit more masculine than most White men (who I agree are, on the whole, far too wimpy and resigned for their own good). I am not a bodybuilder or football player or anything like that, so it’s not like I am afflicted by the ‘macho male complex’ that men like that suffer from. So I’ve noticed that many White women think of me as something a bit unnatural or strange and view me with some contempt and suspicion because I am not easily dominated and controlled like the rest of White men. In fact, I’ll argue and bicker with women (of whatever ethnicity) until we are all blue in the face if I believe something strongly as I’m not afraid to back down like so many modern men are — and I usually win those arguments. And when I do win those arguments, believe it or not I’ve had women get violent with me either playfully or for real, like they are trying to get back at me physically for ‘beating them’ mentally and emotionally in an argument when they are just so used to lording over modern men. It seems as if many White women, if they date or marry White men as most do, actually sort-of want or prefer a push-over who they can easily control, manipulate, and dominate in many ways (though they still want the man to bring them home some money, of course). I think this is a rather recent development and a major reason why gender relations are so screwed up in the modern Western White world, particularly in America. A quick story: I was at a party with my girlfriend the other night that was mostly populated by a bunch of drunken lesbians and overly masculine (but straight) White females, along with their feminized male lackeys. And one of them, in a drunken and pilled-up stupor actually said to me and me girlfriend as we were talking to her [paraphrasing]: “I love to emasculate men. I just like it. It’s fun. I do it all the time at work.” And she said it sort-of at me and my girlfriend, like almost a veiled insult toward me or something. I continued to laugh with her and joked around and such, but still I think it was like a veiled insult toward me because she recognized in me a man who refused to be emasculated and feminized like so many modern men. So I laughed and joked (but was secretly disgusted toward her that she would actually take pleasure in mentally emasculating men and fucking with their egos). Lame story, but I think it illustrates a decent point about the attitude of most modern White women. Also, you didn’t mention Semitic peoples here like Jews and Arabs. But just a thought: Jewish males are certainly very effeminate (as effeminate as many Asian men, often more), and Jewish females very masculine (maybe even as masculine as Black women). Ditto with Arabs — and maybe this is why Arab men are so severe toward their women, like they want to keep them in check or something? Most Jewish and Arab females have, I’ve noticed, many masculine physical traits like deep/husky voices and hairy bodies, while many Jewish/Arab men have many feminine traits like higher pitched voices and moodiness/high emotionality. Many men in Arab countries also engage in some behaviors that are considered effeminate or even gayish here in The West like holding hands as they walk together and kissing each other a lot, but they don’t think anything of it over there. However, there is still something that is just intrinsically aggressive about both Jews and Arabs that I can’t pin down yet, though I’m looking for reasons — maybe it’s their rather fanatical ethnocentrism? So, if possible, I’d like your thoughts on Semitics (however brief) as well if you don’t mind.

Ok, first of all, I do not understand why women would hate an overly aggressive or masculine man, even in the feminized US. But I won’t deny you the reality of your experiences. Around here, most of the White guys are pretty machoed out. Now if you go over to San Francisco, it is a totally different story. The Northern California male is said to be so feminized that many people think that they are gay. Conversely, the women are often said to be quite masculinized. I never heard this too much when I was in Southern California. I do not know why this is, but for instance, my brother knows this older guy was paints his toenails like a woman. I heard that and freaked out. I said, “Is he gay?!” Because I think it sucks for a guy to paint his toenails. My brother answered, “No, he is just a Northern California male.” There are some others like that, including a guy well-known to both of us. I will note: “Sometime he acts like a total fag! What the Hell is the matter with him anyway?!” And then I will imitate his ridiculously faggy behavior. My brother responds that this guy is a Northern California male. Now this guy hooked up with and later lived with a woman for a while who was quite masculine, and I’m not sure what kind of a relationship they had, but they did seem to be happy, so I was very, very happy for them and especially for him, as I have known him forever. At one point, the relationship started ending, and I heard she was bi or lesbian or something and she had moved her girlfriend into the house with our friend. Now, this could be fun if they guy got into the sex, but I do not think so. Last I heard she has living with her lez girlfriend. There is another older guy close to us who has many extremely faggy characteristics: walks like a fag, talks like a fag, etc. I will say: “That guy acts gay!!” and someone will chide me, responding that he’s been married five times. He has some kind of weird relationship with his wife now where he acts all feminine or like a little boy or something, and she thinks it’s really cute, and I guess afterwards they fuck like crazy. Whatever. I am happy for both of them though, because she has made a lifetime project out of being miserable, and the guy is at least getting laid, and I cheer that on in all males. There is another one living in San Francisco married to someone close to us. Everyone (all my close relatives) insists that he acts gay but I do not think he does at all. I just think he acts like me. Hmmmm. But they are very happy together also, so I am happy for them too. I do not know about Arabs. I dated an Arab woman once, a woman from Egypt who was part Black. She was quite submissive, not bossy or aggressive or anything like that. She was Muslim, but that never got in the way of sex. In fact, she was so incredible that I think I want another one of those Arab women! I do not think that Arab women are bossy or domineering in their relationships with men, though some are. Saddam’s Hussein’s Dad was supposedly horribly pussy-whipped by his Mom. I suspect it is probably more common that one might think. The Philippines has a reputation for being a very sexist place where the males are very macho and do not really treat women all that well. Like Arabs, they frequently beat their women. However, a Filipina I know told me that there is a saying called, “under the saya“, which means that a Filipino man is basically pussy-whipped. Saya is skirt. So he’s under his wife’s skirt, and she controls him. I asked if this was common, and she said it was very common. Keep in mind that in the Philippines, the Arab World and Asia, the woman rules the home. The man just needs to keep out of there. I read an interview with an Egyptian man and his sons living at home in Cairo. The living room was decorated in frilly pink feminine stuff and the interviewer asked this macho Arab husband if he liked it this way, and he said basically, “Well, it’s her house and she can decorate it any way she wants to.” I assume the males have some control over the way they want their particular inhabited spaces decorated. In these places, often the woman controls all the money for the couple, and makes all decisions about household expenditures. My Mom told me a story about a Japanese couple who came to look at a house a friend of hers was selling. The seller asked the Japanese man if he was interested, and he said something like, “That decision is left up to her.” In other words, this poor oppressed Japanese woman actually gets to decide what house they buy! It seems to me that these women are not as oppressed as we think that they are, and many Japanese and Arab women resent Westerners and feminists sticking their noses in Japanese or Arab culture and telling them that they are oppressed. You’re often going to get people’s patriotic backs up when you do that. Better to let some folks negotiate their way to liberation by themselves. Jews and Arabs are both highly emotional probably because that is a “Mediterraneanism”. In other words, most of the folks in that part of the world tend to act that way. Arab guys put their arms around each other because this is common in many parts of the world. I had a friend from China who was always trying to put his arm around me in public. I see Mexican Indian farm workers in town who often walk around with their arms around each other, especially when drunk. I think it is an “Indianism”, as you don’t see the other Mexicans doing that. This male buddiness does not seem associated with homosexuality in these Indians and it is not in the Chinese. The Arab World is quite complex. In the Levant and Mesopotamia, homosexuality is despised and treated very harshly, not uncommonly with death. In the Gulf, especially in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, opportunistic or even preferential bisexuality is very common and in fact, the religious police often look the other way, as they are more concerned about men and women together! Stupid or what?! In Egypt, there is fairly free and easy bisexuality among unmarried males, which they may continue after marriage. This is a lot more common in Nubia in Southern Egypt, where people are a lot Blacker, and there is actually a long tradition of that stuff. In Cairo and in Morocco, many males will play the male role in homosexual sex with a “gay” male, who plays the female role. In many cultures, it’s not considered gay to play the male role in gay sex. Most guys who do this are young unmarried males. This is what happens when you forbid young males with a stratospheric sex drive female outlets: they screw each other. I don’t find Arab males feminine at all. In fact, I find them ultra-macho. The commenter asks about Jewish men and women. Well, I don’t think Jewish guys have a reputation for being feminine so much as wimpy. Wimpy and oversexed at the same time! So that is not quite the same thing. And there is the stereotype of the Jewish woman as neurotic, insecure (she hates her looks and longs to be a blond), controlling, addicted to cheap, tacky and gaudy clothing and jewelry, domineering, histrionic (drama queen), and in particular constantly badgering him to make more money. There were horror stories by Jewish men about Jewish women dating all the way back 100 years ago to the early Jewish press on the East Coast of the US. In many ways, this stereotype has not changed. The Jewish guy is supposed to marry a Jewish girl, but he often resents their domineering nature, and the stereotype is he wants a blonde shiska. Jewish women, like Black women, complain that their men don’t want them. But most Jews do still marry their own. On the plus side, Jewish women can be very nurturing, and in my opinion, they can be real Stand By Your Man types. I had a Jewish girlfriend who everyone thought was a bitch. People thought she treated me like crap in public and would say, “I hate the way she talks to you!” Well, in the relationship, she started out as a bitch sometimes, but I turned the tables on that pretty quickly! I forgot her birthday, forgot our anniversary, got in a big fight with her on her birthday (The most evil, cruel, mean, horrible and insensitive thing I could have done!), calmly laughed in her face at her horrible insults, made her cry repeatedly, called her a bitch and a cunt and all sorts of other horrible names I have never called any woman, and this was one of the best relationships of my life. She hated me at times, but she hated me for being a man. She called me cruel, mean, asshole, jerk, evil and wicked, and at the end she called me Hitler. She would horribly insult me to my face. I would respond, “Shut the fuck up, you stupid fucking cunt. Shut up, you dumb bitch, etc., etc,” real calm and assured-like. After a few minutes of that, she would be blubbering like a little girl, “Oh, I adore you so much. Oh, I love you so much. I love you baby. Let’s get married, etc. etc.” Oh man! Isn’t love grand! It’s a horrible cliche, but a lot of these real bitchy types are really looking for a hard, masculine man to put them in their place and turn them into a feminine, blubbering little schoolgirl in love again. These bitches always go after wimpy guys, because they love to dominate them, or they think they love to dominate them, but that just doesn’t seem to work, as it violates nature. I don’t like to be Mr. Advice Column on here, but at 50, it has occurred to me someone is going to wear the pants in a heterosexual relationship. If you don’t, she will. If she suspects you have taken off the pants for a while, she will try to make a power grab to put the pants on herself. This must be stopped, often harshly, with profanities, harsh words, meanness, threats to leave, etc. Usually she will back down completely and start bubbering and even whimpering apologetically and asking, “Are you mad? You’re not mad, are you?” Assure you that you are not but issue an order that she is not to speak to you like that anymore, as you really, really hate it. Women want to take control, but really a lot of times they hate it, because at the same time, I think that even masculinized Western women are disgusted by their vaginized metrosexual wormboy partners. You can wage cultural revolution and gender bend til the cows come home, but at the end of the day, I am convinced that you can’t fool Mother Nature.

The "Nazis and Soviets Were Friends" Lie

Wade writes:

The hatred between Nazi and Bolshevik was just a surface conflict. The real underlying conflict was between German and Russian which had been going on for long before WWII. 30 million dead is just a result of more advanced technology and policies based on Nazi race hatred.

In the beginning of WWII the Nazis and communists had actually signed a pact. When Hitler invaded the northern part of Poland, the Soviets went into the south. Hitler eventually turned east not because he didn’t trust Bolshevism, but because he didn’t trust the Soviet Union (the new Russian state).

You can’t have it both ways. Fascists and the Left have always been the deadliest of enemies. Sure, there are some crossover 3rd Position type groups like National Bolsheviks, but those are based on a faulty reading of history. You have to pick one or the other. Are you a fascist choosing the Right or an anti-fascist on the Left. You can’t order both. Fascists and the Left don’t hate each other just because they think alike and are having a lover’s quarrel. They really are polar opposite ideologies in many ways. Fascism is best seen as a “popular far rightwing authoritarian movement against the Left.” I’ve spent a lot of time on Left sites. One group they will not abide is the fascists. I’ve also been on a fascist sites. What they hate more than anything else is the Left. They want to kill us. This is complete nonsense about the Nazis and Soviets being allies. The Nazis raison d etre was the wipe Bolshevism off the face of the Earth. They were an anti-Communist party to the core. They put people in the camps in this order: 1. Communists 2. Socialists 3. Trade unionists 4. (Last) Jews If you read Hitler’s writings and those of other top Nazis, it’s all about the danger of Bolshevism to Europe and how it had to be wiped out. The Jews were tied in with Bolshevism, so that is why the Jews were targeted. They were out to wipe Judeo-Bolshevism off the face of the Earth. All the other fascists were like this too. Their deadly enemies were the Communists, socialists and union members everywhere, all through Europe. There was a hot war in Spain. When fascists came to power in Europe everywhere in WW2, they immediately went after the Communists. Rightwingers the world over supported the fascists, including the Nazis, as the biggest, baddest Commie killers that ever lived. Stalin knew that Hitler was out to wipe out the USSR from the very start. That was the reason for the breakneck collectivization and industrialization, and frankly for the paranoid purges of the 1937 – Stalin suspected a Nazi plot to overthrow him. The 1940 pact was just a means of buying time temporarily in the war that Stalin knew was going to happen. The US and UK had been egging Hitler from 1938-1941, trying to get him to attack the USSR and take them out. In 1938 Chamberlain gave Hitler Austria not for peace in our time but as deal for Hitler taking out the Soviets. For a long time, rightwingers in the US and UK had been hoping to use and control Hitler long enough so that he could be used as a weapon against the USSR. When Hitler first came to power in 1933, the NY Times praised him as an anti-Communist. If the Left loved fascists so much, why was there a deadly hot war in Spain? Mussolini came to power as a coup against a resurgent Left in Italy. In the early 1920’s, landless peasants were rioting in the streets and marching in the fields all over Italy. The rich use fascism as a last ditch effort to save capitalism in the face of an overwhelming threat from the Left. The postwar fascists of Latin America, the Philippines, Fiji, Ethiopia, Morocco, Indonesia, Turkey, Greece, Zaire, Spain, Portugal, Iran and many other places were admirers of Hitler, Mussolini and all of the other European fascists. The Indian Hindutva fascists hate no one so much as the Left and also admire Hitler. Fascism is all about “exterminate the Left.” The conflict is more nationalism versus internationalism than anything else, but it’s also about wealth and priveleges. Fascists declare the class war dead in the name of class solidarity, but then it goes on nonetheless. All classes are locked into position forever as part of the eternal blood and soil national pact. The rich are rich, the poor are poor, and that’s that. Especially after WW2, rightwing authoritarianism and fascism has been all about everything for the rich and corporations and screw the people. As the class war grinds the masses into the dirt, the fascists march them off to anti-Communist rallies and have them wave flags. They seek to negate the class struggle but prioritizing nationalism over class. With the cloak of nationalism, they seek to make the class struggle seem to disappear under the flag of the nation.

Thoughts on Secessionism of Afrikaners and Chechens

AJ writes:

The Afrikaners are a nation, so do you support stuff like Orania, and Eugene TerreBlanche’s Afrikaner Front trying to carve an independent Boer state in South Africa?

That is an interesting question. Sure Afrikaners can be independent, I think. But they have to let non-Afrikaners live there too, since a lot of them were there first. I don’t support self-determination so you can form your shitty little fascist dog states and throw out all the “impure, non-national people.” The Kosovars did that. I support their independence, but they have behaved like total jerks ever since. The Kosovars acted despicably. They were like, “We have a right to self-determination!” Then when they got it, they ethnically cleansed everyone not a Kosovar Albanian! And then they decided hypocritically that while minorities in Serbia had a right to split, no minorities in Kosovo would have a right to split! Forget that. This is the problem with separatism. The separatists wage a just war against a fascist state, and then as soon as they get freedom, they start their own evil fascist nation-building project and suddenly that wonderful right of secession is immediately revoked. The Afrikaner Front are serious racists, militant Nazi White Supremacists. I’m not sure scumbags like that have a right to self-determination to create some little Nazi White Supremacist state. Anyway, most Afrikaners would not want to be part of such a state. They might want independence, but not under the AF. The ANC are typical backwards Africans. Africans are typical barbarians, too uncivilized to allow any separatism without committing mass murder in the process. Look at Eritrea, Biafra, Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan. Even Arabs are as barbaric as Africans in this regard. Look at the genocidal response of Morocco to the Polisario Front. AJ:

Chechnya is already semi-autonomous, they have their own culture and laws and everything, what else do they want?

Independence? Chechens have been fighting for their freedom since the days of Shamil. It took Russian imperialism 60 years to conquer the place, and it’s been in periodic rebellion ever since. Obviously, they never assented to annexation in the first place, eh? I consider those Caucasian Muslims to be serious pests and troublemakers who are doing nothing but blowing things up and killing people in Russia. Be gone with them. Allow a referendum on independence within the context of the CIS. You can even negotiate further. Russia can station military bases there with the option of reconquering the place if Chechens start acting up again. Make independence dependent on a number of Russia-friendly prerequisitives. Win-win.

Is Conservatism Always Bad?

Yes. In my opinion, conservatism is always bad. Conservatism is always and everywhere at all times elite rule and only elite rule. Some support elite rule. I don’t. I support popular rule. I say elite rule is bad. Since elite rule is always bad, conservatism is always bad. Real simple. In addition, conservatism is almost always dishonest. As an elite philosophy, you can either be honest about your goals and say you are working to better the elite and harm everyone else – say, the top 2 But this continuous lying results in a destruction of Politics. There’s not much of a democracy left when almost the entire media is lying their fool heads off day and night. The population is bewildered at best or brainwashed at worst. This is the sort of “democracy” we have here in America. It’s hardly a democracy at all! Erranter asks if we should not be bashing conservatives.

Doesn’t a conservative just mean someone who is fine with the way things are going, the status quo? There are places where the status quo is democracy and none of those above things. I don’t think it’s fair to attach “bad” to the very definition of conservative and “good” to progressive. That’s changing the definitions which people use to communicate and permanently attaching a moral judgment. It’s also unequivocal that conservatives are bad, because a part of this new definition is that they are bad.

Someone who is fine with the way things are going, the status quo – No, that is not what conservatism means. Conservatism is elite rule. It always has been, it is now, and it always will be. Some things never change. Elites hate democracy. The Republican Party hates democracy. Notice how they are always trying to repress voter turnout. Heavy turnout is always bad for the elite Republicans. Given half a chance, sane electorates generally vote for popular rule (the Left) and against elite rule (the Right). Why would any electorate voluntarily vote against popular rule and for elite rule? They would have to be out of their minds (like the US electorate). It’s hard to vote in elite rule. People don’t like it too much. So conservatives usually need to rule by dictatorship in one form or another. Once Latin America got rid of the dictatorships, the first thing the people did was vote in the Left. There are only a few places on Earth where US style hard rightwing conservatives are actually voted into power, and those elections are problematic because the popular, anti-elite candidates of the Left are typically murdered. The US Guatemala El Salvador (though the Left is starting to win now) Colombia Chile Turkey The Philippines That’s about it. The conservatives in El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Turkey and the Philippines all rule by terror. They all run death squads and slaughter the Left. In the Philippines, conservatives run as populists who will fight and get rid of poverty, so that’s not really US conservatism. In Colombia, Guatemala and El Salvador, conservatives usually run on a platform of “kill the Communists (the Left).” Everywhere else on Earth, people generally vote in some sort of a liberal to socialist type government. All of Africa has generally been run by popular Leftwing parties, with a few exceptions in Zaire and Kenya. They haven’t done a very good job of popular rule, but US style conservatism simply does not exist there. In North Africa, most of the governments are socialist. Morocco was always the outlier, as it was ruled by a rightwing king, but he’s a dictator. All of the Arab World is generally run by some type of socialist party or other. US style conservatism never takes power there. All of the former Soviet Republics are now run by some type of socialist government or other. All of Europe is being run by some type of socialist government or other, with the possible exception of Great Britain. The UK was always the outlier. US style conservatism ruled under Thatcher, but she was probably the most hated ruler in the 20th Century UK, and she couldn’t get much done. Russia is run by a socialist regime under Putin. The Iranian religious government has always been socialist in nature. It’s hard to characterize the Karzai regime, but it is not US conservatism. The Pakistani government is very hard to characterize, but it is not US style conservatism. The recently assassinated leader, Benazir Bhutto, was a socialist. The President, her widower, is also a socialist. Since Independence, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka have generally been run by socialist regimes of one type or another. Myanmar is run by a regime that calls itself socialist. Singapore has a social democracy. SE Asia has been run by socialists since 1975. Thailand typically had rightwing military government. Recently, a progressive, Thaksin, was elected. He was extremely popular, but the conservative elite threw him out in a coup like they often do. At any rate, US style conservatism does not exist in Thailand. China is run by a socialist party. Mongolia is run by socialists. Japan has been a social democracy since 1945. True, South Korea was always a rightwing regime, but recently they elected a leftwinger. Taiwan was always ruled by a rightwing dictatorship, but I am not sure who is in power since independence. They have had a social democracy for a while now. Indonesia was always run by a rightwing dictatorship, but they recently went to democracy. The present leader has begun a number of socialist programs.

error

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)