The lastest offering from Robert Stark is an interview with Kerry Bolton on Peron and Peronism. There has been a long debate about whether Peron was on the Right or on the Left. Some say he was a fascist. However, that is probably not the case. What rightwinger would eulogize the death of Che Guevara as a hero and a comrade? That makes no sense. Peron instituted many populist reforms in Argentina, turning it into something resembling a social democracy. However, he had authoritarian tendencies. His wife Eva Peron shared power with him. Eva rose to the elite by sleeping her way to the top, which I suppose is one way that is always available for any ambitious woman to move up ladders of government or business. Eva very much abused her power, was very authoritarian, and she even had people killed. Peron’s followers were called the “shirtless ones,” working class or proletarian heroes. The Peronist was simply “the man of the street,” the “ordinary man.” Later Peronism split into right and left wings, the right wing being more or less fascist and the left wing being more socialist or Communist. These splits hated each other so much that they used to shoot it out with each other pretty regularly and campaign rallies often turned into massacres large and small. Sections of the Peronist Left later took up arms as the urban guerrillas known as The Montoneros.
Category: Argentina
Does Radical Capitalism Work Anywhere?
Capitalist Caucasian wrote:
Whites thrive under capitalism. Asians thrive under both, and blacks cannot thrive on any economic system, but totalitarian, authoritarian communism does the job of not letting a black society burn to shit. Like black Muslims, for example. Or the fact that some of the smartest, well behaved nigs are Nation of Islam members.
Not really true. Look at the 19th Century White world in the beginnings of industrialization and tell me things were thriving. Or the Potato Famine. Look at how the gangster capitalists have looted the Ukraine since 1991. Latvia went radical free market and the economy collapsed worse than the Depression and all that remains is a hollowed out shell. Estonia lies in ruins. Greece and maybe Ireland are disaster areas. Europe was feudal until WW1, and Eastern Europe was feudal until WW2. The life expectancy in capitalist Albania in 1949 was 32 years. With the return to capitalism in Russia, there was an economic crash three times worse than the Great Depression, life expectancy collapsed, gangsters inside and outside the country stripped the place bare, and 15 million people died, more than Stalin killed. Radical capitalists came to power in Chile and Argentina, two White countries, ran the economies into the ground and murdered 15,000 people in Chile and 30,000 in Argentina. Capitalists caused all of these messes. Whites don’t do so great under radical capitalism either. Nobody does. The thriving White world you are talking about is mostly not run by Libertarian neoclassical free marketeers. Most of those countries are run by social democrats who call themselves socialists and are members of the Socialist International. Asians do well under well under capitalism? In 1949, China was ruined by war and warlords, the nation was under feudal rule, and life expectancy was 32 years. Not sure which Asians you are talking about? Filipinos and Indonesians do not seem to be doing well under radical capitalism. The only real hardcore free market Asian states are Hong Kong and Singapore. All the rest are either socialist to some degree or becoming that way. Blacks do pretty well under both Islam and Communism. At the very least, the resulting societies are orderly, well-behaved, calm and have little crime and chaos. Sometimes I think Black people need the “stern father” approach.
All You Need to Know About the Latin American Left
I used to have a girlfriend who was an Argentine. She couldn’t really speak English very well, but she worked for her parents’ business so it was no big deal. She was by no means a Leftist, but she was somewhat sympathetic to them in a way that almost no American ever is. For instance, if you mention the Latin American Left and the exterminations to which they were subjected to to an American, liberal, centrist of conservative, they will simply say, “They were Communists! Kill them all! Kill all Communists!” So that’s basically the scope of the very interesting debate in America, world homeland of Freedom of Speech (TM) where there is for all intents and purposes no debate whatsoever on the major questions of society.* One night we were discussing the Dirty War, backed 10 There are different reports about exactly who was killed. Some say that most of those killed were armed guerrillas, but the insurgency was pretty much dead by the time General Videla took over anyway, so this is doubtful. Others say that those killed were mostly just unarmed members of the Left – students, professors, workers, peasants, human rights and community workers, and Catholic laypeople. As we were discussing this, she mentioned her horror at the slaughter. Once again, in the US, land of Freedom of Speech (TM), you cannot do this without being labeled a Communist. However, Latin American banana republics actually have more free speech that America does simply because they have a wider acceptable range of opinion. She said and I quote:
Well, you see, the Latin American Left were dreamers. They had the dream of a better world. And in Latin America, that is a dangerous thing.
That’s really all you need to know about the Latin American Left, their struggles, and the US-backed massacres to which they were subjected by the colonial master of the continent, the United States of America. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.
A Look at Some Spanish Dialects
One thing that is interesting once you learn to speak Spanish fairly well is that you can start to pick up the differences in various Spanish dialects. I am told that people who don’t know Spanish well can’t pick up the differences at all. Hearing a divergent Spanish dialect is a very strange experience. You hear Spanish words, but the accent is so off and weird that you think that they can’t possibly be speaking Spanish. A frequent mistake it to think that they are thinking some closely related Romance language like Catalan, French, Portuguese or Italian.
I’ve written about this before, but now that we have more Hispanics and even Mexican nationals reading the blog, maybe we can get some good feedback.
Mexican Spanish is fairly uniform at least around these parts. However, there are some differences.
Oaxacan Spanish: I have heard older Oaxacan Indians speaking a very strange and harsh form of Spanish. I assume it was some Oaxacan Indian Spanish.
Morelos Spanish: Spoken in the state of Morelos near just south of Mexico City. I heard a woman speaking this to her kid. She looked very White, and for some reason I thought she was Iranian. I listened to her for several minutes and I was sure she must have been speaking Farsi. However, she told me she was speaking Morelos Spanish. I looked it up on the Net and it is a distinctive dialect.
Jalisco Spanish: Spoken in the coastal state of Jalisco. This does seem different from the other varieties of Mexican Spanish. I heard a White looking guy speaking it in the store and I asked him what language he was speaking. He was speaking Jalisco Spanish. It had a very European sound to it – like Castillian or Catalan.
Veracruz Spanish: I was in a store and there was a guy on the phone speaking some strange language. There were Spanish words but the accent was insane. After a bit, I said, “No way are you speaking Spanish.” The guy practically fell over himself laughing and he said he was indeed. He looked sort of South Indian, so I thought he was speaking some Indian language like Hindi.
He said he spoke regular Spanish, but he came from the Caribbean coast of Mexico, and he was talking to someone from there, and he was speaking Mexican Caribbean Spanish. This is the most whacked version of Mexican Spanish I have ever heard.
Guatemalan Spanish: A neighbor speaks this. It’s Spanish all right, but it’s not Mexican Spanish at all. Has an odd but recognizable accent. And she speaks incredibly fast and slurs her words together in the worst way.
Salvadoran Spanish: Different from Mexican Spanish, but not dramatically so. It’s immediately identifiable as Spanish.
Puerto Rican Spanish: Caribbean Spanish in general is just nuts. I heard a group of mixed race folks speaking it at a store. I listened for a while, very confused. Then I walked over to them and asked if they were speaking Portuguese, because that was what it sounded like. They said they were speaking Puerto Rican Spanish. The mixed race group had not a trace of racism, and among them were some of the most dignified looking Blacks or mulattoes I have ever seen. A quiet dignity you rarely see in US Blacks.
Colombian Spanish: One of the strangest Spanishes of them all. I knew an upper class Colombian woman from the Zona Rosa in the north of Bogota. She spent about half her time in Spain. She had the sexiest, most breathiest Spanish I have ever heard, almost like a super sexy French accent. It was also very European sounding. It had a very Castillian and almost French flavor to it. I heard her sister talk too, and she talked exactly the same way.
She used to write me emails, and I couldn’t make heads or toes of the Spanish because it was so full of figures of speech, slangs and colloquialisms. Running it through a translator was useless. For all intents and purposes, she wasn’t even writing in Spanish.
I was at a store and a group of Colombians was in line, all young adults. I heard Spanish words, but the accent was so whacked that I thought it had to be something else. I approached them and asked if they were speaking Italian, because that is what it sounded like. They laughed and said they were speaking Colombian Spanish.
Once again, this was a very sensual language. The 30-something beauty talking to me seemed like she was openly flirting with me, but finally I thought that was just how she talked. They were all talking like they were either heading to an orgy or just got back from one, but once again, I think that was the way they talked all the time. These people live in their bodies, fully sensual, and the language pumps right out of their emotional heart. The words seem to sway and move with their bodies. One sexy language!
I recently heard another woman speaking Colombian Spanish, this time from the Caribbean coast. A fruity, delightful language with words that sway in the sun on the golden sands. A sound as juicy as papayas, mangoes and bananas. You want to reach out and grab the words as they fly through the air and take a bite of them.
Peruvian Spanish: I knew some Peruvian women and used to talk to them a lot. The Spanish is not too crazy accentwise, but it has a ton of slangs in it. They didn’t really speak English, so they couldn’t explain what the slangs meant. One thing was that they spoke very, very fast! I kept telling them to slow down, but they could not seem to slow it down no matter how many times you asked. Peruvian has only one speed – very fast.
Chilean Spanish: Sounds very Castillian, but it’s immediately recognizable as Spanish. One problem is the mountain of slang in this dialect. I don’t think there is any Spanish that has as much slang as Chilean. It’s literally chock full of all kinds of weird slangs. They are also the pickiest Spanish speakers I have ever met. Almost like the French, almost correcting your Spanish. Most Spanish speakers are very gracious, but Chileans want you to speak it right!
Argentine Spanish: This is one weird Spanish. You hear it spoken and you hear Spanish words, but the people speaking it look like Europeans and the accent sounds Italian! Or sometimes it sounds like some other European language – Catalan, French or Castillian. This is one insanely whacked out Spanish!
Catalonian Spanish: I heard a group speaking this, and I thought no way is that Spanish. I asked them what they were speaking, and they said Spanish. They said they were from Catalonia. Their Spanish sounded like Catalan! It didn’t sound like Spanish at all. This was one of the bizarrest Spanishes I have ever heard.
Types of Libertarian Morons
All Libertarians are morons; there are just different types of stupid.
America is probably one of the only countries in the world where Libertarianism has any kind of sway at all, although I understand that for some reason, it is relatively popular in Costa Rica for some reason, possibly because the country is heavily White. Whites are the only race on Earth who will heavily go in for Libertarianism, because Whites are much more selfish and individualistic than any other race. European, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealander Whites are not prone to selfishness of individualism.
Selfish and individualistic politics is popular among White elites in Latin America, but only in places where Whites are a minority.
In Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, where Whites or near-Whites are more or less a majority, selfish and individualistic politics is far less popular, since your average White person there is just an ordinary working class person, not a member of an elite group.
Nevertheless, the Cone nations have been ruled by a particularly vicious White elite for a long time. This elite has spent much of the last 40 years slaughtering the working class Whites of the Cone countries in order to maintain their outrageous and feudal-style wealth. As a consequence, White politics in the Cone is polarized into Hard Left and Hard Right, in a way similar to some Mediterranean countries like Italy, Portugal and Spain.
Small government is popular with White elites, as this philosophy in general is only popular with elites around the world. The German Social Democrats used to have a saying, “Only the rich can afford a poor state.” Of course this is true, and this is why the rich the world over, especially in the 3rd World, tend to favor a minimal state. Hatred of taxation is also typical of elites the world over, particularly in the 3rd World.
In general, ordinary people the world over do not favor small government or hate taxation. In that sense, Americans, particularly White Americans, are very strange. The views of White Americasns are more typical of world elites than the ordinary working class people of the world. It’s as if your ordinary working class White person identifies more with his class enemies, the rich, than with his own class. Working class Whites also see themselves as elites, which is odd, since they are not elites, and in fact they are extremely oppressed by their own elites.
This strange philosophy probably has its roots in the Frontier Ethic, the break from colonialism, and the radical individualism that has long characterized White American culture.
As America becomes increasingly non-White, this view will decline. Asians are not radical individualists, and Asian nations are not characterized by small government and low taxation. Hispanics and Blacks are collectivist peoples who also have no interest in small government and low taxation. Black nations are like Asian nations in that there is no interest in Libertarian-style governance.
These trends show no sign of changing in the future. Even as Asians, Hispanics and Blacks make good money and move up in the world, they retain their collectivist roots.
The future does not look good for Libertarian types in the US in the long term, though they may make some gains in the short term.
The future looks bleak for Libertarianism in the world at large, as most nations have no interest in small government or low taxation.
Seen more properly, the vast majority of the world’s people, and the overwhelming majority of the working class, are collectivist people.
White Gangbangers in Argentina
Original link not working, but this photo album is similar. The text refers to the original link.
Click on the photo album to see more of these idiots acting all tough and throwing gang signs. They are from Cordoba, Argentina, which is in the center of Argentina. Known from growing wine grapes, relatively dry climate in the rain shadow of the Andes. These folks look like Whites, which seemed strange to me. An Argentine friend of mine told me that they were typical Argentine mestizos. If that is so, then your Argentine mestizo looks awfully damned White.
I knew that Hispanic-Black US gang culture was spreading to other areas, particularly mestizo and Indian populations in Latin America and I believe Black and mulatto populations in the Caribbean. I have also seen pics of Filipinos and Negritos in the Philippines who have adopted US gang culture. There are some Australian Aborigines and Polynesians who have adopted it too. The Polynesians like to imitate US Black culture, possibly because they feel closer to Blacks. In gang fights at LA schools, the Samoans would always line up with the Blacks.
If you have any information on other regions where US gang culture is spreading, please let us know in the comments. I guess this is one of the only products we are exporting anymore.
When Is It Going to Start Working Anyway?
A commenter asks:
I know there’s probably a lot of info on the web about the various armed conflict/s in Latin America, but do you have any good websites (in English) that are specifically about the rhetoric of the Latin American Rich? And about their actual policies that lead to so many people trying to revolt against them?
I know you’ve mentioned them in your posts, but not all that much. It would be great if you had links to a detailed, extensive database of such information.
Hi, Upside Down World in the blogroll is an excellent resource, just off the top of my head. You know, 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 30 years ago, 10 years ago, yesterday, Latin America was mired in the most horrific poverty amid the most wild wealth. I’m not sure what the rich were saying then. Now here it is, up to 100 years later, and nothing much has changed.
I think in the past it was just “Kill the Commies!” The rich ran the show, had pro-rich military dictatorships for years to decades, when that didn’t work stole elections, and controlled all the media. The masses were utterly downtrodden, but what could you do?
Every now and then the peons would get restless, and the Marines would be sent down there to repress the overwhelming majority of the people and reinstate rich rule. In Haiti, the US stayed for decades. Cuba was nearly a US colony. We invaded the Dominican Republic. Sometimes people fought back. You had the anti-US Sandino rebellion against the Marines in Nicaragua.
Anytime the people got the least bit uppity, there would be a coup or a US invasion, followed by mass death squad terror. This happened in Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Dominican Republic in 1965, Bolivia in 1970, Chile in 1973, Argentina in 1978, and Peru in 1992. This would often be followed by years to decades of state terror, the purpose of which apparently was to say, “Don’t even think of trying this again!”
In 1932 in El Salvador there was a peasant uprising led by Farabundo Marti. It was crushed, and
The Western provinces, where the Matanza took place, were still very conservative even during the Civil War 50 years later. Mass terror works.
But things have changed now. Now they say that neoliberal capitalism (the rule of the rich) is the way to prosperity for everyone. Socialism or rule of the poor is a dictatorship and leads to mass poverty.
Now the rich say that the way of the rich will “lift all the boats.” A rising tide lifts all boats and all of that. It’s supply side economics. Problem is that Latin America has been engaging in supply side economics and the politics and economics of the rich since Day One. Who is it lifting out of poverty, anyway?
Main thing is that they don’t want to spend one dime to help the poor the in any way whatsoever. Doing so will ruin the economy, and we can’t have that. You can’t raise taxes, tax the rich or the corporations, raise the minimum wage or engage in any state spending. All of this is Communism, and it will “ruin the economy.”
They also engage in a lot of capital strikes now. With the election of Humala in Peru the other day, the stock market lost 2
But the economics of the rich isn’t working down there. They’ve been doing it for 200 years.
When is it supposed to start working anyway?
An Apologetics For Zionism
Repost from the old site. This comment was left on my site by a fellow who called himself “Apologist for Zionism”. He makes some very interesting points on here. We have dealt with his notion that every ethnic group deserves a state on this blog previously. Non-territorial nations certainly do not deserve a state at all, unless someone wants to donate one to them. These comments are interesting because in many ways they are straight of out of Theodor Herzl himself. Herzl has been accused by anti-Zionists of being a Jewish anti-Semite, and he was a serious critic of the Jews. He felt that Jews and Gentiles could not live together and he felt that the fault was equally divided between the two groups. He originally favored Jewish assimilation, but after the Dreyfus Affair in France in the late 1800’s (this shocked many people because they thought that anti-Semitism in France was history by this time) he changed his mind and figured that the only way forward was for Jews and Gentiles to live in permanent separation. He noted that when Jews did well, they become very successful businessmen and aroused the envy and wrath of the Gentiles, and when they sank into poverty, they bred radicals like rabbits.
When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; and at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse. Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 1896, p.91.
The commenter points out that many early Zionists were socialists who felt that one of the problems of the Jew was that he had gotten out of touch with the land itself (however, Jews were forbidden to own land for most of their stay in Europe). To cure this defect, these socialist Zionists supported a sort of back to the land thing that would get Jews’ hands dirty and make them into salt of the Earth again. The question of whether or not nations have carrying capacities for Jews is most interesting, but I don’t even want to go there. The author suggests that the US is presently reaching such a capacity. Another very successful minority similar to Jews is the Overseas Chinese. There have been some pogroms against the Overseas Chinese, but it’s nothing compared to what Jews have been through. Only about Now, no group of people, no matter how kind-hearted or progressive, is going to put up with that kind of bullshit for long, and there is no way that the Overseas Chinese work 23 times harder or are 23 times smarter than Indonesians or Filipinos. At the outside, perhaps they are 3.5 times more intelligent than Indonesians or Filipinos. This would entitle them, with The problem with capitalism is that in amasses such insane fortunes in the hands of small groups who frankly have not earned it due to either their genes or their harder work. In so doing, capitalism virtually guarantees endless racial conflict. There are differences between Jews and Overseas Chinese. The Overseas Chinese tend to keep their heads down, keep out of politics, and are not endlessly meddling in the cultural and political affairs of the nation – they just focus on making money. Jews focus on making money too, but they can’t seem to help trying to change society, a habit that arouses mountains of anti-Semitism. This is an interesting comment:
In fact, some theorists and historians even believe that it was the general emancipation of the Jews in the early-to-mid 19th Century that led to the Industrial Revolution in The West and the consequent rise of modern industrial-capitalism, which Jews also played and still played a large part in.The countries in Europe where Jews had the most political and economic freedom, especially England and Germany, were also the first to industrialize on a large scale…coincidence?
That paragraph is most interesting, and led another commenter to rebut that Jews were never a part of industrialization in Germany and Britain; instead they were associated in Britain anyway with finance capital. The commenter then said he was reading a book by a guy named William Engdahl, A Century of War. Engdahl is no anti-Semite, but he felt that the predominance of finance capital in Britain led to colonial adventures instead of building up domestic industry, to the eventual detriment of Britain. He then noted that in the 1920’s and 1930’s, German products were said to be better than British products. I don’t know about Jewish emancipation leading to the Industrial Revolution in Britain and Germany, but I believe that Jews played an essential role in the development of capitalism itself. I also don’t agree with the “German socialist” viewpoint that Hitler later picked up – along with Israel Shamir – that the Jews are a virus-like people, a race of rootless cosmopolitans without ties to the blood and soil and without loyalty to the nation, as the German capitalists supposedly had. It’s my understanding that in the 1920’s, many top German capitalists, including factory owners, were Jews. Jews are now heavily involved in industry here in the US. Jews do not limit themselves anymore to finance capital, and they are not very big players in it anymore anyway, as it all seems to be taken over by multinational banks in the US, Europe and Asia with few to no Jewish connections. The role of the Jews in finance capital in the past was quite large (they almost controlled European banking from ~1850-1930 or so). The big players in the UK 110 years ago were not Jews but a couple of cabals, one centered around a man named Cecil Rhodes. This cabal also had ties to top UK universities like Oxford and Cambridge. They went to the top boys schools like Eaton. They were active in colonialism and in groups such as the Oriental Society. They actually formed secret societies. It’s true that Lord Rothschild was a member (at the periphery) of one of these secret societies, but he seems to have been the only Jew. I really doubt that the dominance of finance capital (= Jewish money) in the UK 110 years ago is what led to colonial adventures. This group centered around Rhodes was very much into colonialism, and Britain was a huge industrial power in those days, mostly due to her Navy and her colonies. Britain ruled the world from 1588 (the defeat of the Spanish Armada – and also the first stirrings of English nationalism – one of the first manifestations of classic European nationalism) all the way up until about 1935, when air power, notably German, successfully challenged British sea and colonial power. German products have always been better than British products, especially fine machinery. I doubt the superiority of German fine machined products over such British products has much to do with Jewish money. There was plenty of Jewish money floating around Germany around that time too. This cabal around Rhodes, I believe, continues to run The London Times to this very day, or at least they did in the mid 1960’s. At this point, the Jews are in Israel and they are not leaving. Radical Palestinians want to throw out every Jew who came after 1916 (The Balfour Declaration was in 1917). As a settler-colonist myself whose ancestors were still stealing Indian land for our settler-colonial project as late as 1873 in California (see Modoc Wars), this sort of thing makes me really uneasy. Any settlement to the conflict in the Holy Land must take into account the safety of the Jews already there. I would hate to see a situation similar to Iraq where maniacal insurgents are running around slaughtering Jews at will and setting off car bombs and killing 100-200 Jews at a time. Arabs are Arabs, and I don’t think Palestinians and Iraqis are all that different, except one comes from the Levant and the other from Mesopotamia. I’m also not sure that Jewish-led industrialization in Germany (assuming it is a fact) led to the alienation and impoverishment of the rural people and the rise of Nazi blood and soil German ethnic nationalism, but it’s a complicated question to be sure. The followers of the Nazis were mostly petit bourgeois, lower middle class office workers and the like. Rural dwellers were not so supportive. Zionist Apologist writes:
Every ethnic group has a right to a state. It’s a shame that the Jews had to steal Israel, but at least they have a place to call home now. Imperialism is unfortunately a part of humanity’s dark history – and we now have to deal with the dark consequences. A homeland for Jews (whether in Israel or wherever else) is the ONLY WAY to ‘heal’ the Jews, and it’ll take many generations. I’m sure you’ve heard the oft-repeated phrase [paraphrasing]: “Diaspora is the disease, and Israel is the cure.” The Zionists were considering places like Uganda or Argentina early on, and places like those would have been a better choice than Israel in the long run since the Jews would have then been able to develop an agricultural base economy, which is the root of a settled and stable nation-state. However, those places were very rural and undeveloped and hence probably wouldn’t have been successful (as the Jews saw many of their ‘agricultural colony’ experiments in Argentina and Africa and the USA and Canada collapse in dismal failure). I have noticed that Ashkenazi Jews have a definite inability to settle anywhere in any substantial numbers that hasn’t already been fairly heavily settled or where they don’t have access to a nearby network of fellow Jews. It is telling as well that the early Zionist ideals of hard work, agricultural and manual labor, and other mainstays of key Zionist doctrines are now being filled by imported (!) labor (often Asian or Arab) since so many Israelis ‘dislike’ that kind of work and all want to be lawyers and doctors and professors and journalists and bankers (surprise, surprise) rather than just another cog in Israeli society. Israel is even having problems with their military draft now. But, you see, THE WHOLE POINT of the Zionist experiment was for Jews to become cogs in a stable Jewish society instead of always being the perpetual Jewish ‘Other’ in the societies of foreign peoples. The Zionists also noticed that sometimes Jews tended to take advantage of often-times gullible non-Jewish peoples because of their general intelligence and capacity to facilitate commerce, and they wanted to fix that too. In fact, some theorists and historians even believe that it was the general emancipation of the Jews in the early-to-mid 19th Century that led to the Industrial Revolution in The West and the consequent rise of modern industrial-capitalism, which Jews also played and still played a large part in. The countries in Europe where Jews had the most political and economic freedom, especially England and Germany, were also the first to industrialize on a large scale…coincidence? The problem with this, though, is that this Jewish-inspired industrialization tended to slowly choke the lifestyle and economic systems of the rural/agrarian people of those countries who obviously weren’t Jews, thus leading to resentment (antisemitism) – hence the Nazi doctrine of “blood and soil” and their desire to eventually resurrect the German peasantry in the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe. I have also noticed that every nation has a sort of Jewish ‘carrying capacity,’ i.e. it is unable to manage, hold, or absorb Jews in very large numbers until antisemitism starts to break out (for instance, history shows that antisemitism in Germany grew very quickly as more and more Jews from Eastern Europe fled to Germany and Western Europe trying to escape poverty or antisemitism or whatever). And in some ways I think that the saturation point may be close to being reached in North America.I must say that an island nation might actually be best for Jews, as long as it could be mostly self sufficient. As Ezra Pound once said in one of his infamous WWII radio broadcasts: “Sell ’em Australia.”
References
- Herzl, Theodore. 1896. The Jewish State. New York: Dover Publications reprint in 1988. Originally published, 1946, New York: American Zionist Emergency Council, edited, original translation by Slyvie d’Avigdor revised by Jacob M. Alkow.
Imad Mughniyeh is Dead
Repost from the old site. A bit dated, but should be useful nevertheless.
I can’t stress the importance of this news. Imad Mughniyeh, Supreme Commander of Hezbollah for the past 25 years, has been killed in a car bomb in Damascus last night, February 12, at 10:45 PM. He was on the CIA’s Most Wanted List with a $25 million bounty on his head. He was the only person killed when a silver Mitsubishi Pajero vehicle (apparently Mughniyeh’s car) exploded in the upscale Kafar Soussa District in the vicinity of a Iranian school that teaches religion to Iranian pupils. Several other cars were damaged and windows of surrounding buildings were blown out. Residents gathered in their pajamas to look at the scene. A single body lay in the street, covered by a white sheet. Kafar Soussa has many apartment buildings constructed in recent years, along with a large shopping center and the main offices of the formidable Syrian Intelligence Services. Mughniyeh was wanted for a number of attacks during the US invasion of Lebanon in 1982, said to be to keep the peace, but actually ending up as usual, supporting the Israelis. Mughniyeh orchestrated the bombing of the US Marine Barracks and French Headquarters in Beirut in 1982 that killed 227 Marines and 58 French troops. He also supervised the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut in 1983 that killed 63 and wiped out the entire top tier of US CIA Middle East agents. He also pulled off the bombing of the Israeli command center in Tyre that killed scores of Israeli troops. He was involved in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the execution of US Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem in 1985. He was involved in the kidnappings of many Americans in Beirut during the 1980’s, including Terry Anderson and CIA officer and US Army Colonel William Buckley, who Hezbollah executed. In 1988, the top US CIA agent in Lebanon, Colonel William Higgins, was kidnapped by Hezbollah and tortured to death. He was also involved in the truck bomb attack on the US military residence facilities at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, targeting US servicemen who were guarding Saudi oil fields. 19 Americans were killed in that blast and 200 more were wounded. There are suggestions that he was involved along with Hezbollah and/or Iran in the dual bombings in Buenos Aires, one at the Israeli Embassy 1992 that killed 29 people, and another at the Jewish Cultural Center in 1994 that killed 95 people. Three Israeli soldiers, Benny Avraham, Adi Avitan and Omar Souad were captured along the Lebanon border in 1999, taken POW, and possibly later executed. The border incident that set off the 2006 Lebanon War led to the capture of two more Israeli POW’s, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. Mughniyeh was believed to be behind both of these abductions of Israeli soldiers. Debka has long claimed that Mughniyeh was on very close terms with both bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the Iranian leadership. This seems bizarre. Al Qaeda’s project is nothing less than Hitlerian extermination of every Shia Muslim on Earth. Mughniyeh has been described as Hezbollah’s Head of External Operations and it is believed that he stays in contact with cells that Hezbollah has all over the world. He is also described as a senior Hezbollah intelligence official, head of the group’s security wing and the founder of the group. In the event of a US or Israeli attack on Iran, Mughniyeh would have been relied upon to be in charge of any response. Angry Arab feels that Mughniyeh’s role and feat were largely exaggerated, but I am not so sure about that; he also feels that Robert Fisk could not possibly have interviewed the actual Imad Mughniyeh in Lebanon in 1991, but I think he did. The interview is worth reading: Fisk in yet another superb, incisive piece. When it comes to Middle East, few are better than Robert Fisk. I guess that is why International Zionism is on a crusade to crucify him. Mughniyeh was Lebanese, born in Tyre in South Lebanon, not Palestinian as many people are saying. He joined Arafat’s Force 17 elite bodyguard unit in Lebanon at a young age. He joined Amal, and then went to Iran for training, where he excelled. He then conducted daring behind enemy lines operations in the Iran-Iraq War. Most of the operations in Lebanon that he is most famous for were actually conducted by a group called Islamic Jihad. This group later was folded into Hezbollah, which was not formed at any rate until 1988 anyway. Mughniyeh personally executed Stethem during the hijacking in 1985. In 1990, he had plastic surgery done in Iran to change his facial features. Then he went back to Beirut, where he lived underground using a variety of fake passports. At some point, his cover got blown and he returned to Iran again for a second plastic surgery operation that completely changed his appearance. He was said to have been in Basra in early 2006 helping Mahdi Army fighters go to Iran for military training. He then returned to Lebanon, where he took part in the Lebanon War. Lately, he was still living in Beirut, but traveling to the Damascus neighborhood where he was killed for meetings on a brains behind Hezbollah’s military wing.” Hezbollah’s casualties in the 2006 War are not known. Israel claims that 1/3 of its fighters were killed, but that seems excessive. It seems clear that Hezbollah has now completely restocked its missile supplies and has tripled them from 15,000 in the 2006 War to 45,000 now. Further, it now has missiles that can reach Tel Aviv. In recent days, Hezbollah teams disguised as reporters were said to be photographing the area on the Israel-Lebanon border. Mughniyeh definitely committed some acts of terrorism – notably the bombing of the Jewish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires – but most of his so-called crimes were simply acts of war, legitimate acts of war I might add. Guerrilla armies lack spy satellites, $500 billion/year defense budgets, smart bombs, cruise missiles, F-16’s and all of the other expensive military hardware that enables advanced states to carry out precision states during war. Guerrilla groups have to make do with what they have. I do consider embassies, especially those swarming with espionage agents, to be legitimate targets for guerrillas in wartime. Surely spies may be executed, but I don’t think enemy troops should be. None of the attacks on US, French or Israeli bases in Lebanon were terrorist attacks. The killings of the three Israelis and the US servicemen were war crimes, but the US and Israel have certainly executed plenty of POW’s and the Israelis continue to do so. The attack that set off the Lebanon War was hardly an act of terrorism. Hence, Mughniyeh’s mantle as the king of terrorism is largely nonsense. Most of his acts were simply very well planned and executed attacks on the enemy in wartime, and within what I consider to be the rules of war. Mughniyeh was one of the most underground people on Earth and no one seemed to know where he was most of the time, and Hezbollah was not talking. He was probably one of the world’s most highly protected and most secretive guerrilla fighters. Whoever killed him by penetrating his multiple circles of Syrian and Iranian intelligence officers and bodyguards surely pulled off a coup de etat. All fingers are pointing to the Israeli Mossad, which is expert at these kind of attacks. However, the Israeli government is matches closely the MO of the Mossad assassination of top Hamas operative Izz El-Deen Sheikh Khalil. In fact, a book written as fiction by a former Mossad agent, though set in the Shia suburbs of South Beirut, appears to describe the MO used in the killing of Mughniyeh closely. If the book had been translated into Arabic and Mughniyeh had read it, perhaps he could have avoided this. Khalil was a founding member of Hamas and a senior member of the Hamas military wing. Actually, there are probably two Hamases. One is the Hamas that runs the Gaza government. The other Hamas is based out of Syria and could be called Hamas-Khaled Meshal. This could be seen as an arm of Hamas run out of Syria, and probably a more militant one at that. Sheikh Khalil was close to Meshal. However, note that Israel “neither confirmed nor denied” that killing of Khalil. Has there ever been a case of an Israeli assassination that they did not take credit for, indeed that they even said explicitly that they did not do? Also note that retired CIA officers are saying that Israel did it. Other theories suggest that either supporters of the pro-government faction in Lebanon, at odds with Hezbollah and Syria, or Iran themselves, killed Mughniyeh. The Syria and Iran theories hinge on those countries giving up Mughniyeh to the US or Israel in order to get the heat off of them and deliver a wanted militant that had a $5 million US price tag on his head in return for an unspecified US quid pro quo. This theory is called into question because Bush placed new sanctions on Syria the day after the bombing. If this was a quid pro quo to get the US to back off Syria, that would not have happened. Mughniyeh was also wanted by some of the Lebanese Christian factions and the saying that they have settled their account with Mughniyeh. Further analysis of Israel’s denial shows that it may not even be a denial at all – Israel rejects terrorist groups blaming Israel for the killing, but does not deny that Israel committed the act. If Israel indeed killed Mughniyeh, which seems likely, that looks very bad for Syria. It means that Mossad has been able to penetrate into the heart of Hezbollah, and it means that the Mossad can operate apparently with impunity deep in the most secure parts of Damascus. Their next target is surely Nasrallah himself. It also implies that Israel has penetrated Syrian intelligence itself, a tough nut to crack. Hezbollah will now probably undergo purges looking for the Israeli agents in Hezbollah. People will be arrested and executed. Mughniyeh is said to have replaced Hassan Nasrallah as head of the Hezbollah after the 2006 war and he was rumored to have enemies in Lebanon, maybe even inside Hezbollah. Hezbollah TV is reporting his death and blaming Israel. Nasrallah will speak at his funeral in Beirut, which will be very heavily guarded. This does not look good for Damascus. They were supposed to protect this guy, who is after all one of their main assets, but they failed. His death is huge news in the roiling stew pot called the Middle East, and there will surely be counter-responses by Hezbollah, probably against Israel. Nasrallah is already thundering threats in the direction of Israel. The wild conspiracy stories are already spreading like vines. This is the Middle East, where intrigues are as normal as sand and hummus and anything that can happen, probably does happen. We have not see the end of this.
Response to Zionist Apologist
Repost from the old site. Always-excellent commenter James Schipper responds to Zionist Apologist from a previous post. Pretty good stuff here. The notion that the problem with Jews is Judaism itself is similar to the arguments of Gilad Atzmon and Israel Shamir. However, Kevin MacDonald points out that Jewish ethnocentrism does not go away in the absence of Judaism. A good document that makes that clear is his book review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. I disagree with a lot in that review, but all you have to do is look around at a lot of Jewish radicals, and it’s clear that they have not yet, and never will, make a complete break with their Jewish identity. So pulling the Judaism out of the Jew does not solve the problem. As my physician noted when I told him that according to Jewish law, you never quit being a Jew, “So they get a piece of you, eh?” In an unpublished interview with me, I asked Kevin MacDonald if the Jews would ever become less ethnocentric with time. He said emphatically, “No. The Jews will always be ethnocentric..” Incidentally, I found MacDonald to be a warm, friendly, sane, intelligent and gracious man. I also did not think he was the slightest bit anti-Semitic, but maybe I am mistaken. He seemed to be a Judeophile in a sense; he was totally fascinated with Jews. Jewish dual loyalty has been a problem everywhere there are Jews and is a direct consequence of their extreme ethnocentrism and nothing else, although James’ suggests that Judaism also plays a role. James’ comments: Giving Uganda to the Zionists would have been just as unjust as giving Palestine to them. Uganda wasn’t empty territory either. As to Argentina, it was a sovereign country and at the time of Herzl it had just learned to develop the pampas. Why on earth would they give some of their pampas to outsiders from Europe? The best territory to cede to the Zionists would have been Western Australia. At the time it was sparsely populated — it still is — and unlike Palestine, it could easily have accommodated all the Jews of the world. Granted, Western Australia is mainly arid or semi-arid, but so is Palestine, with the difference that WA is huge. Unfortunately, the stinking British imperialists preferred to be generous with Arab land. A diaspora is simply the result of emigration. Since 1880, there has been an Italian diaspora. Are these diaspora Italians sick? No, and their diaspora will soon disappear through assimilation because Italians do not have a tribal religion which tells them that Italians are God’s chosen people and that Italy is their sacred homeland, to which they should one day return. The problem of Jews can be summed up in one word: Judaism. It is because of their religion that Jews can’t be fully assimilated and will always remain a foreign or semi-foreign body in Gentile societies. Judaism tells Jews that they are a people, not a religious community. Nobody refers to Lutherans. Orthodox, Sikhs, Mormons as a people because those religions are non-tribal. Consider the difference between Presbyterians and Jews. Most Presbyterians in the world have at least some Scottish ancestry, but Presbyterianism is not at all about Scots or Scotland. Nearly all Sikhs are Punjabis or descend from Punjabis, but the Sikh religion is not in the least about Punjabis. By contrast, Judaism is all about Jews and their promised land. If people sincerely believe in Judaism, one can have some sympathy for them, in the way that one can sympathize with a Jehovah’s Witness who sincerely believes that a blood transfusion is against God’s will. It is much harder to have sympathy for atheists who remain proudly Jewish and become Zionists. To stop believing in Judaism while continuing to believe that Jews are a people and that Israel is their sacred soil is like stopping to believe in Catholicism but continue to obey the Pope. In one way, Israel made life more difficult for Jews in Gentile countries because the existence of Israel makes Jews vulnerable to the charge of dual loyalty. This charge is more than a figment of anti-Semitic imagination.
References
- MacDonald, Kevin. 2005. Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the USSR – Review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. The Occidental Quarterly: 5(3), 65-100.
Western Civilization: A Value Worth Saving
Repost from the old site. Although I find it preposterous that White people themselves need to be saved from extinction, and cannot figure out any lawful way to so anyway, I think that White Nationalists (WN’s) like Jared Taylor do make some interesting points. Taylor, like most WN’s, is a hardcore conservative, but when he talks about saving White civilization, the values he credits White civilization with are positively liberal. To be sure, I do disagree with the WN contention that Euro Whites created these liberal, free and humanitarian structures due to some unique endowment of their genes, though is it is an interesting argument. At the end of the day, it is not really falsifiable. With US Whites at 6 I agree that White Civilization, whether with Whites or without us, is worth saving and needs to be preserved. Jared Taylor of American Renaissance makes some interesting points, and I would like to make some others. Taylor, either admittedly or not, credits nearly the entire liberal and Leftist structure of individual freedom, humanitarianism, democracy and equal rights to White Europeans. In this it is fascinating that the Western Left and even Western liberals are so hostile to White European culture, often vilifying it as the worst on Earth, when the vast majority of their values stem directly from it. Let us look at some of the achievements of White European culture, arguably beginning with the Renaissance, continuing to the Enlightenment, the French and American Revolutions, Napoleon, the Geneva Conventions of the rules of warfare, all the way to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s, with the radical egalitarian agenda of feminism, anti-racism, civil rights, pacifism, animal rights, gay rights, children’s rights, prisoner and suspect rights and the Green Movement. Almost all of our entire edifice of liberal and Leftist rights, goals, and beliefs is derived from this Hegelian emancipation project in the West. I do not mean to degrade the emancipatory projects undertaken elsewhere, especially in China under Mao. But I do think there is something worth saving here. I also think many humans, including many non-Whites, appreciate this project once they are exposed to it in the West. I doubt that they have a genetic aversion to it. There is something appealing about the fight for emancipation, egalitarianism, basic fairness, checks and balances, and individual rights that probably appeals to most humans no matter the genetic background or personality. Freedom and fairness are like drugs that most folks want to get high on once they try them. Let’s look at some of what might be worth saving even as US Whites decline into possible minority status all too soon: 1. Human rights. In the Geneva Conventions after World War 2, the notion of human rights in warfare was proposed by European Whites. Only European White nations have even tried to play by these rules. No one else even bothers. 2. Rule of law. I’m not sure anyone does democracy quite as well as European Whites, but I could be wrong. I am convinced that Asians value authoritarianism over freedom. 3. Environmentalism. As an example, only European Whites seem to have outlawed the very worst pesticides. These pesticides are now massacring US songbirds by the millions. As a birdwatcher, I have seen the decline with my very eyes. Even Latin Americans like Chileans and Argentines have not outlawed the most deadly of pesticides. This is because Argentina never got a good European-type culture. All places colonized by Spain got Spain-wrecked, as the culture of Spain in all its brutality, hierarchy, corruption, collectivism of both right and left, religious superstition, feudalism, extreme racism, intolerance, violence and corruption got transplanted to all of its colonies. To this day most places colonized by Spain are in bad shape, characterized by contempt for the land and the living things on it, casual brutality, extreme sexism, extreme racism, wild gaps between rich and poor, a collectivist mindset that veers between Communist-like and fascist-like, wild corruption and a general lack of democracy. Spain and Portugal themselves have really come a long way, but it is still intriguing that they only got rid of fascism in 1980 and 1985. Their former colonies have not come so far. In Brazil, the environmental devastation is mind-boggling. The fact that Spanish-colonized places ended up so backwards and reactionary and those colonized by other Europeans did not implies that there is nothing genetic about the progressive values that many Europeans laid the groundwork for. Instead, what we see here is the trailblazer called culture. 4. Nonhuman life. If you can find any other nationality besides European Whites who are not trying to exterminate every living thing that they cannot kill for food, grow for food, domesticate, or use in any other way, show me. Asians in particular seem highly contemptuous of and cruel towards non-utilitarian non-human life. Put another way, it seems that European Whites are the only people who care anything about saving wild plants and wild animals that have no utilitarian values at all. It is true that Amerindians were pretty good to the land, but heavily-Indian nations of Latin America have devastated the land with ferocity. 5. Women’s rights. Women’s rights is a Western concept. In the rest of the world, the human norm of enforced patriarchy has been the honored tradition. Only in the West have women even approached something like equality, and even that is only in recent years. 6. Anti-racism. Human societies have always been racist, as ethnic nationalists go to great pains to point out. Indeed, it is probably true. Real anti-racism came out of the West, possibly beginning with Napoleon. After the tumults of the 1960’s, a political correctness characterized by extreme anti-racism has become the norm in the West, usually only wielded against Whites. Casual experience with folks from the rest of the world shows that many display the casual racism that has probably been the norm for our species. 7. Anti-litter. It is true that the Asians have been pretty good at having nice and clean societies. But so have Europeans. One very negative thing about the latest tidal wave of Hispanic immigrants is that they are complete pigs – they casually throw garbage everywhere. It is the same in Latin America. Africa is now a continent almost covered in garbage, at least in its cities. Indian cities seem to drowning in mountains of garbage, often left by the side of the road. Afghanistan is an unspeakably dirty country. 8. Ability to break up a state. I have suggested elsewhere that European Whites are probably right now the only people capable of breaking up states without starting horrible wars. 9. Prisoners’ and suspects’ rights. This seems to be limited to White Europeans. Elsewhere in the world, including Japan, confessions are regularly beaten out of prisoners. Inside jail or prison, prisoners have little to no rights at all. To sum it up brutally, it seems that all of the hallmarks of the liberal society of the West that we cherish so much came straight from the minds of European Whites from the Enlightenment on. Most of the rest of the world seems to regard this stuff with either contempt or indifference. Our nation is in for some very heavy changes over the next few decades, many of them demographic. The replacement of US European White culture with, say, NE Asian or Latin American culture, would be a grave error. If we save anything about this nation in the wake of these tumultuous ethnographic changes, let us save the White European Christian culture we developed here, with all its liberal trappings.
Why Cuba Is a Democracy and the U.S. Is Not
Repost from the old site. Interesting article at a neat website called Double Standards. Most of my media consumption is this sickening garbage called US media. One of the major annoying this about this US media addiction habit of mine is that the media is lying to me all the time. I don’t mind being lied to if I can figure out that I am being lied to. This is where I object. I can’t often tell that the US media is lying to me. One thing that is clear is that the joke of a liberal media, not to mention a Communist media, in the US is some kind of a cruel. But head on over to American Renaissance (the racist right) or, really, any standard US conservative sites and you will find that many conservatives, in addition to being soulless pricks, are also stark raving bats insane. They actually believe that there is a liberal media somewhere in the US, and many believe that the US media is actually socialist or Communist. There is not one speck of truth to this nonsense. There are five main US news stations – ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN. Not one of these could be said to be liberal in any way. No major US newspaper is liberal and none of the three major US newsmagazines – Time, Newsweek or US News and World Report – is liberal at all. There is but one liberal radio station and one liberal-Left radio station on my dial, and both are partly paid for by public funds. One of them has to go on continuous fund drives because it does not accept advertisements. There are some liberal – Left magazines out there, but not many, and most are not large circulation. With the increased Gramscian hegemony of conservative ideas lately, more and more magazines have moved to the Right – The New Republic starting in 1980, The Atlantic sometime in the 1990’s, Esquire at some unknown point. Any true liberal media, first and foremost, would support the rights of ordinary persons and workers over that of the rich and capital. By that yardstick, there is not a single major liberal media outlet anywhere in the US. All US newspapers, newsmagazines, TV stations and large radio stations are hostile to everyone but business, the upper middle class and the wealthy. They use their media monopoly to flood America with propaganda in favor of the class interests of the rich and the upper middle classes and capital. This propaganda is objectively and demonstrably hostile to the interests of the majorities of the following groups: middle class, the working class, low-income persons, consumers, the environment, minority groups, the elderly, the disabled, women and small children. Yet almost no one in these groups is able to ascertain the agenda they are being fed. Instead, the vast majority of members of the above groups actually believe the propaganda of the US media – the propaganda that is directed by their class enemies at them and their class. This was what Gramsci was talking about, and in this way, the media under most capitalist systems is de facto controlled. Chomsky has also written a lot on this. In Europe, at least there are leftwing papers like Liberacion in France. I assume that the continental media may be supportive of European social democracy, a form of capitalism is attempts to redistribute capitalist profits via government to all classes and groups. Can any of my continental readers help me on this one? In Argentina, there is a large leftwing daily, and the Sandinista press continues in Nicaragua. The situation in India and Venezuela are typical for the media under capitalism. When Chavez took power, there were perhaps 5-10 large dailies in the state. There were also 5-10 major TV stations and some large newsmagazines. Every single one of these major media outlets was owned by the upper For this reason, I supported Chavez shutting down the worst offender; but really, he ought to shut down any and every reactionary outlet that supported the coup. On the other hand, this would bring him widespread approbation that might make his situation even worse. In India, almost all of the media is of course owned by the top Not only is Indian media owned by a tiny elite that continues to live in palaces like Rajas while tens of millions of Indians live on the street, and the system kills at least 4 million people every year, but the overwhelming majority of owners and top editors are members of the higher castes. Here in the US, almost all reporting on India is done by Indian-American reporters. Dalit (untouchable) activists say that the overwhelming majority of Indian-American reporters for the US media are members of higher castes. Hence you almost never read anything in the US press about the horrible and wicked caste system in India. I have only touched on the question of whether or not media can be said to be democratic in the US, or for that matter in any capitalist state. There are many more questions raised about the impoverished state of US democracy in the linked article – I would emphasize the money-based elections that characterize not only the US, but most capitalist states. I don’t necessarily agree with all of his points, but it sure is great to read articles like this somewhere! God bless the Internet.
The Real Reason for the Shining Path
Repost from the old site. Rightwing anti-Communists (and for that matter, Centrist and liberal US anti-Communists also) have some very peculiar attitudes about Communism, shaped by the Cold War. Communism, it appears, is some strange, evil and insane system, a crazy, idiotic and totally failed economic and social system that brought nothing but misery, hunger, starvation and poverty to the world, while bringing nothing good. The alternative was capitalism, which would at some point conquer hunger, poverty, starvation and all that. Capitalism is always supposed to conquer these things at some point in the future. Capitalist polemicists usually say, “Just give it some time…” With the neoliberalism that has been pushed since 1980 and has brought nothing but misery and impoverishment to billions and caused many millions of deaths, we have always been told that it would start working pretty soon now…maybe next year…victory is right around the corner. The truth is that after 25 years of neoliberalism, the verdict is in and a long report has documented it quite well. Nearly everywhere it has been tried, neoliberalism has benefited the top 2 Even in the US, from 1980-1992, the top 2 Neoliberalism, nearly everywhere, resulted in lowered economic growth rates, massive debt, plunging wages and living standards for the majority, reductions in access to health and eduction, and reductions in many health and education metrics like infant mortality, life expectancy and the percentage of children in school at various ages. This is because neo-liberalism mandated massive cuts in all social services, especially education and health care. The outcome was foretold. The truth about neoliberalism is that it has always been a scam in which the West, especially Western banks, corporations and investors, ripped off the rest of the World blind and the people were always left holding the bag. Nevertheless, the ripoff artists keep trying to sell their neoliberal snake oil around the world, but more and more nations are no longer buying. Most of the countries of Latin America have tired of the “checks in the mail” neoliberal snipe hunt, and collectively, they are trying, in their own often-limited ways, to dislodge themselves from the grip of the neoliberal plague. Even mainstream economists admit that Latin America (macroeconomically) did not benefit from the neoliberal fad. Recently, Argentina paid off its foreign debt and said no more. In Venezuela, Chavez is trying to forge a completely new path that is, instead of the Communism his detractors libel him with, in truth nothing more than a reformation of capitalism. President Lula in Brazil has been hampered by the death grip of both investor capital and the markets; he has not been able to do much at all. Uruguay has elected a strident Leftist, but it is not known what he can do given his restraints. Chile, after the utter failure of Pinochet’s radical free market economics (something the free market crazies have never owned up to), has elected a socialist and a woman as President, Bachelet. It is not known what she can do in terms of progress, but Chile still has an education and health sector that is in pretty good shape and sports good metrics to show for it. In Ecuador, Rafael Correa is President, and he has formed an alliance with Chavez. It remains to be seen what he can do in terms of progress, as his options, as usual, are limited. In Bolivia, Evo Morales, an Indian, has won a very close election in a country where a small White elite has always run roughshod over the majority Indian population. His options are also limited, but Morales’ rhetoric has at least been almost as radical as Chavez’. A major problem in Bolivia is the mestizos in the East of the country (Santa Cruz Province) who despise the Indians the West as inferior while they sit on top of Bolivia’s rich natural gas deposits. They are making noises about succession, but they will never try it. In Mexico, AMLO (Lopez-Obrador), a Leftist, actually won the election, but due to the usual fraud, the PAN (a rightwing Catholic party that rose out of the religious hot war in Mexico in the 1920’s that left 70,000 dead) now holds the presidency. Felipe Calderon is the PAN President and he won’t do a damned thing to solve the problems that have caused an incredible 1 As an example of such problems, the family of one man, Carlos Slim, the head of the private Mexican phone monopoly, controls 5 There has been some resistance to this semi-feudal order. A very radical movement has tried to overthrow the corrupt and brutal dictatorial government of Oaxaca state. The Zapatistas* are still alive, and recently a Leftist group, the EPL*, has started to blow stuff up again, after disappearing for three years. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega was re-elected, but he appears to have softened his rhetoric to the point where he cannot do much. Still, he has formed an alliance with Chavez. Nicaragua, now the second poorest country in Latin America, lies in corrupt ruins. Support for the considerably neutered Sandinistas is higher than reported in the ruling class media – although Ortega had 3 Under the Sandinistas, Nicaragua went from one of the worst to one of the best in Central America for literacy and health care figures. In 1990, Violeta Chamorro, adored by the whole US political spectrum, including the Cruise Missile liberals of the US Democratic Party, won the election. Right away, she ended free education, requiring students to spend $35 a year on uniforms, a fee that immediately threw large numbers of kids out of school. Most have yet to return. She also got rid of free health care, so most of the population is without health care again. The health and education figures for the nation have shown the expected collapse. It is interesting that Democratic Party liberals are apparently overjoyed about this situation, showing the bankruptcy of their ideology. Most of the rest of the continent is collapsed in the usual ruins. 1 million people die every year from hunger in Latin America, and this has been going on for decades. How come this stuff never makes it to the “Worst Killers in Recent History” contests? The anti-Communist line about Communism divorces it from its concrete realities in the sort of totally rotten social and economic systems that have spawned peasant revolutions for centuries before Karl Marx was even born. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s and the fall of the Warsaw Pact, rightwingers rejoiced. It was the “end of history”, said Francis Fukuyama. The era of peasant revolts was over. Never again would humanity have to worry about any Marxist, Leftist, worker, peasant, or even populist revolution. Capitalism was here to say, in all of its forms, from most enlightened to most hideous, and no one could do a damn thing about it! Well, that is nonsense. Anti-Communists say that revolutions happen for no reason at all, other than the insane desire of Communist madmen to seize power and impose their failed system on an unwilling population. They say that revolutions do not arise from horrible social and economic systems – they arise from sick Marxist pathology. Get rid of Marxism, they say, and capitalism can run wild on humanity again. Perhaps we can even re-instate feudalism and slavery while we are at it. After all, they were both great for business. Amidst the deafening racket of nonsense, a series of economic figures looms up at us like a ghost from the recent Peruvian past. In back of those figures, 15 years later in 1980, like an Inca God rising up from the grave to slay the Spanish invaders 450 years after they waded ashore, is the frightening shadow of the Peruvian Shining Path*, another “totally insane” Marxist group that arose “for no reason whatsoever other than sheer evil”. Yet the figures below show us why a revolution, even one as insane as Sendero Luminoso, was inevitable: From the Peruvian National Planning Institute in Bejar, Peru, in 1965, we learn that the 24,000 families of the White ruling class in Lima had an income of $62,000/yr*. The entire rest of the country had an average family income of $157. The Indians of the Sierra, who even now have a life expectancy of only 45 years, had an average family income of only $10 a year. *All figures in 1965 US dollars. Most people agree that things have only gotten worse in Peru since then. Look at those figures above and tell that that is not kindling and kerosene for bloody revolution. The match was called Sendero, and someone was going to toss a match sooner or later. There were centuries in Peru before 1965, four of them, and they build on our tale. From 1526 (when the Spaniards came to Peru) to 1630, the Indian population declined from 13 million to 600,000 – a loss of 9 For the next three centuries, the Indians were tied to the land like serfs, bonded in debt peonage in a feudal estate society. This continued until well into the 1970’s. The jungle Indians were enslaved and killed for sport starting in the 1800’s and continuing until 50 years or so ago. It is 1980. The bump and lurch of the dialectic, from Hegel to Marx to This is an example, from the city of Cherboksary, Russia, of the most failed economic system ever known to mankind – Communism. The fountains you see are inferior and worthless – totally failed fountains, if you will. The buildings in the background as are complete failures as buildings, since they are dull and boring. Those buildings are called “socialist housing” and everyone in the West agrees that this type of housing does not work. What works much better are the capitalist slums in the pictures to follow. The river is quite clean and this is another example of complete failure. Much better are the black rivers of capitalist slums, stinking with garbage, animal corpses and raw sewage. Why? Because diseases and smells are exciting! Who wants to be bored, anyway? Even the bright greenery in the foreground in a total failure – it’s much better to have live amidst the mounds of garbage you see below. Capitalist slums, with their thrill a minute and constant search for food, are the only way to go. A slum in Brazil. This is the successful system that works. Much better than that failed, dull socialist housing above, no? When are you moving in, reader? Men pick through a garbage dump, probably in Nairobi. Slums in Nairobi make up Slums of Nairobi. This is the only viable system on Earth, capitalism. All of the alternatives, especially Communism, are failed and don’t work. As you can see, this system works great. Communist housing fails because it is dull, boring and lifeless. It is much better to live in lively, exciting surroundings like this Nairobi slum, where I assure you there is never a dull movement. How dare those evil Commies try to move these people into “failed” Soviet-style high-rises! An excellent example of capitalist education from Africa. Capitalism hates education, everywhere and at all times, because the capitalists can’t make any money off of it, and the capitalists all send their kids to fancy private schools, hence they resent paying for a system they do not even use. So capitalism, under neoliberalism, has predictably devastated education systems around the Third World. Who needs to get educated anyway? The problem of the 3rd World is too many kids! Besides, Black people are so dumb that all attempts to educate them are a waste of time, or so The Bell Curve told me. Slums of Brazil. The problem is these Brazilians have too damn many kids! Yet the evidence shows that Brazil’s birthrate is actually below replacement level. Never matter, in that case, the poor should quit having babies altogether! Somehow, Westerners always find a way to blame the victim. Of course, Brazil having the worst rich-poor gap on Earth could not have anything to do with this situation, now would it? By 2020, 4 The charming slums of Brazil. Rio de Janeiro is home to 12 million people – 4 million of them in 800 different favelas, or slums. All of these slums are run by gangs of drug dealers, who engage in continuous battles with each other and the police, that is, when they are not engaging in armed robberies, kidnappings and homicides. Recent articles in the Western press have hailed the dramatic improvements in these slums. As you can see here, they are so much better than they used to be! Residents of a slum in Nairobi trudge through the garbage on their way home. Nairobi has an out of control crime rate, but of course that has nothing to do with the fact that these folks live in slums. It is because the criminals are evil and commit crimes for no reason at all. Furthermore, they are Black, and Black people are genetically natural born criminals. They’re just a race of Bad Seeds, and nothing can be done about them at all. The wonderful slums of Mumbai again! This is the high tech economy that is taking the world by storm, the envy of the planet. Check out that high tech dishwasher this girl is using – I bet it was designed by those IT professionals down in Bangalore! Go, India go! The truth about India is, of course, more tragic than Tom Friedman (see below) can figure out. By 1985, capitalism was killing between between 2.92 and 4 million every year in India, and 1.76 million were being killed in Bangladesh. That is 5.25 million people being killed by capitalism every year in just those two countries alone. But wait a minute! Capitalism doesn’t kill anyone. Stalin and Mao were the worst killers of the 20th century, dontcha know? Since Communism doesn’t work, we have to go with the only alternative, the system that works, capitalism. This photo shows you just how great it works in Mumbai, India. Noam Chomsky reports that, comparing China and India, which had similar developmental figures in 1949, there have been 100 million excess deaths in Indian from 1947-1979. This clearly shows the superiority of Chinese Communism, at least when it comes to saving lives. Note that China’s superior figures even include all of those killed by Maoism, which may number over 20 million people. But Maoism saved far more, and China set a world record with the fastest doubling of life expectancy by any country, going from 32 in 1949 to 65 in 1976, surpassing Joseph Stalin’s record set in 1956. Now in China, gone heavily over to capitalism, millions are dying from lack of health care alone. Getting back to India, recent figures show that there are 4 million excess deaths in India every single year. Gideon Polya calculates that excess infant mortality alone, compared to a model of Sri Lanka, kills 2.7 million Indians per year. Slums of Mumbai. 6 million people – 6 Working backwards and forwards from Chomsky’s figures above of 4 million deaths per year in India from capitalism, which he got from Indian economist Amratya Sen, we can guess that capitalism may have killed 170 million Indians since 1949 as compared to the Chinese model. But wait, aren’t Communists the worst killers of them all? Don’t like the way I do figures? Try these instead then. Capitalism kills 14 million people every single year just by starvation, mostly in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan).
*This blog does not support the project of Sendero Luminoso, as they kill people who are completely innocent. It does support the Zapatistas and the EPL in Mexico.