Interview with Kerry Bolton on Peron and Peronism

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.

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.

One of the only known photos of the super-elusive and ultra-mysterious Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah mastermind. He was so slippery he was dubbed Hezbollah’s Carlos, after the famous terrorist Carlos from the 1970’s. This is a great picture of him, suspicious, haunted, looking over his shoulder, as a man on the run should. And he was a man on the run for most of his life. A more recent photo of Mughniyeh in military fatigues, against a camouflage background, issued by Iran after his death. Between the earlier photo and the later, it looks like he hasn’t missed a meal. Some are also saying that the two plastic surgery operations did not alter his appearance much, but I am not at capable of judging that.

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.

"Latin America’s Twenty First Century Capitalism and the US Empire," by Dr. James Petras

An excellent analysis of the current scene in Latin America by Marxist James Petras. We often wonder what exactly is going on here or there in the world. For the answer in Latin America, Petras answers a number of important questions. What’s amazing is I can’t find one single area in which he’s wrong in his analysis below. Hence, this analysis is immaculate. If any of you can find anywhere below where he is wrong, let us know. A good tutorial on the Latin American politico-economic scene. Warning: Runs 45 pages.

Political Power and the World Market

The twin nemesis of Latin America’s quest for more equitable and dynamic development, US imperial and local oligarchic power have been subject to profound changes over the past decade. New capitalist classes both at home and abroad have redefined Latin America’s relation to world markets, seized opportunities to stimulate growth and forged cross class coalitions linking overseas investors, agro-mineral exporters, national industrialists with a broad array of trade unions, and in some countries peasant and Indian social movements. Parallel to these changes in Latin America, a new militarist and financial political configuration engaged in prolonged wars, colonial occupations and widespread speculation has weakened the structural economic links – dominance – between US imperial economic interests and Latin America’s dynamic socio-economic classes. In the present conjuncture, these basic changes in the respective class structures – in the US and Latin America – define the contours, constraints and ‘reach’ of the imperial classes as well as the potential autonomy of action of Latin America’s leading socio-economic classes. Notions which freeze Latin America in a time warp such as “500 years of exploitation” or which conflate earlier decades of US political-economic dominance with the present, have failed to take account of recent class dynamics, including popular insurrections, mass electoral mobilizations and failed imperial-centered economic models which have redefined the power equation between the US and Latin America. Equally important, fundamental changes in market relations and market competition has lessened US influence in the world market and opened major growth opportunities for new and established sectors of Latin America’s capitalist class, especially its dynamic export sectors. Understanding imperialism, especially the US variant, requires focusing on class relations, within and between countries and regions, the changing balance of power as well as the impact of fundamental changes in world market relations. Equally important the private economic institutions of imperialism (banks, multi-national corporations, investors) are contingent on the composition and policies of the imperial state. Insofar as the state defines its priorities in military and ideological terms and acts accordingly, by channeling resources in prolonged wars, the imperial policymakers weakens their capacity to sustain, finance and promote overseas private economic interests. As we shall analyze and discuss in the following sections, the US has suffered a relative loss of political and economic power over key Latin American regimes and markets as its military commitments have widened and deepened over time. The result is a Latin American political configuration which has changed dramatically over the past two decades.

Latin American Political-Economic Configurations and US Imperialism

The upsurge of social movements, the subsequent ascent of center-left political regimes,the dynamic economic growth of Asian economies and the consequent sharp increase in prices of commodities in the world market has changed the configuration of political power in Latin America and between the latter and the US between 2000-2010. While the US exercised almost absolute hegemony during the period 1980-1999, the rise of a militarist caste promoting prolonged imperial wars in the Middle East and South Asia and the rise of relatively independent national-popular and social-liberal regimes in Latin America has produced a broad spectrum of governments with greater autonomy of action. Depending on the criteria we use, Latin American countries have moved beyond the orbit of US hegemony. For example, if we examine trade and investment, all the major countries, independent of ideology, have to a greater or lesser degree diversified their markets, trading and investment partners. If we examine political alignments, we find that all the major countries have joined UNASUR, a regional political organization that excludes the US. If we examine policy divergences from the US on major regional issues, such as the US embargo on Cuba, its efforts to isolate Venezuela, its proposed military bases in Colombia, Washington remains in splendid isolation, to the point that the new Colombian President Santos, chooses to “postpone” implementation in favor of maximizing billion dollar trade and diplomatic ties with Venezuela. If we focus on ideological divergence between the US and Latin America, particularly on global issues of free trade, military coups and intervention, we find a variety of positions. For example, Brazil opposes US sanctions against Iran and supports the latter’s program of uranium enrichment for peaceful uses. If we focus on joint US-Latin American military exercises and support for the Haitian occupation, most Latin countries – with the exception of Venezuela – participate. If we examine the issue of bilateral trade and regional trade agreements, the US proposals on the latter were voted down, while several countries pursue (so far with little success) the former. On a rather fluid measure of ‘affinity for neo-liberal’ ideology, in which a mixture of elements of statism, deregulated markets and social welfare co-exist in varying degrees, we can draw up a tentative 4 fold division between “left”, “center left”, “center right” and “right”. On the “left” we can include Venezuela and Bolivia which have expanded the public sector, economic regulations and social spending.   On the “center-left” we can include Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador which have increased social spending, public investment and increased employment, wages and reduced poverty, while vastly increasing private national and foreign investment in agro-mineral export sectors. On the center-right we can include Uruguay, Chile and Paraguay, which embrace free market doctrines, with mild poverty programs and an open door to foreign investment. On the right we find Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, all of whom line up with Washington on most ideological issues, even as they may be diversifying trade ties with Asia and Venezuela. Internal shifts in class power within Latin America and the US have spurred divergences. Latin America has witnessed greater policy influence by a more ‘globalist elite’ less tied to the US, and an emerging ‘nationalist bourgeoisie’, and greater pressure from reformist working class and public employees trade union. In contrast within the US industrial capital has lost influence to the financial sector and exerts little influence in shaping economic policy toward Latin America, beyond rearguard ‘protectionist’ measures and state subsidies. The US ruling political elite, highly militarized and Zionized, shows little capacity to engage in launching any major new initiatives toward recapturing markets in Latin America, preferring massive military expenditures on wars and paying tribute to their Israeli mentors. As a result of major socio-political shifts within the US and Latin America and the singular importance of dynamic changes in the world market, there are four axis of power operating in the Western Hemisphere. The emerging economic power of Brazil and the growth of intra-regional trade within and between Latin American economies. The dynamic expansion of Asian trade, investment and markets leading to a long term, large scale shift toward greater economic diversification. The substantial financial flows from the US to Latin America in the form of “hot money” with destabilizing effects, as well as continued substantial investment, trade and military ties. The European Union, Russia and the Middle East as real and potential influences in particular settings, depending on the countries and time frame. Of these 4 ‘vectors of power’, the most significant in recent times in reshaping Latin America’s relation to the US and more importantly in opening up prospects for 21st century capitalist growth, is the boom in commodity prices and demand – the dynamic of the world market. On the ‘negative side’, the prolonged US-EU economic crises has limited trade and investment growth and encouraged greater Latin American integration and expansion of regional markets. A serious threat to Latin America’s growth, autonomy and stability is found in the US currency devaluation and subsequent overvaluing of Latin currencies (especially Brazil) imposing constraints on industrial exports and prejudicing the manufacturing sector. Equally important US and EU manipulation of interest rates – downward – has driven speculative capital toward higher interest rates in Latin America, creating destabilizing “bubbles” which can derail the economies.

US Empire Strikes Back: Protectionism, Devaluation and Unilateralism

By the middle of 2010 it was clear that the US economy was losing the competitive battle for markets around the world and was unable to reduce its trade and fiscal deficit within the existing global free trade regime. The Obama regime, led by Federal Reserve head Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Geithner unilaterally launched a thinly disguised trade war, effectively devaluing the dollar and lowering interest rates on bonds in order to increase exports and in effect ‘overvalue’ the currency of their competitors. In other words the Obama regime resorted to a virile “bugger your neighbor policies”, which outraged world economic leaders, provoking Brazilian economic leaders to speak of a “currency war”. Contrary to Washington’s rhetoric of “greater co-operation”, the Obama regime was resorting to protectionist policies designed to alienate the leading economic powers in the region. No longer in a position to impose non-reciprocal trade agreements to US advantage, Washington is engaged in currency manipulation in order to increase market shares at the expense of the highly competitive emerging economies of Latin America and Asia, as well as Germany. Equally prejudicial to Latin America, the Federal Reserve’s lowering of interest rates leads to heavy borrowing in the US in order to speculate in high interest countries like Brazil. The consequences are disastrous, as a flood of “hot money”, speculative funds flow into Latin America, especially Brazil, overvaluing the currency and provoking a speculative bubble in bonds and real estate, while encouraging excess liquidity and public and private consumer debt. Equally damaging the overvalued currencies price industrial and manufacturing out of world market competition, threatening to “de-industrialize” the economies and further their dependency on agro-mineral exports. US resort to unilateral protectionism tells us that the decline in US economic power has reached a point where it struggles to compete with Latin America rather than to reassert its former dominant position. Protectionism is a defense mechanism of an empire in decline. While Washington can pretend otherwise, the weapons it chooses to arrest its loss of competitiveness in the short run, sets in motion a process of growing Latin America integration and increased trade with Asian economies, which will deepen Latin America’s economic independence from US control.

Latin America’s Center-Left and the US: Economic Ties Trump Geopolitical Strategies

The consolidation of Latin America’s center-left regimes has had major consequences for US policy, namely a reconciliation between arch-adversary Venezuela and Washington’s foremost ally, Colombia. The power of the market, in this case over $4 billion in Colombian exports to Venezuela, has trumped the dubious advantage (if any) of being Washington’s military launching pad in Latin America. The election of Lula’s chosen candidate Dilma Rousseff as President of Brazil, the likely re-election of Chavez in Venezuela and Cristina Fernandez in Argentina, means that Washington has little leverage to reverse the dynamic diversification and greater autonomy of Latin America’s leading economies. Moreover, as the political rapprochement between Venezuela and Colombia, including the mutual extradition of Colombian guerrillas and drug traffickers demonstrates, closer economic relations are accompanied by warmer political relations, including a tacit pact in which Colombia abjures from supporting the rightwing opposition in Venezuela, while the latter does likewise toward the Left opposition to Santos. The larger meaning of this obscuring of ideological boundaries is that Latin America’s economic integration advances at the expense of US prompted ideological divisions. The net result will be the further exclusion and diminution of the US as the dominant actor in the Southern Hemisphere. At the same time it should be remembered that we are writing about greater capitalist integration, which means the continued marginalization of class based trade unions and social movements from strategic economic policy making positions. In other words, the decline of US hegemony is not matched by an increase in working class or popular power. As both decline, the big winner is the rising business class, mostly, but not exclusively the agro-mineral, financial and manufacturing elites linked to the Latin American and Asian markets. The prime destabilization danger now includes US currency wars, the growing potentially volatile extractive exports and the high levels of dependence on China’s (and Asian) appetite for raw materials. Imperial Wars, Free Trade and the Lumpen Legacy of 1990’s One of the paradoxes leading to the current eclipse of US hegemony in Latin America is found in the very military and economic successes in the 1990’s. A broad swathe of North and Central American and the Andean countries has witnessed the rise of what we call “lumpen political-economic power” which has devastated the formal economy and legitimate political authority. The concept of “lumpen” is derived from ‘lupus’ or Latin for ‘wolf’ a metaphor for a ‘predatory’ actor, or in our context, the rise of a political and economic class which preys upon the public and private resources and institutions of an economy and society. The lumpen power elites are based on the creation of a dual system of legitimate and illegitimate political authority backed by the instruments of coercion and violence. The emergence and formation of a powerful lumpen class of predatory capitalists and their accompanying military entourage is what we refer to in writing of the “process of lumpenization”. Today “lumpenization” no longer merely entails the overt violent organizers of illicit production, processing and distribution of drugs but an entire array of ‘offspring’ economic activity (kidnapping, immigrant smugglers, etc.) as well as large scale long term interaction with ‘legitimate’ economic institutions and sectors, including banking, real estate, agriculture, retail shopping centers, tourist complexes, to name a few. Money laundering of illicit funds is an important growth sector, especially providing important flows of capital to and from major US and Latin American financial institutions. Today over three-quarters of Mexico’s territory and governance is contested by over 30,000 organized armed lumpen led by centralized political-economic formations. Central America is a major transit point, production center and terrain for bloody lumpen struggles for power and revenue collection. Colombia is the major center for ‘raw material production’of drugs, marketing,and import and export center under the leadership of powerful lumpen capitalists with long standing ties to the governing political, military and economic elite. The lumpen economy has supply chains further south in Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay and distribution networks through Venezuela and Brazil as well as multi-billion dollar money laundering and financial links in the Caribbean, the US, Uruguay and Argentina. Several important issues to keep in mind in discussing the lumpen political economy.These include: (1)the growth in size, scope and significance over the past 20 years (2) the increasing economic importance as the ‘legitimate’ economy goes into crises (both cause and consequence) (3) the increasing public cynicism as previously thought of “legitimate” economic and political actors (capitalists) engage in multi-billion dollar financial swindles and are “bailed” out by political leaders. The ‘boom’ in lumpen political-economic growth can be dated to the end of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, coinciding with several major historical events in the region. These include: the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement; the US-oligarchy defeat of the revolutionary movements in Central America and the demobilization but not disarmament of the paramilitary and armed militia; the total militarization and paramilitarization of Colombia especially with the advent of Plan Colombia (2001) and the end of peace negotiations; the deregulation of the US financial system in the mid 1990’s and the growth of a financial bubble economy. What is striking about all the countries and regions experiencing ‘deep lumpenization’, is the profound disarticulation of their economies and smashing of their social fabric due to free trade agreements with the US (Mexico and Central America) and the large scale US military intervention during their civil wars (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia). The US politico-military intervention left millions without work and worse, destroyed the possibility of reformist or revolutionary political alliances coming to power and carrying out meaningful structural changes. The restoration of US backed neo-liberal-militarist collaborator regimes left the young unemployed peasants and workers with three choices: (1)submit to degradation and poverty (2) emigrate to North America or Europe (3) join one or another of the narco-trafficking organizations, as a risky but lucrative route out of poverty. The timing of the rise and dynamic growth of lumpen power coincides with the imposition of US free trade and political victories in the aforementioned regions. From the early 1990’s forward lumpen power spreads across the region fueled by NAFTA decimating the Mexican small producers and the US imposed Central American “peace accords” which effectively destroyed the chances of socio-economic change and dismantled but did not disarm the militias and paramilitary gunmen.

Case Studies of Lumpen Dual Power: Mexico

Mexico, unlike the other major economies of Latin America did not experience any popular upheavals or center-left electoral outcomes during the late 1990’s or early 2000. Unlike Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador, in which new center-left regimes came to power imposing regulatory controls on financial speculation, Mexico witnessed electoral fraud and signed off on NAFTA, deepening its ties to Wall Street. As a result it experienced a series of financial shocks, undermining its capacity to launch a more diversified trading and investment model. Unlike Argentina which launched state directed employment generating investment policies, Mexico, under US tutelage, relied on emigration and overseas remittances to compensate for the loss of millions of jobs in agriculture , small and medium manufacturing activity and retail sales. While popular uprisings and mobilization in Latin America led to the rise of center-left regimes capable of securing greater independence in economic policy from the US and the IMF, the Mexican elite literally stole elections in 1988 and 2006, blocking the possibility of an alternative model. It successfully repressed alternative peasant movements in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero unlike the successes in Bolivia and Ecuador. While the center-left regimes captured the economic surplus from the agro-mineral sectors and increased public and private investment in production and social spending, Mexico witnessed massive illegal and legal outflows of investments into speculative ventures in the US: an outflow of over $55 billion between 2006-2010. Regional migration within Latin America fueled by high growth, led to rising income; overseas immigration depleted Mexico of skilled and unskilled labor; in some cases ‘return migration’ from the US of deported gang members, with arms and drug networks fueled the growth of lumpen power . With the severe recession, US immigration policy led to the closing of the border, the massive deportation of Mexican immigrants and the decline of the major source of foreign earnings: remittances. Pervasive and deep corruption throughout the cupula of the Mexican political and economic system, combined with the decline of the legitimate economy, the absence of channels for popular redress and Washington’s insistence that militarization and not social investments was the solution to rising crime, led to the huge influx of young recruits to the growing network of lumpen-capitalist directed narco enterprises. With almost all US and Mexican financial institutions and arms vendors as willing partners and an unlimited pool of young recruits with a ‘lean and hungry look’, Mexico evolved into a fiercely contested terrain between a half dozen rival lumpen organizations,and the Mexican military, with nearly 30,000 deaths between 2006-2010.

Lumpenization: Central America

Drug gangs dominate the streets of the major cities and countryside of all the countries which were militarized during the US backed counter-revolutionary wars between the 1960’s to early 1990’s. US proxy military dictators and their civilian clients, in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras decimated civil society and particularly the mass popular organizations. In El Salvador over 75,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands were uprooted, driven across borders or into urban shanty towns. In Guatemala over 200,000 mostly Mayan Indians were murdered by the US trained “special forces” and over 450 villages were obliterated in the course of a scorched earth policy. In Nicaragua, the Somoza dictatorship and the subsequent US financed and trained counter-revolutionary (“contra”) mercenary army killed and maimed close to 100,000 people and devastated the economy. In Honduras, the US embassy promoted and financed in-country and cross-border counter-insurgency operations which killed, uprooted and forced thousands of Honduran peasants into exile. Highly militarized Central American societies, in which US funded and armed death squads murdered with impunity, in which the economy of small producers was shattered and ‘normal’ market activity was subject to military assaults, led to the growth of illegal crops, drug and people smuggling. With the so-called “peace agreements”, the leaders of the insurgents became “institutionalized”in elite electoral politics,while large numbers of unemployed ex-guerrillas and demobilized death squad militia members found no place in the status quo. The neo-liberal order imposed by the US client rulers with its free market ideology built “fortress neighborhoods”, hired an army of private “security” guards, while the productive bases of small scale agriculture was destroyed. Millions of Central Americans faced the familiar “routes out of poverty”: outmigration, forming or joining criminal gangs, or attempting to find an economic niche in an unpromising environment. Outmigration for semi-educated former members of armed bands led to their early entrée into armed groups, deportation back to Central America, swelling the ranks of narco traffickers in their “home country”. Highly repressive immigration policies implemented in the new millennium closed the escape valve for most Central Americans fleeing violence and poverty. Former guerrilla fighters and their families, abandoned by their former leaders embedded in electoral parties, turned their military experience toward carving a new living, as security guards for the rich, or as armed traffickers competing for ‘market shares’ with and against the discharged deathsquad militia members. Between 2000-2010, the annual number of homicides exceeded the number of deaths suffered during the worst period of the civil wars of the 1980s. US imposed peace agreements and the neo-liberal order which resulted, led to the total lumpenization of the economy and polity throughout the region, the practice of electoral politics and even the election of “center-left” politicos in El Salvador and Nicaragua notwithstanding. Lumpenization was a direct consequence of the ‘scorched earth’ and ‘mass uprooting’ counter-insurgency policies which were central to US re-establishing dominance in the region. Economic and personal insecurity and social misery were the price paid by imperial Washington to prevent a popular revolution.

Case Study: Colombia

The ties between the world centers of finance and the most degenerate and blood curdling ruler in the Western Hemisphere were most evident in the slavishly laudatory puff-pieces published in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal in praise of President Alvaro Uribe, while over 3 million Colombians were driven off their lands, several thousands were murdered, over a thousand trade unionists, journalists and human rights activists were killed. Two thirds of his Congressional backers were financed by narco-traffickers. Incarcerated deathsquad leaders identified top military officials as their primary supporters. All of Colombia’s Presidents collaborated closely with US military missions and all were financed and associated with the multi-billion dollar drug cartels, even as the Pentagon claimed to be engaged in a “war against drug trafficking”. Landlords and their financial and real estate backers organized private militias, which terrorized, uprooted and killed hundreds of thousands of peasants, others fled to the urban slums, or across the border to neighboring countries. Others joined the guerrillas, and still others were recruited by the death squads and military. With the advance of the guerrilla armies and then President Pastrana’s opening to peace negotiations, President Clinton launched a $5 billion dollar military scheme, “Plan Colombia” to quadruple Colombia’s air and ground forces and deathsquads. With Washington’s backing, Alvaro Uribe, a notorious narco-deathsquad politico, so identified by US officials, took power and launched a massive scorched earth policy, murdering and displacing millions of peasants and urban slum dwellers in an effort to undermine the vast network of community organizations sympathetic to the agrarian reform, public investment and anti-military program of the guerrilla movements. Mass terror and population flight emptied whole swathes of the countryside; livelihoods were destroyed and landlords in alliance with drug cartel bosses and Generals seized millions of acres of land. For the financial and respectable mass media, the massification of terror mattered not: the insurgents were ‘contained’, driven back, put on the defensive. They trumpeted the killing of key guerrilla leaders: foreign corporate property was secure. Rule by Uribe, the military and the narco-death squads secured US power and influence and created an ideal “jumping off” location for destabilizing the democratically elected Venezuelan President Chavez. The latter was especially important by the mid 2000’s when Washington’s internal assets attempted coup and lockout were resoundingly defeated in 2002-03. Having gained strategic territorial advantage over the guerrillas, Washington in collaboration with Uribe moved to shift the balance of power between the narco-deathsquads and the state: a disarmament and demobilization and amnesty was proclaimed. The result was detailed revelations of the deep structural links between narco-deathsquads and the Uribe police state regime, up to and including family members and cabinet ministers. While ‘nominally’ the cartels are in retreat, in fact, they have become decentralized .Equally important top politicos and military officials continue to collaborate in the production, processing and shipping of billion dollar cocaine exports … with major US banks laundering illicit funds.

Rule of Lumpen-Capitalism in the Imperial System

Drug trafficking has deep roots in the economies of North and South America and has profound ramifications throughout their societies. One cannot understand the tremendous growth of US banking and financial centers if not for the $25 to $50 billion dollar yearly income and transfers from laundering drug funds and double that amount from illegal money transfers by business and political leaders directly and indirectly benefiting from the drug trade. Lumpen capitalists, their collaborators, facilitators paramilitary mercenaries and military partners play a major political role in sustaining the imperial system. Washington’s major influence and principle area of dominance resides in those countries where lumpen power and deathsquad operations are most prevalent, namely Central America, Colombia and Mexico. Both phenomena are derived from US designed ‘scorched earth’ counter-insurgency strategies that prevented alterations, modifications or reforms of the neo-liberal order and blocked the successful emergence of social movements and center-left regimes as took place in most of Latin America. The contemporary imperial system relies on lumpen capitalists, their economic networks and military formations in practically every major area of conflict even as these collaborators are constant areas of friction. As in Afghanistan and Iraq today and in Central America in the recent past and in Latin America under the military dictatorships, the US relies on drug traffickers, military gangsters engaged in extortion, kidnapping, property seizures and the pillage of public property and treasury to destroy popular movements, to divide and conquer communities and above all to terrorize the general public and civil society. The singular growth of the financial sector especially in the US is in part the result of its being the massive recipient of large scale sustained flows of ‘plunder capital’ by lumpen rulers and their economic partners via ‘political crony’ privatizations, foreign loans which never entered the local economy and other such forms of pillage characteristic of ‘predator’ classes. The deep structural affinities between Wall Street speculators and Latin lumpen-capitalists provided the backdrop for the ascendancy of a new class of lumpen financiers in the imperial financial centers: bogus bonds, mortgage swindles, falsified assessments by stock ratings agencies, trillion dollar raids on state treasuries define the heart and soul of contemporary imperialism. If it is true that the promotion and financing of lumpen warlord capitalists was an essential defense mechanism at the periphery of the empire to contain popular insurgencies, it is also true that the growth of lumpen capitalism severely weakened the very core of the imperial economy, namely its productive and export sectors leading to uncontrollable deficits, out of control speculative bubbles and massive and sustained reductions of living standards and incomes. Lumpen classes were both the agencies for consolidating the empire and its undoing: tactical gains at the periphery led to strategic losses in the imperial centers. Imperial policymakers resort to terrorist formations resulted from their incapacity to resolve internal contradictions within a legal, electoral framework. The high domestic political cost of long term warfare led inevitably to the recruitment of mercenary lumpen armies who extracted an economic tribute for questionable loyalty. Lacking any popular constituency, mercenary armies rely on terror to secure circumstantial submission. Having secured control, local warlords preside over the rapid and massive growth of drugs and other lumpen economic practices. The alliance of empire and lumpen capitalists against modern secular and traditional insurgencies, brings together high technology weaponry and primitive clan based religious-ethnic racists in Iraq and Afghanistan and deracinated psychopaths in the case of Colombia, Mexico and Central America. For Washington military and political supremacy and territorial conquests take priority over economic gain. In the case of Colombia the scorched earth policy undermined production and lucrative trade with Venezuela. Imperial ascendancy had similar consequences in Asia, the Middle East and Central America.

When Lumpen Power becomes a Problem for the Imperial State

Lumpen capitalism develops a dynamic of its own, independent of its role as an imperial instrument for destroying popular insurgency. It challenges imperial collaborator regimes. It displaces, threatens, or cajoles foreign and domestic capitalists. In the extreme, it establishes a private army, seizes territorial control, recruits and trains networks of intelligence agents within the armed forces and police, undermining imperial influence. In a word lumpen organized military capitalism threatens the security of imperial hegemony: newly emerging predators threaten the established collaborators. The imperial attempts to use and dispose of lumpen counterinsurgency forces has failed; the demobilized paras become the professional gunmen of a “third force” – neither imperial nor insurgent. The decimation of the reformist center-left option, which took hold in Latin America, precludes a socio-economic alternative capable of integrating the young combative unemployed, stimulating the productive economy, diversifying markets and escaping the pitfalls of a US centered neo-liberal order. The divergence of priorities and strategies between Latin America’s center-left and Washington has as much to do with economic and class interests as it has with ideological agendas. For the US security means defeating the rising power of lumpen military economic formations in their remaining ‘power bases’. For Latin America, security concerns are secondary to diversifying and boosting market shares within Latin America and overseas. Lumpen power is currently under the political control of domestic rulers in Latin America; it is out of control in US clients. The US solution is military; the Latin approach is greater growth; social expenditures and police repression especially in Brazil. The Latin solution has greater attraction, evident in Colombia’s break with the US military base and encirclement strategy toward Venezuela. Colombia’s new President opted for $8 billion dollar trade deals with Venezuela’s Chavez over and against costly million dollar military base agreements with the US. Clearly the US economic decline in Latin America as a direct result of its reliance on military and lumpen power, is in full force. The driving force of accelerated decline is not popular insurgency but the attraction and lucrative opportunities of the economic marketplace within Latin America and beyond for the local ruling classes. Insofar as militarism defines the policies and strategies of the US Empire there is no remedy for the challenges of lumpen power in its ‘backyard’. And Washington has nothing on offer to recapture a dominant presence in Latin America. The world market is defeating the empire. Latin America’s twenty-first century capitalists are leading the way to further decline in imperial power.

Freemarketeers Get Ready to Murder Ireland Again

Rich Broderick lays out the case. 160 years ago, classical economics, the ancestor of the neoliberalism and freemarket fundamentalism that currently rules the globe, deliberately murdered 2 It was a genocide as brutal and Pol Pot’s and nearly as brutal as Hitler’s Holocaust. But it was done in the name of economic theory, a theory which today rules the world, which makes it particularly tragicomic. Ireland was destroyed and 1/4 of its population was murdered, Pol Pot like, in the name of ideology. Free market ideology, to be precise. Here it is, 160 years later, and the classical economists yet live. Classical economics, instead of being a peculiar aberration of Europeans, now sits astride the globe, having conquered the world in its name. Ireland will be destroyed once again by the rich, just as the rich destroyed it 160 years ago. Few people will die, but Ireland will be ruined just the same. Here is what happened. Ireland subscribed to neoclassical economics, the economics that says that you must lower taxes to the bone on the rich and corporations and take a completely hands off approach to regulation of business. In this case, Ireland allowed a totally unregulated Wild West of the Banks. Wealthy bondholders on the Continent apparently made bets with bonds on these hazy banks, and then the banks went south, and anyone with any sense could have predicted. Logic would say that rich bondholders in Paris and Berlin made a bad bet on Irish banks, and as happens when you make a bad bet at the casino, they lost and need to eat their losses like everyone else. The best thing the Irish could do is to do an Argentina and simply default on their debt. It would be bad for a little while, but Argentina was growing again within 6 months. They should leave the ridiculous EU along with Greece, Spain, Portugal and any other European country with any sense. The sooner the EU dies, the better. Instead, the rich bondholders on the continent will be paid off for the bad debts. Imagine if you got t to go the casino all you wanted to. You got to keep all your winnings, and every time you lost, the local poor and working people would be reduced to penury to pay you for your losses. Paradise! This is the scam that the rich and corporations of the world, especially parasitic finance capital, are running on all the rest of us. They need to be congratulated. Good scam, good scam! It’s increasingly a war of the top Who’s side are you on? Do you make less than $250,000/yr.? Then you are in the bottom 9 Whose side are you on? Are you fighting for the interests of your class in the class war or are you fighting for the enemy against yourself and your own like a fool?

Problems of Leftwing Democracy

Repost from the old site. In the comments section, astute commenter huy remarks on the conundrum of socialist democracy when capitalists retain control over the media and culture::

The only problem is that a socialist revolution would probably require a dictatorship and repression. This is because without dictatorship and repression, rich capitalists would be able to prevent significant social services and state planning in a democracy via their control of the media and peoples’ thoughts. I’m not for socialism as a long term thing, but only as a way to quickly develop a country’s infrastructure and economy, before gradual privatization of suitable sectors.

I respond: huy is are correct as far as his first two sentences go. I will deal with the third sentence at the end. This conundrum is why Communists opted for the dictatorship of the proletariat, not because they are lovers of repression and haters of freedom. The rich capitalists, through their media control and also their cultural construction and fertilization creating Gramscian cultural hegemonies (what huy referred to as “control over people’s thoughts”), are typically able to prevent social services and state planning in a democracy. This is why Communists say that you never really have a democracy in capitalism. You always have a dictatorship of capital. Be that as it may, most folks nowadays do not seem to want to live under a dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, the roadblocks in the way of socialist democracy present a a serious problem. Not only are the capitalists able to thwart significant progressive change via media and cultural control, but the same capitalists, via control over the economy, are able to stage lockouts and capital strikes, to send their capital out of the country, to artificially create shortages, and to send wealthy housewives out into the streets beating pots and pans in a middle and upper class strike, etc. These housewife pot-banging strikes occurred in Chile under Allende, Venezuela under Chavez, and just recently occurred again in Argentina when President Kirchner tried to tax booming agricultural exports. The big ag producers in Argentina responded by trying to starve the cities by staging ag strikes and refusing to ship produce to the cities so the people would have nothing to eat. What is ominous about this is that these same rich housewife pot-banging demos and a latifundista (large landowner elite) strike presaged the coup that brought the death squads into power in Argentina in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. The generals stayed in power for several years, during which they murdered 30,000 leftwing Argentines, the vast majority of whom were just idealistic young people working with the poor and had not taken up arms at all. The capitalists will usually try to stage a coup through their control over the military too. That is why Hugo Chavez is correct in cleansing the corrupt bosses’ oil workers’ union, in cleansing the officer corps of the military of reactionary elements, and putting in some state media. The corrupt state oil workers union was a white collar union of well to do managers who had been operating the state oil company as a personal ATM for decades. They were behind the owners’ lockout strike that followed the coup, and after Chavez fired those who had been behind the lockout and sabotage, they destroyed much of the records and paperwork of the oil company before they left. Clearly they had to go. In the previous coup attempt, the middle and upper-class officer corps supported the coup, but the enlisted men, who came from the poor, did not. The poor rank and file military refused their officers’ orders, and the officers backed down. Hence, cleansing the officer corps of coup supporters was a must. Getting a foot in the door of the Right’s media monopoly was also important. Previously, the rich had all of the papers, magazines and especially TV stations and they used these to wage continuous lying propaganda war against Chavez. Furthermore, the entire rightwing media not only supported the coup attempt against Chavez but was actively complicit in it. For that treason, Chavez is perfectly within his rights to shut down the entire rightwing media. He only does not do this because of the international outcry it would arouse. The Right did the same thing with their media control during the Allende regime in Chile, printing wild lies about Cuban armies offshore and hiding in Chilean bases ready to invade Chile and impose Communism at gunpoint. Middle class and upper class capital strikes can be devastating to the economy, and most folks, no matter how revolutionary, just get tired of the economic pain after a while and vote to put the reactionaries back in power. Sanctions work the same way. The US and UK and sometimes France and Canada (when those two latter states are in an imperialist mood) usually slap sanctions on democratic Left states as soon as possible. Recent examples are Nicaragua, Haiti and Zimbabwe (at first democratic, now increasingly dictatorial), and this alone is enough to devastate the economy and cause the people to vote out the Left and put reactionaries back in power. What happens is that in an effort to get some control of the country back and fight back against all of this US plots, the Left regime often starts becoming more authoritarian and less democratic. Then the US says it’s a dictatorship and needs to be overthrown on that basis. If that doesn’t work, the US forms a reactionary contra counterrevolutionary army that goes around killing any civilian that is pro-Left, murdering teachers and health care workers, burning down schools, ag cooperatives and health care facilities and just making the place ungovernable. In order to fend off contras and coups, Chavez has built up his military and even armed the population. One more thing the US does is to flood money into the democratic Left country to buy the election of the reactionaries via all sorts of fake civil society groups. A good way to stop this is to ban all money coming to political groups from outside the country, but that is easier said than done. The money seems to find its way in anyway. The US and its reactionary allies also stage bombings, shootings, riots, etc, against democratic Left states, and then often blames them on the Left. This is what they did in Chavez’ Venezuela, Aristide’s Haiti and Mossadegh’s Iran. If worse comes to worse and none of the above works, the Left regime is overthrown by a coup and replaced by a reactionary dictatorship. This dictatorship typically then institutes a reign of terror in which anywhere from 100’s to 1 million progressives are killed all over the land. This is what happened in Indonesia in 1965, when 1 million Leftists were killed in a CIA coup. What is even creepier is that while the Left is in power, the CIA is usually running around the country making up lists of leftwingers. As soon as the coup comes, the CIA hands over the lists to the death squad Right now in power, and they use these lists to hunt down progressives and murder them. So if a Left regime is in power, there is always the terror of a future coup followed by a murder spree against anyone politically active in the regime. This is enough to make people afraid to get politically active. The reign of terror itself so so terrorizes the population that most people are afraid to get involved in progressive politics for years or even decades afterwards. Why get involved? Who is to say when the death squads will come back in power and try to kill you for being politically active in Left politics? All of this makes socialist democracy or even social democracy in backwards states almost impossible to achieve. On the other hand, lots of leftwingers are trying to figure out a way to have some sort of socialist or even Marxist democracy, despite all the challenges. The Sandinistas had a democratic socialist revolution, and Hugo Chavez is having one too. The Nepalese Maoists support 10 When I look at Cuba and I think about a few dissidents getting thrown in prison, is that really worse than masses of people dying early from preventable death or not having enough food to eat, or living in shantytown hovels, or prostituting themselves, or homeless kids sniffing glue, turning into criminals and getting killed by cops as happens all over Latin America? Third World capitalist nightmare states punish an awful lot of innocent people too. Doesn’t Cuba punish a lot fewer innocent people by clapping a few dissidents in prison than are harmed in these failing 3rd world capitalist states? In India, capitalism is killing 4 million people a year. That’s a five-alarm fire right there. If we had a socialist revolution there even with a dictatorship and saved 4 million lives a year, would it be worth it for a few folks slapped in prison? I do think that the new way of Chavez, the Sandinistas, the FMLN of El Salvador and the Nepalese Maoists is the better way to go. Nothing wrong with democracy. If the people reject socialism at the polls and go back to capitalism and lots of them go hungry, go homeless, drink sewage water, get sick, get crippled and start dying, I guess we can say that they made a choice to have that happen to themselves. Most socialist countries did go socialist for a while (usually decades) to develop the economy and then go towards capitalism after they were pretty well developed. People have no idea how much of China’s economic growth is based on the foundations laid by decades of Maoism. At any rate, most do not realize China is still a very socialist country in many ways. The Communists in Russia built that place up from nothing. Without the USSR, Russia would probably be like India or Afghanistan. The Vietnamese and Laotian Communists are also putting in a lot of capitalism, and North Korea now has joint partnerships for foreign investors. I support Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela in their experiments at mixed economy. I also really like social market of Belarus. Really what we ought to look at is does the system give us the outcomes that we want? If it does, it doesn’t matter what mixtures of socialist, collective and private ownership it has. There are also all sorts of ways of enterprise ownership. We can have nonprofits, labor collectives, family-run businesses, single owners and ownership by neighborhoods, towns, cities, states and nations. All of these forms of ownership are operating all over the world as you read this. The cooperative sector in particular is a great way to go, and most do not realize it is a non-capitalist economic system. Worker-owned firms compete with each other, and there is no exploitation of labor as in capitalism. One of the best examples of that is the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque Country. Most Cuban agriculture is now run by cooperatives. In the cooperative model, you get away from the management-labor conflict you see in capitalism.

Cool Page On Social Democracy

Repost from the old site. This is a really cool page on the Social Democratic Party of America. There are several social democratic parties in the US, and no, rightwing fuckwads, they are not much like the Democratic Party at all. A lot of them don’t even like the Democratic Party. Social democracy means a lot of things all over the world. There is a Socialist International of socialist parties all over the world, and I support that organization. Even a lot of Communists don’t necessarily hate it. A lot of us on the Left support all sorts of socialist models, from Communism to social democracy even all the way to the US Democratic Party. Your average US rightwing shithead can’t seem to figure that out, but then, they subscribe to a philosophy that is narrow-minded and stupid in both intent and praxis. Truth is, as you can see by this page, there is not a lot of love lost between at least this social democratic party and Communists. To say that they are one and the same just shows that you are a stupid rightwing asshole. No serious political scientist would make such a statement. I don’t necessarily agree with this party in their critique of Cuba, Belarus and other countries ruled by Communist-type regimes, but hey, it’s a big tent here on the Left. There are all sorts of social democratic parties all over the world. As you can see, they are major parties in Slovenia, Japan, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Romania, Ukraine, Iceland, Austria, Serbia, Poland , Paraguay, Portugal, Finland, Cameroon, Guatemala, Tajikistan, Macedonia, France, Italy, Sweden, Belarus, Denmark and all sorts of other places. I have varying opinions on how well they are doing; I think that the ones in Europe have done a pretty good job. But I have a pretty low opinion of Lula’s PT in Brazil, Bachelet’s Socialist Party in Chile, the UK Labor Party (An imperialist socialist party?), and I doubt if this new Guatemalan party is going to get much done. The Peruvian social democrats have a particularly horrible record. The Sandinistas in Nicaragua will not be able to get much done either. Cristina Merkel is having a hard time getting a lot of her agenda through in Argentina. Social democracy seems to work best in highly developed and wealthy countries, as you can see above. In the poor Third World, they haven’t been able to do much to change the reactionary and backwards nature of society, nor to alleviate poverty, nor to do much of anything. I think in a lot of cases there may be a necessity for revolutionary change, either via the way of the gun, or possibly peacefully in a more civilized society via the Hugo Chavez model. In Europe, the ruling classes and the Right were completely destroyed in World War 2, which left millions of rightists and fascists dead and left the whole rightwing movement scattered and discredited. Hence social democracy was able to make a lot of headway with a defeated and more or less rendered-civilized and neutered Right. Further, society itself changed in that even the wealthy, the upper middle classes, the middle classes, and corporate executives began to support social democracy. In part this social pact was due to massive pressure from the Left which caused the European Right and business classes to sue for peace via a Social Compact. Also, society itself changed and social democracy became the dominant model for all classes. Something similar occurred in Japan. The Right was destroyed by the war, and those that were not dead were discredited and humiliated. In Eastern Europe, decades of Communism may have left a distaste for Communism but not for social democracy. Once again, most of the rightists were simply slaughtered, the rest were in jail or discredited, and society itself was well-molded along socialist lines for decades. In Latin America, faced with a much more backwards, venal, dishonest, amoral, criminal, corrupt, and murderous upper class and upper middle class intent on staying in power at all costs, social democracy has had a really hard time getting much done. It’s fascinating that the US has allowed social democracy to flower in Europe, but has smashed every glimmer of it in Latin America as “Communism” or “dictatorship”. Socialist parties in India (the Congress Party) have failed for similar reasons as the ones in Latin America. Social democracy in Sri Lanka has a good record. In most of the Arab World, there is a more or less socialist model in place, no matter what the governments call themselves. Radical free market capitalism is contrary to Arab society and to Islam itself, hence it is not likely to succeed in any Arab or Islamic society. Cambodia is run by a socialist party. So is Burma, but most socialists want nothing to do with them. Contrary to rightwing bullshit, socialism in the form of social democracy has not failed at all. It is not a failed or discredited model or any of that. Social democratic parties have sadly had a really hard time getting off the ground in the United States. For the most part, this is because America is extremely rightwing for a developed country. It is no exaggeration to say that the US is the most reactionary developed country on Earth, in both its leadership and in its citizens. This is 10 There’s been a decades-long propaganda war against socialism in which the word “socialism” was deviously married to word “Communism”. Americans being a bunch of morons, and basically very rightwing in their natures, swallowed the whole thing. But in the mid-1970’s, things were different. We had had over a decade of fairly progressive politics, even under Republicans, and leaders of major US corporations got together, agitated and worried. They said that if something is not done now, we are going to have a European-style social democracy in the US. This began a years-long project to set up and fund a series rightwing foundations and think tanks in the US. They are still going strong, and have tremendous influence on US politics due to their ability to churn out papers, speakers and conferences on issues almost immediately. They have deep ties to the reactionary corporate media and quickly popped onto TV and the front page and kept there as long as the Right wants or needs any issue to be spotlighted. It is true that there is a tradition of radical individualism in the US, but that’s only among White people. This may have been slightly reasonable at some point if you were Davey Crockett building a cabin in the woods, but those days are long gone. One great thing about the loss of a White majority in the US (which will be both good and bad) is that US non-Whites, in particular Hispanics and Blacks, are much more sympathetic to at least Democratic Party politics and possibly social democracy. On the other hand, reactionary politics have such a deep hold on this country that even some younger Blacks and Hispanics, once they start making some money, adopt some form of reactionary politics, typically nowadays along the lines of the faddish but ultra-rightwing libertarianism. This is discouraging, and shows that a non-Whites in the US are not necessarily a progressive bloc. Another thing to note is that despite the hostile rhetoric some US social democratic parties take towards the Democratic Party, we already have a lot of social democracy here in the US, brought to us actually by both political parties. The Right, meaning White America, has been savagely slashing away at this social democracy for decades now, but even so, it’s a Hell of a lot better record than the social democratic parties in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Jamaica and Brazil, which in my opinion have failed to varying degrees. If Americans were anything like Europeans, social democracy ought to be an easy play here in the US. But for one thing, White Americans’ opposition to high taxation is going to make this a difficult project. White Americans’ opposition to socialism and social democracy is rooted in a lot of things, but one of the main things is race. It’s all about taking the hard-earned tax dollars of White Americans and giving them to worthless gangbanging, welfare-addicted, drug-abusing Hispanics and Black criminals, scumbags and lowlifes. Truth is that this simple-minded mindset has devastated a lot of hardworking working-class lower to mid-income Whites, but White America just can’t see that. White Americans don’t have much in the way of racial solidarity. If there is anything, there is solidarity based on class and that’s it. Whites in the suburbs think that low-income and working class Whites, whom they refer to as White trash, can fuck off. While White American politics are indeed often rooted in race, they are also rooted in class too, and the two can be contradictory. Life is complicated.

What Has the Latin American New Left Accomplished?

Tulio wonders what good the Latin American Left has done down there. How bout we shoot the question back at him and ask what good the Latin American Right did for 190 years for the majorities? Answer: Zero.

But what have the results been? Has there been any meaningful progress that’s happened because of the rise of the left in Latin America that can be solely attributed to leftist economics and politics? I’m not here to attack the Latin left per se. I don’t mind them much so long as they aren’t on this hate America tip and blaming the United States for all their home grown problems e.g. Chavez. I’ve never heard any anti-American hate speech from Brazil, Argentina or Chile under Bachelet.The bottom line though is what have these left wing leaders actually done? Everything is still horribly corrupt, there’s still massive inequality, still no universal health coverage, millions still live in favelas, there’s still lots of crime in a place like Venezuela. So what is so great about these left-wing leaders? Great, so we will live in a country like Cuba where there’s socialism yet everyone is still poor. Whoopie do. And that’s the best latin socialism has to offer.

Not really. Chile and Costa Rica both have socialism (social democracy) and they have some pretty good figures on life expectancy, infant mortality and whatnot. Comparable to the US or even better, with much lower per capita income too. All Latin America has national health care last time I checked. Public hospitals are free, assuming they exist. There’s a lack of hospitals, doctors, medicine, etc, but in some places like Chile, Costa Rica or Trinidad and Tobago, public health care is pretty good. I doubt there is one country in Latin America that lacks free public health care. The US is pretty bizarre on world scale in lacking this. As far as favelas, I know Chavez has been on massive spree building public housing and renovating other housing, fixing streets, wiring up areas for electricity and running plumbing lines. And he’s done a lot of land reforms, breaking up large estates and giving them to small farmers and co-ops. He has opened a tremendous number of new hospitals and clinics, often staffed with Cuban doctors. He’s opened up new state markets where the poor can buy subsidized food for affordable prices instead of practically starving like they were 20 years ago, when 8 Crime is a long-term problem in Venezuela and the region, and it’s not Chavez’ fault. Corruption is a long-term problem in the region, due to Latino culture, and it will be there no matter what kind of regime is in. Chavez has reduced income inequality and poverty more than anyone else in the region. It’s great what Chavez is doing down there! Incredible! We don’t need Cuban socialism. Canadian socialism would be fine. Correa in Ecuador has done well, but he’s hampered by the oligarchy in what he can do. He threw the US out of the their Manta Military Base, he wrote a new Constitution and doubled health care spending. Ortega just got in, and he’s not pushing a strong program, plus the oligarchy is against him. Honduras had a coup. The FMLN just got in in El Salvador and is unfortunately pursuing a moderate agenda. However, the Civil War Accords already broke up the big land estates and distributed land to small farmers and co-ops, similar to the Mexican Revolution. Whatever other problems you have down there, at least you can grow enough food to eat. Brazil’s Lula reduced poverty dramatically there. Morales has done some good things for Bolivia, for one thing nationalizing the gas and oil reserves. He also wrote a new Constitution. Kirchener did a good job in Argentina. She blew off the debt. Her efforts at further reform have been hampered by the oligarchy. Lately, she’s been trying to break up the media oligopoly, but she’s running into a lot of static on that. Bachelet in Chile did not do much. She was not pushing a very Left agenda. The guy in Uruguay just got in and he’s a moderate. Lugos in in Paraguay is new too, and he’s pushing a moderate line. People pushing a moderate line are not likely to get much done, and in most cases, really good reforms to benefit the people have been hampered by the oligarchs. But these are the best changes your average person in Latin America has ever seen. What’s failed has been more or less 180 years of rightwing authoritarian oligarchic rule in the vast majority of Latin America. That’s what in general has never done the slightest damned thing for the people from Day One. People have had it with it, so they are starting to vote in some pro-people governments, in many places for the first time in history.

Multiculturalism and Socialism: The Odd Couple

Repost from the old site. In the comments section, Scott, who is a White nationalist, discusses the disconnect between multiculturalism and socialism or social democracy. Yes, we do allow White nationalists, even anti-Black ones, on the board, but every time a cute Black woman shows up on the board, we force them to kiss her. On the lips. On penalty of banning. None have left yet. Brown sugar, how come you taste so good? Scott says:

Look at the countries that have the highest index of egalitarianism in the West: Iceland, Norway, Sweden (used to have more). The inhabitants are all pretty closely related to one another. I’ll spot my sibling $100 cash.  It’s basically the same thing but in a less dramatic way in such countries, but when other nationalities come in because of the aforementioned ethnostates’ welfare system, as seek to take advantage of it, the whole system gets messed up. Find me an ethnically diverse country with a social democracy.

I respond: Scott is right. Does the UK count as a multicultural country? If it does, it’s growing a nasty White racist – fascist party of reaction to the diversity in the BNP. Does Venezuela count? If Venezuela counts, I would say that Venezuela is a country riven with violence, tension and class war. There seems to be a racial angle, but in the upper class and upper middle class, it’s really more about class than race. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the oligarchy is much more light-skinned than the Underclass that supports Chavez. Is multicultural Russia a social democracy? Maybe so, but it’s riven from one end to the other with horrible racism. Do Communist states like China and Cuba count? Maybe so, but those countries, probably due to the class warfare (in the case of both) and combined class/race warfare (in the case of Cuba) inherent in their societies, needed full, bloody Communist revolutions to institute any kind of socialist system. Vietnam and Laos are multiethnic countries, but the Lao and the Vietnamese are the overwhelming majority. They also needed Communist revolutions to put in socialism. I would say Sri Lanka. They have a pretty good social democracy there, and the ruling party is a member of the Socialist International. There’s also a horribly vicious civil war going on, because that “socialist” party in power has never done much to help the Tamils. Socialist parties in Chile, Argentina and Brazil haven’t been able to get much done. In Chile and Argentina the problem is probably much more class than race. In Brazil, surely it’s both race and class together. The socialists in Ecuador and Bolivia are trying to get something done, but Bolivia is riven with a horrific class/race division and it’s almost civil war there. I don’t think that the socialist parties in Nicaragua and Guatemala will be able to get much done. Both nations had Leftist revolutions for decades, in the case of Nicaragua followed by a revolutionary government and more civil war, this time counterrevolutionary. Nicaragua was always more about class than race, but the oligarchy is light-skinned. In Guatemala, the situation is very much about both class and race riven together. One thing becomes clear in this analysis. The only way to peacefully vote in a socialist or social democratic government is to have a relatively homogeneous society. Typically a White society. As diversity and multiculturalism increases, even in White European countries, White racist/fascist groups rise up for various reasons and racial violence against minorities becomes common. In multiethnic or deeply class-riven nations (Note how often the two are conflated!), socialism, social democracy or movements towards them is typically accompanied by either outright civil war, de facto civil war, tremendous open class war in terms of coups, attempted coups, lockout strikes, riots, imperialist interventions, class-based separatist movements, and much violence. In other places, socialist governments are not able to get much done due to deep class and race-based conflicts and the threat of violence from dominant ethnics and/or classes. In other places, long civil wars eventually installed Communist regimes in multiethnic countries and ethnic conflict subsided or stopped. Short of installing a Communist regime, multiethnic countries moving towards socialism are likely to experience a lot of internal violence and chaos. If diversity is so bad for socialism, why do socialists in the West keep pushing it? Good question.

Conservatives Promote Stupidity, How and Why

In the comments, Matt astutely notes about Republicans’ willful promotion of stupidity:

Rob, You may remember how conservatives at one time were writing all those books about how l “liberal” education policies were making American children stoopid (Closing of the American Mind, Don’t Know Much About…, Cultural Literacy). Whether their idea of the causation was correct or not, they were right; Americans are stoopid. But you’ll notice they’ve mostly shut up about it. They must have figured out that the poorly educated and the willfully ignorant were their base.

Good point Matt. Of course that’s their base. Sure, a lot of people who vote Democrat aren’t very smart, but that’s just the way they are, and nothing can be done about it. Anyway, the Democratic Party in general is not hostile to science and does not promote complete and utter stupidity, except when they parrot GOP ideas and concepts. What’s funny is that I’m sure the guys running the GOP are very smart people. No doubt they are often very intellectual guys. But they willfully peddle Stupid Juice by tankload to the masses, and they know full well what they are doing. It’s disgusting, but there’s a method to their madness. If they could get people to vote rightwing by peddling intelligence, I’m sure they would do that instead. What’s disturbing is that conservatives have always promoted ignorance and stupidity everywhere they’ve been in power and at all times. The priests of the Middle Ages would not let the Bible be translated, because they didn’t want their flocks to learn to read. The Taliban burn down girls’ schools. The Nazis burned books. When Fujimori seized power in Peru, he shut down most of the nation’s universities as hotbeds of subversion. The army raided the universities, ransakcked them, tore them to pieces, raided libraries and destroyed all the books, on and on. The universities were later reopened, and students shuffled back to campus, appalled at their trashed schools. Funding for the universities was gutted, and the books in the libraries were never replaced. Curiously, Peruvian polls consistently show that a majority of Peruvians support Fujimori, so I guess Peruvians are even more retarded than Americans. At least we don’t send in the army to tear down UCLA and burn all the books in the library while the population cheers. Not yet anyway. I guess that’s in the future. A similar thing happened in El Salvador under rightwing rule. The universities were shuttered as hotbeds of subversion. Under Pinochet in Chile, funding for the public schools was gutted, and your average Chilean public school now is literally falling apart. The wealthy send their kids to public schools, so they don’t care. Not quite pro-stupidity, more like “we don’t want the masses educated.” The same happened in Argentina, where funding for the public schools was incredibly transferred to private schools, leaving the public schools tottering and and decrepit. This is essentially what the Right in the US wants to do with their vouchers scheme. The ruling elites have always feared that an educated population would figure out the rich people’s scam and cut off some of the loot or transfer some to themselves, so conservatives everywhere and at all times have attacked the education of the masses. The motto of conservatives is that the dumber the people are, the easier they will be for us to manipulate. I am ashamed to admit that the worst Communists who ever lived, the Khmer Rogue, deliberately targeted any urban person with an education. They often signaled out those who worse glasses for execution. One wonders how much the national IQ went down during Khmer Rogue rule. Mao executed intellectual dissidents during the 100 Flowers Campaign. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao shuttered universities and sent students to the work the fields with the peasants. The argument was that intellectual students were a privileged elite. Stalin’s purges in the 1930’s disproportionately targeted the intellectual leadership of various ethnicities who he distrusted. Otherwise, Communists have been some of the most pro-educational governments in the history of man, but we do have some shameful backsliding. Any time your government is mass imprisoning and/or executing the intellectuals of society, it seems to me that the state is engaging in some pretty retarded behavior. Here’s a plan! Let’s put all the smart people in prison! Better yet, let’s kill all the smart people! Duh. No better way to run your society into the ground.

Why America Sucks

All the voters are White. Of course the country is a reactionary nightmare.

As you can see, the overwhelming majority of US voters are White. It is US White voters and only US White voters who have sent America down the conservative and reactionary sewer pipe in the last 30 years. An operation that is yet ongoing, and that seems to be gaining quite a bit of steam. In the 2006 election, it was even worse. 7

The electorate also is overwhelmingly White.

The voter pool is also overwhelmingly White. So the argument that Blacks and Hispanics don’t turn out to vote is washed up. Even if they all turned out to vote, it wouldn’t matter much. It would only shift the electorate maybe -

As long as America is overwhelmingly White, it will be a terrifyingly reactionary and backwards place, the laughingstock of the Western World. There is nothing inherently reactionary about White people. In Europe, they are reliably socialist. Someone show me a reactionary and non-socialist country in Europe please? In New Zealand and Australia, Whites are quite socialist, whatever their limitations in recent days with the horror specter of Mr. Howard.

In Latin America, it is true, Whites are reactionary, extremely so. Even in Uruguay and Argentina, they are reactionary. But these countries also have a revolutionary White Left that in the past has given the White elites the bullets and bombs they so richly deserve.

Argentina today, though a reactionary and Third World mess like the rest of the continent, at least has a Leftist President. A real Leftist, not an Obama rightwinger. The Argentine elite is alarmed about the Communist takeover of Argentina, Commies being coded as “fascists,” and are openly calling for the return of the fascist dictatorship. Fascist Argentines bashing Left opponents as fascists while calling for the return of Argentine fascism. Typical fascist obfuscation and mind-warping.

They claim that Kirchner had Commie “brownshirts” in the streets who have taken over entire zones. The Commie Kirchner is supposedly trying to “censor the media” by breaking up the reactionary media monopolies that own nearly the entire media of the land. But why should the Right own 9

Media should be delineated democratically according to predilection. If 3

Uruguay elected a former Left wing guerrilla, but I’m not sure how much will change, as he is dedicated to following the neoliberal suicide model. Is Uruguay a more socialist state than the USA? An interesting question.

Costa Rica is a pretty socialist place, which is interesting since anti-Communist fools and liars always uphold Costa Rica on their social figures, comparing it to Cuba on the grounds that Cuba is not so hot. What these congenital liars don’t realize (Or maybe they do!) is that all of Costa Rica’s great figures are attributable to Costa Rican social democracy.

Those are the countries in which Whites are a majority.

In the rest of Latin America, Whites are a minority, and they are frighteningly conservative to reactionary. They have generally stayed in power through repression, fraud, imprisoning, assaulting, kidnapping, torturing and murdering the opposition. White elites have done this in most countries in the region: Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Mexico.

The implication is that Whites will only support any kind of socialism where they are a good, solid majority. They are only 6

The entire rightwing movement in the US for the last 30 years has been coming from Whites. Has it been coming from Hispanics? Of course not. Has it been coming from Blacks? Please. Has it been coming from Jews? Pull the other one. Has it been coming from Asians? Forget it.

So when you read that “the voters” are furious with Obama and support all sorts of reactionary monstrosities in opposition to him, it’s US Whites, and only US Whites, who are leading this Tea Party opposition wave to Obama. And much of it is undoubtedly racist, no matter how much they scream that it’s not.

US Whites, as a

The other day, my mother (smartest women on Earth) told me that in the lifetime of my brother and I, we will live to see the US become a more progressive country. If all goes according to plan, I will take off around 2035 or so. The reason for this, she said, is the decline of Whites.

White nationalists have told me that a declining White America will lead to a more progressive place. Their reasoning for this is curious, and doesn’t make much sense. One guy told me that as Whites decline further and further, they will get more and more radical. As they dip below 4

Will Hispanics, Blacks, Jews and Asians continue to be reliably progressive into the future? It’s an interesting question. Majority-Indian, mulatto and mestizo places like Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Panama are quite backwards and rightwing. A White minority in all places continues to rule to the detriment of everyone else. Usually they enforce their rule at gunpoint and often with deadly force. But they get the votes of mestizos, Indians and mulattos to do this.

In the Caribbean, Black and mulatto elites have treated their own people horribly. This is particularly the case in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Most of the Black Caribbean is not very socialist, with the exception of Cuba. But Dominica is an equitable country, and Trinidad and Tobago has a decent amount of socialism. Socialism was arrested in Jamaica with the US assault on Manley, a White socialist.

The record in Black Africa is not good in terms of socialism. North African Arab states are much more socialist than Black Africa. True, there is not much to divide in the first place, but still. Even Black African countries that have fallen into some money are still horribly rightwing. Gabon, a wealthy African country, has nightmarish levels of poverty, malnutrition, maternal mortality, child and infant mortality. Apparently, as has always been the case in Africa, a tiny Black elite has grabbed control over the economy for themselves and possibly their tribe and is locking out everyone else.

Given that mestizos, mulattos and Blacks have a poor record of setting up socialist systems in their own lands, one wonders just how socialist they will be here in the US as they grow in numbers. So far, they have been realiably socialist, but what will the future bring.

The model in mulatto, mestizo and Black countries is typically astounding gaps between the rich and the poor, horrifying levels of poverty, and often an enraged, militant and sometimes armed but cash-starved Left minority battling the elite for power. In these countries, poverty is a big deal, the opposite of the US. So there, all parties, from Right to Left, run on reducing poverty and fighting for the poor, with a few overtly fascist exceptions in Guatemala, El Salvador, (Honduras?) and Colombia and a strange overtly rightwing government in Chile, increasingly a US model state in Latin America.

The Right has the entire media spectrum. In Honduras, a 9

The ignorant mestizo, mulatto and Black electorate tends to vote for parties that often have progressive sounding names. In many cases, these parties are said to be overtly socialist parties. This is especially the case in the Caribbean, where almost every party has a socialist-sounding name. So down there, the Right calls themselves socialists, progressives and populists fighting for the poor while they implement reaction.

A similar dynamic is seen in Africa, where most parties have socialist-sounding names.

In other words, the US model of reactionary parties having open reactionary images, programs and politics is nonexistent in most of Latin America and Africa. No one would vote for it. In fact, it’s anathema in most of the world! It’s nearly nonexistent also in Arabia, South Asia, Europe, SE Asia and NE Asia. Turkey does have an overtly rightwing government.

Other than Turkey, show me one overtly reactionary party along the lines of the US Republican Party in power in any of these places.

One wonders if the model of the US reactionaries will change in the future with White decline. Will we see the rise of a backwards mestizo, mulatto or Black elite looking for votes possibly on an ethnic basis. Will we see the rise of fake populism and fake socialism, where the Right will operate rightwing parties with socialist and progressive sounding names campaigning on poverty reduction and helping the have-nots, to get the non-White vote? Will the Republican Party model of an openly and brazenly reactionary party become nonviable as non-Whites refuse to support it, according the model in the rest of the world?

A History of Social Contracts Around the World in the Last Century

Sometimes when there is a real threat from the Left, the Rich consent to a “social contract.” This has happened in numerous places. The US in the Depression, with the threat of Communism hanging over their heads..

Western Europe, once again with a threat of Communism.

It never happens without a serious threat though. The rich only give up stuff as a compromise to fend off something a whole lot worse.

In places like Latin America, social contracts are more or less impossible. Most of the 3rd World is like that. Social contracts usually only happen in more modernized states. The 3rd World is characterized by backwards elites that never give up anything at all without massive violence.

Mexican elites did give up stuff, but it took a horrible revolution that killed

Same thing in El Salvador. It took 70,000 dead to get the rich to compromise a bit.

They compromised in Costa Rica too in 1947, but I don’t understand why.

There was also a social contract under Peron in Argentina for reasons that are hard to figure.

It’s notable that both Argentina and Costa Rica are White. Social contracts are much more likely in White than in non-White countries.

Social contracts occurred in the Arab World because the Arab-Islamic World is socialism-friendly. They don’t like the idea of massive wealth accumulations and people with nothing to eat. Something about evolving in the desert I guess…

A social contract took place in Taiwan as a way to ward off Communism from China. Similar thing in Japan. Asians are sort of natural socialists too, like Arabs. They don’t like the idea of folks starving. Guess they’ve seen plenty enough of that.

In addition, those are collectivist cultures, possibly due to Buddhism. Radical free market capitalism won’t fly to well in a Buddhist society. The Buddha surely would not have approved of neoliberalism. It’s against everything he taught. There is another thing. These are homogeneous and extremely ethnocentric societies. If a Japanese person is starving or homeless, this strikes at the heart of every Japanese person, as he is automatically your brother on account of ethnicity. That man on the street under a pup tent may as well be your cousin.

Thailand is one of the few Asian countries that has avoided wealth redistribution. The rest – Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and China, did it with guns. The Thai Communists had a lot of support due to SE Asian culture, but they eventually quit. They were resurrected recently in the Red Shirt riots, which was a classic socialist movement led by many former Communist guerrillas.

The Philippines has avoided wealth redistribution due to a horrible Spanish colonial culture that turned it into Latin America in Asia. Nevertheless, there is a huge Communist insurgency going on.

The situation in Indonesia is awful for a Southeast Asian country, but they had a huge Communist movement that was massacred by the state and the CIA. 1 million people were killed in 1965 to put that down. As in Pakistan, Islam gets in the way of justice.

Social contracts have been impossible in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, probably due to Hindu culture with its caste system in which the poor feel that they are ordained by God to their place. Caste and vile Indian culture has cemented in feudal relations in the entire subcontinent, even in Islamic nations like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

Where wealth redistribution is prevented by peaceful means, as in South Asia, efforts shift to guns and bombs. The Nepalese Maoists have 4

Sub-Saharan Africa seems quite hopeless. Tribalism and worship of kings who steal it all and leave their subjects with crumbs mean that Africans apparently think it’s their lot to starve.

There is a militant redistributionist effort in South Africa though. Zimbabwe confiscated White farms. But in these places, the race factor was important. Africans won’t tolerate White grabbing it all and leaving them with crusts and heels, but apparently they let they don’t mind their own people doing it to them.

African tribalism is the worst. One tribe gets in power and tries to grab everything in the country and leave all the other tribes without a thing. The tribe in power thinks this is completely normal. Those out of power probably think it’s normal too. Those on the outside mostly plot to overthrow the tribe that’s in now so they can get in themselves and steal it all for their tribe. There’s little sense of justice in the continent. Everything is a zero-sum game.

Chinese Mafia in Argentina

Strange stuff.

I guess there are no wonderful races. Every race has its garbage and its gangster and banger types. Like most Asian mobs though, these idiots mostly prey on their own kind. Pretty much the same thing with Asian gangbangers in Fresno. There are Hmong, Lao, Vietnamese and Cambodian gangsters and the gangs are often mixed between one or more of these groups instead of being ethnically pure. They mostly just prey on their own kind or attack rival gang members. Most of the parents seriously hate it, unlike the Latrinos* in this area I live in, where their parents were probably bangers too.

*Well, there’s Blacks and niggers, Whites and White trash, so there’s got to be Latinos and Latrinos. I’m cool with that. Every race has its garbage. There are no great races. Most groups range from a little bit bad to incredibly and unbelievably bad. The lens of humanity is a prism, and the ranges are a spectrum, not black and White Manichean dualities.

The 13% Solution: A Modest Proposal?

In the comments, Abiezer Coppe proposes a unique solution to the “Black problem” in US society:

I’m a White integrationist. I’m for integration to the extent that I feel whites in White countries should marry blacks to the extent that the blacks die out as a separate entity. That’s a very blunt way of putting it. Whites would also die out as a separate entity. we’d have “mixité”, a genuinely mixed race society.

If I went to live in Senegal I would expect to learn Wolof and integrate, live by the values if the majority Black society, not hang out in a ghetto of ex-colonial White French people, marry a Senegalese Black girl, and have lovely coffee coloured children. Egalité, Fraternité, Mixité….

Of course in reality this racial mixing is totally impractical. I wouldn’t force it on anyone. A milder version on the integrationist approach is that Blacks integrate with the values of the majority. For this reason I accept the French position on making the wearing of the hijab in public illegal. Black French Muslim women have to abide by the secular values of the French White majority.

Black intermarriage would enrich the white gene pool. Imagine if the USA was mostly White people, but instead of 1

We would benefit from Black genes. Pure white people would also disappear. The more racial mixing the better. Mixed race people benefit from the strengths of both racial groups. That always been my view. So we’d all end a light shade of khaki, or slightly olive skinned. So what?

Black ghettos are a terrible thing in White countries. Any kind of racial segregation is. Brixton is partly Black ghetto. It can breed hatred, envy. To be honest I don’t really like living in all White city either. I’d prefer a mixture.

Leicester is a great city. I really like going there. It’s very vibrant culturally, and racial conflict seems to be minimal. But then it”s 3

On the question of differential and lower Black intellectual ability, and its inheritability, I remain agnostic because I haven’t seen the evidence.

The Blacks I’ve met have all been very bright – PhD types – with the exception of the Trinidadian woman friend I know, who isn’t intellectual at all. She’s affectionate and sexy as hell though. I would. She always has white boyfriends. She’s figured it out. She goes for White men because in her experience they (we) are more civilised and treat her better than her own kind.

She had two Black (one from Ghana, one from Trinidad) husbands before that. They both abused her and were violent. Anecdotal, I know…

Korean, Japanese and Chinese IQ is all ~108. Highest for any major racial group. Vietnamese IQ is quite high – ~102.5, probably due to Chinese admixture. (Both figures setting US White IQ at 103).

I’m not sure what to say about this except that it’s already been done in the Arab World in places like Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. The Berbers are precisely 1

Mexico and Argentina adopted a

Mexico also had a significant number of Blacks, mostly on the Caribbean Coast. Mexicans will tell you that they mysteriously vanished into thin air, but the truth is that the average Mexican nowadays is

White nationalists go ballistic at proposals like this, calling them White genocide. I’m not sure it matters. They also say that the breeding in would not be across the board, and that Colorism a la Brazil would replace racism.

Other WN’s would talk about severe damage to the White gene pool, especially the White IQ. It’s hard to say what the effects on White genes would be. I suspect that there might be a ~

Radical Blacks like the Abagond*-Ankheson Mie types would probably be furious and see this as Black genocide, but it would solve a lot of Black problems, albeit by making the group pretty much vanish.

*I hate to keep bringing up this guy’s name. Maybe I should call it the Abagondsphere. Suffice to say he’s not alone. There is a gigantic section of the Black blogosphere, including bloggers, commenters and readers, all linking to each other continuously, who sound just like this guy. Their whole playbook comes out of  Tim Wise Whiteness Studies Critical Race Theory stuff.

It’s hard to characterize them, but in general, these are educated, intelligent Blacks, often with good incomes. They often have a college education, and it’s not unusual for them to even have advanced degrees like Masters and PhD’s. They often make very good money. It’s almost like the more degrees they have and the more money they make, the angrier, whinier and more grudge-like and CRT-pitching they get.

As a good rule, you don’t hear regular Black people talk like this. I have Black neighbors all around me, and they know nothing of this nonsense. Your average working class type or even Underclass Black doesn’t think much about Whites. Here, they all hang out with Hispanics and Whites. If you’re nice to them, they’re nice to you. They hardly ever talk about White people. They see me wearing my Obama tshirt with my Obama bumper sticker and they run up to me and hug me.

Or they come up to me and talk about Tea Partiers. “You see these racist Tea Partiers? Can you believe that?” I’ll imitate Paul Mooney and say something like, “Yeah, fuck those crackers. Hell with those honkies. Those silly White people. They hatin’ on Obama. It’s all because he’s Black.” And they give me a high five.

They aren’t ingrates at all.

The Pakistan-Peruvian Axis, Part 2

I was listening to some music on the road today. For a long time, I thought I was listening to music from India. Normally, I hate that stuff, but this particular Indian music I could listen to. I got closer to town and now it sounded like Arab music. When I got into town, I started listening to the lyrics and I thought I heard Spanish words over and over. But it didn’t make sense. Spanish words with Arab or Indian music? Then now and then they would all say, “Ole!” like they were at a bullfight. Huh? Then the announcer came on. I was intrigued.

It was Miguel Agujetas, and the music was Flamenco music from Spain. I’ve never heard this music before. It’s the music of the Andalucian Gypsies, with roots in Gypsy, Moorish (North African), Byzantine (Middle Eastern Greek) and Sephardic (Mediterranean Jews) music. As you can see, there is a general Mediterranean and Middle Eastern or Arab flavor to this music. But the roots of Gypsy music are in music from India, so Indian culture has flowed into the Mediterranean region too through the Gypsies.

This is what I meant by the Pakistan-Peruvian Axis of Arabized peoples. The Andalucian Spaniards are an Arabized people. To the extent that Flamenco music is popular in Latin America (they play it in Southern Brazil and Argentina), these parts of Latin America are also Arabized. Keep in mind that this is the White part of Latin America, but with a heavy White Med flavor full of Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians and even Arabs. The flamenco music is from the Iberian element.

Linguistic Map of Latin America

Map of the major languages of Latin America

This is an interesting map, though on first thought it seems unnecessary.

First of all, it makes quite clear how Brazil stands out as the Portuguese speaking state in Latin America. One could argue that this makes them odd man out, but if we look in terms of population, Latin America has a population of 570 million. 192 million of those are Brazilians. So 3

All the Spanish-speaking countries can communicate well with each other, and there is a “neutral Spanish” that any educated person can use when conversing with any other educated person from Hispanophone Latin America. As long as you are doing this, you will both be understood.

Getting down to regional dialects, things do get complicated. I understand that Chilean soap operas, spoken in the rich dialect of the Chilean street, are dubbed in the rest of South America because other South Americans can’t understand Chilean street Spanish. But they are  probably well understood in Argentina. There does seem to be a “Southern Cone Street Spanish” that is harder to pick up as the latitudes move northward.

Bolivian Spanish sounds strange, but it’s probably intelligible in South America. It heavily inflected with Indian languages.

There is a general Caribbean Spanish that can be hard to understand.

The language of the Colombian Caribbean coast can be hard for even other Colombians to understand.

Dominican Spanish is notorious for being hard to understand. First of all, it seems to be based on Canarian Spanish of the Canary Islands, which is a very strange form of Spanish. Into this base went a ton of African words, much more than in the rest of Latin America. Further, it is spoken very fast. Dominican Spanish is pretty baffling to other Spanish speakers, at least for a while. Nevertheless, there is a more neutral form of Dominican Spanish that is widely intelligible to other Hispanophones.

On the streets of Mexico City, a very hardcore slang has emerged, sort of a Mexico City Street Spanish, that is pretty hard to figure out outside of Mexico.

Latin America is interesting in that the rest of the world seems to be learning “English as the universal language,” while Latin America is lagging behind.

I know quite a few educated Latin Americans who barely speak a lick of English. Latin Americans live not so much  in the society of the Western Hemisphere, but more particularly in the society of Latin America. And Latin America is extremely Hispanophone. Everywhere you go, most everyone speaks Spanish. Spanish is a very highly developed modern language with words for everything. Why bother to learn English? What for? To talk to gringos?

However, at advanced university levels, such as Master’s Degree and particularly doctorate level, increasingly there are requirements to learn English.

One would think that Mexicans at least would be required to take some English in school, right? Forget it. First of all, Mexican schools are crap, and they are broke. The elite and upper middle class steal all the money in the country, and the Libertarian/Republican dream minimal state/free market economy hosts horribly defunded and decrepit schools. It’s not uncommon to meet 20 year old Mexicans who dropped out in the 2nd grade.

English is typically not offered in Mexican public schools. It’s only offered in private schools, which is of course where the moneyed class above sends their kids, which is why they won’t pay for public schools (They don’t use ’em), which is why the public schools are crap. I’m sure many more non-Hispanic Americans in the US are taking Spanish than Latin Americans are studying English.

Hispanophones also often do not bother to learn Portuguese. Some of the educated ones claim they can understand it without studying it, but I doubt it.

A lot of Brazilians say they can understand Spanish pretty well (I think they study Spanish more than Hispanophone Latins study Portuguese), but when you start talking to them in Spanish (which I do on a regular basis) it doesn’t seem to work very well. Want to talk to a Brazilian? Learn Portuguese!

As we can see on the map, both French Guyana and Haiti speak French.

I was talking about Haiti with my liberal Democrat Mom once. The general conversation was along the lines that Haiti was all screwed up. She said, “Well, they’re all Black, they’re dirt poor, and worst of all, they’re in the Western Hemisphere, but they all speak French!” Indeed. What do these funny Frencophones think they’re doing in our Anglophone, Hispanophone and Lusophone Hemisphere anyway?

Further, the language of Haiti is not really intelligible to French speakers. It makes about as much sense as hardcore Jamaican English does to us. However, the Haitian elite often speaks good French. They also say they understand Spanish, but I’ve tried to talk to them in Spanish, and it didn’t go anywhere. Often they don’t understand much English either. Want to talk a member of the Haitian upper class? Learn French!

So the Haitians are rather isolated in this Hemisphere, but I’m not sure if your average dirt poor Haitian cares. I suppose they could always talk to the Quebecois, but no one understands Quebecois either.

French Guyana is also a French speaking country. It’s still a colony, and it has a very nice standard of living. Nowadays, colonies don’t even want to go free anymore, as it means a standard of living crash.

As you can see, British Honduras speaks English. There are some other English speaking islands in the Caribbean and some French speaking islands too, but none are marked on the map.

Dutch has pretty much died out in the Western Hemisphere, but it used to be spoken widely in Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean.

The main language of Guyana is probably some English creole, but it’s not shown on the map.

Indian languages are still very widely spoken in Peru (Quechua), Bolivia (Aymara) and Paraguay (Guarani).

More On Hugo Chavez and the Media

A commenter refers to this Guardian post on “Hugo Chavez the dictator.”

That article is a lie. The law that passed made the stations fill out a bunch of paperwork so they could be monitored better. Just routine bureaucratic stuff. Those opposition stations deliberately refused to fill out that paperwork, knowing full well that they would get shut down. They basically shut themselves down on purpose in order to make Chavez look like a dictator. I believe that most of those stations have been reinstated after they filled out their paperwork.

The “yanking the advertisements off the air” is not true. The law limits the stations to one ad break per 30 minutes. I’m not sure what the purpose of that is, but it applies to all stations, pro-government, anti- and neutral.

The part about “forcing them to carry Chavez speeches” isn’t really true. They do want all of the media to have to carry important government announcements. During the coup, for instance, the government was constantly sending out announcements regarding this or that, mostly in opposition to the coup. The Opposition media completely blocked out all government statements and showed soaps and sports nonstop instead. No one could figure out what was going on because the Opposition had all the media.

So, yeah, they have to carry some government statements, but not that many. If you think about it, every time Obama gives a speech, all the US stations are all over it, right? Including Fox? But down there, they just lock out all government statements like they don’t exist. That doesn’t seem fair or right.

The law that the MSM is complaining about so much is a pretty reasonable media responsibility law, similar to that in many countries. I believe it is almost identical to the law in Canada, for instance.

The draft law the piece referred to is troubling, but Chavez himself opposed it. It was the Chavista legislature that proposed that. The Attorney General’s statement was also disturbing, but the law never got passed anyway. You know, some dictatorship, the Chavistas can’t even pass their own laws!

I don’t agree with a lot of the government’s hard line on the media, and at times, I wish they would just blow the Opposition media off. I know they’re assholes, but so what? Let the dogs bark.

Globovision is still on the air 7 months after that article was written, but I think they are moving to cable.

On the regular airwaves, 2

The article is not correct that Venezuela is the worst in the Hemisphere. In Colombia, they just murder the Opposition media, so it frankly barely even exists. In Peru, there is a law called “apology for terrorism.” It’s used pretty broadly.

In Colombia, Peru, Chile, Panama, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, there is no opposition media that I’m aware of. The elite has almost the entire media spectrum. I’m not sure of the situation in Mexico, Ecuador, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay, but the elite seems to have most to all of the media in those places too. There is a Left media in Argentina, but it’s one daily paper. There is probably some Left media in Brazil, mostly newspapers. In Argentina and Brazil, the elite control TV. There is opposition media in Nicaragua from the Sandinistas.

So really, Venezuela is probably one of the few places in the Hemisphere, along with Nicaragua, Bolivia and Ecuador, where there is a ferocious and vibrant Opposition media at all. Keep in mind that the elite control the media in Latin America. They almost always control the state too, so in essence there’s never any opposition media in Latin America, except when a leftwing, anti-elite government comes in. Then the entire media spectrum of the nation lines up against the state. So the strange truth is that Venezuela has one of the loudest, most belligerent, most vibrant and most powerful opposition medias in the region.

Some dictatorship.

What Chavez is trying to do is to get away from the elite media model towards community radio and TV. He has been giving out licenses by the handful for community radio and TV stations. It’s true that most of these smaller stations support him, since most communities support him, but community stations in anti-Chavez regions have anti-Chavez community media. Even the Chavez-supporting community media is often extremely critical of the regime, when they feel that they are screwing up. Someone needs to keep the government on its toes.

What he’s doing is democratizing the media space, moving away from the typical model in capitalism where an elite, say the top

The “mounting economic problems” in Venezuela are due to the worldwide recession or depression that the US elite set off with their financial machinations and fraud. Venezuela is experiencing the same thing that everyone else is, it’s not Chavez’ fault. During Chavez’ term, the economy has grown like gangbusters.

The commenter also refers to this article to claim that “Hugo Chavez is a dictator.” This was the defeat of the proposed Constitution rewrite. There were good and bad aspects of it. The bit about censoring the media in a national emergency was an attempt to make sure the situation that occurred during the coup would not recur. I supported his bid to run for life. If Venezuelans want to keep re-electing him over and over, let them. That sounds like democracy to me.

I think the bit about seizing private property was for economic sabotage. A lot of the capitalist food producers are engaging in economic sabotage to try to bring down the regime, and it’s hard to figure out how to deal with them!

The inflation is occurring, or was occurring in 2007 at the time the article was written, due to an overheated economy that is growing too fast. You know, the same guy who is ruining the economy is also presiding over an economy that is growing so wildly it is getting inflationary? The “student opposition” is like the “student opposition to FARC” in Colombia. Rightwing students from moneyed classes are rallying at their expensive private universities. Yeah, some “student movement.” Just like the 60’s, huh?

The main thing is that Chavez’ constitutional reform was defeated. How is that a dictator puts his laws up for vote and the people vote them down? What kind of dictatorship is that? A lot of Chavistas voted against that law, and I don’t blame them.

I admit that Chavez bothers me at times with his polarizing rhetoric and bombastic blathering. The guy’s a demagogue, let’s face it. But so is Castro, so was Daniel Ortega, so was Juan Peron. Latin Americans love their caudillos and their demagogues.

Nepal’s Former Ambassador to U.S.: What About a Military Takeover?

This is a very interesting article written by Nepal’s Ambassador to the US. What he’s doing here is throwing out a trial balloon of a rightwing military coup in Nepal to overthrow the civilian government, followed by the inevitable death squad terror that always follows in such cases. Note that towards the end he mentions Pinochet, Suharto and Chung Park Hee. All ran far rightwing anti-Communist military dictatorships, all three came to power via military coups at a time of a threat or reality of a Communist or Leftist takeover of the article.

This is what capitalism always does, and in a way, the Leninists have a point, which is that the capitalists never allow any substantial challenge to their power to come about legally. If it does or even threatens to, there’s usually a military overthrow of the state followed by years of death squad terror aimed at decimating the Left for decades to come. It happened in Haiti, Chile, El Salvador, Uruguay, Guatemala, Argentina, Peru and Indonesia. They tried it in Venezuela recently.

You can forget about the parts towards the end where he talks about how a fascist coup followed by a death squad regime is the only way to eradicate poverty and bring about prosperity and opportunities. Those are the last things this guy wants, and these rightwing coups never bring about any of that. Fact is, they’re designed to prevent just those sorts of things.

The coup would need the support of both the US and India. I’m sure it would be forthcoming from both places.

What happened in Nepal is that there was a negotiated settlement to the Civil War there. As part of the settlement, there were elections which the Maoists won with 4

It would be as if the Head of the US Joint Chiefs refused to obey the Commander in Chief, then refused to step down when the President fired him. It was for all intents and purposes a military coup. It seems that India was involved up to their mitts in this. Then the Maoist President simply resigned, as the rule of civilian control of the state was being violated.

As you can see below, the Ambassador chides the whole notion of “civilian rule.” Apparently he thinks it’s a bad idea. Since then, I’m not sure what’s been going on on the ground in Nepal, except the Maoists have been involved in a lot of protests up and down the country, and yes, they have recently declared a few new states.

All in all, this is a pretty ominous proposal the Ambassador is tossing out there.

The original appeared here. La Republica is apparently the voice of the rightwing and business community in Nepal, best as I can tell.

Getting Out Of The Quagmire

by Sukhdev Shah

(Shah is Nepal’s ambassador to the U.S. He worked for the International Monetary Fund for two decades and is a U.S. citizen.)

As things have evolved over the past three years, Nepal has become a fertile ground for a military takeover of the government, independently or under the shadow of a constitutional authority.

Such a possibility has been talked about in a limited circle but been forced open by a delegation of some Nepali Congress (NC) leaders who recently urged President Ram Baran Yadav to consider imposing President’s Rule to help restore peace and enable the Constituent Assembly (CA) to complete writing the constitution before the expiry of deadline in five months. This is not an incredible or inappropriate suggestion, considering the marathon obstructions staged by Maoists to prevent the CA to open for business and carry out its mandate.

Even after losing the control of government in May this year over the enigmatic issue of civilian supremacy, Maoists have not softened their stance on the president’s action that re-instated the ex-army chief after his firing by the then Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal. In order to further press on this issue, Maoists have announced formation of autonomous states in several parts of the country in defiance of the wishes of government, which also seems to challenge the constitution- making authority of CA.

By doing so – unilaterally deciding to divide up the country into ethnic enclaves – Maoists have started the process of a slow dissolution of the State which they eventually would turn into an all-powerful proletarian dictatorship, making the country a one-party State. This particular perception of Maoists’ ultimate objective and long-term planning is not based on fancy or conjecture but comes straight out of their public declarations that claim the virtues of `fusion’ of ideologies and role of peoples’ war – jana yudhha – as means to capturing the State power.

The Maoist strategy of declaring autonomous states is probably the shrewdest means adopted until now to undercut the legitimacy of Maoist-version of a bourgeoisie State and assert people’s power under its own leadership. And this strategy would be highly appealing for the grassroots, who have had no great admiration for all-powerful Kathmandu-based governments doing the dictates of generations of family dynasties and self-serving corrupt politicians.

With the promises of self-rule allowed to ethnic majorities under the autonomous state system, ordinary people can see the benefits of localization of government authority, with a chance of liberating themselves from the tyrannies of centrist authoritarian rule.

Facing the challenge

Needless to say, government is at a loss on how to face up to the Maoist new challenge. The easiest course of action will be to ignore it – let them disrupt house-sitting, demonstrate on the street, put-up road blocks, spread anarchy, and declare more autonomous states, which can be viewed as no more than a symbolic defiance. However, by ignoring such threats to its authority, the government in power is unlikely to generate confidence and win sympathies, or hope that current impasse is going to end quietly and uneventfully.

If Maoists continue with its present strategy of making the central government look irrelevant, indifferent, and detached from the basic functions of the State, there will be no need for them to make a forceful entry into the capital to capture power. This will come to them naturally and effortlessly – from the growing irrelevance of government at the center, aided by gradual shift of state functions to regional, autonomous states.

There should be nothing wrong with the slow dissolution and eventual disappearance of the traditional State and its replacement by a grassroots entity that is built-up from grounds up. Indeed, by forcing the dissolution of the State, Maoists would be making a bloodless coup, which would be entirely legitimate in an environment of deepening conflict, lack of direction, heightened uncertainty, and loss of control over critical government functions.

There is not much that the Maoist-less current coalition government can do to stop or even slowdown the country moving in this direction except if it chooses to force-stop the process by making a last-ditch effort and take one extreme measure, similar to the one advocated by NC leaders noted above – presidential rule backed by the army.

Given the limited options the current government has in outsmarting the Maoists, it may be attracted to do just that and the army would, most likely, choose to go along. The army’s willingness to comply with such an option can be argued in two ways, the first being that it never got to use its full force to suppress Maoist rebels during their decade-old insurgency.

Reportedly, the army was held back by palace orders, which had to come to think of Maoist challenge more as a counter to political parties than a threat to itself. Second, by making civilian supremacy a battle-cry, Maoists, once in power, will seek a quick dissolution of the army, which they view as the last hurdle on the road to complete victory.

Maoists have been in sort of an undeclared war with the army for sometime now but it is becoming increasingly certain that the army will not just sit back and surrender. Rather, it may be getting ready for a showdown and final war with the Maoists – an opportunity it was looking for during king’s regime but was repeatedly denied. Army’s willingness to face up to the Maoists will be strengthened if its actions are given the legitimacy of enforcing presidential rule, which is allowed under the constitution.

A discouraging outlook

There are many ways in which the current conflict can get resolved and the much-lauded peace effort moved towards its logical conclusion – which is to get an agreement on the constitution, hold broad-based election, and usher in an era of constitutional rule that upholds people’s sovereignty. However, the outlook for consensus building and restoration of normal conditions appear increasingly dim, even non-existent.

The main reason for pessimism is that communism generally, and Maoism in particular, is now a ground reality in the country, reflecting not as much the smartness of ideology Maoists have brought to bear upon the population but the utter incompetence, lack of vision, and unabashed dishonesty of the regimes that have governed Nepal for decades and centuries.

In particular, all of them have failed to create glue that binds people together, encourage them to pursue a common goal, and motivate them to work for a better future, for themselves and their children.

The Maoists have taken advantage of this vacuum by creating grassroots organizations to bring the people together, partly by the force of their ideology but mostly by aligning people against the hereditary and traditional interests.

Of course, the record of nine-month rule by Maoists has caused much disappointment and helped cool down enthusiasm for its long-term sustainability but they continue to remain in public consciousness as the last hope for people who consider themselves dispossessed and have not much to lose from serious anarchy and breakdown of the law and order. At least one half of the country’s population would fit this category who seem united backing up Maoists’ intention of winning over and destroying the bourgeoisie democracy.

Presidential rule or army takeover can eliminate some Maoists and subdue their backers but it will be incapable of winning the ideological war. At the same time, if the ideologically- hardened comrades in hundreds of thousands face up to the army onslaught and engage them in running battles, the situation can easily get out of hand and millions will flee to take shelter across the border in India.

It is difficult to predict how India will respond to the emergence of calamitous situation across its 800-kilometer open border with Nepal, but it is hard to think that it will do nothing. Most likely, it will commit itself actively to prevent the spread of violence, including the stationing of its own peace-keeping force to keep order. Of course, such a move will have unknown consequences for Nepal’s separate and independent existence.

There is little or nothing to take a bet on how the events are going to unfold over the coming months and years, but the present cat-and-mouse maneuverings by political parties and Maoists are likely to move the conflict to center-stage for a showdown. If this comes to pass, army will have a greater chance of claiming victory, provided that the conflict involves mostly the leadership on the top.

Another big uncertainty is if Nepal has the good fortune of some strongmen rising to the occasion – the likes of Korea’s Park Chung-Hee, Chile’s Pinochet, Indonesia’s Suharto – to take up the challenge of suppressing dissent and mobilizing the machinery of the State to focus on only one mission: Building a strong and prosperous nation.

With so many options tried over so many years to eradicate poverty and catch-up on the bandwagon of growth, opportunities and prosperity, this last option may just have a chance to succeed.

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

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

Whites In Latin America

Updated June 25, 2014. This article is 64 pages long, so be warned. I’ve been reading a lot about this issue because I find it fascinating. Of course the media is going to feed you a lot of crap, nonsense and lies about this situation, so where do we go to really learn about it? Maybe I should ask some Latin Americans? That isn’t going to work. Most of the Latin Americans I have met are from the middle and upper classes, and almost all of them insist that there is no racism in their particular country. That sounds dubious! So, where shall we go to get the straight-up ugly truth? No better place than Stormfront, the home of Nazi White nationalist maniacs! True, they are not very nice people, but I figured that if there were any Latin Americans on there, they would definitely tell it like it is. Indeed there is a Latin American forum on Stormfront, and it is populated by lots of Latin American Whites. I learned a lot there, reading probably over 1,200 pages over a few days, but I’m not going to link to any of the comments because why link to Stormfront? The truth will be very depressing to White nationalists, and it surely destroys some of their cherished myths. One of them is that racial separatism is possible. Apparently it is not. Another is that as a White population shrinks, separatism becomes more of an urgent reality for a larger number of Whites. The truth, as we see in Latin America, is quite the opposite. As the White population shrinks down below 5 First of all, many or probably most White nationalist types in the US are Nordicist idiots who think that Latin American Whites are not “pure Whites.” Regardless of the truth of this, Latin American Whites have a more lax view of Whiteness. To them, if you have White ancestry, and if you look White and you act White, you are White. This strikes me as very reasonable. During colonial times, children of a criollo (pure Spaniard, or White) and a castizo (1/4 Indian, 3/4 White) was considered to be criollo, or White. This person would have been 1 The Latin American system classes all European Meds as White: Portuguese, Spaniards, Italians, Romanians, Greeks and Yugoslavs. Also, White Arabs, especially Lebanese and Syrian Christians, are also considered White. Latin American Whites also consider Armenians and Georgians to be White.

Penelope Cruz is a classic Med beauty, and she's in completely White. Cruz is born in Spain. This is pretty much a class White Latin American phenotype.
Penelope Cruz is a classic Med beauty, and she’s completely White. Cruz is born in Spain. This is pretty much an upper class White Latin American phenotype.
How many Whites are there in Latin America? That’s a very interesting question. Many figures are tossed about. I figure the best figure is around 170 million+ Whites in Latin America. What was interesting on the forum is the way that they described Latin American Whites. According to them, the average White down there is very, very racist in US terms. In Argentina, the general belief is that they are White and not a part of the rest of Latin America as a result, and there is open contempt, at least in private, for mestizos and mulattos*, not to mention Indians. The general belief, contrary to the US, is that dark = ugly. Indians are ugly, Whites are beautiful. Latin American Whites do not necessarily despise mestizos, though some certainly do, and this feeling is more pronounced in some countries than in others. In many cases, Whites do not dislike mestizos of the same social class. However, the contempt for Indians is a hallmark of the mindset of Latin American Whites pretty much across the board. In the US, the feeling is quite the opposite. Indians are not regarded as ugly, and Indian women have long been fetishized by White men as sex objects. Indian men are not seen as ugly either. We pretty much like Indians here in the US. Similarly, Whiteness is highly prized all over Latin America in both Whites and non-Whites, whereas in the US, many Hispanics, typically Chicanos, get angry if you suggest that they are White or part-White. This is seen as an insult to them. In Latin America, Indians are widely despised by Whites, there is no way of getting around that obvious fact, and no amount of denial and lying will make it go away. Let us look at Mexico. It is a common Mexican lie that there is no racism in Mexico. This lie is usually perpetrated by mestizos and Whites. I doubt many Indians would tell you that. Among the Mexican upper class, with the males at least, there is once again a belief that Indian women are ugly. Nevertheless, Mexican politics means that most Mexican Whites say they are mestizos, deny their Whiteness, and hate the US. These are traditions of Mexican society. Mexico decided a while back to deal with the race issue by formulating a lie that said that every Mexican was a mestizo, and that’s that. That lie is called mestizaje, and it is said to be the essence of Mexicanness. There is another lie about Mexican society, this one about Blacks. A friend went on a tour of Mexico and was informed that the large Black population had simply disappeared. The truth is that they were “bred out.” They were bred into the population so heavily that the average mestizo now is Denial of Whiteness goes along with mestizaje . Hatred of the US (the gringos), is part of Mexican culture for a long time now. These same Mexicans, who deny their Whiteness, insist they are mestizos and hate the gringos, the men anyway will have nothing to do with a woman that is pure Indian or maybe mostly Indian. On the other hand, they date, sleep with and gladly breed with mestizos, especially the lighter ones. They will often deny this by saying that the mestiza is White like they are, or not like the household help, or whatever. These same Mexican Whites are also very happy to have mestizos and Indians moving into the Whiter parts of Mexico, as this means more low wage labor and more customers to buy their stuff. White consciousness in Mexico is essentially about zero. The same White Mexicans who will insist that they are mestizos and not White will get angry if you call them indio. Indio is a big insult to any White Mexican. Nevertheless, there is little overt racism in Mexico between mestizos and Whites, perhaps due to the homogenizing effect of mestizaje. However, there is some discrimination in employment to the extent that lighter skin makes it easier to get a good job than darker skin. Light skin, eyes and hair are valued traits, but they are not necessary to get along in society. However, there is considerable racism against Indians. In addition, most White and mestizo Mexicans have a deep and abiding hatred for Blacks, whom they call pinche mayates (fucking niggers). In recent years, the number of White Mexicans marrying mestizos has been very high. In Mexico,  mestizos often want to marry White according to the tradition of mejorando la raza, literally, “improving the race.” Mestizo men are said to have an extreme fetish for blonde White women. It is true that if you watch Mexican TV, you might think Mexico is 9 The history of White Mexico is quite interesting. Forum posters say that Mexico was around 3 What’s happened since then is more and more breeding with mestizos and possibly even Indians, such that the percentage of White Mexicans is now about There are up to 10 million Whites in Mexico. Areas of Mexico that were 9 Historically and to this day, most of the Whites lived in the northeast, but they are also scattered throughout the country. Nuevo León in the northeast used to be overwhelmingly White until a vast migration of Indians and mestizos from the South swamped it. Afterward, very heavy mixing occurred, and Nuevo León is no longer a White state. Most of the Whites in Nuevo León live in the large city of San Pedro.
Monterrey, a large city in the economic powerhouse state of Nuevo Leon. Monterrey is a mostly non-White city now; Whites only live in a few sections.
Monterrey, a large city in the economic powerhouse state of Nuevo Leon. Monterrey is a mostly non-White city now; Whites only live in a few sections.
But there are still small towns in the mountains of Nuevo León which are, bizarrely enough, all-White towns. Many people in these towns have blond hair and blue eyes. The original plan for Nuevo León was to create a separate Spanish colony, separate from New Spain, but it never came to fruition. This state is prosperous and plays a very important role in the Mexican economy.
A player for the Mexican team Los Tigres. Although very dark skinned, he would probably be considered a Mestizo in Mexican society due to the concept of social race. If you are heavily Indian but don't speak an Indian language or live an Indian lifestyle, you are automatically mestizo.
A player for the Mexican team Los Tigres. Although a very dark skinned Indian, he would probably be considered a Mestizo in Mexican society due to the concept of social race. If you are heavily Indian but don’t speak an Indian language or live an Indian lifestyle, you are automatically mestizo.
According to posters, along with the claim that Mexico was 4 With Mexican-Americans, things are a bit different. I have seen very White Hispanics who act angry if you tell them they look White. Many of them do not even realize that Hispanics are mixed with White and Indian. The levels of White-hatred among US Hispanics seems to be quite high, probably as a result of US culture. Within the Chicano community, some Whiter Chicanos complain of a lot of mistreatment, often due to envy. Costa Rica is a very interesting case, and the Nevertheless, this population had become much less White during colonization, since the Spaniards brought few women with them. Most male Indians were either killed or exported to Peru. Hence, the colonists bred with Indian women. This continued all through the 1500’s and 1600’s. Later on there was an input of Black slaves from Jamaica. By independence, these people were about 5 The Central Valley region, where Whites initially settled, is still as White as Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and Antioquia in Colombia, two heavily-White enclaves in Latin America. This region may be 9 After independence, the government had a policy of importing White workers from Europe, and this continued until about 1950 or so. This resulted in mass breeding with the original Costa Ricans, hence the original group became lighter over time. This is why Costa Rica traditionally has been such a White place. As late as 1960, Costa Rica was probably 9 However, in recent years, a large influx of mestizo illegal immigrants from Nicaragua, Colombia and other places has come into the country. There are 4 million native Costa Ricans in the country, but there are also 1.5 million Nicaraguans and 1.3 million Colombians. 9 The Colombians are regarded as “the Jews of Costa Rica” in that, once they go into a business sector, they tend to quickly dominate it. Hence, Colombians are somewhat resented in Costa Rica.  Downtown San Jose now looks like Mexico City. Crime has risen along with the mass illegal immigration. In addition, on the Caribbean Coast, there are now many Jamaican Blacks, possibly also illegal immigrants. In coastal cities, people tend to be mixed-race. In the inland cities, most people are White. In recent decades, many mestizos have appeared among native Costa Ricans, as the Whites there are starting to breed in with mestizos. In some places, a majority of Whites are now married to mestizos. Nevertheless, the upper class is still overwhelmingly White, as this photo set of Costa Rican Presidents shows. And Costa Rica is still a mostly-White country. The population is 7 Costa Rican Whites are quite racist and openly dislike Indians and Blacks, in keeping with the Latin American standard. They have fewer problems with mestizos, unless the person is a heavily-Indian mestizo. A sort of Latin American version of PC nonsense along the lines of Mexico’s mestizaje has recently become de rigeour in Costa Rica. The notion is, “We are all White.” In addition, the usual anti-White nonsense history familiar to any American is now taught at all high schools. Most Whites are drinking the Nonsense Koolaid, and White consciousness is now very low. Honduras has the tiniest White population in Latin America; only At some point, this group become seriously inbred, and many of them migrated to the US in order to spread out and ameliorate their genetic issues. The situation of Cuban Whites is also very interesting. Cuba was an 7 Hence, at the time of the Revolution, 8 The rest included 1 There was little breeding between Whites and Blacks because Cuba was a very racist society, something the anti-Castro Cubans deny. Part of the reason for this was high White race consciousness in Cuban Whites. Another aspect was that breeding with Blacks would be like breeding with your former slaves, as many White Cubans were slaveholders. This was seen as insulting and degrading to Whites. After Castro, most of the Whites took off, and they keep on leaving. Cuba is now 3 Cuban Whites go back to Cuba now and say that their beautiful White homes are now inhabited by Blacks and mulattos, and this infuriates them. They insist that after Castro, they are going to go back and take over all their White property from the Blacks and mulattos. This is probably a fantasy. As you can see, there is a heavy racist element in the whole anti-Castro movement. Cuban-Americans were described as still very racist, and most want nothing to do with Blacks or mulattos at all. In South Florida, you will rarely if ever see a White Cuban-American woman with a Black man. It is just not done. Further, there is a lot of housing discrimination in Miami as racist Cuban Whites refuse to rent to mestizos or mulattos. The situation in the Dominican Republic was described as dire. Posters said that maybe 1
Problems with the classification: In the DR, Dominicans like this are considered to be White. These people are more accurately classed as light mulattos.
Problems with the classification: In the DR, Dominicans like this are considered to be White. These people are more accurately classed as light mulattos.
The DR has always been a much darker place than Cuba or Puerto Rico. Dominicans have long looked down on Haitians as Blacks, and most Dominicans will tell you they are mulattos no matter how much Black they have in them. In part, this is a way of distinguishing themselves from Haitians. Soon after the Haitian Revolution in 1804, Haitians invaded the Dominican Republic. The Haitians quickly turned this into a nonstop rape-athon of the Dominican women. Anyone who was lighter-skinned such as Whites and mulattos was quickly killed, and the Dominican Blacks were enslaved by the Haitians. That is why to this day, Dominicans hate Haitians so much, over 200 years later. Most remaining DR Whites are in the areas of Santo Domingo, the capital, and Cibao and Bani. These were tobacco-growing regions, and tobacco did not need huge armies of slaves to work on it. Hence, tobacco growers were often small landowners. The lack of slaves meant that there was much less interbreeding between Whites and Blacks. The situation in Puerto Rico was very confusing, although it seemed as if maybe the population is 6 Some White Puerto Ricans in the US are race-conscious. Even in the US, it is not common for a White Puerto Rican woman to date a Black man. However, in Puerto Rico, things are different. A number of non-Whites try to marry White in a mejorando la raza gambit. Kinky African hair is devalued as pelo malo or “bad hair.” Many Puerto Rican Whites are quite racist by US standards. Slurs and jokes about Blacks are commonplace. There was racial apartheid in Puerto Rico until 1898. Until that time, Blacks were not allowed to own businesses or be doctors, lawyers or engineers. Up until the 1960’s, banks would not hire Blacks, and Blacks were not allowed into some clubs. Since the 1960’s, salsa music has been promoted. Most Whites dislike this “African” music and want nothing to do with it, but it is extremely popular with Blacks and mulattos. Upper middle class areas are 9 There is a serious illegal immigration problem consisting of Blacks and darker mulattos from the Dominican Republic. White Puerto Ricans have a very dim view of the US Puerto Rican community, whom they generally describe as “trash.” They say most of them are Blacks and mulattos and act worse than the non-Whites on the island. White Puerto Ricans usually do not live in Puerto Rican enclaves in the US and instead tend to be spread out. Unbelievably, there is even a tiny number of Whites in Haiti of all places. Haiti is 9 The original Whites were massacred in 1804 during a rebellion led by a Black named Desallines. Almost all 25,000 of the White slaveholders and their families were killed in the uprising, which ended slavery in Haiti once and for all. Considering the Whites were slaveowners, as a revolutionary I support Desallines’ Rebellion, but they should not have killed minors or mentally disabled Whites. There was one case where they killed a screaming crazy White woman who was well-known to be mentally ill. Some of the Blacks wanted to save her, but the mob had their way. The rebellion also ended colonialism in Haiti. With 25,000 Frenchmen dead, France said goodbye and good luck to the colony. France has been furious at Haiti ever since. After the Whites were either killed or left in 1804, the place quickly fell apart, and the Blacks begged the Whites to return. Some Whites did return, but in 1805, a Black leader ordered all of the Whites to be tortured to death. It’s hard to believe, but one of the big vote-getters in one of the recent fake elections in Haiti was a White man named Charles Baker (photo). The rest of the Caribbean has very few Whites left, and those that remain, posters on the forum report, have very much of a siege mentality. Barbados ( There is also a group of very light-skinned mulattos in the Caribbean – especially in the Grenadines and St. Kitts – who see themselves as White or near-White. They refuse to marry Blacks and will only marry “high yellows”, “redbones” or “Portagees.” I assume that those are words for very light-skinned mulattos. Some even have White features like green eyes. In Barbados, the Grenadines and St. Kitts, there also remain small White communities who seldom intermarry. They only marry White out of tradition. Along with this is a refusal to date or even socialize with Blacks and mulattos. For this, they have long been accused of racism. The Bahamas has a St. Barts, unbelievably, is a 3 Martinique is Jamaica is only .0 The Cayman Islands still have quite a few Whites (1 All through the Caribbean, the White birth rate is low, about the same as in the US. The birth rate for the Blacks and mulattos is much higher. Although White communities are hanging on in the Caribbean, posters acknowledge that they are “culturally Africanized” to some degree due to living near Blacks for so many years. Colombia has a large White population estimated at around 2 Antioquia Province is one of the Whitest places in Latin America along with Southern Brazil and Costa Rica’s Central Valley. This region is 8 The capital of Antioquia is Medellin, and this is also a very White city, but recently many Blacks, mulattos and Indians have been moving to the city from other parts of Colombia, so it is not as White as it used to be. Manizales is another majority-White city. The Whites are mostly Spaniards, but curiously, in Barranquilla and Santander, there are many Germans. Colombia received a very large input of Black slaves. There is a lot of racism in employment here, and the dumb blonde gets the job over the competent Black with a degree. Everything here is all about appearances both genetic and personal – your height, weight, clothing – and above all else, social class. Other than that, some say that race relations are generally pretty good, keeping with the trend in the most heavily mixed Latin American countries such as Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil. However, others say that racism is still a very serious problem in Colombia. 30 years ago, it was not uncommon to see signs in Colombia saying saying, “House For Rent. No Blacks.” To this day, it is very common for Afro-Colombians to be turned away from upscale establishments on account of their color. Whites are about 2 There is a vast population of Blacks, mulattos and zambos. (Zambos are mixed Black-Indians) in the country, especially in certain areas. Venezuela also received a large number of Black slaves. Ecuador is a profoundly racist society, as you often see in South American countries where the White Similar to how it was in the Jim Crow South, non-Whites are not allowed to eat in White restaurants, or if they are, they must use a separate set of dishes. Whites often wash their faces and hands after dealing with a non-White, as if they had been dirtied. Official figures show that Ecuador is 6 The racial history of Ecuador is pretty nasty. Slavery lasted in various odd forms all the way until 1930, and de facto White rule was ongoing until the 1970’s. Non-Whites were not allowed to have any significant government or military posts until that time. In the 1970’s, a progressive regime allowed non-Whites into the officer corps. The nation is very racially stratified, and Whites, Blacks, mulattos, mestizos and Indians all pretty much marry their own. From 1809 to 1905, Chinese and Jews were banned from entering Ecuador, and there was something resembling an actual racial apartheid structure in place. In the early 1900’s, a progressive mestizo president came aboard and initiated a series of major changes. At the time, the White population was 3 In the 1920’s, a significant wave of German immigration came to the country. Presently, Germans make up the largest One would think that there would be hardly any Whites in a country like Peru, yet 1 This gives us 3.5 million Whites in Peru. The rest of the population is 4 Peru is an incredibly racist society, and Lima is regarded as the most racist city in Latin America. If a mestizo or Indian stops a White on the street of Lima and asks directions, the White will usually refuse to speak to them. The Whites there have the attitude, “We don’t even talk to these people”, who they refer to as cholos. Even mestizos experience a lot of racial discrimination, and this experience was one of the reasons so many young Peruvian mestizos became cadres in Sendero Luminoso. My perception is that the average Peruvian mestizo has a lot of Indian blood, possibly even mostly or pure Indian. Social race is rampant here, and if you take off your Indian clothes, move out of the village to a big city and quit speaking Quechua, you can automagically transform yourself into a mestizo. Many light or upper class mestizos identify as White and desperately want to be White, and many are admitted into White social circles. A lot of these people have high levels of cognitive dissonance. You may hear an obviously mestizo upper middle class mestizo point to a lower class mestizo as dark as they are and curse the “cholo de mierda” (shitty cholo). Posters said that the rest of the mestizos who are not trying to identify as Whites really hate Whites and don’t try to hide it at all. Race relations in Peru appear to be catastrophic. Although official figures put the number of Whites in Bolivia at 1 The Indians were said to have a grudge against the Whites going back centuries to the Conquest. Posters said that the Indians consider the whole country theirs, hate everyone who is not Indian and want to throw all non-Whites out of the country. Whites have traditionally tried to marry only other Whites, but lately some young Whites are starting to date Indians and Blacks, much to the consternation of their more traditional relatives. Whites do not really hate mestizos, though out of tradition, they do not date or marry them. Furthermore, the mestizos often hate the Indians just as much as the Whites do. Posters described White Bolivians as living in fear. Expressions of White ethnocentrism invite attacks, robberies and even homicides, so Whites tend to keep their heads down. The feeling among Bolivian Whites is that they are losing their country. Many White Bolivians are taking off, often migrating to Southern Brazil. About 5 The official figures showing 5 The reason the government number is higher is because it relies in self-report, and many Brazilians who are light-skinned but not really White see themselves as White and identify as White. The rest are Blacks, mulattos, Indians, caboclos (mestizos) and zambos. Something like 4 Census figures say only about This means that Brazil has a Black and part-Black population of 3
A typical Brazilian mulatto. Although he is a player on the Argentine soccer team Boca Juniors, his parents were Brazilians.
A typical Brazilian mulatto. Although he is a player on the Argentine soccer team Boca Juniors, his parents were Brazilians.
About 1 A tiny . There are possibly 96 million Whites in Brazil, meaning that Brazil has one of the largest White populations in the world. The stunning truth is that Brazil has more Whites than most European countries. If Brazil’s Whites were a country, it would be one of the largest White countries on Earth. Southeastern Brazil is still very White, especially Rio Grande do Sul. The three southern states – Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná and Santa Catarina – are the Whitest ones; in addition, the state of São Paolo is still majority White, but it is much less White than the southern states. São Paolo used to be overwhelmingly White, but lately it has been flooded with non-Whites from the northeast and other areas. The city of São Paolo now is heavily non-White (7 A recent government survey found that the South is 8 In Rio Grande do Sul, Blacks and mulattos are concentrated in the southern part of the state near the Argentine border. In Parana, they live near the Paraguayan border.
The South of Brazil, an extremely White part of Latin America
The South of Brazil, an extremely White part of Latin America
The Whites are mostly Germans and Italians (7 French, Poles, Dutch, Ukrainians, Swedes, Belgians, Croatians, Lithuanians, Jews, Russians, Romanians, Lebanese and Syrians are a yet smaller sector. West of Curitiba there are 10 The White South has its roots in history. There were few Indians in this part of Brazil for some reason, so they were easily overrun and routed. The main industry of the South has always been cattle ranching, and there is no need to import Black slaves for that. Further, there were few of the plantations that characterized the North. This is also one of the wealthiest regions of the country. The An Argentine female sports team. How White can you get?
An Argentine female sports team. How White can you get?
The largest White group are Italians at 6 German and Irish Argentines mostly segregate themselves from those of Spanish and Italian descent, but many Argentines are some mixture of German, Spanish and Italian anyway. There is a certain amount of German supremacist Nordicism in the German community along with very high levels of support for Nazism.
Argentine soccer player Ortega. Spanish descent.
Argentine soccer player Ortega. Spanish descent with small Indian admixture.
Only about There was a large Black population in the 1800’s in Buenos Aires, but they seem to have vanished into thin air. Argentine legend says they fled the country due to persistent discrimination, but that seems a little dubious. They were probably just bred into the population, and the Argentine gene pool is now Since the 1990’s, there has been a huge illegal immigrant invasion of mestizos and Indians from Bolivia (by far the largest group), Peru, Paraguay and Chile. There are other immigrants coming in from Asia, mostly Korea but also some from China. Immigrants, almost all mestizos and Indians, are continuing to pour into Argentina at the rate of 200,000/yr. The government does nothing to stop it, and recently gave citizenship to millions of mestizos and Indians from Bolivia. The illegals from Bolivia and Peru are regarded by White Argentines as troublesome people who commit a lot of crime, engage in street protests and riots, and have no interest in assimilating. In addition, the heavily-Indian illegals from Peru and Bolivia have an extremely high birthrate in Argentina of 6+ children per woman. The girls start getting pregnant at age 14-15. On the other hand, White Argentine women are only having 1-2 kids at most. The posters were complaining about this and saying that the non-White immigration situation in Argentina was far worse than in the US and that in 20-30 years from now, White Argentina may be just a memory. Posters said that White Argentines were very racist at least in US terms. Most were said to be sympathetic to Nazism and fascism, and this is why so many Nazis fled to this area after World War 2. However, the fascist military dictatorship, which flaunted Nazi imagery, nostalgia and anti-Semitism, pretty much ruined things in terms of overt White consciousness in the country. To be strongly pro-White now is to be a Nazi or pro-dictatorship, and this is not acceptable in polite society since the dictatorship was so unpopular. There is also still an extremely high level of anti-Semitism in Argentina, at least as compared to the US. White Argentines complain privately about how Jews and non-Whites are wrecking the place, but have a “What can you do about it?” attitude. The mestizos of Argentina are very light, and at some point it gets really hard to tell who is a light mestizo and who is White. The mestizos identify as Whites and say they are White. The reason for this is that the huge immigration from Europe to Argentina lightened the Argentine mestizo population, similar to what occurred in Costa Rica. Also there has been a dramatic increase in White-mestizo breeding in the past few generations, something that was previously rare. In addition, a correlative to US hip-hop culture called cumbia villera has recently showed up. It is based on the culture of Argentina’s mestizo and Indian ghettos, and the topics and mindset of the music resemble rap – songs about killing people, selling dope, treating women like crap, etc. Most Argentine Whites are horrified by this trend, but a lot of young Whites are getting into because it’s “cool”, the same way a lot of young Whites are getting into Black rap music. Young Argentine Whites who are into villera music are also starting to date mestizos. As in the US, it’s White females going for the darker, thuggish types. There the young White women go for mestizo villera types, and here young White women go for Black rapper types. At the same time, there is an increasing trend among Argentine Whites to say that they have a little bit of Argentine Indian in them, sort of like the way many White Americans say that they have a little bit of Cherokee. This is seen as progressive, liberal and hip. I mentioned above that most Argentines are quite racist and are contemptuous, at least in private, of mestizos, Indians, mulattos and Blacks. It works the other way too. Argentines say that many Mexican, Caribbean and Colombian mestizos, mulattos and zambos really hate Argentines. Some hate Argentines and Chileans more than gringos. They call Argentines “Nazis” even though Argentines have never done anything to them. However, many of these same folks would love to get into Argentina. The situation in Chile is very confusing. It’s not really a White country. It’s more of a light-Mestizo country. 6 Mixing occurred early in Chile, as it really took a long time to defeat the Indians; they really put up a hard fight here. They were not totally defeated until the 1880’s or so, and after that, they were not exterminated, but their population was seriously reduced. There were not many White colonists in Chile, and the few who were there were often soldiers. Mass breeding occurred between White soldiers and Indian females. This constituted the basic stock of the nation. The initial White stock was mostly English and Spaniard. The Spaniards were mostly from Castille, Andalusia and the Basque region. Later, many immigrants arrived from Europe, and there are large German, Italian and Croatian colonies in the South. White Chileans are also Swiss, British (often Scots Irish) and French. Among the Germans, there is high support for Nazism. The lower classes tend to be a bit darker shade of mestizo (2 However, Chile is experiencing the same problem as Argentina, a mass invasion of darker mestizo illegal immigrants from Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, mostly the first two, beginning in 2000. Further, many of the White Argentines who settled there after the recent crisis are going home. Along with the mass immigration of Peruvian and Bolivian Indians and mestizos has come a serious wave of street crime. The local Chilean Indians are not much of a problem. They live isolated in their own communities and leave other people alone. White Chileans will happily breed with mestizos and even Indians. Often it’s a White girl and a mestizo or Indian man. White consciousness is pretty low in Chile. Posters lament that the racial situation in Chile looks dire. Many posters commented that mestizos and Indians in Latin America really hate Whites. Although this is a typical White nationalist claim everywhere (that all non-Whites hate Whites), there may be something to it in Latin America. One said he had heard Indians and mestizos saying that they were going to take power all over Latin America and throw all the Whites back to Europe. All posters felt that Lula in Brazil, Chavez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia and Castro in Cuba were anti-White Leftist politicians. Lula was seen as anti-White for initiating affirmative action for non-Whites for the first time in Brazil. Chavez was accused of “ethnically cleansing” Whites from the country, but that seems like nonsense. What’s going on actually is that wealthier Whites are leaving Venezuela due to Chavez’ socialist policies. Morales was accused of wanting to take over all the Whites’ property and give it to Indians and mestizos. All over Latin America, the Indian, mestizo and anti-White cause was seen as being led by Communists for various reasons. Some of the reasons given were quite dubious. It’s probable that these Leftists are simply being driven to ameliorate the vastly inequitable situation in their countries. One poster noted that in spite of the profound racism, at least in his part of Latin America (apparently Peru), Indians and mestizos of both sexes were constantly trying to marry White or at least have babies by Whites. This went so far as males misleadingly impregnating White women, females misleadingly allowing themselves to be impregnated by White men, ingratiating themselves to and flattering Whites, etc. The poster said they want to marry White to “wash themselves.” I find it dubious that mestizos and Indians have that much self-hatred, but it’s possible. All of his aunts and uncles married mestizos, and none of the marriages turned out well. He described Indians and mestizos as aggressive, abusive (usually verbally but sometimes physically), and unable to control their emotions well. None of the mixed race offspring of his relatives did well in school. All of his White relatives now have mixed feelings about their part-White kids, and to some extent, they are ashamed of their offspring due to their mixed blood, poor grades and mestizo values. While most posters lamented the historical fact that the original White settlers to Latin America had bred in heavily with Indians and to some extent Blacks, others attempted to rationalize it. As one put it, it was either Indian and Black women or homosexuality/bestiality. Some posters attempted to explain why White men had bred in so heavily with Indian women. One described it as a natural match. Indians being racially Mongoloid or Asian, Indian women are similar to Asian women. Indian women, similar to Asian women, were described as very submissive, and White men liked this quantity very much. The poster noted that in the US you see many White male/Asian female couples for the same reason. A Caucasian male and a Mongoloid female appears to be a natural mix. Each party gets what they want out of the relationship. Another poster said that many White males continue to breed with Indians, Blacks, mulattas and mestizas because these women are not laboring under the same sexually repressive strictures that White women in the region are. The life of a moneyed White woman in the region is somewhat restricted sexually, as she feels bound by the Madonna/whore dichotomy characteristic of Hispanic culture. However, in the White women in poorer classes and with non-White women are much freer sexually. As one poster put it, “Indian and Black women spread their legs very easily, and many White men are tempted by this.” All posters felt that the future for Whites in Latin America was hopeless. Continued immigration of non-Whites, high birth rates of non-Whites combined with low birth rates of Whites, along with continuing and accelerating intermarriage of Whites with non-Whites, meant a slow darkening of the White population and its eventual diminishment to low numbers. Various proposals were suggested to “take back our countries,” but all were rejected as hopeless. One suggestion was mass emigration to Uruguay, seen as one of the last holdouts for Whites in Latin America. This was rejected as impractical, mainly due to the small size of the country. A while back, there was a “move to Argentina” movement, but that didn’t seem to catch on either since most White Latin Americans love their home countries and don’t want to leave. Another problem was that Argentina’s economy was very bad. There were many threads about leaving Latin America and moving to Whiter places, especially Europe. Some radicals offered militant proposals. One was to declare a White nationalist state in Southern Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, separate from Brazil, and presumably evict all the non-Whites.
A version of the White State that some Latin American White nationalists envision. It's surely unworkable for a variety of reasons.
A version of the White State that some Latin American White nationalists envision. It’s surely unworkable for a variety of reasons.
From that base, the new state would expand across the rest of Brazil, pushing the Blacks and mulattos into Northeastern Brazil. Then the Blacks would be shipped to Central Africa and the mulattos would be shipped to Angola. This proposal seems unlikely to come to fruition. The White State in the Southern Cone, expansionist or not, is a pipe dream for other reasons. Part of the problem is that Brazilians and Argentines, even the Whites, hate each other. I’m not sure what it’s all about, maybe soccer. Also they speak two different languages and have very different cultures. Further, even White Brazilians are very nationalistic and would probably never want to leave Brazil. A union of Uruguay and Argentina would actually be possible due to deep cultural connections between the two, but it would not be good for the White state, since Uruguay is PC Central in Latin America. It would be like annexing a gigantic Spanish-speaking Massachusetts. I saw in these threads the future of the US. America will become much more mixed and Spanish-speaking. The history of the continent is one of the marriage of the two great races, the White and the Indian, and the language of the marriage was Iberian. We missed out on it here, since so many Indians died, White immigration was so huge, and most colonists were from Britain. Also, White colonists here brought women along. Soon the US will become just another Latin American country, that is, we will finally become part of the continent of the Americas. In other words, the unusual and continentally anomalous experiment of “America” will slowly end, and we will finally join the Americas. *Although the word mulatto is offensive to Blacks and mixed race people, I am going to use this word because that is the way that Black-White mixed race folks are referred to in Latin America. Further, “mixed race” is a seriously idiotic way to describe Black-White mixes. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

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