Chavez’s Right Turn: State Realism versus International Solidarity,” by James Petras

This is an excellent article by James Petras.

He shows how Hugo Chavez has turned so far to the right that he is now in some ways one of the most rightwing Presidents in Latin America. For instance, only Chavez has supported the US and Colombia in backing the Honduran coup regime. And he is becoming one of Colombia’s sole allies in the region.

Why has he done this? A few reasons. For one, he’s surrounded and threatened. Colombia keeps threatening the invade Venezuela to go after Colombian rebels that hide there, and the US under “liberal” Barack Obama has just stationed 7 new military bases in Colombia for the sole purpose of attacking the Colombian guerrillas and threatening Venezuela. Colombia built up forces on the border, repeatedly crossed the Venezuelan border, and moved Colombian death squads into Venezuela to attack the people.

The Colombian guerrillas are on the defensive and can no longer provide the buffer that they formerly provided along the border to a Colombian invasion of Venezuela.

The Obama-backed coup against Honduras, which has resulted in a wave of murders against the Honduran Left, changed things. Chavez now realized that the Obama regime was willing to use military force to get what it wanted in Latin America.

At home, the opposition has made its strongest showing in a decade, winning about 5

In other words, he’s boxed in with nowhere to turn. Under these circumstances, Chavez has decided that the Colombian guerrillas, who they used to support, are a liability. He has been cooperating with Colombia in handing over guerrillas who are in Venezuela. He signed a non-aggression agreement with Colombia in return for an agreement to help catch any Colombian guerrillas in Venezuela. However, he has gotten little in return for this other than that Colombia has stopped invading and threatening his territory.Colombia still maintains a deep alliance with Chavez enemy, the US. Colombian forces are still massed along Venezuela’s borders.

Chavez hope to keep Colombia from joining in the US in any joint US-Colombian military escapades inside Venezuela. He also hopes to keep Colombia from joining in any US propaganda-destabilization efforts in Venezuela.

However, the threats have escalated, and the US appears emboldened. Chavez’ moves to the Right have not earned him the tiniest bit of praise or space from the US – they hate him more than ever. US imperialism slapped an embargo on the Venezuelan oil company due to Venezuela trading with Iran. I am not sure what this embargo entails? Incredibly, the Venezuelan opposition supported this foreign embargo on Venezuela! What a bunch of traitors.

Following his new alliance with Colombia, Chavez became the only nation other than Colombia in Latin America which has recognized the coup regime in Honduras. He did this under pressure from Colombia.

Petras points out how Allende’s Chile, Mexico in the 1980’s, Cuba and Brazil have all harbored Latin American guerrillas (in Brazil’s case, an Italian guerrilla). They refused to extradite them. But Chavez is boxed in in a way that these regimes may not have been.

Petras shows how other Left regimes also cooperated with the Right at various times. Stalin cooperated with Hitler for a while in order to buy some time to move his industry east of the Urals and build up his military-industrial complex. He even sent some German Communists who were hiding in the USSR to Germany, where they were certainly tortured and killed. But Stalin was boxed in, and he needed to buy some time, so he made a deal with the devil.

In the early 1970’s, Mao entered into a new alliance with the US under Richard Nixon’s detente. Afterward, Mao supported Pinochet and the rightist rebels in Angola. They denounced any Left regime that head the slightest ties with the USSR and supported their enemies, no matter how rightwing they were. All for the benefits of a sunshine policy with the US.

In the event of a new confrontation with the US, can Chavez expect his new Colombian ally to be neutral? Dubious. Colombia will probably ally with its imperial master in the US. And can he expect any support for the radical Left in Latin America now that he has betrayed them? This also is dubious. He may well end up with no friends at all.

Chavez’s Right Turn: State Realism versus International Solidarity

Introduction

The radical “Bolivarian Socialist” government of Hugo Chavez has arrested a number of Colombian guerrilla leaders and a radical journalist with Swedish citizenship and handed them over to the right-wing regime of President Juan Manuel Santos, earning the Colombian government’s praise and gratitude.

The close on-going collaboration between a leftist President with a regime with a notorious history of human rights violations, torture and disappearance of political prisoners has led to widespread protests among civil liberty advocates, leftists and populists throughout Latin America and Europe, while pleasing the Euro-American imperial establishment.

On April 26, 2011, Venezuelan immigration officials, relying exclusively on information from the Colombian secret police (DAS), arrested a naturalized Swedish citizen and journalist (Joaquin Perez Becerra) of Colombian descent, who had just arrived in the country. Based on Colombian secret police allegations that the Swedish citizen was a ‘FARC leader’, Perez was extradited to Colombia within 48 hours.

Despite the fact that it was in violation of international diplomatic protocols and the Venezuelan constitution, this action had the personal backing of President Chavez. A month later, the Venezuelan armed forces joined their Colombian counterparts and captured a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Guillermo Torres (with the nom de Guerra Julian Conrado) who is awaiting extradition to Colombia in a Venezuelan prison without access to an attorney.

On March 17, Venezuelan Military Intelligence (DIM) detained two alleged guerrillas from the National Liberation Army (ELN), Carlos Tirado and Carlos Perez, and turned them over to the Colombian secret police. The new public face of Chavez as a partner of the repressive Colombian regime is not so new after all.

On December 13, 2004, Rodrigo Granda, an international spokesperson for the FARC and a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, whose family resided in Caracas, was snatched by plain-clothes Venezuelan intelligence agents in downtown Caracas where he had been participating in an international conference and secretly taken to Colombia with the ‘approval’ of the Venezuelan Ambassador in Bogota.

Following several weeks of international protest, including from many conference participants, President Chavez issued a statement describing the ‘kidnapping’ as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and threatened to break relations with Colombia.

In more recent times, Venezuela has stepped up the extradition of revolutionary political opponents of Colombia’s narco-regime: In the first five months of 2009, Venezuela extradited 15 alleged members of the ELN and in November 2010, a FARC militant and two suspected members of the ELN were handed over to the Colombian police. In January 2011 Nilson Teran Ferreira, a suspected ELN leader, was delivered to the Colombian military.

The collaboration between Latin America’s most notorious authoritarian rightwing regime and the supposedly most radical ‘socialist’ government raises important issues about the meaning of political identities and how they relate to domestic and international politics and more specifically what principles and interests guide state policies.

Revolutionary Solidarity and State Interests

The recent ‘turn’ in Venezuela politics, from expressing sympathy and even support for revolutionary struggles and movements in Latin America to its present collaboration with pro-imperial rightwing regimes, has numerous historical precedents. It may help to examine the contexts and circumstances of these collaborations: The Bolshevik revolutionary government in Russia initially gave whole hearted support to revolutionary uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Finland and elsewhere.

With the defeats of these revolts and the consolidation of the capitalist regimes, Russian state and economic interests took prime of place among the Bolshevik leaders. Trade and investment agreements, peace treaties and diplomatic recognition between Communist Russia and the Western capitalist states defined the new politics of “co-existence”. With the rise of fascism, the Soviet Union under Stalin further subordinated communist policy in order to secure state-to-state alliances, first with the Western Allies and, failing that, with Nazi Germany.

The Hitler-Stalin pact was conceived by the Soviets as a way to prevent a German invasion and to secure its borders from a sworn rightwing enemy. As part of Stalin’s expression of good faith, he handed over to Hitler a number of leading exiled German communist leaders, who had sought asylum in Russia. Not surprisingly they were tortured and executed. This practice stopped only after Hitler invaded Russia and Stalin encouraged the now decimated ranks of German communists to re-join the ‘anti-Nazi’ underground resistance.

In the early 1970’s, as Mao’s China reconciled with Nixon’s United States and broke with the Soviet Union, Chinese foreign policy shifted toward supporting US-backed counter-revolutionaries, including Holden Roberts in Angola and Pinochet in Chile.

China denounced any leftist government and movement, which, however faintly, had ties with the USSR, and embraced their enemies, no matter how subservient they were to Euro-American imperial interests.

In Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China, short-term ‘state interests’ trumped revolutionary solidarity. What were these ‘state interests’?

In the case of the USSR, Stalin gambled that a ‘peace pact’ with Hitler’s Germany would protect them from an imperialist Nazi invasion and partially end the encirclement of Russia.

Stalin no longer trusted in the strength of international working class solidarity to prevent war, especially in light of a series of revolutionary defeats and the generalized retreat of the Left over the previous decades (Germany, Span, Hungary and Finland) .The advance of fascism and the extreme right, unremitting Western hostility toward the USSR and the Western European policy of appeasing Hitler, convinced Stalin to seek his own peace pact with Germany.

In order to demonstrate their ‘sincerity’ toward its new ‘peace partner’, the USSR downplayed their criticism of the Nazis, urging Communist parties around the world to focus on attacking the West rather than Hitler’s Germany, and gave into Hitler’s demand to extradite German Communist “terrorists” who had found asylum in the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s pursuit of short term ‘state interests’ via pacts with the “far right” ended in a strategic catastrophe: Nazi Germany was free to first conquer Western Europe and then turned its guns on Russia, invading an unprepared USSR and occupying half the country. In the meantime the international anti-fascist solidarity movements had been weakened and temporarily disoriented by the zigzags of Stalin’s policies.

In the mid-1970’s, the Peoples Republic of China’s ‘reconciliation’ with the US, led to a turn in international policy: ‘US imperialism’ became an ally against the greater evil ‘Soviet social imperialism’.

As a result China, under Chairman Mao Tse Tung, urged its international supporters to denounce progressive regimes receiving Soviet aid (Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, etc.) and it withdrew its support for revolutionary armed resistance against pro-US client states in Southeast Asia. China’s ‘pact’ with Washington was to secure immediate ‘state interests’: Diplomatic recognition and the end of the trade embargo.

Mao’s short-term commercial and diplomatic gains were secured by sacrificing the more fundamental strategic goals of furthering socialist values at home and revolution abroad. As a result, China lost its credibility among Third World revolutionaries and anti-imperialists, in exchange for gaining the good graces of the White House and greater access to the capitalist world market.

Short-term “pragmatism’ led to long-term transformation: The Peoples Republic of China became a dynamic emerging capitalist power, with some of the greatest social inequalities in Asia and perhaps the world.

Venezuela: State Interests versus International Solidarity

The rise of radical politics in Venezuela, which is the cause and consequence of the election of President Chavez (1999), coincided with the rise of revolutionary social movements throughout Latin America from the late 1990’s to the middle of the first decade of the 21st century (1995-2005).

Neo-liberal regimes were toppled in Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina; mass social movements challenging neo-liberal orthodoxy took hold everywhere; the Colombian guerrilla movements were advancing toward the major cities; and center-left politicians were elected to power in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador and Uruguay. The US economic crises undermined the credibility of Washington’s ‘free trade’ agenda.

The increasing Asian demand for raw materials stimulated an economy boom in Latin America, which funded social programs and nationalizations. In the case of Venezuela, a failed US-backed military coup and ‘bosses’ boycott’ in 2002-2003, forced the Chavez government to rely on the masses and turn to the Left. Chavez proceeded to “re-nationalize” petroleum and related industries and articulate a “Bolivarian Socialist” ideology.

Chavez’ radicalization found a favorable climate in Latin America and the bountiful revenues from the rising price of oil financed his social programs. Chavez maintained a plural position of embracing governing center-left governments, backing radical social movements and supporting the Colombian guerrillas’ proposals for a negotiated settlement. Chavez called for the recognition of Colombia’s guerrillas as legitimate ‘belligerents” not “terrorists’.

Venezuela’s foreign policy was geared toward isolating its main threat emanating from Washington by promoting exclusively Latin American/Caribbean organizations, strengthening regional trade and investment links and securing regional allies in opposition to US intervention, military pacts, bases and US-backed military coups. In response to US financing of Venezuelan opposition groups (electoral and extra parliamentary), Chavez has provided moral and political support to anti-imperialist groups throughout Latin America.

After Israel and American Zionists began attacking Venezuela, Chavez extended his support to the Palestinians and broadened ties with Iran and other Arab anti-imperialist movements and regimes. Above all, Chavez strengthened his political and economic ties with Cuba, consulting with the Cuban leadership, to form a radical axis of opposition to imperialism. Washington’s effort to strangle the Cuban revolution by an economic embargo was effectively undermined by Chavez’ large-scale, long-term economic agreements with Havana.

Up until the later part of this decade, Venezuela’s foreign policy – its ‘state interests’ – coincided with the interests of the left regimes and social movements throughout Latin America. Chavez clashed diplomatically with Washington’s client states in the hemisphere, especially Colombia, headed by narco-death squad President Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010). However recent years have witnessed several external and internal changes and a gradual shift toward the center.

The revolutionary upsurge in Latin America began to ebb: The mass upheavals led to the rise of center-left regimes, which, in turn, demobilized the radical movements and adopted strategies relying on agro-mineral export strategies, all the while pursuing autonomous foreign policies independent of US-control. The Colombian guerrilla movements were in retreat and on the defensive – their capacity to buffer Venezuela from a hostile Colombian client regime waned.

Chavez adapted to these ‘new realities’, becoming an uncritical supporter of the ‘social liberal’ regimes of Lula in Brazil, Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador, Vazquez in Uruguay and Bachelet in Chile. Chavez increasingly chose immediate diplomatic support from the existing regimes over any long-term support, which might have resulted from a revival of the mass movements.

Trade ties with Brazil and Argentina and diplomatic support from its fellow Latin American states against an increasingly aggressive US became central to Venezuela’s foreign policy: The basis of Venezuelan policy was no longer the internal politics of the center-left and centrist regimes but their degree of support for an independent foreign policy. Repeated US interventions failed to generate a successful coup or to secure any electoral victories, against Chavez.

As a result Washington increasingly turned to using external threats against Chavez via its Colombian client state, the recipient of $5 billion in military aid. Colombia’s military build-up, its border crossings and infiltration of death squads into Venezuela, forced Chavez into a large-scale purchase of Russian arms and toward the formation of a regional alliance (ALBA). The US-backed military coup in Honduras precipitated a major rethink in Venezuela’s policy.

The coup had ousted a democratically elected centrist liberal, President Zelaya in Honduras, a member of ALBA and set up a repressive regime subservient to the White House. However, the coup had the effect of isolating the US throughout Latin America -not a single government supported the new regime in Tegucigalpa. Even the neo-liberal regimes of Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Panama voted to expel Honduras from the Organization of American States.

On the one hand, Venezuela viewed this ‘unity’ of the right and center-left as an opportunity toward mending fences with the conservative regimes; and on the other, it understood that the Obama Administration was ready to use the ‘military option’ to regain its dominance. The fear of a US military intervention was greatly heightened by the Obama-Uribe agreement establishing seven US strategic military bases near its border with Venezuela.

Chavez wavered in his response to this immediate threat: At one point he almost broke trade and diplomatic relations with Colombia, only to immediately reconcile with Uribe, although the latter had demonstrated no desire to sign on to a pact of co-existence.

Meanwhile, the 2010 Congressional elections In Venezuela led to a major increase in electoral support for the US-backed right (approximately 5

Chavez faced several options: The first was to return to the earlier policy of international solidarity with radical movements; the second was to continue working with the center-left regimes while maintaining strong criticism and firm opposition to the US backed neo-liberal regimes; and the third option was to turn toward the Right, more specifically to seek rapprochement with the newly elected President of Colombia, Santos and sign a broad political, military and economic agreement where Venezuela agreed to collaborate in eliminating Colombia’s leftist adversaries in exchange for promises of ‘non-aggression’ (Colombia limiting its cross-border narco and military incursions).

Venezuela and Chavez decided that the FARC was a liability and that support from the radical Colombian mass social movements was not as important as closer diplomatic relations with President Santos. Chavez has calculated that complying with Santos political demands would provide greater security to the Venezuelan state than relying on the support of the international solidarity movements and his own radical domestic allies among the trade unions and intellectuals.

In line with this Right turn, the Chavez regime fulfilled Santos’ requests – arresting FARC/ELN guerrillas, as well as a prominent leftist journalist, and extraditing them to a state which has had the worst human rights record in the Americas for over two decades, in terms of torture and extra-judicial assassinations. This Right turn acquires an even more ominous character when one considers that Colombia holds over 7600 political prisoners, over 7000 of whom are trade unionists, peasants, Indians, students, in other words non-combatants.

In acquiescing to Santos requests, Venezuela did not even follow the established protocols of most democratic governments: It did not demand any guaranties against torture and respect for due process. Moreover, when critics have pointed out that these summary extraditions violated Venezuela’s own constitutional procedures, Chavez launched a vicious campaign slandering his critics as agents of imperialism engaged in a plot to destabilize his regime.

Chavez’s new-found ally on the Right, President Santos has not reciprocated: Colombia still maintains close military ties with Venezuela’s prime enemy in Washington. Indeed, Santos vigorously sticks to the White House agenda: He successfully pressured Chavez to recognize the illegitimate regime of Lobos in Honduras- the product of a US-backed coup in exchange for the return of ousted ex-President Zelaya.

Chavez did what no other center-left Latin American President has dared to do: He promised to support the reinstatement of the illegitimate Honduran regime into the OAS. On the basis of the Chavez-Santos agreement, Latin American opposition to Lobos collapsed and Washington’s strategic goal was realized: a puppet regime was legitimized. Chavez agreement with Santos to recognize the murderous Lobos regime betrayed the heroic struggle of the Honduran mass movement.

Not one of the Honduran officials responsible for over a hundred murders and disappearances of peasant leaders, journalists, human rights and pro-democracy activists are subject to any judicial investigation. Chavez has given his blessings to impunity and the continuation of an entire repressive apparatus, backed by the Honduran oligarchy and the US Pentagon.

In other words, to demonstrate his willingness to uphold his ‘friendship and peace pact’ with Santos, Chavez was willing to sacrifice the struggle of one of the most promising and courageous pro-democracy movements in the Americas.

And What Does Chavez Seek in His Accommodation with the Right?

Security? Chavez has received only verbal ‘promises’, and some expressions of gratitude from Santos.

But the enormous pro-US military command and US mission remain in place. In other words, there will be no dismantling of the Colombian paramilitary-military forces massed along the Venezuelan border and the US military base agreements, which threaten Venezuelan national security, will not change. According to Venezuelan diplomats, Chavez’ tactic is to ‘win over’ Santos from US tutelage.

By befriending Santos, Chavez hopes that Bogota will not join in any joint military operation with the US or cooperate in future propaganda-destabilization campaigns. In the brief time since the Santos-Chavez pact was made, an emboldened Washington announced an embargo on the Venezuelan state oil company with the support of the Venezuelan congressional opposition. Santos, for his part, has not complied with the embargo, but then not a single country in the world has followed Washington’s lead.

Clearly, President Santos is not likely to endanger the annual $10 billion dollar trade between Colombia and Venezuela in order to humor the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s diplomatic caprices. In contrast to Chavez policy of handing over leftist and guerrilla exiles to a rightist authoritarian regime, President Allende of Chile (1970-73) joined a delegation that welcomed armed fighters fleeing persecution in Bolivia and Argentina and offered them asylum.

For many years, especially in the 1980’s, Mexico, under center-right regimes, openly recognized the rights of asylum for guerrilla and leftist refugees from Central America – El Salvador and Guatemala. Revolutionary Cuba, for decades, offered asylum and medical treatment to leftist and guerrilla refugees from Latin American dictatorships and rejected demands for their extradition.

Even as late as 2006, when the Cuban government was pursuing friendly relations with Colombia and when its then Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque expressed his deep reservations regarding the FARC in conversations with the author, Cuba refused to extradite guerrillas to their home countries where they would be tortured and abused.

One day before he left office in 2011, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva denied Italy’s request to extradite Cesare Battisti, a former Italian guerrilla. As one Brazilian judge said -and Chavez should have listened: “At stake here is national sovereignty. It is as simple as that”. No one would criticize Chavez efforts to lessen border tensions by developing better diplomatic relations with Colombia and to expand trade and investment flows between the two countries.

What is unacceptable is to describe the murderous Colombian regime as a “friend” of the Venezuela people and a partner in peace and democracy, while thousands of pro-democracy political prisoners rot in TB-infested Colombian prisons for years on trumped-up charges.

Under Santos, civilian activists continue to be murdered almost every day. The most recent killing was yesterday (June 9,2011): Ana Fabricia Cordoba, a leader of community-based displaced peasants, was murdered by the Colombian armed forces.

Chavez’ embrace of the Santos narco-presidency goes beyond the requirements for maintaining proper diplomatic and trade relations. His collaboration with the Colombian intelligence, military and secret police agencies in hunting down and deporting Leftists (without due process!) smacks of complicity in dictatorial repression and serves to alienate the most consequential supporters of the Bolivarian transformation in Venezuela.

Chavez’ role in legitimizing of the Honduran coup-regime, without any consideration for the popular movements’ demands for justice, is a clear capitulation to the Santos – Obama agenda. This line of action places Venezuela’s ‘state’ interests over the rights of the popular mass movements in Honduras.

Chavez’ collaboration with Santos on policing leftists and undermining popular struggles in Honduras raises serious questions about Venezuela’s claims of revolutionary solidarity. It certainly sows deep distrust about Chavez future relations with popular movements who might be engaged in struggle with one of Chavez’s center-right diplomatic and economic partners.

What is particularly troubling is that most democratic and even center-left regimes do not sacrifice the mass social movements on the altar of “security” when they normalize relations with an adversary.

Certainly the Right, especially the US, protects its former clients, allies, exiled right-wing oligarch and even admitted terrorists from extradition requests issued by Venezuela, Cuba and Argentina. Mass murders and bombers of civilian airplanes manage to live comfortably in Florida.

Why Venezuela submits to the Right-wing demands of the Colombians, while complaining about the US protecting terrorists guilty of crimes in Venezuela, can only be explained by Chavez ideological shift to the Right, making Venezuela more vulnerable to pressure for greater concessions in the future.

Chavez is no longer interested in the support from the radical left: his definition of state policy revolves around securing the ‘stability’ of Bolivarian socialism in one country, even if it means sacrificing Colombian militants to a police state and pro-democracy movements in Honduras to an illegitimate US-imposed regime. History provides mixed lessons.

Stalin’s deals with Hitler were a strategic disaster for the Soviet people: once the Fascists got what they wanted they turned around and invaded Russia. Chavez has so far not received any ‘reciprocal’ confidence-building concession from Santos military machine. Even in terms of narrowly defined ‘state interests’, he has sacrificed loyal allies for empty promises. The US imperial state is Santos’ primary ally and military provider.

China sacrificed international solidarity for a pact with the US, a policy that led to unregulated capitalist exploitation and deep social injustices.

When and if the next confrontation between the US and Venezuela occurs, will Chavez, at least, be able to count on the “neutrality” of Colombia? If past and present relations are any indication, Colombia will side with its client-master, mega-benefactor and ideological mentor.

When a new rupture occurs, can Chavez count on the support of the militants, who have been jailed, the mass popular movements he pushed aside and the international movements and intellectuals he has slandered? As the US moves toward new confrontations with Venezuela and intensifies its economic sanctions, domestic and international solidarity will be vital for Venezuela’s defense. Who will stand up for the Bolivarian revolution, the Santos and Lobos of this “realist world”? Or the solidarity movements in the streets of Caracas and the Americas?

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?

I Thought the FARC Was “Near Defeat”?

Repost from the old site. A bit dated, but good nonetheless.Here on Robert Lindsay, we do support the FARC and the ELN unequivocally.

This is one hardass rebel army. The US corporate media says they still have 7,000 men under arms, down from 17,000, and in my opinion, their militia numbers in the 100,000’s. I strongly disagree with the 7,000 number, and I think the actual number of FARC troops is probably at least 18,000. They have a presence all over the nation and in several surrounding countries too.

It’s true that they have been dealing with the most intensive military offensive against any rebel group in the history of Latin America, and in recent days, suffered the loss of some top commanders. But they will weather these changes. As soon as a top commander dies or is killed or captured, there is someone else waiting to take his place.

James Brittain notes that the FARC has recently waged some of its most impressive attacks in a long time.

A reporter noted in 2004 that there is an unstated fear that the guerrillas could overrun Colombia’s major cities at any time. As a way of dealing with this, the venal and murderous Colombian ruling class periodically issues proclamations touting the weakness of the FARC, how they are near defeat, how they are suffering from massive defections, etc.

During Plan Colombia and Plan Patriota from 2000-2006, the Colombian regime repeatedly said that the FARC was near defeat. Analysis indicates that instead, attacks have grown over time. During 2008, the US media got into the act, crowing that the FARC was “near defeat”. But this year, the FARC attacked Colombia’s most important oil infrastructure facility and wiped out entire Colombian military battalions.

Between the 29th of April and the 6th of May, 2008, the FARC carried out repeated attacks on Colombia’s largest oil pipeline and halted the export of up to 3 million barrels of oil. At the same time, the FARC attacked various transportation routes crucial to the flow of military supplies and the movement of oil in Colombia’s north.

An essential bridge was destroyed in Cesar Province, preventing the movement of troops and paramilitaries. In Norte de Santander, the FARC attacked forces guarding the Caño-Limón Pipeline.

These last attacks were just hours after the US Ambassador visited the region and crowed about the near-defeat of the FARC. On May 3, 2008, Colombia deployed a battalion to the region to resume the flow of oil. The battalion was quickly destroyed by the FARC, which kept attacking the pipeline for another 2 days.

On May 27, 2008, the FARC attacked Colombia’s largest coal mine, derailing 40 wagons out of a 110 wagon train carrying 110 tons of coal. Further attacks hampered Colombia’s ability to engage in foreign trade by shutting down many export routes.

The North was thought to be relatively free of the FARC in recent years, as their center of operation was said to be in the South, but these attacks proved that wrong. In 2007, when the FARC was “near defeated”, somehow the number of internal refugees grew by 3

The FARC has auxiliaries in all neighboring countries, the FARE in Ecuador, the FARV in Venezuela (demobilized but ready to fight if need be), the FARB in the Dog’s Head of Brazil, and the FARP in Peru.

The FARP has expanded all the way down to central Peru lately, where they have had great success forming base communities with peasants who hate the state but are disgusted by Sendero’s brutality. Many former Senderistas in Peru, up to 1,000, have signed on with the FARP. FARP has linked up with the devastated remains of the MRTA in San Martin Province and sent the MRTA leftovers back to Colombia for armed training.

They have also linked up with what is left of Sendero, a considerably less radicalized organization. A column of Senderistas from the Huallaga Valley was also seen marching off to Colombia. In Peru, the FARC troops are uniformed, healthy, well-armed and supplied, with modern communications equipment and brimming with confidence.

They come into the villages and offer basic necessities and health care to peasants who are pleased to see them and find them impressive compared to the ragtag guerrillas they are used to. Just because Sendero has been badly hammered does not mean that the people of Peru are not in a revolutionary mood.

The FARC also operates R & R bases in Panama and operates all across northern Brazil to southern Guyana, where they tax gold mining operations. This is one way the FARC has reacted to the largest offensive ever launched against any Latin American guerrilla group – they have expanded to all of the surrounding countries.

8

When members of the FARC put down their arms to run for office in the 1980’s and formed the Patriotic Union, they were massacred like flies. Years later, 5,000 UP activists lay dead, and the party was disbanded. This is how the Colombian regime responds to challenges from the Left, even unarmed. With bullets. Until that changes, war will go on.

Colombia is currently one of the US’ top allies in the world, and the US’ top ally in Latin America. It’s unfortunate that US’ best friend in the region is such a murderous and fascist state, but it speaks volumes about the nature of the US state itself.

Black IQ Gains in Britain, Kenya and Dominica

Repost from the old site.

A recent post of mine noted that the Black IQ in the US has shown gains of about 5.5 points against Whites in both children and adults. At age 12, the Black IQ is now 90.5, as opposed to 85 30 years ago. Black adult IQ’s have risen from 79 to 84.5 during the same period.

At the same time, Blacks have shown major gains in achievement test results relative to Whites. They narrowed the achievement gap by about 3

Rising IQ’s over time are referred to as the Flynn Effect (FE). In Britain, the results are even better. West Indian Blacks in the UK now have an IQ of about 93.5 at age 11. Scores for adult Caribbeans in the UK are not known. Studies from 1960’s-70’s showed an IQ of 85 for these same children, but now it has moved up by 8.5 points. Young Caribbean Blacks in the UK have closed the IQ gap by more than half.

Interestingly, this IQ increase has coincided with a spectacular increase in crime among these British-born Jamaicans. The first generation that came in the 1950’s and 60’s were mostly hard-working and law-abiding. But their offspring in many ways have been a disaster.

Here we see once again the phenomenon discussed on this blog before, that the male children of low-wage immigrants to the West are often criminals. This even held for the offspring of Irish, Italian and some Jewish Whites to the US over 100 years ago. With a rising IQ coinciding with a skyrocketing crime rate, again we see the disconnect between the simplistic game that White Nationalists play called “low IQ = high crime”.

Most Caribbean Blacks in the UK are Jamaicaans. In Jamaica, the Black IQ is about 71.5.

A counterargument to these rising Jamaican IQ gains is that these Jamaicans are heavily intermarrying with Whites. In the first generation, up to 2

But let us look at the argument. If base Jamaican IQ is 71.5, then a 2

A good analysis of the UK Jamaican data is that, if assuming the benefit of increased White genes, the more complex modern environment in the UK is raising Jamaican IQ by 5-10 points. In another score 92 at that age, both scores in comparison to a White score of 100. The Black US score then declines to 85 (a 10 point drop) and the African Black score drops to 67 (an incredible 25 point drop). Black scores decline as children age, and this recent post suggests that an initial high score followed by sharply declining scores are indicative of earlier maturation among Blacks. I do not know to what extent early Black maturation (Blacks do mature earlier, and this has a genetic basis) explains the strange phenomenon of high Black IQ’s in small children which rapidly decline into adulthood.

But it is interesting that Tizard’s group raised together in an institutional setting, the young Black kids had even higher IQ’s than the Whites.

In the Caribbean nation of Dominica, there has been a stunning rise in IQ over a 36 year period from 1965-2001. There was an 18 point rise during this period, which rose their IQ’s from 61 to 73 (the IQ’s did not rise by 18 points because other groups’ IQ’s were also rising during this period). This represents a gain against UK Whites of 12 IQ points.

The test used was Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test that is said to be the best available for measuring pure “g” intelligence.

A schematic of the g, or general intelligence, factor. The ovals represent subtests on an intelligence test. G is a correlation coefficient of various tests. It measures the tendency of superior test takers (and someone who has a brain that works a bit better), where if they do well on one test, they also tend to do well on all other tests. The
FE is generally not on g because some tests have risen dramatically, others moderately, and still others little or not at all. Therefore, intelligence has not risen in a general, across-the-board kind of way. However, certain aspects of intelligence have definitely risen, and those aspects would seem to me to have quantifiable benefits in modern society occupationally, academically, and in other ways.

 

It also predicts success in life in various ways pretty well and is not culturally biased in any way. The researchers gave a vocabulary test to the group and found a similar rise of about 18 IQ points on that test.

Researchers tried to tease out which factors were most related to the IQ rise. The only factor that explained the rise fairly well was schooling, so it appeared that improved schooling was a major cause of the IQ rise. The IQ rise occurred at the time of a major expansion of the school system in Dominica.

Socioeconomic status of parents explained about 1

These findings are interesting for many reasons. This post suggests that most of the FE is due to increased caloric intake among children, resulting in earlier maturation. Improved nutrition has often been suggested as a reason for the FE but did not seem to be a factor here.

Those who favor a genetic explanation for racial variations in IQ (nearly all of whom are White racists) disparage all societal interventions to increase IQ as worthless. In particular, they oppose spending any more money on educating “inferior” Blacks and Browns, as it is just throwing good money after bad. This study indicates that increased educational spending can indeed have IQ benefits for Blacks.

Some other findings in this study are of interest. One is that the rise is on the Raven’s test, which is the most heavily g -loaded test in existence. Critics of the FE claim that the rise is not on g, or general intelligence, and hence it is worthless. The Dominican rise was definitely on g.

In the West, while there have been major rises in tests of problem-solving, visual analysis, visual intelligence, and verbal analysis, there have been little to no gains in general knowledge, vocabulary, arithmetic, and mathematical analysis.

Some interpret this to mean that there has been no rise in general intelligence – only a rise in “factors subject to environmental bias.” Such an analysis is false – but it is interesting that in Dominica such huge gains are being seen in vocabulary, while in the West, vocabulary gains have only been 4.4 points over 80 years.

A study out of Kenya in 2003 looking at 7 year old children found an incredible 26 point gain over 14 years from 1984-1998 in rural Kenya, leaving them with an IQ of 89 (Daley et al 2003). This apparently represented a 21 point IQ gain over British Whites from the previous IQ of 68.

The rise was correlated with schooling, family structure, nutrition, and the health of the children. Schooling seemed to be the major factor and once again coincided with a major educational expansion by the government. The test used was the children’s version of Raven’s, the Children’s Progressive Matrices, once again a very g-loaded test, so the Kenyan rise was also on g.

The Kenyan, UK, and Dominican studies are important because they show Blacks reducing the Black-White IQ gap by 10-15 points in a few decades. Hereditarians argue that the Black-White gap is permanent in all areas of the world, and that Blacks are a hopelessly stupid race – a drain on humanity. All money spent on raising Black IQ’s is wasted for this reason.

The three studies above show purely environmental factors causing major reductions in the Black-White IQ gap.

Another study found massive gains, that I have not been able to quantify, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, over a 72-74 year period. The gains were probably at least on the order of 20 points. Researchers suggested that increased cognitive stimulation in the form of a more complex world was responsible for the rise.

A common complaint of all of these studies showing rising Black IQ’s, both in tandem with Whites and in closing the Black-White gap, is that the studies are done only on children. But most IQ tests are done on kids. Taking African studies as an example, we can see here that 6

In my opinion, testing kids is probably a better way to measure pure neurological efficiency without throwing in all sorts of potentially confounding extraneous variables.

Adults are much more likely than kids to have physical and mental diseases (schizophrenia and depression lower IQ), to be in jail, prison, or homeless, to abuse alcohol and drugs, or to have suffered serious head injuries. All of these factors throw a monkey wrench into tests that should be trying to show us real differences between races.

Just today, the White Nationalist blog Majority Rights posted a well-done article by Richard D. Fuerle, A Possible Explanation for the Flynn Effect. The article’s interesting premise is that the FE is due to increased caloric intake and even increasing obesity in our modern world. This increased food intake would result in earlier maturation and higher IQ’s among children, which would then level off in adulthood.

The author suggests that the FE is not really an IQ increase but an effect of this early maturation, and that people are getting less intelligent, not more so.

I believe this theory is wrong, though it has an interesting premise. James Flynn also disagrees with Fuerle’s article, saying that the author was led astray, as he did not have good knowledge of the literature. Flynn also disagreed with the notion that the FE was only in children and that it leveled off in adulthood, saying that he had refuted this in an article his famous article published in JEM: The Journal of Educational Measurement, in 1984 (Flynn 2008).

Some of the comments following Fuerle’s article are also not correct.

First of all, IQ’s have been rising among all age groups, not just kids. It’s really a cohort effect. James Flynn agreed with me (Flynn 2007) that Black adults of today have the same IQ scores (100) as the Whites of 1957. Blacks of today have somewhat higher scores than the Whites of WW2.

This brings up a conundrum as one wonders if today’s US Blacks would have been able to beat the Japanese in WW2, since they can’t even seem to run Detroit (Taylor 2007). This long and rather involved post of mine deals with a lot of the arguments around the FE, including some of the misconceptions about it. My post theorizing that Blacks of today equal the Whites of 1957 is here.

Here, I show that Black children and adults have indeed made about a 5.5 IQ point gain on Whites over the past 30 years, coinciding with the liberation of Blacks via Civil Rights laws. The notion that IQ has risen due to increased caloric intake is interesting but probably invalid. Flynn himself says that after 1950, gains due to nutrition were minimal to nil in the West.

Furthermore, the gains should have been across the board, not just in the certain areas that the FE is in. As we see above, the FE is also occurring in 3rd World countries like Kenya and Dominica where excess nutrition is certainly not an issue. In those countries, it is related to better education, if anything. Much of the FE remains mysterious.

The notion that gains are occurring only in certain areas that are “subject to environmental bias” is not correct. First of all, in Dominica, huge gains were seen in vocabulary, one of the areas that is not seeing much gain in the West.

Vocabulary, general knowledge, basic math, and mathematical analysis are all subject to environmental influence too, but Western society has not been promoting these areas so much.

The areas that the FE is occurring in – verbal analysis, analytical reasoning, visual analysis, visuospatial reasoning, on-the-spot problem solving for which no previous method was known, etc. – are areas that our increasingly sophisticated society has been promoting.

We have promoted this in terms of an increasingly complex society and the mass promotion of scientific thinking. The visuospatial aspect may be due to video games, cell phones, computers, and many things that need programming – boom boxes, car radios, microwaves, answering machines, thermostats, on and on.

My personal opinion is that TV has a lot to do with it. TV shows are increasingly complex, and kids sit in front of TVs with clickers clicking through 50 different channels one after the other. The camera usually only focuses on something for a short time, then moves on. Even jokes and dialog on TV come at a rapid pace. Movies seem to have gotten a lot more complex in recent decades too.

Lastly, the FE is only ending or reversing in Scandinavia. It is still going full blast in the US and in the 3rd world.

The notion that IQ is rising while “real intelligence” – general knowledge, math and vocabulary – is not cannot be supported. Those three things are no more “real intelligence” than the stuff that is going up in the FE.

Another argument advanced later in the discussion has to do with Malcolm Gladwell’s misreading of the FE. Gladwell says that the gains have been almost exclusively on a subtest of the WISC called Similarities. Although gains on Similarities reflect increased use of scientific thinking in our society, these gains are disparaged in the comments section as showing a phony effect of increased intelligence when there has been none.

First of all, the commenters are wrong in that gains on Similarities are a meaningless artifact. Similarities tests for the ability to solve problems on-the-spot without a previously learned method. Raven’s tests for the same thing – it is said to test for the “ability to make sense of the buzzing confusion of life.” Second, Gladwell is wrong. Major gains have occurred on many tests, not just Similarities:

Look at the gains:

Similarities         23.45
Picture Arrangement  21.5
Coding               18
Object Assembly      17.35
Block Design         15.9
Picture Completion   11.7
Comprehension        11
Vocabulary           4.4
Arithmetic           2.3
Information          2.1

A nice photo of James Flynn, along with Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton, from an obscure document reporting on a conference on intelligence in Amsterdam last year, is here. The link also features a short, interesting interview with Flynn along with some interesting abstracts on intelligence.

Some abstracts I found interesting were those showing that the more intelligent people are, the less likely they are to believe in God. Also, among believers, the more intelligent people were, the more liberal and less literal they were in their beliefs. These findings also applied at a national and ethnic level.

Other abstracts showed that the more intelligent people are, they longer they live and the healthier they are. A recent finding not in the document was that in the West, the smarter you are, the more likely you are to be a vegetarian.

References

Daley, Y. C.; Whaley, S. E.; Sigman, M. D.; Espinosa, M. P.; and Neuman, C. (2003). “IQ On the Rise: The Flynn effect in Rural Kenyan Children.” Psychological Science 14, 215-219.
Flynn, James R. (November 2007). Personal communication.
Flynn, James R. (January 2008). Personal communication.
Keita, Lamin. (December 2007). Personal communication.
Nisbett, R. E. (1998). “ Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Africa, Americas, Asia, Blacks, Brazil, Britain, Caribbean, China, Civil Rights, Crime, Culture, Dominica, East Africa, Europe, Europeans, Flynn Effect, Genetics, Health, History, Immigration, Intelligence, Jamaicans, Kenya, Latin America, Nutrition, Psychology, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Religion, Reposts From The Old Site, South America, White Nationalism, White Racism, Whites27 Comments on Black IQ Gains in Britain, Kenya and Dominica

There Be Cannibals!

Repost from the old site. My understanding of cannibalism is not good. It’s well-known that starving people in just about any society will eat their own dead. Clearly, the Anasazi Indians of Arizona and New Mexico, ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians, engaged in cannibalism during the 1300’s. I don’t care what the Indians say. Indian tribes are notorious liars when it comes to denying anything that makes them look bad. The cannibals and head-hunters of New Guinea are well-known, and some were said to continue to engage in the practice until the mid-1960’s. Cannibalism was well-known in other parts of the world, especially Polynesia and Fiji. It was legendary in New Guinea and widely practiced in Australia too. The cannibals of the Congo below were not the only ones in Africa, just some of the more notorious. There were also cannibals in the Brazilian Amazon and a few in North America here and there. But Polynesia, especially New Zealand, had some of the worst cannibals of all. A Maori wife of a chief killed in combat would offer herself to be killed and eaten by her enemies, becoming dinner to show her love for her husband. A Fijian husband’s power over his wife was such that he could kill her and eat her at any time for any or no reason at all. In some societies, people were eaten if they were loved. In Australia, people ate the corpses of their relatives and friends in order to pay tribute to their lives. In New Guinea, old folks, having a hard time straggling through life, were hanged from trees or killed in other ways, often by their own kids, in a big party with the whole village gathered around. After they were dead, they were chopped up and eaten. Beats mortgaging your house for Mom’s nursing home, eh? Smoking a fish is a good way of making it more flavorful, and logically it follows that it adds a little zest to roast human. Humans waiting to be eaten were “tenderized” in water or other liquids to make the flesh less beef jerky-like. Tribes from Africa to Polynesia went out on hunting parties, like armies of Jeffrey Dahmers, looking for human prey to kill and cook up. Although women definitely are better looking then men, some cannibals insist that we guys are more delectable. Others prized female flesh most of all and went to great woman-chasing lengths to obtain it. Dying in battle is bad enough if you are to be a meal afterwards, but being wounded and then hauled away to be served on the dinner table must have been a particular horror. Slaves were captured, kept in chains and horribly mistreated for long periods, knowing all the while that one day that would serve as a main course. What is interesting is that so many cannibal societies insist that Roast Human tastes great, even better than many or most domesticated or wild animals. One wonders why we taste so great. Did we evolve to be good eatin’? In many places, White explorers were told, “Of course we eat people! Don’t you?” One New Guinea tribe had a legend about how they became cannibals. One day the men went out hunting. They came back with some wild pigs and whatnot. The women berated them, “Is that all you can give us – that lousy stuff? The humiliated men, their masculinity at risk, figured that the women wanted people to eat, not some dirty animals. So they took off to a neighboring village and came back. They came back with humans to eat, the women danced all around and their manliness was intact. Biting off the nose of a corpse is pretty horrible, and cannibals deny that they do this. They only bite off the noses of those others kill, not those they kill themselves! They do have some class. If boiling a dead man’s heart is too much for you, just get your daughter to do it, and then drink the delicious juice. A rack of rib sounds pretty good, but would you eat it if it came from a seven year old girl? Now, I like pork myself, but “long pig” is said to be more delicate, and it never makes you so full you feel ill. We all like to get together with the family for Thanksgiving, but how about the New Guineans, a woman and her two daughters, who dug up the corpse of one of the daughter’s baby and consumed it? Gives a new meaning to three generations at the table for dinner, eh? The Dobudura in New Guinea liked to keep a fresh supply of meat on hand. So they would capture a man and keep him alive for up to a week, cutting off bits of his flesh any time they felt hungry. They used a plant medicine to keep the food supply from bleeding to death. When he is nearly dead, they would poke a hole in his skull and scoop the brains out with a spoon, brains being a major delicacy and all. One way to ensure a delicious meal is to roast a man while still alive, for the meat tastes better when prepared this way. Deboning a chicken makes for better eating, and humans may be similarly deboned. What to do with the giblets? Well, with human giblets, just give them to the kids, who roast them in the fire and eat them up. With the coming of “evil Western colonialist missionaries” all of this quaint “indigenous” cultural behavior was laid to rest once and for all, or so we thought (but see below). Many cultures became ashamed of their former cannibalism and refused to discuss it. The Aborigines were puzzled at why it had been outlawed. Why were we not allowed to eat our friends anymore, to have a party and say what a great guy he was? None of it made sense. I suppose the Cultural Leftists, in love with all cultures, wicked, sublime and in between, as long as they are not White and Christian or Jewish, want to resurrect all this delectable human-chomping. As the Congo War devolves, we are receiving reports that Congolese militias are once again reverting to old habits of cannibalism. In particular, they are killing the Pygmies (the Bantus have waged a long genocidal campaign against both Bushmen and Pygmies) and cooking them up for chow. Almost all roads in the Congo built by those evil colonialists are now in disrepair – not due to weather or abuse, that is normal. It is that in the Congo now, when a road falls apart, no one ever fixes it. Never. Ever. Hence, roads just pretty much do not exist. The apartheid Whites of Southern Africa, of paternalistic mind, always said that when the White man left Africa, Africans would “go back to the bush”, in every conceivable way. That’s not necessarily the case in all Africa. See an optimistic post about a disaster zone called Nigeria, and note the good economic growth the continent has been experiencing, with the sole exception of Zimbabwe, which is disgustingly tossed out by White racists as an exemplar of all of Africa. Yet in Congo, it appears that this depressing forecast is being borne out. Delicious quotes follow, from Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo. Check out the title – I suppose the anti-racists assume it must be “racist”, no? Dark continent, heart of darkness, the horror, the horror, and all that? Racists salivating over this post as an exemplar of “nigger innate savagery” be warned: cannibalism was not generalized over all of Africa. It was a cultural phenomenon primarily confined to the Congo, which then grew, strangely, in the 1800’s, to encompass more of the colony via cultural transmission.

For their part, the Malela were delighted by their diet of human flesh, describing it as “saltish in flavour, and requiring little condiment.” Unfortunately for their neighbors, their search for human flesh led to widespread slaughter. Edgerton, 85 But the Basongye, or Zappo Zaps as they were often known, sold slaves to their neighbors knowing that they would be eaten; they also ate their own dead. Soon after the end of the Arab War, they would work for the Free State and spread cannibalistic terror across the Congo. Other societies such as the Baluba, for example, ate the hearts of virtuous or brave people to gain their strength, but they also ate the bodies of criminals and slaves to prevent them from doing evil to their masters or haunting them. Ibid, 86 In some Congolese societies, people ate human flesh only occasionally to mark a particularly significant ritual occasion, but in other societies in the Congo, perhaps even a majority by the late nineteenth century, people ate human flesh whenever they could, saying it was far tastier than other meat and, perhaps surprisingly, that male human flesh tasted better than female. Persons to be eaten often had both of their arms and legs broken and were made to sit up to their necks in a stream for three days, a practice said to make their flesh more tender, before they were killed and cooked. Teeth filed to sharp points were widely thought by Europeans to be the mark of cannibals, but in some societies whose people actually were cannibals, teeth were not filed at all, and in others that did not practice cannibalism, people nevertheless filed their teeth to sharp points. As Sydney L. Hinde noted during the Arab War, the Batetela were such devoted cannibals that children actually killed and ate their parents “at the first sign of their decrepitude,” but they did not file their teeth. Ibid. In 1907, the Bankutu people were seen by a European traveler to hunt people for food as other Congolese hunted animals. They served human flesh in “little rolls like bacon.” As late as 1923, American traveler Hermann Norden reported that cannibalism was commonplace. One Congolese man reprovingly scolded him for not eating some human flesh when he was offered it: “You know the flesh of man tastes better than the flesh of a goat.” A Belgian companion of Norden’s admitted that he had probably been served human flesh and had eaten it unknowingly. In 1925, Hungarian anthropologist Emil Torday reported an encounter with a Muyanzi man who boasted about cooking human brains with a pinch of salt and red peppers, then dipping his bread in it. “Then he would smack his lips and run away like an imp.” Missionary and explorer A.L. Lloyd reported that when a European told a Bangwa tribesperson that eating human flesh was a “degrading habit,” the man answered, “Why degraded? You people eat sheep and cows and fowls, which are all animals of a far lower order, and we eat man, who is great and above all; it is you who are degraded.” Ibid, 86 While in the Congo, Livingstone saw human parts being cooked with bananas, and many other Europeans reported seeing cooked human remains lying around abandoned fires. British captain and medical officer Sydney L. Hinde, who would take part in the Free State’s war with the Arabs in 1892-93, reported an incident in which a Basongo chief asked a Belgian officer’s tent to cut the throat of a little slave girl he owned. He was cooking her when soldiers seized him. British adventurer Herbert E. Ward once asked a group of Congo tribespeople whether they ate human flesh. Their immediate answer was “Yes, don’t you?” Later, Ward witnessed cannibalism on numerous occasions and was often offered human flesh to eat. He recalled an occasion when a young Bangala slave was killed. Soon after, the chief’s son, a boy of sixteen or so, “nonchalantly” said, “That slave boy was very good eating – he was nice and fat.” Ibid, 88 Several European officers in the Force noted with a mixture of horror and approval that because Congolese on both sides of such battles cooked and ate all of the dead and wounded, burial parties were unnecessary and diseases were kept under control. Cannibalism had become so routine that one Force Publique officer admitted he had become quite “bland” about it.” Ibid, 100 At least a thousand Arabs were killed – then smoked and eaten. Ibid, 102 While some Free State officials were exploiting Congolese and others tried to care for them, a constant concern of these Europeans was cannibalism. It was not simply the eating of human flesh that repelled them, but that so many people were murdered expressly so that others might feast upon their bodies. Early in the 1660s, Englishmen Andrew Battell escaped the Portuguese who had enslaved him, to spend sixteen months among the Jaga people near the Congo’s Atlantic coast. He reported that they preferred human flesh to their own cattle. Later, as we have seen, healthy children were stabbed to death to provide a feast for their owners, and men were known to help sick coworkers “die,” then smoke their body parts for later consumption. Six Bangala men on the Stanley, a thirty-ton, stern-wheel steamer, were suspected by the ship’s captain of killing two crewmen who fell ill. They pleaded innocence, but smoked human body parts were found hidden in their lockers. Some men showed no restraint in their appetite for human flesh. When one of Gongo Lutete’s wives was killed in battle, his own men ate her. Enraged, Lutete ordered these men killed the next day and eaten. None of the Europeans were surprised that Africans on both sides of the war with the Arabs routinely cooked and ate not only the dead they found on the battlefield, but the wounded as well.” Ibid, 108

References

Edgerton, Robert B., The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.  Harris, Marvin, Cannibals and Kings: The Origin of Cultures. Glasgow, 1978, p. 69. Hogg, Garry, Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, quoting The Rev. James Chalmers, Life and Work in New Guinea. RTS, 1895. Lange, Algot, In the Amazon Jungle. Putnam, New York, 1912. MacGregor, Sir William, Foreword to Murray, Papua, or British New Guinea. Faber Unwin, 1912. Maynard, Dr. Felix & Dumas, Alexandre, The Whalers. Hutchinson, 1937. Métraux, Alfred, Easter Island. André Deutsch, 1957. Murray, J. H. P., Lieutenant-Governor and Chief Judicial Officer, “Papua”, Papua, or British New Guinea. Faber Unwin, 1912. Rice, A. P., in The American Antiquarian vol. XXXII, 1910. Seligmann, C. G., “South-eastern New Guinea”, in The Melanesians of British New Guinea. Cambridge University Press, 1910. Simpson, Colin, Adam in Ochre . Angus & Robertson, 1938. St Johnston, Alfred, Traveller, Fiji Islands, Camping Among Cannibals. Macmillan, 1883. Walker, H. W., FRGS, Wanderings among South Sea Savages. Witherby, 1909. Wallace, A. Russel, Travels on the Amazon. Ward Lock, 1853. Williams, F. E., Orikaiva Society. Clarendon Press, 1930.

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.

Ring in the New Year with the Sex Pistols!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWAPe8S2hgA&feature=related] Recorded by the Sex Pistols in Brazil, with vocals by Ronald Biggs, a member of the Great Train Robbery gang escaped from prison and living on the lam in Brazil. Background on the song here. Background on Biggs here. Yes! Yes! Yes! No one is innocent! Yes! God save us all! Yes! Listening to the Sex Pistols, for a male of a certain age, is reliving a boy’s first orgasm over and over again. Lyrics: God save the Sex Pistols, they’re a bunch of wholesome blokes They just like wearing filthy clothes and swapping filthy jokes God save television, keep the programs pure God save William Grundy from falling in manure Ronnie Biggs was doing time until he done a bunk Now he says he’s seen the light and he sold his soul for punk God save Martin Boorman and Nazis on the run They wasn’t being wicked, God, that was their idea of fun God save Myra Hindley, God save Ian Brady Even though he’s horrible and she ain’t what you call a lady Ronnie Biggs was doing time until he done a bunk Now he says he’s seen the light and he sold his soul for punk Ronnie Biggs was doing time until he done a bunk Now he says he’s seen the light and he sold his soul for punk God save politicians, God save our friends, the pigs God save Idi Amin and God save Ronald Biggs God save all us sinners, God save your blackest sheep God save the good Samaritan and God save the worthless creep Ronnie Biggs was doing time until he done a bunk Now he says he’s seen the light and he sold his soul for punk Ronnie Biggs was doing time until he done a bunk Now he says he’s seen the light and he sold his soul He sold his soul, he sold his own soul, soul for punk

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.

Sendero Fades and FARC Rises in Peru

Repost from the old site. Web Archive is your friend. What wonderful dead Internet things it has managed to preserve for us, little snapshots long expired, such as Argentine Jewish journalist Uki Goni’s interview with Nicholas Shakespeare, author of the novel The Dancer Upstairs, based on the Shining Path* insurgency. The novel was later made into a Chuschi, Ayacucho, on May 17, 1980, almost exactly 200 years after the last Inca rebel, Tupac Amaru, on May 17, 1781, was drawn and quartered by Spaniards, the four pieces then buried at far corners of Peru. The Chuschi ballots burning was an inauspicious affair. At 2 AM, five masked youths and one adult entered the office of the registrar, tied him up, burned the ballots and registry and retreated into the night. The attack had been led by a schoolteacher. The incident was scarcely even noted in the press. But the single spark to light the prairie fire had been lit. The correlation with the execution of Tupac Amaru was not accidental, yet this little-noted fact has hardly been noticed by anyone who studied the insurgency. But it has profound implications for understanding the movement. Best’s son was the Edith Lagos, a fighter killed in 1982, drew over 30,000 (in a city of 70,000 people) – mostly Indians – to her funeral in Ayacucho, the capital of the province where it all began. The huge crowd had defied a ban on her funeral. Furthermore, Lagos (rare photos of the strikingly beautiful Lagos here and here) had recently graduated from a Catholic high school run by nuns in Ayacucho. She had been a model student at the high school. Earlier, her parents had sent her to Lima to study to be an attorney. She often skipped school to watch movies from India, because, she said, she liked to cry. When she was not doing that, she was meeting with trade union workers in the city and talking revolution. She was rapidly recruited into the Shining Path and her rousing speeches electrified Indians throughout the Southern Sierra. At age 17, she was already a guerrilla commander. Lagos was captured several times by government forces. There is a photo of her in government custody in 1981, face swollen by beatings, 18 year old eyes already hard with determination. By now, Sendero held the northern third of Ayacucho. On May 2, 1982, in one of Sendero’s most impressive actions, 500 Senderistas raided and took over the university city of Huamanga, a city of 80,000 people. They blew up the local jail and raped, tortured and finally bayoneted to death by government forces. She was all of 19 years old. This was pretty typical behavior by government forces. In contrast, Sendero often tended to wounded government soldiers’ wounds, took them prisoner, and asked them to defect from the security forces or join Sendero. Her father was asked to come to Andahualyas to identify the body. He came, picked up the body and took it back to Ayacucho. All along the way, the procession was repeatedly stopped as throngs of peasants poured into the road to mourn their dead heroine. Her funeral and mass were held in the main Catholic (Lagos was a Catholic, as were most of rank and file Senderistas and even some of the leadership – Abimael Guzman himself is said to be Catholic) cathedral in Ayacucho, where her coffin was draped with a hammer and sickle flag inside church, an odd sight. There is a rare videotape of the funeral. The chapel is packed with peasants, storeowners, government workers, all dressed in Indian garb. As her coffin is borne out of the church, a rousing, clapping chant rises from the crowd as it presses forward and drapes a hammer and sickle flag over her coffin: “Commandante Edith presente! The people will never forget your spilled blood!” The crowd circled the square three times, each time swelling the crowd as more and more people poured out of their homes to join the march. Marching into the cemetery was a solid wall of humanity. The Shining Path banner rode on the outstretched arms of the crowd. There are those who swear that Maria Elena Moyano, “Mother Courage”, in 1991, is without merit. Further, Moyano was killed, albeit brutally, for organizing counterinsurgency patrols and turning in supporters and members of Sendero to the police. As such, she was no longer a civilian. The very name of the group was the Peruvian Communist Party en el Sendero Luminoso de (in the shining path of) this fascinating web page. One cannot really understand Sendero without knowing about Mariategui. So from the start, Sendero raised feminism and the liberation of the Indians as two of their banners. Simon Strong’s Shining Path (1992) is the finest book ever written on the movement. He spent a lot of time in Peru and concluded that at the time, the movement had a huge amount of support, even among the military, the Catholic church, teachers, students, workers, peasants, the urban poor and exiles. They also had massive support among the Ashaninka Indians in the Amazon, and also with some other tribes. The notions that Sendero held 1000’s of Indians “prisoner“, or that they massacred scores of unarmed jungle Indians, are total nonsense. At the time Strong wrote his book, the movement was at the peak of their popularity. Later that year, Guzman was captured, and it has been all downhill ever since. But the general assessment of anti-Sendero authors, that Sendero either had no understanding of, or was hostile to, infuriating Peruvians with her Maoist “Serve the People” purse (the rightwing blogosphere has had an idiotic field day with this, but I seriously doubt that Diaz supports or supported Sendero, so the whole affair is just the usual rightwing character assassination), the Peruvians they refer to are elite, the only ones the media ever talks to. No one else in Peru matters or has a voice. At the moment, Sendero is fairly unpopular, even among those who formerly supported them. These same people also despise the government, the system, and the White elite who exploit them. But Sendero was so vicious and crazy, killing so many people, including the masses and other Leftists, that they left a bad taste in the mouths of many. These people have not given up on revolution by any means. After all, the Peruvian system is worthless, insane and evil, and it should be destroyed. It is only reasonable that such an insane and evil system should produce an insane and evil insurgency – Sendero. Now, Guzman and his fellow leaders sue for peace in prison, while a few holdouts under Comrade Artemio wage armed struggle, mostly in Ayacucho, the Huallaga Valley, the Satipo River area and Huanuco. A few years back, they were recruiting in the squalid slums of Lima once again. These days, a more intelligent group of guerrillas is in Peru – the FARC* of Colombia. A massive, wealthy movement with deep roots in the Colombian poor, especially the rural poor, FARC has been spreading out lately down into the Ucayali River area in the jungle. They are primarily in the area of Yurimangas and north. They have been spotted as far south as the Apurimac River near Ayacucho (where Sendero is still active) and even in Lima. They are very well-supplied, upbeat, loaded with cell phones and radios, very well-disciplined and are making deep inroads in Peru. They give medical care, food, cooking utensils and field tools to the people and don’t bother a soul. They are quite popular with the masses they are interacting with, who see them as better than Sendero. Many former supporters and members of Sendero have lined up with the FARC in Peru. Earlier this year, a column of Senderistas went back to Colombia, probably for training. FARC has been urging Sendero to join with FARC and modify their line. Another column of the remaining leadership of the MRTA* (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) from around Tarapoto and Moyobamba in San Martin Province (their longtime headquarters – photo here) also left for Colombia around the same time – FARC is trying to join together remnants of both Sendero and MRTA with FARC in Peru – a very interesting and possibly fruitful plan. For a great webpage on Tarapoto, complete with awesome pics, by an American woman who spent some time there, see here. The notion that the MRTA was finished after the hostage raid in 1998 is not true – as the century turned, they continued to build the movement in every province of Peru. One of the problems with the MRTA is that they never had much money. Even around Taratopo, where they had a lot of support, they were a sorry sight, often sickly, pale, thin, and broke, wearing ragged clothes. Compared to that impotent picture, and Sendero’s madness and brutality, many of Peru’s peasants think that the FARC are just dandy. Even in Colombia, the FARC has been much more sane and less brutal towards the masses than Sendero was. As such, you can now go into areas of Colombia where everyone for miles around is in the FARC in one way or another, every villager in every town, every ragged farmer in every field with a gun hidden in his clothes, every woman in apron cooking in her kitchen. And it has been this way for decades in Colombia in these areas. This is the reality of FARC’s roots in rural Colombia. The interview with Shakespeare, who is hostile to revolution, nevertheless makes clear that Peru is one nasty place. It is the most racist country he has ever been to, Shakespeare opines. Sure it is. If someone from a lower class (or caste, really) asks a white elite for the time of day in Lima, the rich man will not even speak to the lower-class person. In fact, he won’t speak to him virtually no matter what he wants. The Indians have been killed, enslaved, raped, abused, ignored and basically slaughtered with hunger, disease and out and out murder since Pizarro stepped ashore in 1521. Shakespeare went to Ayacucho, where a white man had been murdered by Indians a week before. Everywhere he goes, the Indians whisper pistaco – the name for a mysterious white giant that murders Indians for their fat which he uses to run Western industry. Pistaco does not exist, but the Indians think he does. Shakespeare said that Sendero started a myth that Tupac Amaru’s body, quartered and buried over 200 years before, was slowly growing underground and would regenerate as he rose with Sendero’s victory. The materialist Sendero would never make up such a story. The story could only come from the Indians themselves, and I am sure they believed it. And in many ways, Peru today is the same as at any time in the decades and centuries after Pizarro waded ashore 500 years ago. Until that changes, Peru will always be in a revolutionary situation. Peru created Sendero; it could not have grown in any sane or decent society. If Best was evil, so was the land that made him. The crimes of the Sendero Frankenstein rest in large part with its creator, the horror called Peruvian society itself. Sendero carried out 96 actions last year, about 2 a week; clearly, it is still alive, though nowadays they are fighting to get their leaders and cadres released and negotiate and end to the war – reasonable demands that no Peruvian state will cotton to. A few years back, they were recruiting again in Lima’s horrid shantytowns (photo here). Meanwhile, FARC expands with great success across Peru. They combine this success with a group in Venezuela, FARV – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Venezuela – (which has 2,000-3,000 members but has not engaged in many actions yet) and another group in Ecuador called FARE – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Ecuador – mostly in the border area with Putamayo and just building a movement now. FARB – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Brazil – exists in the Dog’s Head region of Brazil where Peru, Brazil and Colombia all come together, building a movement once again. FARC also uses the border areas in Panama as an R and R area. The local Cuna Indians of the Darien are quite cooperative, but the Panamanian state has murdered some of them for allowing FARC to stay with them, though FARC has never done a thing in Panama. Recently, FARC has been spotted all the way over in far northern Guyana, where they are trying to tax the gold mining operations. This sighting implies that FARC also has a presence all across far northern Brazil. US media reports place FARC operatives recently in Bolivia, where they were giving political advice to groups associated with the new president Enrique Morales before his election. Despite recent offensives by the Colombian state, FARC is alive and well and expanding across much of Latin America. This as the radical version of Sendero peters out. Revolution is a bloody thing. If states don’t want 12 year old kids carrying AK-47’s professing revolution while roaming their slums*, they need only create a semblance of a decent society. There is no end of history, and you can only push a man so far before he rises up to strike you back. *A Salvadoran man I met in a San Mateo, California restaurant in 2001 told me he saw a 12 yr old boy in the San Salvador slums carrying an automatic weapon and chanting revolutionary slogans in 1969. He went home and told his family, and his parents resolved to sent him out of the country, saying that revolution was surely on its way. Their omniscience was keen. 11 years later, it exploded in full force via the FMLN*. *This blog strongly supported the FMLN in El Salvador to the point of contributing money to their weapons fund. We also strongly support the FARC in Colombia, all of its regional split-offs and the MRTA in Peru. We do not support the project of Sendero Luminoso as they kill people who are completely innocent. All support for groups is with certain reservations.

"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.

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.

Socialism Rules the Planet

Uncle Milton, as typical of his contrary nature, disputes my contention that most nations on Earth are run by social democratic parties or are social democracies.

The US, the Baltics, Colombia, the Philippines, the UK and Chile are exceptions. May I ask how do you define Social Democracy…? Almost every Latin America country (Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela for example..) has a higher (worse – less egalitarian) Gini index than not only the US and UK but also the Philippines. Nicaragua (43.1) is the exception but is quite close to the PI (44.5). The UK’s Gini index is better than New Zealand’s and matches Italy while it only a smidgen about Australia and Ireland. As for the Baltics, Latvia and Estonia are at the same level as Italy. (By the way I do understand these figures are subject to question..in the examples above I am using the UN’s estimates.. the CIA estimates place the UK at the same level as Switzerland) I would think that income equality would be a pretty important (but not the solely import…) measure of a Social Democracy.

I said most countries on Earth are run by socialist or populist parties. I only list those countries – The US, the Baltics, the UK, Colombia, Chile, the Philippines and Somalia – that are run by parties that are explicitly hostile to socialism and are open advocates of neoclassical economics. If you can find anymore, let me know. Liberal, socialist, Communist, progressive and populist parties run the planet! Rightwing parties hostile to socialism which promote neoclassical economics are a tiny minority. Socialism rules the Earth! Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua are run by socialist parties. They have made efforts to reduce the Gini coefficient of course, but their efforts are attacked in the US, and there are usually assassination attempts and coup attempts against them in their countries. I don’t give a fuck about Gini coefficient. The US’ social democracy is anemic compared to that of the New Zealand and Italy. What matters are the benefits afforded to the people. They are excellent in New Zealand and Italy and anemic in the US. Income distribution ain’t everything. Gini coefficient is not that important in a state that provides no benefits. The Baltic states are some of the few states on Earth run by conservatives that are openly hostile to all forms of socialism and are open advocates of neoclassical economics.

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.

Demographics Augurs Well For US Socialism

Repost from the old site. In the comments section, Mort Goldman notes that Scandinavian socialism can never happen in the US because US Whites will oppose being taxed to pay for non-Whites. That’s pretty much been the history of the US for the last 28 years or so. But I argue that as Whites decline, and as they become a minority, we can move more towards a Scandinavian model. Uncle Milton, another commenter, says:

“I think that when Whites get to be a minority, we can have more of a Scandinavian-style socialist society.”Why do you believe the US would have a Scandinavian style socialist society when Whites become a minority in the US..? Why wouldn’t it be more like Brazil or Mexico..?

Here is my response to this very interesting question posed by Unc: Good question Milton. Minorities here in the US are pretty politically savvy and leftwing. Our society is already much more socialist than Brazil or Mexico and our ruling class is not as White as theirs is, nor is it as horrible, venal and ruthless. Brazil has death squads that roam around the land murdering uppity peasants. Any politician who goes after them is going to feel their wrath, possibly with bullets. Also, the press down there is quite a bit more reactionary even than the US press. Under the Republicans in the last 14 years, US Whites have been trying to move towards a Mexico-Brazil type capitalism, but it hasn’t been all that successful. These efforts have culminated under Bush, who has also started to actually steal elections, harass dissidents and move towards authoritarian rule, in line with the US Banana Republic model. Those ruling classes down there in Mexico and Brazil will not budge an inch. The rest of the people, though they are getting royally screwed, are not politically savvy like the Venezuelans, Haitians or Bolivians. In other words, the system is already incredibly more rightwing down there than it is up here. It’s hard to make changes in those hardcore reactionary societies without taking up guns or getting lucky like Chavez or Morales. Since our society is already pretty socialist and the only people feverishly working to make it less so are a rapidly declining, desperate and increasingly unsuccessful White demographic, the future augurs well for socialism in the US. Blacks and Hispanics in the US are much more sophisticated politically than Mexicans and Brazilians, and it’s much easier to add more socialism to an already quite-socialist society.

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.

Is Semco Socialism?

Repost from the old site. Is this socialism? A Brazilian company, Semco, has adopted an anarcho-syndicalist style of organization and has been growing for decades. Workers hire and fire management and agree on management’s salaries. Workers set their own salaries and hours. 2 It’s supposed to be anarcho-syndicalist style of management, but I’m not even sure what anarcho-syndicalism is, even after reading this article. Even if it’s not socialism, it sounds like it’s a heck of a lot better than what we have. From Monday Memo , a management website. Hat tip Entitled To An Opinion. TGGP, at ETAO, asks if this works so great, why don’t profit-maximizing corporations adopt it? In the comments, Kevin Carson says the corporations are not really profit-maximizing, they are out for short-term profits and care nothing about the long term health of the company. The company may as well be sold off to some junk bond guy who strips the assets, fires everyone and pockets the cash. Or it’s going to get bought out by someone else down the road. You have to wonder if capitalism is such a wonder machine, why do capitalists wreck their own companies for short-term profits and Wall Street gains while ruining the long-term profits of the enterprise? Why do they seem to care nothing about the long term interests of the company such that they would just as soon sell it to someone else to do God knows what with, or auction it off in an LBO to some junk-bond guy who specializes in cannibalizing companies and leaving piles of bones? What’s so great about this “magic hand of the market” crap anyway? It’s good for making money. So? So’s slinging crack on the corner.

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?

Thoughts on Etnocentrism and “Race-Mixing”

Repost from the old site.

White nationalists tend to say that any White person who dates or marries outside the White race is a “race traitor” who is engaging in “race mixing” and is fostering “racial suicide”. They also say that any such person must be a “White self-hater” with no love or pride on their own people.

This post will examine whether or not that is so. It will also examine ethnocentrism cross-culturally, with a view towards whether or not it is normal. It will also examine the tendency among human groups to simultaneously guard their women from outsiders while the males also attempt to mate with outsiders.

I argue that all of these things are cultural norms in human beings and may have biological or genetic origins.

I’ve been talking to some of my smart friends about this stuff, and here’s what we came up with.

I noted that I have met persons from all over the world. One tendency that I noted among most, but not all, persons, was ethnocentrism, often of an extreme type. They all had a lot of pride in their race, nation, ethnic group, religion, or whatever. In particular, they did not like to hear criticism of it from outsiders.

At the same time, many were not particularly racist. They certainly were friendly enough towards me. These same people, if they were young and unmarried, often combined a profound ethnocentrism with a desire to marry outside their group. In this case, many of them wanted to marry an American, especially a White American.

This would seem to strongly contradict White nationalist theory that everyone who desires to marry outside their race, nation or ethnicity is race-traitor who is full of hatred for their own kind. That just doesn’t seem to be true. White nationalists are flat out wrong. It’s perfectly possible to love your people and marry outside of them.

Oddly enough, people seem to be able to combine an often profound ethnocentrism with a desire to marry out and commit “race-treason” or “racial suicide”.

I talked to one of my friends, and while he is not a White nationalist (he despises them), he admitted that he thinks Whites, specifically Northern Europeans, are superior to all other groups. He also said that he had been in love with a number of non-White women, and he would have gladly married them.

He said that even after he married them, he would probably still have felt that Northern Europeans were superior, even though he loved his wife. He suggested that many people of other races who marry non-group members probably feel the same way.

How can we make sense of these findings?

First of all ethnocentrism does seem to be a norm in human societies. As an example, let us look at a tribe in the Brazilian Amazon called the Pirahã.

This tribe has been the subject of a lot of research lately because they appear to lack recursion in their language. As recursion is said to be a human linguistic universal (or part of universal grammar in the Chomsky-Pinker paradigm) that is genetically coded into our brain, its absence in the Pirahã implies either that they are genetically distinct (dubious) or that the Chomsky-Pinker theory of universal grammar needs a lot of work.

Leaving aside the Pirahã’s lack of recursion for a moment, let us look at their extreme ethnocentrism. The Pirahã have been in contact with Europeans for a good 200 years. During that time, many a missionary has tried to convert them to Christianity. However, for a primitive people, the Pirahã are very scientific-minded, so they have never accepted Christianity.

Anthropologist/linguist Daniel Everett has worked with the Pirahã for 30 years. He originally started out as an evangelical minister to them, but their rejection of his preaching caused him to question his own religion, and he is now an atheist.

He used to talk to them about religion and the Pirahã would say, “Well, who is this Jesus guy? Have you ever seen him? Have you ever met him? Do you know anyone who has seen him or met him?” He would have to answer no to all of these questions. The Pirahã would then say, “So why should we believe this stuff?”

According to their culture, one can only believe things that one has experienced with their own senses, or that someone you know has experienced sensually.

Anyway, this is why the Pirahã have been rejecting missionaries for 200 years now. Not only have they rejected missionaries, but they have also rejected the Portuguese language and modern living, which they have also been exposed to for 200 years. They know what the Portuguese language is, and they know what modern living is, but they want no part of either.

Portuguese language classes have often been offered to the Pirahã, and they attend the classes and pretend to be engaged, but actually refuse to learn any of the language. Some of the children start to learn Portuguese, but as soon as they show signs of learning the language, the parents pull them out of class and refuse to let them return. They don’t want to learn Portuguese! Period!

Further, they want no part of modern culture. They have been told over and over the advantages of modern culture, but they’re not buying.

These refusals are rooted in the Pirahã’s profound sense of ethnocentrism. The Pirahã see themselves as superior to all other races, and they are even superior to all of the Indian tribes around them, whom they want nothing to do with. I’ve seen pictures of the Pirahã, and they just look like Amazonian Indians to me. In my ethnocentric mind, I can’t see how they have anything to feel superior about. But they do feel this way.

From this interesting post in Majority Rights, a White Supremacist site that is nevertheless intelligent, interesting and relatively easy to tolerate, we can see that this feeling is not limited to the Pirahã. It’s a discussion of racism in China. One commenter, who is Chinese, notes that most NE Asian groups see their race, nation or ethnic group as superior to all others, including surrounding Asians.

A White commenter who met Vietnamese students in Europe noted that these Vietnamese felt the same way. Furthermore, he noted that the Vietnamese place strong restrictions of their women marrying out.

The commenter said that a female member of the group that married out to a White man would be considered a whore who was lower than dirt who had just married into a subhuman race, the Whites. But if she married into an Asian group not her own, that would be even worse. She was now worse than a whore for marrying into a group that was even lower than Whites. The commenter noted that the Chinese felt much the same way.

I would imagine many other East Asians, especially the ethnocentric Koreans and Japanese, feel the same.

We really could go on and on here, but ethnocentrism, even profound ethnocentrism, seems to be a human norm. We can certainly get away from it as individuals, but it’s probably always going to be with us. It also implies that the thorough deracination of Western Whites, to the point of deliberate self-abnegation, is simply not normal. Much as I dislike them, the White nationalists are correct on this point.

Another commenter linked to this article, reported in the press as racist anti-African riots by Chinese students in China against African students. To the extent this stuff was written up at all in the Western press, it was as irrational racist riots against innocent Africans by racist Chinese.

The truth seems to be more complicated. A White American who was a student in China at the time noted that the African students were throwing wild parties in their dorms. Non-African males were allowed in, but not Chinese males. Chinese females were very much invited. He attended one of these parties and “rescued” two Chinese women by getting them out of there.

It was common knowledge at the time that the Africans were getting Chinese women drunk and then “raping” them. Whether that meant date rape or actual physical rape is uncertain, but after a while, Chinese students (probably mostly young males ) had had enough and there were days of anti-African riots.

Among the regulations that followed was that African male students were forbidden from consorting with Chinese females in their dorms.

In the examples above we see another essential part of ethnocentrism – “Don’t any of you outsiders dare to fuck with our women. We will defend the honor of our women with our lives and we will kill any outsider males who take liberties with our females.”

You don’t have to study a lot of anthropology or history to see how this line seems to be written all through human history. The horrible stoning of Dua Khalil Aswad, a 17 year old Yezidi girl who eloped with a non-Yezidi man, is an example. She was stoned to death by a crowd of 10,000 Yezidi men for “marrying an outsider”.

One of the best ways to rile up a population against an invader or an enemy is to suggest that “they are taking liberties with our women.” Countless male armies have been roused to defend the honor of the nation’s or group’s females.

We also see this in the Jim Crow laws of the South where Black males were lynched for looking at, whistling at, talking to, having sex with, or raping White women. The image of pure Southern womanhood was to be upheld with blood.

What’s up with this? Kevin MacDonald argues that there are probably dual imperatives operating here. The first is protection of the females of the tribe from mating with outsiders. This is probably done in the furtherance of “ethnic genetic interests.” That is, most tribes probably want to survive for as long as possible as an entity. The best way to do this is to keep outsiders away from your women.

At the same time, MacDonald argues that there is an opposite genetic imperative at work, that the males seek to mate with outsiders, while protecting their females from doing so. MacDonald sees this as attempting to add genetic diversity to the group to make it more fit, but I see it as more base than that.

Probably many of these mating occurred during raids in which the outsider females were raped. In many cases, they were captured as some sort of slaves, brought back to the group, and forced into marriages with males of the group.

In this way, the tribe poaches the women (probably the best, or most attractive women were favored), removes them from the competing group, and brings them into one’s own group. Though White nationalists would argue that this is genetic contamination, it surely was not seen that way. The tribe simply wishes to perpetuate itself, and the genes it utilizes in that goal are not relevant.

In older times, a woman who mated out probably was carted off by invading outsiders or went off with the outsider willingly, and hence was simply lost to the group. If all the women did this, the tribe would go extinct.

Yet males could mate out and still live with the group, since they would bring any captured women back to reside with the tribe of the man who captured her.

Further, by capturing the best females of competing outsiders, you deplete them of their best resource. If you rape them and run off, you force the outsiders to bear the children of your tribe (assuming they raise the child and don’t kill it), interjecting the genes of your own tribe into theirs against their will. It’s a form of domination and aggression of a very base sort.

Racists typically use these facts to try to justify racism by saying that everyone is a racist and that anti-racism is abnormal. This is to be condemned. At least here in the modern West, there seem to be an awful lot of folks that are significantly free of racist feelings, so it would seem we are not genetically doomed to racism.

Modern political correctness argues that the tendencies above, ethnocentrism and protection of one’s women from outsiders, are examples of the most horrible and evil racism.

The Left would simply argue that these are reactionary archaisms that must be swept away via revolution. They would probably throw in something stupid and say that these backwards tendencies are all related to economics.

But it seems so much deeper than that.

Though civilized man is capable of transcending most of his base instincts much of the time, the fact remains that at the end of the day, we are just long-legged bipedal apes.

Any sensible analysis of human behavior needs to recognize that.

Update on the Guerilla Movement in Peru

There is a lot of lying about the new Sendero, and next to nothing about the smaller MRTA in Peru. The MRTA is said to be defunct, but actually about one person is arrested every three weeks on charges of being an MRTA member. Why the group is still illegal is not known, since they have not waged any attacks in 14 years. However,  the state refuses to negotiate a peace treaty with them, so members are still on the run.

Recently, the remains of the MRTA in San Martin Region took off for Colombia with a column of FARC guerrillas. A column of Shining Path guerrillas also took off for Colombia with the FARC. In the past, Sendero hated both the FARC and MRTA as revisionists. The new Sendero is much more moderate and reasonable, and they are working with both organizaitons.

FARC also now has a large presence in Peru, though they are not waging any attacks. Instead, they are just building a movement in rural areas. There are about 1,200 FARC members in Peru, members of FARP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Peru). There are also FARC branches in Venezuela (FARV – 2,000 members), Ecuador – FARE, and Brazil, FARB, where they operate in the Dog’s Head region.

In Peru, FARP is mostly in the northeast, but they have been spotted all the way down to Pucallpa. In contrast to often poorly equipped MRTA members, FARC members in Peru are extremely well-equipped, dazzling peasants with their gear.

Sendero’s numbers are vastly underreported. First of all, there is a huge network of the old Sendero, mostly gone to ground for many years now, often over a decade. They have not carried out attacks since 1993, but the government is still arresting them as members of an illegal organization. This is Abimael Guzman’s old group who are still loyal to Guzman. They seek a peace treaty with the state and to form a legal political party for the time being.

The other groups are mostly centered around the VRAE and the Upper Huallaga Valley to the north. The state usually says that there are 300 fighters total in these groups, but there are more than that. Recently they upped it to 600. There must be more than that even. In recent years, one person is arrested per day on charges of being members of Sendero Luminoso. So 350 Senderistas are arrested every year for several years now. In one year, the entire 350 man group would be arrested.

In recent years, Sendero has started coming back to some of their old hideouts. In 2003, they were recruiting again in Villa El Salvador, a huge slum in Lima. They are returning to many of their old haunts in Ayacucho. They recently made an appearance in Chuschi, where the revolution started in June 1980. They have also shown up in Cangallo. There have recently been arrests at the University of Huamanga in Ayacucho, where Guzman was a professor and where the revolution began. A huge march in the city demanded the release of several students arrested for being Senderistas.

Sendero has a presence once again in the Cuzco Region, mostly in the jungle in the west near Vilcabamba. They have shown up recently in Sicuani in the south of Cuzco in the high Andes. They once again have a presence in Huancayo, the mining village in Junin. They have been seen recently in eastern Ancash, where they had not been seen in years. This is probably a movement west from the Huallaga. Similarly, there have been a couple of sightings in eastern La Libertad near Tayabamba.

They have moved all through the Amazon to the area where Peru, Colombia and Brazil come together. These reports indicate that Sendero may even be present in the Dog’s Head in Brazil and in far southern Colombia.

The new Sendero has refused Guzman’s orders to surrender, lay down arms and seek peace. Since the state offers them nothing but arrests until they die, they may as well fight on. Why not? The VRAE and Huallaga factions are both now working very heavily with local cocaine traffickers. For this sin they have been heavily critiqued by the old Sendero as mercenaries. However, they are making a lot of money. They have brand new uniforms, new weaponry and have excellent gear.

Reports indicate that in the old days, Sendero was very brutal. Villagers said they killed people “for no reason.” Others say that they entered villages, stole whatever they wanted, and then shoot up the village if they refused to join the insurgency. Sendero’s brutal tactics were quite successful, but they also horribly alienated the poor peasants. Many are still angry to this day.

However, the new Sendero leaves the people alone, or, if they deal with them at all, is good to them. When they come into towns, they buy whatever they want, leave pamphlets, ask if anyone wants to join, and then leave. Most villagers have a positive opinion of them these days. Even the local rondas that Peru set up to fight Sendero (local village militias) refuse to fight them anymore. Sendero is now allied with other regional guerrillas and they have issued positive statements on the New Left movements in Venezuela, Bolivia and elsewhere. Previously, such folks were condemned as revisionists.

Bottom line is this is a much more reasonable organization. Whereas I used to hate them, now I support them 10

Here it is 30 years after Sendero started its war in Peru, and I hardly think Peru is any better off now than then. Peruvian capitalist society is just crap, and it seems to be unreformable. Let’s just get rid of it altogether and start anew.

It would be nice if a Peruvian Chavez would come along, but that’s not in the stars.

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.

Video of the FARC Overrunning Mitu, Vaupes

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeZgy8rgWYs&feature=related]

Mitu is a city in Vaupes, Colombia on the Brazilian border in the middle of the Amazon. The FARC overran the small police detachment there on November 1, 1998.

The attack begins at 4:58 AM, and the town is overrun later in the day, the remains of the police detachment all surrendering. The prisoners will be treated pretty well. They won’t be tortured or murdered, although some were killed when the Colombian army tried to liberate some of these prisoners.

You can see the use of the some of the FARC’s homemade mortars here. The last part includes a battle against the reinforcements that were sent in by the army to retake the town. This battle takes place outside of town, in jungles and plains.

You can also see that the FARC is a huge army, with bases, full uniforms, huge detachments that march in formation, chains of command, etc. The war in Colombia is really a war between two gigantic armies, not between a single army and a band of ragged guerrillas.

This video is by the FARC.

Overall, it’s a pretty amazing video of urban warfare, shot in the midst of a huge and savage battle with some cool jungle and plains warfare at the end.

Those opposed to the FARC are asked what the Left in Colombia should do instead. Now that Uribe is committed to military defeat with no negotiations, the prospects for the FARC are bleaker than ever. They can’t negotiate an end to the conflict, so they must fight. They can’t really surrender either. Even if they disarm and try to seek power peacefully, they are going to be massacred anyway like the rest of the Left. So it’s fight or die for the FARC.

The model of the Colombian state is based on capital formation by way of violence, similar to the US model in the 1800’s. Land is stolen from peasants and the indigenous at gunpoint, and they are killed or attacked if they resist. Then their land is given to large landowners who already have almost all of the land, or else given to large multinational corporations for various land exploitation development projects.

It’s development by violence, with the paramilitaries and army clearing the way. Communities, organizations and peoples who resist multinational development projects or the theft of their land are attacked by the Colombian military or the paramilitaries and often killed. Labor unions that try to organize in multinational or any other enterprises are also attacked by the army and the paramilitaries.

Refugees flood into urban slums with few amenities, no electricity, no running water, no indoor plumbing, and few jobs. These slums are now policed by paramilitaries, the enemies of the people. If these slum-dwellers protest conditions in their shantytowns, they are likely to be attacked and killed by the paramilitaries who patrol them. Women’s, human rights, campesino, indigenous and Afro-Colombian organizations are all attacked as agents of the Left.

Most of those attacked by the army and paramilitaries are first vilified as supporters or members of the FARC. In most if not all cases, it’s not true. They are definitely not members of the FARC in most if not all cases. Are they supporters? Who knows? Probably not openly. Keep in mind that anyone and everyone on the Left is automatically accused of being a “FARC supporter,” so you don’t need to support them to get killed. It’s a pretty hard accusation to prove anyway. How do you prove if someone is a “FARC supporter” anyway?

In this way, the Colombian military serves the interests of the Colombian oligarchy, especially the large landowners, and the multinationals. and wages war on their own people.

This is the model that the Colombian urban middle class, both US political parties, the Obama Administration and the entire US mass media support to the hilt. There’s nothing to support here for any progressive person.

A new political party has sprung up recently called the Democratic Pole. The Polo varies from social democrats to Communists, but they have little to no relationship with the FARC. Nevertheless, there is a huge vilification campaign going on against the Polo and its candidates, and the military and paramilitaries are starting to kill Polo figures on a regular basis.

That’s some background on the Colombian conflict and on the Colombian government, the US’ biggest ally in Latin America and one the top recipients of US aid in the world.

FARC Branches in Other Parts of Latin America

FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), a very powerful guerrilla group, also has branches in other nations.

FARE (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Ecuador) operates in Ecuador, mostly in Sucumbios. See my other post for more on them.

FARB (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Brazil) operates in the Dog’s Head of Brazil on the Colombian border. They don’t do much there militarily as it is just a rear base. Mostly they resupply there from Brazilian merchants. The area is sparsely populated jungle. FARC also ranges across the northern part of Brazil all the way to the border of Brazil and Guyana, where they tax the gold mining businesses.

FARV (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Venezuela) is just the FARC in Venezuela. They have about 2,000-3,000 people under arms. It’s hard to say what they do there. It seems Venezuela is mostly a rear guard base, and Hugo Chavez definitely supports the FARC and leaves them alone in Venezuela.

Colombian paramilitaries are now starting to operate in the border area too, and things are getting messy. Also, about 200 peasants have been murdered by Venezuelan death squads in the past decade. The death squads are run by wealthy landowners, usually cattle ranchers, and opposition politicians. It’s really the Opposition who are the killers in Venezuela, not Chavez.

The killings stem from land conflicts, as most of the land in that part of Venezuela is owned by a tiny group of big landowners and most of the population are rural peasants. Peasants stage land takeovers in the typical Latin American style. Chavez has started to buy out some landowners and give land to peasant and Indian communities, but the process is slow.

FARV are mostly Venezuelans, a militia that is armed and pro-Chavez. They do little, but are mostly there in case of a rightwing coup or anti-Chavez invasion, in which case they will take up arms to defend Chavez.

FARP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Peru): This is the FARC in Peru. They have been active down there for a few years now, mostly in the north around Loreto Province, but they have been active all the way down to Pucallpa in Ucayali. They use it as a rearguard base, but are also forming deep relations with the peasants. They buy stuff from peasants and give them things that the peasants need. They are quite popular in the area, whereas Sendero Luminoso were widely hated for their brutality against the poor.

In addition, FARP has recruited 1,200 new members all across Peru in the last few years. Many of these people are former Shining Path members who quit the group or were released from prison. They’ve soured on Sendero due to the brutal tactics and have taken up with FARP instead. FARP carries out no armed activities in Peru, though they are said to be very well equipped and supplied. They are also taxing coca crops being grown in the part of Peru right across the border from Colombia. This area is a wild jungle.

FARC in Panama: FARC has long used the Darien Gap region of Panama as a rear base. There are occasional shootouts with Panamanian security forces. There are now death squads in Panama murdering Indians for “cooperating with the FARC.” The FARC just stay in Indian villages and buy stuff from the Indians, that’s all. It’s just an R & R area.

FARC in Bolivia: There are rumors that the FARC has been in Bolivia training militias aligned with President Evo Morales, but there is no hard evidence that this is true.

FARC in Paraguay: There are allegations that FARC has helped train the EPP, a new Paraguayan guerrilla group, though there is no hard evidence.

FARC in Nicaragua: The FARC has a long relationship with the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Large stashes of FARC money and guns have been seized there, but the FARC carries out no armed activities. Nicaragua is just used as a place to buy guns and amass funds.

New Guerrilla Group in Paraguay – EPP (Paraguayan People’s Army)

Fascinating news.

A new guerrilla group has popped up in Paraguay in the past couple of years, and it’s now starting to make news in the worldwide media after ambushing and killing 4 people in the Concepcion Region of the Northeast on April 20, 2010. Reports are confused. First reports said that 1 cop and three workers were killed, but later reports say that 4 cops were killed in an ambush.

The group has deep roots in the landless peasants in the severely impoverished northeast, where there are frequent conflicts between landless peasants and large landowners, with the landowners regularly hiring death squads to kill peasants.

The same thing goes on in Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia (most notoriously) and Honduras. Other death squads continue to operate in Mexico, Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala, Bolivia and Peru. In Ecuador, they exist, but mostly just issue threats. As you can see, rightwing death squads that target the Left are a fixture of Latin American society.

In Mexico, Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Venezuela, Honduras and Bolivia, the Left is more or less unarmed. In Peru and Colombia, the Left is armed and fights back. There are also very small guerrilla movements in Mexico. There is an armed Left in Ecuador, but they don’t seem to do much. I assume that if they repression continues as it is in Honduras, the Left is going to take up arms again. As it is, there is about one killing a day occurring since the US-sponsored coup.

Usually the killing continues for a while until the Left has enough, gets tired of waiting around for the government to come out and kill you, and decides to take up arms so the next time the state comes out to kill you, you can at least fight back. This is generally how what the US calls “Leftist terrorist groups” get their start – in self-defense.

In late December 2008, the EPP raided a military post in Concepcion Province, stole some weapons and set the post on fire.

Around 10 people were arrested early this year in Concepcion on charges of kidnapping a wealthy rancher and holding him for 94 days until he was released on $550,000 ransom.

The area of Concepcion where the guerrillas are operating is mostly thick jungle on the border with Brazil. The group wears camouflage uniforms, carries modern weapons and includes female fighters. The group is said to have about 60 members, meaning they are very small. The Paraguayan government says that they were trained by the Colombian FARC, which I find plausible.

This appears to be the same group that broke off from the leftwing Free Motherland Party (PPL). They were involved in the kidnapping and death of Ceclia Cubas, the daughter of a the daughter of a former Paraguayan president (1998/1999).

The group actually seems to have emerged in the past couple of years, though it’s been around for about 18 years. The group emerged in 1992 when some trainee priests were thrown out of the seminary for their radical views. They formed a group called the declared a state of emergency in Concepcion, San Pedro and three other northern provinces after the latest attack and has sworn to wipe them out. We will see what happens next.

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.

Map of the Romance Speaking World

Here is a very nice map of the parts of the world that speak a Romance language, in whole or in part. The main languages covered here are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian.

Nice map of the Romance languages of the world. Click to enlarge.

The heavy Spanish speaking zone is Spain, Rio Muni, New Mexico and Latin America except for Brazil, the Guyanas, Haiti and some Caribbean islands that speak French. To a lesser extent, it is spoken Spanish Sahara and Belize. To a much lesser extent, it is spoken in  parts of the US and in the Philippines where it is a dying colonial language.

The heavy Portuguese speaking zone is Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, other parts of Africa and East Timor. In the latter countries, it is a lingua franca.

French is heavily spoken in France, Quebec, French Guyana, French Polynesia, Belgium and Switzerland, less heavily in much of Africa, especially Congo, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Gabon, Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Mali, Togo, Cote d’Ivorie, Burkino Faso, Senegal, West Africa, Central Africa, Djibouti and Madagascar, less in the rest of Canada, and even less in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Louisiana, where it is a dying colonial language overtaken by national languages in Southeast Asia, Arabic in Northwest Africa and English in Louisiana

Italian is spoken heavily in Italy and less so in Libya and Albania.

Romanian is spoken heavily in Romania, Moldova and Serbia.

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.

The Flynn Effect and "g"

Repost from the old site. Commenters recently have been bringing up the Flynn Effect (FE) of rising IQ’s in the past 80 years. There are many paradoxes and controversies over this effect that the commenters have been sharp enough to notice and point out. One argument is that the FE is not a real intelligence rise at all, since it is not on real g intelligence. In other words, the FE means nothing, and people are no smarter than before. The FE gains are not gains in intelligence at all, they are zero, nothing, null. This is not correct, but the argument is very interesting. First we need to understand what the FE is and what it means. Then we need to understand what g is and what it means. The post concludes that there has indeed been an FE rise on g, but only on one component of g. Further, the post critiques the whole notion of seeing intelligence purely through the lens of g as senseless and meaningless, not to mention flat out wrong. The subject matter is highly complex, but I tried to make it as simple as possible. My readers are a very intelligent bunch, and I think most of you should be able to follow this argument. You really need to read this slowly and take your time to try to understand what is going on here. It took me months of studying the FE before I finally started to get a handle on it. The Flynn Effect (FE) is a secular rise in IQ over time that has been occurring throughout the West for 80 years now. All ages and ethnic groups are effected. Preliminary evidence indicates that it is also occurring in the Caribbean (Dominica), South America (Brazil) and Africa (Kenya). An overview of the FE itself goes beyond the scope of this post. The FE is quite complex, and many people do not seem to understand the concept properly, hence are not able to discuss it, much less debate it. However, most people of reasonable intelligence, if interested, seem to be able to grasp the basic implications of the FE. Hereditarians, most of whom are White racists, are very upset by the FE (Talk about being opposed to human progress!) because they have a strong emotional investment in White intellectual superiority and the intellectual inferiority of Blacks, Hispanics and other groups. We know that the major hereditarian researchers on intelligence are racists because almost all of them support getting rid of all anti-discrimination laws. The agenda is clear for both lab coat racists and White nationalists: if we can prove that Blacks, Hispanics and others are intellectually inferior to Whites, we can legalize discrimination, especially job discrimination, against them. A particularly frightening lab coat racist endeavor is attempting to prove that Blacks are inferior employees to Whites on average. If they prove this scientifically, then they will have a logical reason to support discriminating against Blacks in employment. Almost all of these folks are White, and most of them call themselves race realists. They spend a good deal of time screaming and yelling about why Blacks and Browns will not accept that they are intellectually inferior (Steve Sailer specializes in this). Why would anyone want to accept, or actually accept, such a thing? Furthermore, given the nefarious agenda behind those promoting these theories that seeks to legalize discrimination against Blacks and Browns, any Black or Hispanic person who gets behind this would have to be out of their minds. I have ritually added “Hispanic” after Black above, but in general, Hispanics are being left out of this debate. The real effort here is directed by racist Whites against Blacks, not Hispanics. It is against Blacks that these Whites seek to legalize the right to discriminate. The Flynn Effect has been hard to argue against, but the hereditarians have tried hard. They have shown that the FE is not on g. G is a hypothesized common correlational factor that supposedly measures pure intelligence. Everything outside of g is “not real intelligence”. However, according to one paper, the very concept of g is tendentious to say the least, and possibly nonsensical. The paper is titled A schematic of the g, or general intelligence, factor. The ovals represent subtests on an intelligence test. G represents the totality of the areas where the purple subtests shade into the pink circle, and the degree to which they correlate (line up) with each other. G is a correlation coefficient of various tests. It measures the tendency of superior test takers (and someone who has a brain that works a bit better), if they do well on one test, do also do well on all other tests. The FE is generally not on g because some tests have risen dramatically, others moderately, and still others little or not at all. Therefore, intelligence has not risen in a general, across-the-board kind of way. However, certain aspects of intelligence have definitely risen, and those aspects have quantifiable benefits in modern society, occupationally, academically and in other ways.

The argument of whether or not the FE gains are on g or not is very complex, about as complex as the FE itself. First of all, the FE gains have not been across the board. In general, they have focused on verbal analysis, visual analysis, visual intelligence and problem-solving. Gains have been few to none in basic things like general knowledge, mathematics, mathematical analysis, spelling and reading comprehension. G is a hypothesized and problematic construct that is a correlational factor all of the subtests on an intelligence test. It is thought to be highly heritable and physiologically based, and this is why the hereditarians have gone nuts over it. It measures how someone with a somewhat more neurologically efficient brain will tend to score better across an entire range of subtests than someone who with a less efficient brain. The reason the FE is not on g is because it is limited to a subset of intelligence subtests, and gains have been small to none across another subset. Therefore, there is no g gain. However, Raven’s Progressive Matrices has shown larger gains than any other test. Raven’s was designed to measure pure g and nothing else. Raven’s scores are not thought to be effected by environmental factors outside of pregnancy and the first few months of life, and are thought to be purely neurologically, physiologically or genetically based. Given the pure g basis for Raven’s, the wild secular gains on it on the FE are most puzzling. However, recently James Flynn has shown that the FE does show a .5 correlation on a factor analyzing fluid g. There is fluid g and crystallized g. Fluid g is thought to peak early in life. This is why things that require raw brain processing power tend to peak in young people: creativity – artists, musicians, poets, novelists, filmmakers, mathematicians, physicists – often do their best work as young people (usually as young men). Fluid g is really a measure of how well, fast or efficient your brain works. Crystallized g is another matter altogether. Crystallized g may be seen as “what you know” as opposed to “how fast of a brain you have.” While fluid g peaks early, crystallized g often goes up throughout life, and people can still score high on crystallized g in their 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and even 80’s. This is what we might call “accumulated knowledge” or “wisdom”. The old person’s brain does not work as fast, but the accumulated knowledge makes up for that in that they can see connections between things easier. The young person’s brain works very fast, but with the lack of accumulated knowledge and life experience, they are not able to put things together as well to arrive at the correct conclusion. This is why no society has ever put the 18-23 year old’s in power, no matter how zippy their brains are. Instead, the old men have always been put in power. The accumulation of a life of learning is thought to lead to a wisdom that will manifest itself as the ability to make “wise”, correct and proper decisions. The concepts of crystallized and fluid g are complicated, but hopefully that explanation helped you understand it better. The FE is on fluid g, not crystallized g. Visual intelligence and analysis, problem solving, verbal analysis analytical thinking in general, on intelligence tests, is in the realm of fluid g. Those are those little puzzles that ask you to decide which figure goes next in the series. On intelligence tests, crystallized g measures accumulated knowledge and the degree to which one has learned basic tasks of modern life. The FE gains on mathematics, math analysis, reading comprehension, vocabulary and general knowledge are small to nil, and all of these tests measure crystallized g. To sum, these are the sorts of things you learn in school. This is why, despite skyrocketing IQ’s, we cannot read a book, add and subtract, or do calculus any faster than our grandparents. We also do not know any more than they did, and we know no more words than they did. This is obvious in the many reports on “idiocratic” state of high school seniors, college students or college grads. And this is how a puzzle is solved – how IQ’s are surely rising at the same time as idiocracy is. From Flynn’s chapter summary:

IQ gains over time were calculated for each WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) subtest and the subtests ranked by size of gain. Verbal Similarities led at 20 points per generation – larger than gains on Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Similarities measures on-the-spot problem-solving (something akin to fluid g); verbal subtests that do not measure this show low rate of gain. WISC subtests were also ranked by their correlations with Raven’s, the latter being used as a marker for fluid g. The r between the two hierarchies was calculated to approximate a correlation between IQ gains and fluid g . The result of 0.50 contrasts with the negative correlation between IQ gains and the g generated by factor analyzing the WISC battery itself, which is generally viewed as predominately a crystallized g. In sum, it appears that human groups can make massive fluid g gains in a period too short to accommodate radical change in the speed and efficiency of neural processes. Moreover, once gains in intelligent behavior over historical time are seen to be independent of brain physiology, does g really provide a criterion for assessing their significance? Finally, not only a measure of fluid g (which is highly heritable) but also inbreeding depression are shown to be correlated with IQ gains – gains overwhelmingly environmental in origin. Therefore, correlations between such genetically influenced factors and the size of the black/white IQ gap do not show that the gap has a genetic component.

The Similarities test has risen faster than any other test. It measures analytical thinking and is thought to be a good measure of raw fluid g. The final paragraph is interesting. The Black-White IQ gap is correlated with something called inbreeding depression score, a purely heritable measure. Hereditarians use this to say that the B-W IQ gap is genetic. But Flynn shows here that the FE (a purely environmental gain) also correlates with inbreeding depression, a purely hereditarian score. Flynn uses this to say that the B-W IQ gap is not necessarily completely genetic. Flynn notes above that the FE cannot possibly be caused by brains that actually work better physiologically than the brains of our grandparents. Genetics doesn’t work that fast. Therefore, what does the FE measure? Flynn says it measures “intelligent behavior.” So our brains don’t work any better than our grandparents’ brains, but we show improved “intelligent behavior” over them. Therefore, another mystery is solved, how massive IQ gains can occur without concomitant improvement in the physiology of our brains. Since hereditarians use g as a measure of physiological efficiency of our brains, Flynn calls this into question by noting that g gains can occur too fast to be accommodated for by physiologically improved brains. Therefore, Flynn suggests chucking g as a measure of pure brain physiological efficiency. Therefore, the White nationalist and hereditarian argument that the FE is not on g has been proven wrong.

References

Flynn, James R. 2000. IQ Gains, WISC Subtests and Fluid g: g Theory and the Relevance of Spearman’s Hypothesis to Race, Chapter 12 in Bock, Gregory R., Goode, Jamie A., Webb, Kate. Novartis Foundation Symposium 233 – The Nature of Intelligence, pp. 202-227. Novartis Foundation. Published online.

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.

Racial Separatism in Brazil, India and the US

In the comments section, White Preservation, who is a White separatist, states:

Do note though that in all countries that are very multiracial/multiethnic (USA, Brazil, India, etc) race and ethnicity often correlates quite closely with class-status, with the lower classes of multiracial/multiethnic nations always being of a ‘darker’ racial/ethnic heritage. Thus, if those chaotic multiracial nations were calmly dissolved and the races then re-separated and re-organized again as best they could manage, then the very troublesome and explosive class/race correlation could largely be done away with and humanity would certainly be better for it.

There are some serious problems with this analysis. Much less so for the US, but the problems in India and Brazil are so severe as to utterly preclude any kind of racial separatism. Why? There are hardly any “races” to separate anymore. My response: Not necessarily so true in India. The very intelligent and cultured Brahmins of South India are often much darker than the much less intelligent and very backwards low castes of North India. It’s not so simple. Besides, it makes no sense to divide India into two races, Light North Indians and Dark South Indians. It’s just ridiculous. The place is a totally chaotic racial/ethnic mishmash, with darker folks also in the north, lighter folks also in the south, and people with all sorts of mixed features of both. It would just be insane to try to separate out any kind of real races out of the mix, and anyway, a lot of darker folks would align more with lighter and a lot of lighter folks would align more with darker, due to caste, intelligence, class and cultural variables. Intelligence is more along caste lines than along racial lines. The Brahmins are smarter than the others. Further, there is no support whatsoever in Brazil for racial separatism. There are a few Whites down south who advocate this, but honestly, they just have no support at all. And they have been squawking about this forever. Even in Brazil, it is going to be very difficult to tease out any kind of real races. Sure, down South, you often have folks that are pretty White, but I have seen genetic tests done down there that show that even a lot of  Southern Brazilian Whites have lots of Indian and Black in them. In most of Brazil, all “White” means is at least somewhat lighter than others. There are Black people, true, but most of the population is just some unholy Godawful genetic mystery casserole such that “racial separation” makes no sense because there are hardly any races to separate out anymore. It’s true that in the US, there is still a White population of 6 The US isn’t all that mixed in yet, so separation is still doable (other than it has almost

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