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.

Why Non-Whites Are the Only Hope for the Left

Dirty Bull says:

The USA is a very unequal society in terms of income distribution – in fact it verges on Latin American levels of inequality.Just look whats happened to California – has mass immigration made it a better and more equitable place over the years, or Brazil-lite with gated communities, violent gangs and murders and horrible inequality, or was California thrown off the path it was pursuing in the ’50s, namely, a Sweden with warm weather, intelligent, educated people, low crime, good schools, good civic values etc? The undeniable pattern is that mass 3rd world immigration produces horrible inequality.

3rd World immigration is here to stay. The future at best is some sort of Venezuela or Bolivia type state in the US, with the non-Whites and some Whites rallying around some sort of Chavezismo, Moralesismo or Bolivarianism and the Whites digging in their heels, becoming more radical, more militant and probably more violent. We may even see White factions trying to pull off military coups in the US in the future. They are already openly stealing US Presidential elections, which is pretty outrageous right there. The future is increasing polarization, but there is no alternative. Keep in mind that US Whites were never socialists. They rallied around Barry Goldwater in 1964. The John Birch Society, the society of White America, peaked in the 1960’s. The closest US Whites came to socialism was in the 1970’s. I think there was a concerted effort in the 1970’s to wage war on the Left. This is what I think happened: Rich Americans and heads of big corporations met in the 1970’s and said we have to do something right now otherwise we will end up with a European social democracy. One of the problems was that we had a huge middle class. Huge middle classes are hated by elites because large middle classes usually start demanding some kind of socialism or social democracy. So a plot was hatched to destroy the US middle class and hence ward off the threat of social democracy. One of the ways this way done was to dramatically ramp up immigration. Immigrants were imported from all over the world. Most of them were elite types – rich Latin Americans, people fleeing Left regimes, high-caste South Asians, etc. These people are all elite types or think like them, and they all have a burning hatred for equality, socialism and social democracy. Along with that, Reagan deliberately allowed mass importation of illegals from Mexico. The purpose of this was to destroy the part of the middle class that was working class based, because by this time, many working class White had worked their way to the middle class with union jobs. At the same time, the all-out ideological war on unions was ramped up. You will not find one single major newspaper, newsmagazine, radio channel or TV station that supports the organizations of the working class – unions. All of the US media is deadset against unions. Also, many intellectual stink tanks were set up, like the Hoover Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Foundation, etc. These have since grown to a massive size. At the same time, the Left has no media presence and their think tanks are poorly funded. Another part of the plan was to keep on redefining the Left. What was once Center was now Left, then what was once Right was now Left. So the goalposts for what was Left or liberal were continuously moved as the Center moved further and further to the Right. All of this was carefully plotted out by US plutocrats. At this point, sure, income inequality is at its worst level since the 1920’s. Apparently most White Americans think this is fantastic, since they support the party doing this. Huge numbers of White Americans hate unions. This includes many working class Americans. Tens of millions of White Americans hate the Left and liberals as their supposed enemies. It’s worked very well. There are various strategies for the Left here. One is to try to sell US Whites on some kind of socialism or social democracy. This has been a hopeless endeavor for 30 years, and it gets more hopeless with each passing year as US Whites move further to the Right. Take note of the Tea Parties. US Whites are now like Goldwaterites or John Birchers. They’re more rightwing than at any time in in the last 45 years. But at this point, White people are totally hopeless. This project has failed and needs to be hung up to dry. There’s no chance that immigration will slow down. As non-Whites increase and Whites decline, the populace will logically move further and further to the Left. Hispanics are a very left and liberal leaning group. Present polls have them about 7

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.

How Much Salt in a Salt Packet?

You know those little tiny salt packets they give you at restaurants? Hard to find out how much salt is in those. McDonalds salt packets have 189mg of salt, so your average salt packet has about that much. Maximum is 2000mg of the poison, but Americans eat way more than that. Bottom line: the stuff gives you high blood pressure, a disease I already have. I try to limit my salt to 280mg per item. One pickle that I’m eating now (170mg). Or one packet of salt on your birria de chivo (goat) Superburrito, which I just added. I must say, adding the two lemon slices and the salt packet did make it taste a lot better! A goat Superburrito! Crazy or what? Not at all, just one of the pleasures of living in the The Diversity. The real killer stuff is soups and other kinds of prepared foods, even canned vegetables. There’s no logical reason to load this stuff up with salt, but they do it anyway. I look for the low-salt soups, but even those are like 480mg. Throughout our lives, we are slowly salt-poisoned. Not only does it gives you high blood pressure, but it also supposedly makes you fat to boot. You barely need any of the stuff. Studies in the Solomon Islands had 2,800 random villagers eating a traditional diet with almost no salt. They found zero cases of obesity and zero cases of high blood pressure. Later they found one guy who had gone off to the city and was eating the wonderful Modern West Diet (TM). He came back to the village fat (only case of obesity) and with high blood pressure. We’re committing suicide by fork! How does salt give you hypertension (HTN)? It slowly poisons your kidneys, and after a while, they don’t work very well anymore. Your malfunctioning kidneys give you high blood pressure. Salt is a necessary but not always sufficient factor in HTN. Studies of the Yanonomo show that they get 270mg of salt a day. Not one of them had HTN. Contrary to the notion that stress causes HTN, the Yanonomo live very violent lives. All the men beat their wives and there is frequent physical conflict between everyone. Homicide is endemic. By age 40, 10 What happens in modern society is that high level salt poisoning over a lifetime kills your tongue. The years of salt poisoning kill the taste receptors in your tongue. Result? Your sense of taste is dulled over the years. Upshot? You keep pouring more and more salt on your increasingly tasteless food to make it taste good. Dumb or what? After years on a low salt diet, you won’t even like the stuff anymore. I eat a real salty dish now that I used to love or even crave and I feel like I just swallowed a mouth of seawater.

Venezuela and the USSR In Context

Erranter disputes my views in A Look at the “Failed Socialist States”:

Venezuela is certainly not better than much of Latin America. Russia is probably better off now than it was with communism. The Soviet Union killed way more people than recent alcoholism. I see no reason to romanticize the USSR whatsoever; it was infernal. The nuclear meltdown alone may have killed 1 million people.

Actually, Venezuela does look good compared to the rest of the region. More importantly, when Chavez took power, about 8 Venezuela, with the exception of a few tiny islands in the Caribbean, is the wealthiest country in Latin America! So Erranter is wrong, Venezuela is indeed better off than the rest of Latin America.


		Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Americas, Asians, Capitalism, Chechens, Chinese (Ethnic), Crime, Economics, Eurasia, Europeans, Fascism, Hispanics, Immigration, Israel, Jews, Lao, Latin America, Middle East, Near Easterners, Neoliberalism, Nicaraguans, Organized Crime, Political Science, Politics, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Russia, Russians, SE Asians, Socialism, South America, US Politics, USSR, Venezuela, Vietnamese, War, White RacismLeave a comment on Venezuela and the USSR In Context			

A Look at the "Failed Socialist States"

A very rightwing Russian in the comments suggests that Communism and socialism has failed everywhere:

Robert, as a “right wing Russian” Im very curious on your on the fall of the USSR. it was socialist to the bone (my birth certificate even has a nice little hammer and sickle on it, I’m sure you’d love it) yet it fell apart. Also, why do Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea suck? Shouldn’t they on your list?

The list is of the top 13 richest countries on Earth. 12 of the 13 are socialist states (welfare states). The three countries you list are not in the top 13 wealthiest countries. Look at Russia now. A shithole or what? They were better off under Communism. The transition to capitalism killed a good 15 million people and life expectancy collapsed. I think it has just now recovered, 20 years later. I’m not wild about pure Communism. It’s got a ton of problems. But I think Russia has gone too far to the right now. Nevertheless, Russia is a still a socialist country. Russia has a gigantic state sector in the economy. It still has a very extensive safety net if I am not mistaken. Maternal mortality and infant mortality is very low in all of the CIS. If you compare the CIS to places with similar incomes, housing and health care is excellent. Moldavia is a very poor country, very poor. Yet their health figures are superb, there’s no hunger, the cities look nice and modern, education is first world. It’s similar in all of the former states of the USSR. All of the former USSR are still socialist states with a big state sector, vast safety nets, good housing and health care, excellent health and education figures. All of these great things are a legacy of the USSR. The Russian government is following a state capitalism similar to the Chinese. It’s not neoliberal capitalism at all. It’s a kind of socialism, certainly it’s socialism according to the Republican Party – Tea Party – Glen Beck sense of the word. The Russian state spends huge amounts of money on roads, broadband, all sorts of public works. Even cities spend lots of money on things like public baths. All of the former USSR rejects the neoliberal model if I’m not mistaken. Those who went for it the most have eaten shit the worst. Latvia went neoliberal-wild and their economy has been totally creamed, with a Depression as deep as the US Depression in the 1930’s. Venezuela is doing great! Compared to the rest of Latin America. Things have improved dramatically since Chavez took power. The people love him. That’s why he always wins. Cuba doesn’t suck either. Cubans have the best housing, health care and education in the region. There’s no unemployment. There are no homeless. If you go into the rural areas, you will see something you will not see in any other Latin American country, healthy, happy, clean, well-fed children wearing nice clean uniforms. There are no kids on the streets sniffing glue and dressed in rags, starving with no shoes. There are no shantytowns in Cuba. None, zero. Nearly all homes have electricity and plumbing. No other state in Latin America has achieved any of these things. Cubans are some of the best fed people in the region. The malnutrition rate is North Korea sucks, but I doubt if it’s their fault. With the fall of the USSR, the price of oil went up 10X and everything collapsed. I’m convinced that they are trying to do everything they can to feed their people and get the country going again, but it’s an uphill battle, plus we threaten them. Before 1990, North Korea was doing great. I actually support a mixed economy versus pure Communism.

Is Conservatism Always Bad?

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

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

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

More "Nazism is a Left Movement" Insanity

A rightwinger writes the following in the comments, arguing that Nazism, bizarrely enough, is a movement of the Left.

I have to disagree with you comment that the right wing and conservative movement being about smaller government is “just rhetoric.” If you look at the U.S. constitution, you can see that it is very much about enumerating, specifying and limiting the powers of the federal government while reserving power to the much smaller governments of the states and to the people. The separation of powers in government to executive, legislative, and judicial branches that keep each other in check was specifically designed to prevent the kind of runaway government that exemplified Nazi Germany or the British Crown in the 1700’s. I fully agree with you that the U.S. government has not lived up to that ideal in many ways, but this government has hardly been in the hands of right-wingers or conservatives for the past half century. Also, some bloggers claim that the fact that Nazis fought against other left wingers proves that they were not socialists. This argument has no more validity than saying that different denominations of Christianity fighting each other proves that any one of them wasn’t Christian. Within any belief system, you may well find factions fighting over who will be top dog. The unbridled centralized power of the Nazi government to control the economy and corporations, while trampling on the rights of individuals and exterminating millions of people based upon race and religion is just an especially warped form of socialism. I maintain that one of the biggest lies of the twentieth century has been that Nazis were right wing. That kind of centralized government power is completely inconsistent with right wing ideology which strives to put strict limits on government. George Washington said it well: “Government is like fire – a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

There is a field called political science. They don’t agree with you. Nazism is considered by political scientists to be a movement of the far right, for what it’s worth. There is a recent movement by some lunatics, mostly in the US, to repackage Nazism as a movement of the Left. This movement is led by extreme rightwing loons like libertarians, extreme Chicago School neoliberals and the Austrians who follow Mises. Because the rightwing in the US is insane, it’s filtered down to the Republican Party as a whole. You would be hard-pressed to find a single respected political scientist anywhere on Earth who thinks Nazism is a Left movement. It’s not. It’s not a Left movement. Not at all. The founding fathers were actually liberals, progressives, and in some ways libertarians. A movement for limiting the extreme powers of government at that time was a very liberal movement. Back then, conservatives were all big government types. The rightwing in the US at the time, the Federalists under Hamilton, were big government types. They were monarchists, elitists who were anti-democratic. The rightwing has been opposed to democracy all over the world and at all times. Conservatism is a movement of elites, typically wealthy elites. Democracy is bad for business. Your notion that the Right is about small government is ridiculous. Here in the US it tends to be, but they don’t even do very good on that score. Government is usually much more repressive under a US rightwing regime than under a left one. George Bush’s regime was one of the most dictatorial we have ever seen in the US. It was a radical rightwing regime. Around the world, rightwing regimes have almost always been big government projects, at least in terms of the national security state. They are typically quite repressive too. The “small government” conservatism is pretty much a uniquely American phenomenon. Other than Thatcher’s Britain, show me one more rightwing government since WW2 that believed in or practiced “small government.” This is a fetish of US conservatism not shared by the Right of the rest of the world. I have a hard time understanding why this “Nazism is a Left Movement” has got going. This is a recent thing. When the Nazis were in power, they were generally loved by the Right all over the world because they were some of the most badass anti-Communists that ever lived. After the war, former Nazis sought refuge in hard rightwing regimes in South America and joined with CIA groups and the rightwing governments of Taiwan and South Korea in fighting the Left all over the whole world. Post World War 2, many hard right dictators have lauded the Nazis as their heroes. No one on the Left has. I suppose it is because we say that Nazism was a far rightwing movement. Well it was, and it is. Big deal. So the right is defensive about this because they don’t want to be associated with Nazis. It’s ridiculous. It’s as if every liberal had to renounce the Khmer Rouge and deny that they were a Left movement for fear of being tainted with them. There have been plenty of nasty folks on the Left. The Khmer Rouge were mass murderers. Mao, Stalin, the North Koreans, the Vietnamese, Hoxha, Mengitsu – they all killed lots of people when they were in power. But the Nazis were not among the mass murderers of the Left. Those were the mass murderers of the Right. As if it matters though, really.

Conservatives Promote Stupidity, How and Why

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

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

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

Tiki-Tiki Has 250 Words?

Repost from the old site. Forget it. Via Marilyn Vos Savant in Parade Magazine, we are told that Tiki-Tiki, otherwise known as Sranan Togo, a creole with 100,000 native speakers and many more second languages speakers on Suriname, has the smallest vocabulary of any known language – with only 250 words. This claim is credulously repeated elsewhere on the Net. It is true that Internet dictionaries of Tiki-Tiki do show few words, possibly as few as several hundred. The SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) page says that Sranan Togo has maybe 3,000-4,000 words, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of words for major world languages (Vos Savant notes that English has the largest vocabulary at 250,000). Many of those English words are neologisms, that is, new words that are being created on the fly, especially on places like the Internet. I actually think that English has more than 250,000 words, but I can’t prove it. As slang and whatnot proliferates in a widely spoken language, it gets pretty darn hard to count up all the words, much less write them all down. There are other ways to create words, so it is not really so true to say that certain languages have low vocabularies. For instance, many languages spoken by small tribes have an almost endless productive variety of features for word production. In some (or perhaps many) such languages, roots can be manipulated almost endlessly to create new words to describe just about anything. Nouns can turn into adjectives, adverbs and verbs and verbs can turn into nouns, adjectives and adverbs. Adding morphological particles onto existing roots creates a process whereby one root could possibly create up to 1000 or so new words if one is creative enough. This potential is lost in much of the nonsense about “primitive” versus “advanced” languages, a distinction that hardly exists anyway. The truth is that the most insanely maddening languages on Earth, languages so crazy that brilliant linguists are still trying to figure them out, are spoken in general by the world’s most primitive and backwards peoples. As a language gets bigger and used more by a civilization, it gets stupidified more and more as it loses its complexity. The reason is that people need to be on time and earn a paycheck. They need to say things quickly, make the sale or hang up the cellphone, and get to work on time. In a more primitive situation, people are hunter-gatherers or they are laid-back agriculturalists who just take it easy and tend their fields all day. Despite blatherings of IQ theorists, even primitive humans are highly intelligent beings. We can prove this by looking at the insanely brilliant languages they have constructed all by their own selves. We think that people get bored in these primitive settings, as their high intellect is not stimulated enough. One of the things these tribes do to stimulate their high intelligence is to play games with languages. This is why you such wildly complicated languages in such places. Much of this complexity is superfluous (noun markers, case endings, etc.) and can easily be jettisoned if one wishes to become a multitasking metrosexual. Anyway, I did some quick research on Sranan Togo and found semantic distinction derived from philosophy. Briefly, a type is a generic and a token is a specific instance of that generic. For instance, tree would be a type and maple tree would be a token. Waterfall would be a type and Vernal Falls would be a token. Man would be a type and Jesus would be a token. So in 1783, an early version of this creole already had 20,122 words. It must only have increased its vocabulary since then. I’m calling bullshit on this 250 words line. A creole is different from a pidgin. A pidgin is often created by immigrants to a new country where none of them understand each other. Early immigrants to Hawaii created some pidgins. Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, Koreans, etc. were all thrown together on sugar and pineapple plantations and no one could understand each other. English was the main language. The immigrants took English, I believe, and then layered onto it parts of their native languages and finally created a pidgin that they could all understand. A pidgin is a mess, since it is a language made by adults, and due to brain constraints, adults cannot create a functional language out of thin air on the fly. The pidgin is then spoken to the adults’ kids, who pick it up as a first language. But kids are little language-creating genius machines, and they somehow take this messed-up pidgin and transform into a full-fledged language, a creole, by expanding it in a variety of important ways. The creole is then transmitted to kids again, and soon the pidgin dies and everyone is speaking creole. It took some time for us to figure out what was really going on here, but we are pretty confident that kids are indeed expanding the pidgin and turning it into a creole. A guy named Derek Bickerton at the University of Hawaii has done some great work in this area. I actually bought and tried to read Bickerton’s Language and Species, but I only got 4 In Suriname, actually formerly Dutch Guyana, Sranan Togo is the mother tongue of some 100,000 descendants of former slaves brought to the country. It has also become a lingua franca for other ethnicities in the place, including speakers of Hindustani, Amerindian, Javanese, Dutch, and Chinese tongues. Like all of the Guyanas, there is quite a fine mess of ethnicities in Suriname, and I think they have been breeding together for a while such that race is becoming a bit of an afterthought. As another aside, although Vos Savant, in addition to being a hottie, is quite brilliant and is even smarter than I am, it is not true that she has the highest IQ on Earth, or that her IQ is 220 or whatever. She got that score at age 10 or so. There are others who have gotten sky high scores at that age. At a young age, IQ is computed by looking at how the young person’s mind compares to older peoples minds. In adults, we do not compute it that way, and adult scores are never as high as the same kids’ score. In Vos Savant and other extremely high-IQ kids, their IQ’s have seen considerable regression in adulthood, but they are still sky-high. Glad to see she’s getting a paycheck just by being smart. Wish I could.

References

Braun, Maria and Plag, Ingo. (2002). How Transparent is Creole Morphology? A Study of Early Sranan Word-Formation. University of Siegen, Germany. Yearbook of Morphology 2002. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Schumann, Christian Ludwig. (1783). Neger-Englisches Wörterbuch. Editio Tertia. Paramaribo.

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.

Recessions Are Getting Worse and Worse

As you can see, recessions are getting worse and worse in the US in recent years.

This is why voters are getting angrier and angrier. But they are venting all of their rage in a rightwing direction. That’s not going to help the matter. Republicans never help grow jobs. They could care less about jobs. Who cares about jobs?

Jobs means labor. Labor is the enemy of capital. Capital and labor battle it out to divide up the spoils of profits. The objective of capital is to give as little of the profits to labor as possible. That means hiring the fewest workers that they can possibly get away with, paying them the lowest wages they can get away with, giving them the worst possible benefits that they an get away with.

So the fewer workers the better, all other things being equal. Capital is always trying to eliminate jobs via mechanization, overwork, forced overtime, etc. Any way that capital can figure out to eliminate a job, they will do it. Why then should we expect capital to give two flying fucks about about how many people are working? Who cares!

As long as profits are going great, capital doesn’t care if the unemployment rate is

When the unemployment rate goes up, the stock market tends to rise. When unemployment starts dropping below a certain point, the stock market starts dropping and you see all sorts of weird articles in the business press talking about how unemployment has gotten too low. They start demanding that the Fed raise interest rates to drive up unemployment. A few weeks later, Alan Greenspan does just that. The corporate media, from “left” to “right,” raises a gigantic cheer.

The recessions are getting worse because Project Middle Class Death is working quite well.

This project formerly had Alan Greenspan at its helm. Greenspan was in charge of a ruling class project initiated in the 1970’s that was intended to reduce the wages and wealth of the US middle class by 1/3. This project had the total support of both political parties, “left” Democrats and “right” Republicans, along with the entire “left to right” spectrum of the corporate media. When it comes to class politics in the US, true liberals are rare to nonexistent.

Even the Democratic Party is sworn to neoclassical economics that only benefits the top 2

Wages have been flat since 1980 or possibly as far back as 1973. The gap between the rich and upper middle class has skyrocketed. Bottom line is that business is bad, and we are in a recession due to lack of consumer demand. Neoliberal voodoo doodoo economic hokus pokus won’t get us out of this mess.

Giving businesses and the rich more tax breaks won’t create more customers in the stores. As if businesses are not hiring more workers due to their tax burden! This is why Obama’s latest neoliberal stimulus proposal is so flawed. The centerpiece is yet more supply side tax cuts and tax breaks for US business. I can assure you that that won’t create a single job.

US businesses are sitting on a mountain of cash. They don’t even know what to do with it. Profits are going like gangbusters. If I run a business and have no customers, I have a problem. If at that same business, you give me a tax break, I now have more money. But so what? I still have no customers. Why should I hire even one more worker as long as we don’t have any more business? I run a business, not a government make-work project.

All of the supply-side neoliberal gimmickry on Earth will not stimulate demand and create more customers. As the customer base declines, the risk of deflation unfolds.

Since Republicans have nothing to offer the economy but neoclassical and neoliberal supply side tax cuts and tax breaks for the rich and business along with huge cuts in government spending, this cannot possibly help the economy. Not in any possible world can it help the economy. Not in the best of all possible Milton Friedman Fantasy Worlds can it help any possible economy.

This is where Keynesianism steps in. The only actor that can stimulate demand in such a case is government. The credit markets are dried up, and the banks have not been loaning much to business for 30 years now. There’s no money in it. The money is in doubling down at the Casino in the Sky at the latest Derivatives Magic Show table. If the banks aren’t putting money into the private sector, and business doesn’t want to borrow anyway (no customers, remember?), once again, Keynesianism tells us, it’s time for Government Man to come to the rescue.

Neoliberalism a la Milton Friedman has never been proven to work anywhere. In fact, everywhere it has been tried, it has failed. Its theories about monopolies have been proven to be incorrect.

In Latin America, it failed for last 20-30 years, such that most Latin Americans want to chuck it. Even establishment hacks at Time Magazine admit it failed in Latin America. It was tried in nearly pure form in Chile at the start of the Pinochet regime, and it so badly ruined the economy that Pinochet threw all of his Chicago boys out and went back to socialism of a sort.

In Russia, it allowed a bunch of international Jews to strip the country, its assets and its wealth blind, creating a huge number of millionaires and killing millions of Russians by reducing life expectancy. A good analysis of neoliberalism shows that it reliably ruins a country’s education and results in large declines in many health figures such as infant mortality and life expectancy. In other words, neoliberalism kills.

But neoliberalism isn’t designed to fix economies, save lives or send folks to school. The neoliberal project is one of income transfer. It involves a massive income transfer from the bottom 8

Neoliberalism also regularly blows up economies. That’s a feature, not a bug. It’s supposed to do that. It’s called boom and bust.

“You Can’t Be a Maoist and a Clintonite Democrat!”

I keep hearing this over and over from some of my friends. I just had a talk with a friend of mine about this. He’s like me. Basically a liberal Democrat on the left wing of the Democratic Party. However, he has long called himself a Communist. He now calls himself a democratic socialist. He has long supported Communism overseas, especially in the USSR. According to my critics, this guy can’t possibly exist. Neither can I.

And yet we do.

My critics are badly mistaken. My friend says they don’t understand politics in the US. For instance, in many countries, it makes sense to join a small Left party and vote for them. In a parliamentary system, you might just elect a deputy or two, and you won’t hurt the rest of the Left at all. In the UK, you can reliably vote Green and elect some folks here or there. In Abiezer Coppe’s town, nearly 5

That’s not possible in the US. The Green Party never goes anywhere and can barely elect a soul to any office in the land. There’s no point voting Green.

Here in the US, voting Left third party is just throwing your vote away. At worst, you’re helping to elect Republicans. At best, you’re masturbating in a voting booth. There’s no point even getting involved in Left Third Party politics here in the US. Why bother? I could go join some kooky Commie sect, but why bother? I would spend the remaining 30 years of my life whacking off politically and not accomplishing a damn thing.

The truth is that in the US, the only action on the Left is in the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is truly a big tent party. It has everyone from rightwing unreconstructed racist Southern Democrats all the way to out and out socialists and Communists. I’ve known many socialists and Communists in the US who typically vote Democrat. Some were even active in Democratic Party politics.

So, our rightwing critics are right in a sense. A fair number of liberals are anywhere from soft on Communism to out and out Com symps and fellow travelers.

My father was an anti-Communist liberal Democrat all his life. He was furious at my politics and nearly regarded me as a deadly enemy politically. That’s because I was just too “Village Voice Left,” as he put it, for his tastes. Nevertheless, towards the end of his life, he was sympathetic towards the late USSR, East Bloc and Cuba. He was still an anti-Commie liberal, but he got more socialist in his old age.

My mother was similar. An anti-Communist Republican, she once told me philosophically that in many 3rd World countries they were probably better off Communist, as capitalism had largely failed there anyway. She’s lately moved to the Democratic Party. Comments like hers are fairly common among fairly liberal middle class Whites.

My point is, I am simply on the Left. Sure I support the Democratic Party. They aren’t exactly peaches and cream, but the US is a deeply reactionary country, and Democrats are the only vehicle for progressive change.

I also support socialists of all types, including social democrats. I have a soft spot for Communists and Chavez types, though I’ve never lived under a Communist regime, so I don’t know if I would actually like it or not. Perhaps given that experience, I might take a different stand on Communism.

People question how I can support Maoists in Nepal, India and other places.

Easy. All of the rest of Left politics in these places has failed. The Indian Congress Party is a socialist party. So is it’s evil twin in Nepal, the Nepalese Congress Party. Worse, revisionist Communism has even failed in India, looking at the experience of the CPI-M in West Bengal. Revisionist Communism has badly failed in Nepal, with a Marxist-Leninist party in bed with the worst of the Right in the present government.

There’s never been an effective Left party of any type in the Philippines. There probably never will be.

What’s the alternative in Colombia? The Left can’t even organize without getting massacred. Obviously, the Left needs to take up guns to defend themselves.

While I’m not a Maoist, it’s clear that rest of Left politics in the places above has failed, so it’s time to give the Maoists a chance. Let’s see what they can do. What the heck, nothing else has worked.

Why America Sucks

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

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

The electorate also is overwhelmingly White.

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

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

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

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

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

Media should be delineated democratically according to predilection. If 3

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

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

Those are the countries in which Whites are a majority.

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

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

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

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

US Whites, as a

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Western Europe, once again with a threat of Communism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rich Are the Enemy (Always and Forever)

“Behind every great fortune is a great theft.”

-Honore de Balzac.

Well of course. The greatest French caffeine addict of all time was onto something.

Marx hinted at the same. If you read Marx carefully, it’s apparent that every bill in your billfold has a history drenched in blood. Blood, theft, mass murder, conquest, genocide, slavery. But no! The rich earned every penny. Earned it with whips, bullets, swords and mass graves, sure.

I keep getting fascists trying to recruit me to fascism. I guess they don’t understand the meaning of the word socialist. Socialism is all about democracy, if not politically, then at least economically, or a movement towards a more egalitarian distribution of income. Fascism at its best is pro-elite and pro-aristocracy. Fascism can never be democratic either economically or politically, though the jury is still out on the Third Positionists.

And why would I support Third Positionism? Third Positionism is racist socialism at best. It’s socialism for Whites. Fuck that. I’m a liberal for Chrissake. We don’t do racist hate, socialist or otherwise. Take it somewhere else!

The rich will always and forever be the enemies of the socialists.

Socialists who make alliance with the rich, the class enemy, have left the fold.

The Socialist International is full of these fake socialists nowadays. This fake bourgeois socialism, the socialism of APRA in Peru, Frelimo in Mozambique and the outrage called New Labor in the UK, is the “socialism” of Obama. In other words, Obama’s socialism is not even socialism at all. It’s not even liberalism. I don’t know what it is. I think it’s an attempt at pro-corporate liberalism, which is a joke on its face, as it’s impossible.

This is Obamanomics in a nutshell:

Obama: Hey! I have a plan!

Liberals: What is it, oh Godhead?

Obama: Look! Let’s get the rich and the corporations to work with us to redistribute income and create a more just society! I talk to them all the time! I can get them to go along with my plan! I promise.

Smart liberals: WTF.

Dumb liberals: Show us the way, master!

Look Obama, you dipshit, if your goal is progress (progressive politics), you don’t enlist your class enemies in the project. Hint: They aren’t on board for the ride.

The New York Lies, the Nation’s Liespaper of Record, Bashes Chavez with the Crime Stick Again

This article is a crock of lies. Just the US capitalist dogs, lying like they always do. This time they have the Venezuelan capitalist worms as a backup chorus.

First of all, crime is pretty much the same as pre-Chavez. Only homicide has gone up. And there are several nations in the Americas, all strong allies of the US, that have homicide rates as high as Venezuela’s. Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala…

Caribbean? Africa? Let’s not go there.

There is tons of crime in Latin America, and tons of homicide. Been that way forever, or at least for my lifetime.

What has increased under Chavez is not crime overall, but homicide. No one knows why, but the drug trade is usually suggested as the major culprit. Due to regional conditions, the drug trade has expanded into Venezuela a great deal under Chavez.

Nations with wild crime statistics are almost always Washington allies. Hence, Simon Romero and his rag, the New York Lies, never discuss that. I’ve never heard the US press blame a high crime rate on an existing government in my life.

Until Hugo Chavez showed up.

Chavez has the misfortune of being a leftwinger in a nation that is undergoing a crime wave, so the US media has decided, for the first time ever, to blame a government for crime.

The New York Lies bashes the government for not closing the gap between the rich and the poor. Yet the NYL is dedicated towards an agenda around the world to expand the rich-poor gap. Any nation that tries to reduce it gets pounded incessantly by the rats at the Lies. Chavez has made this the raison d etre of his government since he got in. This is the whole reason for the Lies‘ propaganda war against him.

The article mentions that Venezuela is experiencing an economic downturn in the past couple of years. It’s true, after years of explosive growth under Chavez. Last time I checked, the economies of most of the world were underwater, right? All because of the NY Lies’ buddies on Wall Street, who blew up the world economy. Ever hear the NY Lies blame any other country for the local effects of the downturn? Course not. It’s not their fault. But when the global Depression hits Venezuela, it’s all Chavez’ fault.

The article mentions inflation in Venezuela, said to be the highest in the region. Venezuela has had high inflation for decades. It was actually much higher when the opposition was in office. It’s dropped quite a bit under Chavez.

All of the opposition clowns quoted in the piece are well-known opposition losers and jokers. Nearly every thing they say is dishonest on some level.

Contrary to the piece, Venezuela has had a horrendous crime rate for decades, as far back as anyone can remember. The rich don’t even care about crime, and they never did in the past, because almost all of the crime and homicide is in the horrible slums that Chavez is trying to get rid of.

Chavez did not cause the murder rate to go up, and out of control crime rates are not so easy to solve. Ask governments in parts of the world where crime has been terrible for decades whether it’s their fault and what they can do about it. It’s not their fault, and no one knows how to fix it.

Really, it’s just the poor massacring each other, so the rich don’t even care. This is just another club to beat Chavez with.

Chavez has been trying to deal with the problem. He’s hired a lot more cops, and he is retraining a lot of the police force. He also boosted their wages significantly.

One major problem is that the police and the criminals are all too often the same folks. So no one trust the cops, and the cops commit tons of crime themselves. In part, this is why crimes are not solved. People don’t cooperate with the cops.

Oh, and about that figure: 9

The opposition has no plan, repeat no plan, to deal with crime. Crime was insane and out of control the whole time the opposition was in office, and they were never able to get a handle on it.

The main agenda of the opposition is to stop closing the gap between the rich and poor and to start widening it again, zero out all the social spending, and start reshifting income from the bottom to the top again, the way it was in Venezuela from 1823-1989. Impoverish the working people to enrich the wealthy. Declare war on labor (the working people). Great agenda. Ought to do wonders for that crime rate.

Wink.

It’s also a lie that Chavez has not reduced the rich-poor gap. He’s done a better job of it than nearly anyone else in Latin America. The poverty rate was near 8

What will the opposition liars scum do about the rich-poor gap they bash Chavez with? Nothing. No wait, a lot. They will make it much worse. The NY Lies forgot to tell you that.

I will add that the government’s attempts at censorship are lamentable though.

More on Joran van der Sloot

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAsREwm8YoI&feature=channel]

Pretty amazing find. Joran van der Sloot made a video of his coffee shop in Thailand and posted it to Youtube!

He went to Thailand and opened up his own coffee shop very quickly. You can see him at 2:43 in the video, surrounded by friends, holding a drink, wearing a baseball cap backwards, with a white shirt and green shorts. He made a bunch of good friends very quickly after landing in Thailand. Typical of a psychopath. They can make many friends very quickly anywhere they go. Their friends often like them very much and hang around with them due to the confidence and charm of the psychopath and the fringe benefits hanging around him gets you.

He bought the coffee shop with money he made trafficking Thai girls. Students hung out there, and he used the coffee shop to recruit new girls to prostitution.

In Thailand, he apparently enrolled at Rangsit University as a cover, then set up a company called DD Consulting, a fake modeling agency apparently designed to recruit underage Thai women into prostitution. By day, he played the role of a student, complete with a student visa, but it was all fake. At night, he prowled the bars with his business cards finding girls to prostitute. He even had business cards printed up with his company on them.

He then apparently trafficked them to the Netherlands on fake promises of being strippers in the best clubs in the Netherlands. He told the girls they would get $15,000/month once they were in the Netherlands. They never saw a dime. Once there, they were trafficked as sex slaves. He received a $13,000 finder’s fee for each one. In Thailand, he went by a fake name, Murphy Jenkins. So the man is also a sex trafficker.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK_l3C0dSrk]

Here is a video of him trying to trick two Thai women into prostitution. He has two Dutch male accomplices with him.

Two of the Thai women that he trafficked have vanished, and no one knows where they are. They may be dead.

Thai police are investigating him in relation to the two disappeared Thai girls and have requested access to him in the Peruvian prison where he now resides.

Dutch police investigated him for sex trafficking, but dropped the investigation due to lack of evidence. This is typical of a true psychopath, almost worming away from the law. They are very good at covering their tracks and can often lie their way out of trouble. They pay off people, change their story so much that even the cops can’t think straight anymore, do whatever it takes. Then they dash to other parts of the globe, get a fake name and vanish again.

He spent most of 2009 flitting around the globe playing in poker tournaments. He won $12,000 at a tournament in Macau. He met a young woman in the casino and invited her back up to his room, where he assaulted her. Sound familiar? She is now cooperating with Macau police, and the Macau cops are working with their colleagues in Peru.

Here is Joran van der Sloot’s Youtube page! Amazing. Criminals have their own Youtube pages. Too much, man. There are plenty of comments on the page, including some from beautiful young women telling him how much they like or love him. These charismatic psychopaths often have hoards of female followers, and they can get women anywhere they go. If you go to Ted Bundy videos on Youtube, you will see many comments by young women saying that they love him or that they would have sex with him if he were alive. One said she would do him, but only if she had a weapon with her.

Is Joran van der Sloot a psychopath or a sociopath? He is clearly a psychopath, not a sociopath. His psychopathy is a result either of being born that way or a combination of that and something in his early environment.

Let’s look at his Youtube page for clues about his psychopathy:

If I would have to describe myself as an animal it would be a snake however I want to be a lion and one day I will be a lion.

Of course. A snake, then a lion. Psychopath. Sure he’s a snake. All psychopaths are. Sure he wants to be a lion and rule the roost. All psychopaths do.

Favorite TV shows are crime shows. Of course. Favorite music? Gangsta rap. Sure. If you read the short intro, you will see that there is a certain slickness, phoniness, and lack of depth to his prose. This is a characteristic of the psychopath. They literally make it up as they go along, and they are about as “deep” as any other wild animal.

In the Peruvian case, it looks like he slipped her a date rape drug, GHB. An empty packet of the drug was found in her car. Then he probably led her up to his room and tried to assault her. She was just coming out as a lesbian, and she probably did not want to do it, so he probably got furious and killed her. He may have also killed her for her money, since she won a lot gambling that night. The story about her finding stories about him on his computer and locking him out of his room are probably just more in the endless series of Joran lies.

I figure with Natalie Holloway, it was the same MO. Met her at a casino, got her drunk and slipped her a date rape drug. On the beach, she may well have gone into seizures from the GHB combined with the alcohol. Then she died on the beach. He freaked out because he caused her death by slipping her the GHB when she was drunk, so he disposed of the body at sea with the help of his buddies. She’s sleeping with the fishes and will never be found. The ocean is a damn fucking good place to dump a body! Can hardly think of a better one. Large lakes like the Great Lakes are pretty good too.

He didn’t exactly murder Natalie, but he’s responsible for her death by slipping her the dangerous GHB which killed her.

FARC Attacks Eliminate 17 Colombian Security Forces

A FARC roadside bomb and automatic weapons fire ambush in Caqueta killed 14 Colombian police in Caqueta. A number of cops were trapped inside a burning vehicle. They were hit with roadside bombs, then attacked with automatic weapons, then doused with gasoline and set on fire. Another 7 police were wounded. There is a government offensive going on in Caqueta right now, and the FARC is resisting it.

Those aren’t really cops. They are “state police,” and their mission is counterinsurgency.

Earlier, there were two other FARC attacks near the borders with Venezuela and Ecuador that left 3 soldiers dead, 7 more wounded and 1 missing.

Altogether, 17 security forces were killed in three attacks, 14 more were wounded and 1 is missing in two days of fighting

In Colombia, anyone having any opinions whatsoever on the Left is fair game to be killed by the state. The military, state or death squads will often denounce you as a “FARC member” or a “FARC supporter.” The first case is almost never true, as the FARC usually wear uniforms. Anyway, FARC members can easily be arrested if there is any evidence against them.

Most people so named are just trade unions, people on the Left, members of political parties, community workers, organizers, etc., members of campesino and human rights organizations, on and on. The second charge is much harder to prove. What in the Hell is a “FARC supporter” anyway, and how does one go about proving such a thing? Most folks so named are probably not even vocal FARC supporters, but even if they were, is that illegal? If it’s ok to kill “FARC supporters,” then why doesn’t the FARC have the right to exterminate every single “government supporter.” Fair’s fair, right?

In addition, there is a long-term process going on of removing peasants from their land by the military, death squads and the state. The land is often taken by force. The military or death squads come out and order you off your land. If you say no, they threaten to kill you. If you don’t leave, they attack you. If you leave, they steal your land. This process of theft of peasant and Indian land for large landowners has been going on for at least 200 years in Colombia. It’s very similar to the fencing of the commons in England which some commenters on this site waxed ecstatic about.

Isn’t it clear that capitalism requires the removal of small farmers from their land, by deadly force if necessary? This has been the process of consolidation of capitalism in most nations in the world, including the US. Why is this something to support?

Notice that the entire world press supports the fascist Colombian state in their war against the people. In the latest election, the Defense Minister was elected President. He’s a true fascist and a mass murderer. The US government, public and the world media can’t get enough of him.

The world fascist press (if it supports fascists, it’s fascist, right?) has been saying that a massive offensive under the genocidal Uribe has reduced the FARC’s strength by 5

The haters of the FARC on this site are asked exactly what it is that the FARC are supposed to do. You don’t support them, so what do you think this organization should do? You have no answers, do you?

Belarus: Dictatorship or Democracy? A Review of Stewart Parker’s: “The Last Soviet Republic”

Belarus: Dictatorship or Democracy? A Review of Stewart Parker’s Book: The Last Soviet Republic. Originally Published on Globalresearch.ca

by Gearóid Ó Colmáin

August 24, 2010

Since the pronouncement of former US Secretary of State Condolezza Rice in 2008 calling the democratically elected president of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko “Europe’s last dictator”, the image and reputation of this noble country has been fanatically tarnished by the mainstream media.

The irony here is that Belarus is indeed deeply familiar with the iniquities of dictatorship. They, more than any other country, suffered the worst of Nazi atrocities during World War 11.

Belarus has always been a multicultural country with Jews, Christians and Muslims living side by side for centuries. This deep tolerance for cultural and religious differences is still celebrated in Belarus today. Yet the European Union, Israel and the United States, never cease from spreading atrocious lies and disinformation concerning the Republic of Belarus.

Belarus has generally received scant coverage from alternative and left-wing media, which is rather surprising considering the fact that Fidel Castro has awarded Alexander Lukashenko with the order of Jose Marti, the highest honour bestowed upon friends of the Cuban people. In a recent visit to Belarus, the president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez praised Belarus as a model of socialist development, one which Venezuela should emulate.

Yet there is a paucity of books and articles about this country and its “controversial” leader. One notable exception to this hiatus comes from Stewart Parker who published a clear and revealing book on Belarus and the policies of Alexander Lukashenko in particular.

For readers seeking an insight into this fascinating country, Parker’s The Last Soviet Republic: Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus (2007) is a brilliant exposé of the lies and distortions emanating from the European Union and the US concerning “human rights” violations in Belarus and the absence of “democracy.” What follows is an attempt to summarize and evaluate the findings of this valuable study.

Alexander Lukashenko came to power after a landslide victory in 1994. A former director in a collective farm during the USSR era, Lukashenko was one of the few Belarusian politicians to oppose the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1990. Although the Belarusian leader had always been an outspoken critic of the USSR’s corruption, he remained committed to Marxism-Leninism, and opposed the rampant privatization proposed by Boris Yeltsin and his followers.

In the final years of the Soviet regime, Lukashenko, then a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, formed a group called “Communists for Democracy.” Lukashenko argued that the real problem in the USSR was the decline in democratic participation and the parasitism and corruption of the ruling bureaucracy. He also advocated more autonomy for the USSR’s constituent Republics.

Belarus had always been the most advanced Soviet Republics, with high achievements in education and science. In spite of economic stagnation and increasing corruption in other republics of the USSR, Belarus’s state planning had continued to yield impressive results, with economic growth continuing throughout the Brezhnev era. In 1993 Lukashenko was appointed head of an “anti-corruption committee.”

One of the numerous myths repeatedly circulated since the fall of the USSR is that a majority of the Soviet people wanted free market capitalism. This was certainly not the case in Soviet Republic of Belarus. It was Alexander Lukashenko’s defence of Soviet values, together with his outspoken criticisms of the Communist Party of the USSR and the apparatchiks of the soviet regime that earned him the respect and confidence of the Belarusian people. In 1994 Lukashenko was elected President of Belarus with over 80 percent of the votes.

Finding a place for Belarus in the post-Soviet chaos was a difficult task for the young president. One of the first issues concerned the national flag. The BPF, a nationalist party, wanted to restore the white, red and white flag of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had been the national flag under the puppet regime of the German empire in 1918. It was also used by the collaborators with the Nazi Wehrmacht during World War II. The people finally settled for maintaining the Soviet flag minus the hammer and sickle. Radio Free Europe later lamented the dropping of the Nazi collaboration flag as a “heavy blow to democratic forces.”

In the intervening years since the fall of the USSR and the rise of Lukashenko, over 15 billion dollars had been siphoned out of the country. Privatization and the lifting of price controls had caused inflation to soar, with prices rising 432 times. The Soviet economy was being replaced by mafia gangsters. Western “freedom” and “democracy” was taking its toll!

Through a series of referenda Lukashenko was able to set in motion a democratic social program which has made Belarus one of the most prosperous and least corrupt countries in Eastern Europe. Just like Venezuela, a clause in the constitution decided by a referendum permits the indefinite re-election of the president should the Belarusian people wish to do so.

Over 80 percent of industry in Belarus remains in public ownership. In 1996 the unemployment figure in the country amounted to 4 percent. Lukashenko’s administration has since reduced this figure to little over 1 percent, one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world. Industrial output rose by 9.7 percent in 2004. Wages have been increasing significantly every year since Lukashenko’s accession to power.

Economic growth in Socialist Belarus has been so impressive that even the World Bank and the IMF have had to acknowledge this incontrovertible fact. In June 2005, the World Bank published a report titled Belarus: Window of Opportunity, which admitted that the Belarusian economy was growing steadily, while the IMF admitted that Belarus had significant wage increases coupled with low government debt. Good news for Belarus, bad news for the World Bank and IMF, whom Lukashenko, speaking before the Russian Duma in 1999, had called “a pack of swindlers.”

In a world where the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, Belarus offers real hope that economics does not have to function that way.

According to the system developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini, known as the Gini coefficient, Belarus ranks as the most equal country on earth. The Gini coefficient for Belarus in 2005 was 0.217, the lowest out of 113 countries. In Belarus, the lowest income is only five times lower than the highest income. This means that the notion of “corporate greed” one hears about in the United States and Europe is virtually nonexistent in the Republic of Belarus.

Belarus also comes out on top in education. Adult literacy in Belarus is the highest in the CIS nations at 99.

In contrast to Western “democracies” where social security is being systematically destroyed to sustain the financial oligarchies, male workers in Belarus retire at 60, while women retire at 55 with full pension entitlements.

Needless to say, the attitude of the EU and the United States nomenclatura, that is to say, the self-proclaimed “international community,” is that Belarus is not a “democracy.” Media disinformation has backed this hostility of European and US elites to Belarus by publishing an impressive quantity of lies. At the 60th session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2005, President Lukashenko put the US “human rights” obsession thus:

If there are no pretexts for intervention – imaginary ones are created. To this end a very convenient banner was chosen, democracy and human rights, and not in the original sense of the rule of people and personal dignity, but solely and exclusively in the interpretation of the US leadership.

In order to promote the US “interpretation” of human rights, President Clinton sent Michael Kozak to Belarus in 2000. Kozak distinguished himself during the 1970s in the Iran/contra scandal where he was instrumental in organising the sale of arms to the contra terrorists in Nicaragua in exchange for cocaine, which the CIA sold to poor Americans on the streets of Los Angeles, the same poor people who would subsequently be incarcerated for “possession of narcotics.”

While poor people were forced to make military uniforms in US prisons for their drug convictions, Kozak was one of Washington’s key handlers of Daniel Noriega, a CIA narcotrafficker and dictator of Panama. Clinton had deep confidence in Kozak’s democratic credentials, as he himself was governor of Arkansas, where the CIA operation was conducted from. The US-funded terrorist campaign in Nicaragua cost the lives of over 30,000 people, most of them civilians. Kozak had the perfect credentials for spreading “democracy” American style in socialist Belarus.

Upon his arrival in Minsk, US ambassador Micheal Kozak, Clinton’s former CIA gun-for-drugs terrorist handler, now US “pro-democracy” diplomat, was quick to make contact with his European counterparts. Representing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was Hans Georg Wieck. Wieck worked closely with Kozak to groom “opposition” candidates in Belarus suitable to Washington and Brussels.

When Lukashenko won another landslide victory in the presidential elections of 2001, the OSCE condemned the elections as unfair without producing a shred of evidence to corroborate their claims.

After the 9-11 attacks in New York, the US showed the real motives behind the “global war on terror” when Senator John McCain declared:

Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus cannot long survive in a world where the United States and Russia enjoy a strategic partnership and the United States is serious about its commitment to end outlaw regimes whose conduct threatens us…September 11th opened our eyes to the status of Belarus as a national security threat.

McCain was referring to the sale of arms by Belarus to the CIA’s disobedient puppet dictator Saddam Hussein, a claim denied by President Lukashenko. Here we see the US accusing other countries of crimes which it itself committed for years when it sold arms to the Iraqi dictator. But the real crime committed by Lukashenko was his progressive social policies, which were setting a bad example for other countries strangled by the financial interests of the US global oligarchy; US “national security” meaning the security of the financial elite, and “global war on terror” meaning global war on freedom.

But the US was determined to launch its global terror campaign against any state that dared to resist casino capitalism. Belarus and Lukashenko himself would pay a heavy price for standing up to the IMF and the World Bank. In 2004 the United States proceeded to take action with the passing of the Belarus Democracy Act, calling for sanctions against Belarus and funding for “pro-democracy” groups.

Most opposition groups in Belarus today receive funding from the United States government, paid for by cash-strapped US tax payers. This funding almost culminated in the so-called “Denim Revolution” in 2006, a CIA-funded attempt to arouse popular opposition to the Lukashenko government in order to replace it with a pro-US regime. However, unlike their neighbours in other Eastern European countries, the Belarusians did not take the US bait, and Lukashenko stayed in power.

After the failure of the “Denim Revolution,” the EU imposed a travel ban on Lukashenko and 30 ministers, preventing them from traveling to any part of the EU. This shows the extent of the anxiety among the EU elite in the face of Belarus’s popular democracy.

Stewart Parker sites a number of poignant examples in his book which reveal the extent of systematic anti-democratic interference in Belarusian affairs by the United States and their vassal states in Europe. What is particularly “totalitarian” about socialist Belarus is not the Belarusian state, but rather the way in which that state is portrayed by the so-called democratic authorities of the EU and the US.

The absurdities promoted by the mainstream media come from all sides. Lukashenko has been accused of anti-Semitism, in spite of the fact that the thriving Jewish community in the country seem to be unaware of this fact. In fact, the chief Rabbi of Belarus has praised the Belarussian president for his support of the Jewish community, yet the EU, the US and Israel insist that Lukashenko is “anti-Semitic” and also opposes “free media.”

The Belarus government has been accused of internet censorship and media control. More lies! The Open Net Initiative carried out a study after the “disputed” elections of 2006 to see if the claims about Internet censorship were true. They “found no evidence of systematic and comprehensive interference with the Net. Any regime-directed tampering that may have taken place was fairly subtle, causing disruptions to access, but never turning off the alternative information tap.”

Another slander against the Belarusian president came from Russia’s “free media.” In 1995, Dr. Marcus Zeiner interviewed Lukashenko for the German newspaper Handelsblatt. The interview with Dr. Martin Zeiner was cleverly mistranslated to include positive references to Hitler. This was confirmed by the interviewer himself who subsequently said “a tape of the interview had been quoted out of context and with the sequence of comments altered.”

The BBC continues to propagate this lie about Lukashenko, which only serves to prove the desperation of the corporate media in the face of popular leaders whose policies threaten their empire of lies.

Stewart Parker’s book The Last Soviet Republic is an indispensable guide to a country and leader the bourgeois media does not want you to know about. It is, to my knowledge, the only comprehensive study of a country that only receives attention when vicious opportunities for anti-socialist propaganda present themselves.

We have much to learn from this brave little country that sacrificed so much to defeat the forces of fascism of Europe’s past and is now menaced by those same fascist forces which have resurfaced today in the name of “human rights,” “democracy” and “freedom.” In a world dominated by the ideology of the financial elite, those who stand for the common man and woman are beaten down ruthlessly. Alexander Lukashenko stands for democracy, human rights and freedom, which is why the corporate media call him a “dictator.”

Hurricane Neoliberal Wrecked Iceland

Repost from the old site.

Iceland is bankrupt. Moral to the story: the more a nation swallowed the neoliberal poison, the more fucked the are. The more sensible and socialist they were, the safer they are.

As I said before, if anything comes out of this world economic collapse we are presently experiencing, it is that neoliberalism should be buried for once and forever with a stake through its heart. That’s not going to happen, but it should.

Since 1980, the entire world has been a swoon with something called neoliberalism. Started by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, it quickly become championed by both US political parties, almost the entire US corporate media – newspapers, magazines, TV and radio – and almost every single economics department at every US university. An entire generation of economists was graduated with a sole idea in his head.

Neoliberalism was tried for decades in Latin America. Or, actually, it was forced down their throats at gunpoint. It failed in Latin America as it failed everywhere. Death rates went up, life expectancy went down, infant mortality went up, access to medical care went down, wages went down, unemployment went up, schooling figures declined.

There was economic growth, but almost everywhere on Earth, it went only to the top 2

For over a decade now, I have been reading increasingly shrill and paranoid screeching in The Nation, Counterpunch and other sane places that the march to neoliberalism could lead to economic catastrophes, recessions, depressions, market crashes.

The folks saying this are called Leftists. In the modern Zeitgeist, Leftists are insane people, losers promoting a failed ideology, persons to be mocked who lack a single coherent idea.

Who tells the truth? Why, the entire politico-media world blaring FREE MARKET in my head day and night. I, the cynic, wondered dubiously if this Chicken Little stuff would come true.

Sadly, the Leftists, intellectual losers on the wrong side of history, were right all along. They predicted this whole damn mess. As I said, neoliberalism is predictable. The entire media-political intellectual class, the entirety of US thinking, wisdom and expertise, was wrong, wrong, wrong, a million times wrong.

Shitheads.

Now the shitstorm is slamming into their faces, and yours and mine, with hurricane gale force.

Iceland, otherwise sensible Nordics, become the worst neoliberal crackheads in Europe. No one deregulated their financial sector like the Icelandics. They were Milton’s test-tube baby. They’re now his Frankenstein.

The same way Friedmanites blew up Chile and raped Russia, leaving her beaten and bloodied, they have left a scorched Earth in frozen Iceland. The most free market in Europe has been wrecked worst of all.

Other states in Europe, accustomed to heavy state intervention in economic affairs, are probably going to ride this out a lot easier. Their financial sectors were already pretty well-regulated, and they are nationalizing like mad.

Interestingly, in Africa, the financial sector is still heavily under state control and there has been almost no financial deregulation. Africa, along with Cuba and some other places, is expected to be able to ride out this crisis quite well.

I never thought in my lifetime I would see socialism vindicated like this. Here in America, we nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the world’s largest insurance company. Now we are on our way to nationalizing the banks.

Would ever thought that George Bush was a secret Marxist-Leninist?

Chinese Mafia in Argentina

Strange stuff.

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

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

What Do White Nationalists Want?

Repost from the old site.

We clearly established here a while back that White nationalism is for the most part simply White racism or White supremacism with a nice-sounding new name to keep from scaring people off. In a fancy, innocuous-sounding package, in other words.

I think maybe less than

On more moderate sites like American Renaissance, the view that NE Asians are equal to or superior to European Whites is commonly held, such that we must note that many White nationalists are in fact not White supremacists. This is an important distinction. The Left always calls these folks White Supremacists, and in many cases, that’s not fair.

I’m fascinated with White nationalism for some perverse reason, and to be honest, that’s why I write about it all the time.

Reading this blog is unfortunately just a glimpse into my perverse, unhealthy and chaotic mind. I wish I was more mature than that, but I’m not. Whatever is in my mind during given periods ends up on the blog. I admit I’m obsessed with race. Hence, the blog is race-obsessed. I’m not able to separate my private mental life from this blog yet, and I may never be.

Let’s look at the White nationalist program to see if this movement is racist or not.

Even on Amren, in the comments, you see a very large number of White nationalists saying that, ideally, we ought to throw all non-Whites out of the US. I don’t know how many feel that way. I never heard any of them say that they morally oppose such a project. I wonder how many WN’s don’t think this is a good idea. Clearly such a desire is racist.

On a lesser but yet important level, the vast majority of WN’s seem to take the opinion that only European Whites are real Americans. All others, no longer how long they have lived here, will never be Americans. I argue that this notion is racist in and of itself. Those opposed are invited to the comments to disagree.

A very large number of White nationalists, even on Amren, hanker for a race war, in particular a war between Whites and Blacks.

They also like to project about this a lot, claiming that Blacks want a race war with Whites. Sure, Nation of Islam Black Nationalists might, but it’s not a common view. I’ve been around thousands of Blacks (I taught in Black schools for years) and I’ve never heard one Black person say this.

White nationalists hanker for this because they think they can win this war. Most Blacks don’t think this is a good idea, I assume because it’s obvious that they would lose. If anything is racism, hankering for race war sure as Hell is.

One thing that is clear is that almost all WN’s seem to want White separatism in some form or another. I’m aware that some WN’s say that they are not White separatists. Their numbers are very small. Even those who say they are not White separatists still support “the right of communities to implement separatism at a local level.” Hmmm.

It seems to me that in general, White separatism would have to be driven by feelings of racism. I wouldn’t say all the time, but surely most of the time. As a political project, White separatism must be seen as racist to the core, regardless of the motivations of individuals.

The final WN view is that all anti-discrimination laws should be repealed. Some say we should only do this a piece at a time, but they all seem to support it. I would be very interested to meet a White nationalist who does not support getting rid of all anti-discrimination laws.

This project is so obviously racist on its face that I have even said that non-racist folks pushing this, such as libertarians and anarchists, are de facto racists in that they are pushing a racist agenda, no matter what pretty and loving thoughts may be dancing in their empathy-drenched minds.

This has aroused a firestorm of fury on libertarian and rightwing anarchist sites, but it’s always a pleasure to have the right kind of enemies.

Just to be fair, let’s point out what’s not racist about WN. Discussions of race realism are not necessarily racist, depending on how they are handled. Complaining about or criticizing other races is not necessarily racist either. Maybe they’re just telling it like it is? Opposition to anti-White hate propaganda, so prevalent in our society, is not necessarily racist.

Feeling pride in being White is not necessarily racist either.

My opinion is that all races and ethnic groups should take pride in themselves. It’s sad that more ethnic nationalists don’t feel this way. In fact, if you meet people from around the world, most people do take pride in their race or ethnicity! It’s healthy! Love yourself, love your tribe, love your nation, love your race.

Ideally, if WN’s respected the right of other groups to take pride in themselves, WN’s could look at proud Blacks and Hispanics and at least respect them for standing up for their people; instead, WN’s almost always see such folks as deadly enemies.

WN’s often say that their project is not racist. They also typically deny that they are racists themselves. But this is a lie in almost every single case. I don’t think I’ve ever met a White nationalist who was not a pretty hardcore racist. If you’re not a racist, why would you sign to a game like that in the first place?

Let’s look at the White nationalist project in summary:

Project/philosophy                Racist?

Strike anti-discrimination laws   YES
Remove non-Whites from US         YES
Only Whites can be real Americans YES
Advocate race war vs. non-Whites  YES
White separatism project at core* YES

*At project level, not individual level.

I would argue that from an anti-racist point of view, WN is invalidated right there.

We don’t need act silly and beat people up for talking about IQ or crime rates, feeling filial pride, or defending their people against idiots of other races. Given my argument above, why on Earth would any non-racist to anti-racist White person, however proud, sign on to WN? Forget it.

In an incredible book about Peru’s Shining Path, The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru, Peruvian journalist and uber-intellectual Gustavo Gorriti wisely noted that Sendero’s revolution was a “race against time.”

Gorriti speaking at some sort of citizens’ security committees conference in Peru on July 4, 2008.

Sendero saw Peruvian society as it was, not as it is. Sendero saw Peru as semi-colonial and semi-feudal, but it was moving away from both by the time they started their war. Their war was actually a war against time, progress and modernity itself.

Peruvian society is horrible, and armed Left revolution is more than justified, but Sendero’s analysis applied better to 1960 than 1980. In the ensuing 28 years, Peru only moved further from semi-colonialism and semi-feudalism.

US White nationalism is, like Sendero, in a race against time. In the past 45 years, support among US Whites for the five core projects/philosophies listed above has apparently declined each year in the US. The decline seems to be continuing. Yet White nationalists are racing harder than ever to implement their projects, the prospects for which seem to grow dimmer by the day. How many ways can you spell “doomed”?

References

Gorriti Ellenbogen, Gustavo. Translated, with an introduction, by Robin Kirk. 1999. The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

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.

New Sendero Attack in Peru

Excellent news out of Peru. Sendero Luminoso recently carried out an operation against the prosecutor in Acobamba in the Huancavelica Region. The local prosecutor was shot dead as he was entering his office in the morning. The assassin headed back over the border to Huanta Province in Ayacucho, where they have a huge presence. Acobamba is near the VRAE, where there is a large Sendero group operating.

The Position of the Left on Western Culture, Whites, Judeo-Christianity and Islam

A little debate here. The first quote is me defending secularism, the second one is Abiezer Coppe defending the Western Left against my charges. I reiterate after the blockquote with evidence from around the world.

It is sickening the way that the Left is sucking up to Islam. Stop it right now! It’s all because Muslims are fighting European Judeo-Christian “colonizer-imperialist” types in Israel and now in Iraq, Afghanistan and even in Europe. To the Left, European Judeo-Christian civilization is evil, and hence so are all Whites. Jews are considered White. We are all racist colonizer/imperialist slavers.

The dark Muslim noble savages are fighting evil White Euros, and the Left cheers.

The Left hates:

1. Euro Whites 2. Euro Christians 3. Euro Jews 4. The West

The dark Third Worldist oppressed darkies are fighting a holy war against all four, the West can’t get enough of it. I’m not sure if the Zionists ever mention this, but I think they are right. The Left even dislikes the Jews because now they are the ultimate expression of the White Judeo-Christian Western Euro colonizer.

No Robert, stop spreading lies about the Left. The Left aren’t that racial. You’re just spouting.

A sane Left will support Christian values as highly progressive. See Slavoj Zizek on Christianity.

Support for Islamism. The Maoists and Trots do it, and that’s about it. It’s third Worldist Idiotism…if you convert to Islam YOU CANNOT LEAVE. The penalty for leaving the Islamic religion in Pakistan is six months in prison, according to a commentator on Radio 4. Is this true?

Of course it is true. That’s if they don’t kill you.

I am talking about the Western Left.

The real existing Left, the one that matters, is not anti-West or anti-Christian.

The Latin American Left is pro-West and pro-Christian. Many of them are Christians. Even the leadership of Sendero Luminoso were Christians, including Abimael Guzman, who is still a Catholic! The Filipino Left is pro-West and pro-Christian.

This is the Liberation Theology Left, and I love it. Jesus was a Commie! In those countries, priests pray alongside the rebels and in some cases even serve in rebel armies. The Sandinistas had priests in their cabinet. Hugo Chavez is very much a Liberation Theologian; this is the best way to describe him. There is a lot of good theory coming out of Cuba nowadays since believers can join the party. They are calling themselves Christian Marxists. Even Fidel says Christianity is compatible with socialism and Communism.

The Indian and Nepalese Maoists don’t mind the West or Christianity. If there is a beef with anything, it’s Hinduism.

The real existing Left in all Muslim states is not too wild about Islam! The Left in the rest of the world cares nothing at all about Western culture or Christianity.

This anti-West, anti-European, anti-Judeo-Christian, anti-White shit is mostly just rebellion on the part of Western Leftists against their own eeeeeeevil religions and cultures.

Maoists in general are not too wild about Islam. The Iranian and Afghan Maoists are some of the most Islam-hostile groups in the Islamic world. They’ve basically had it up to here with Islam.

The Filipino Left has made alliance with Muslim separatists on a strategic basis and gets along with them well. The Indian Maoists support separatists in Kashmir.

Trots are always pro-Islam anymore, but they are irrelevant outside the West, which means they are irrelevant in the Real World.

The 13% Solution: A Modest Proposal?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mexico and Argentina adopted a

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They aren’t ingrates at all.

The Death of Middle Class White Culture

Erranter, a new and great commenter who is very smart and is also an excellent writer, writes about the death of the middle class:

While the economic loss of the middle class is indisputable and lamentable, I think that the loss of certain middle class values is of even greater concern. Some of these values can be quite inhibiting and it’s understandable that so many impulsive, lively intellectuals of the last century wanted to crush them, but they had to realize what they’re going to supplant them with for the mass of men.While a select few may be able to go it alone and survive by their wits and be their own moral guide, most people need guidance. Hell, even the select do. The simple values of self-restraint, merit, playing by the rules, forward thinking – all middle class values – are necessary to everything we currently think of as civilization.

I get annoyed being around them for too long, but I wouldn’t really want most kids to grow up bohemian or hick. It helps give me “structure” and the middle class on the whole is rather open to change and new ideas, which the lower classes aren’t. I still get annoyed, but I’ve got to admit there isn’t yet much of a better option I can think of, because hardly anybody’s born rich.

Basically, I went to the part today and I saw a bunch of pregnant 16 yr olds, various hicks of all races, the usual romp of morons and sluts, making you horny for no good reason and then going over to the guy in board shorts with tats all over his back. In my mind I felt like a whiny geezer but I couldn’t help it.

These people have a crappy culture. I was the only one with a book and was afraid as I walked over the bridge I would get insulted for it. It’s like middle school all over again. It’s some sort of lower class mishmash culture that all the races are adopting. They probably hang their walls with beer banners and babe calendars. Anyway, a lot of these people were probably “middle class” economically.

But big F-ing deal. All that really means is they can afford to drive SUVs and eat out. If you spread the money to them and they don’t grow up and ascend to a reasonable level of civilization then what’s the point of them having money?

Maybe I’m just getting pissed off by American culture. I love America, I tell myself. But do I? Maybe it was flawed from the start. Has this always been our general level. And isn’t the truth that this country was set up for businessmen, landowners, lawyers, moneymakers of all kinds?

We don’t name cities or roads after writers or artists. Industrialists, statesmen we adore, but mention you like to read and write at a family reunion and everyone will stare at you, then somebody will say, “but how are you going to make money with that?”

I can only speak from the POV of White culture. Yes, an intellectual and non-trashy White middle class culture used to exist. My father’s family grew up in it (Actually, they were poor!), and so did I as a boy. It still exists in the upper middle classes and the rich. Poor Whites have always acted pretty bad, and the middle classes have always looked down on them, I would say appropriately so.

But even working class Whites used to have a decent culture. My neighbor growing up was a working class Greek man married to a Mexican woman. I was best friends with their kids, especially their oldest son. I still am.

This guy immigrated from Greece and had a high school education at best, but he could talk your ear off about any intellectual subject under the sun. He was basically an autodidact. I remember once I loaned him a copy of Catcher in the Rye (on request!) and he returned it a while later with a slight knowing smile. He got it. How many ordinary people get that book, I mean really, really get it? His sons told me that he liked to read too.

I worked a lot of White working class jobs growing up, and it was not unusual to find bright working class men of all ages who liked to read and were frankly intellectuals of sorts. White society has always respected that sort of things, even if they were seen as a little odd or even quaint. They didn’t look down on it, instead they were sort of mystified by intellectuals.

I can’t comment on middle class Black society.

Asian society in the US has always respected intellectual pursuits, as do the East Indian Punjabis around here.

The Mexicans really don’t, but if you go down to Mexico, there is a thriving intellectual culture. There is a huge respect for intellectuals in Peru, Colombia, Brazil and Argentina, a legacy of their Spanish colonial past. It’s an honor to be a man of letters down there. Same in Russia, France, Germany, the UK, Italy, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, the Netherlands and even in the Arab World. Intellectuals are respected in almost all Asian countries, even SE Asia, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Only in the USA is this sort of thing scorned upon!

What’s happened is the mass dumbing down of middle class White culture to the worst of White culture, as in poor Whites, and also the worst of Underclass Black and Hispanic culture. It’s Idiocracy World.

The White middle class has been proletarianized in the worst way. They aren’t stupid, but they are pitifully ignorant. I knew business owners and pharmacists who never read the paper or watched the news. They didn’t know the slightest fucking thing about current events, or much of anything else.

I just came off 18 years in a White working class small town in the Sierra Nevada. The Idiocracy was deep rooted and pervasive there, even among the middle classes. At the same time, the uptight values of the White middle class along with lunatic Christian fundamentalism were everywhere. It’s the worst of the Old White Middle Class (the uptight part) combined with the worst of the New White Middle Class (the dumbed down crap part). There’s almost literally nothing of value there.

You don’t have to be all that bright to develop a world-class intellectual and civilized culture. A recent survey put France’s IQ at 94. That’s all you need. Ours is 98. We have no excuse.

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