The Mysterious NATO Snipers Shooting Both Cops and Protestors at Demonstrations

The Mysterious NATO Snipers Shooting Both Cops and Protestors at Demonstrations

The pro-Russian Ukrainian government was overthrown by bringing in fascists from Lithuania and Georgia (two supposedly non-Nazi countries) as snipers. They were disguised as musicians and carried their sniper rifles in their music cases. They were trained in supposedly non-Nazi Poland by trainers working for supposedly non-Nazi NATO. They were then brought to a large multistory building in the Maidan.

For a day or two, the snipers fired out of that  building, targeting both cops and protestors both. There is video of the snipers being hustled out of the country by the new government. You can see them carrying their “musical equipment cases.” Some of them were women.

A videotape has been released that shows some of the Georgian snipers who were hired to shoot at people. They said that they did not know they were supposed to be shooting at both sides and they felt bad about doing so.

There is an audio tape of a German government official talking to the president of Estonia. He is telling that the NATO side is the one with the snipers shooting people in the square. The audio was intercepted and can be heard.

The Ukrainian Parliament conducted an investigation of the Maidan shootings. The investigation revealed that both protestors and cops were killed with bullets from the same guns and that the Berkut police, who were blamed for the sniper attacks, did use these bullets in their guns. This proves that the Berkut did not kill the people at the Maidan. After that, the subject was buried and to this day, Western media blames the Berkut for the  shootings.

This is the NATO and US way. Every time you see snipers on rooftops shooting both protestors and police or shooting protestors on both sides, it’s always some sort of fascists, either the US, NATO or local fascists as in Venezuela but they were directed by the CIA.

These US and NATO snipers have fired on both sides and cops and demonstrators so far in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Thailand, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Thailand. In Venezuela and Ukraine, the governments were blamed but the shooters were anti-government fascists in both cases.

In Iraq, the government was blamed but the snipers were US Marines operating on rooftops and out of the US Embassy. The President of Iraq himself reported that this is what US forces did. Trump told him he was going to direct snipers to shoot at the demos unless the President obeyed him, and when he disobeyed, Trump did just that. The US snipers in Iraq shot both protestors and police. The Iraqi government was blamed.

Mysterious snipers recently fired on pro-Hezbollah protestors. Hezbollah was blamed. The shooters were fascist Maronites, probably under the direction of the US. However, this time they were caught and the false flag failed. Nevertheless, Western media continued to blame “Hezbollah snipers.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alt Left: The Family As Core of Venezuelan Society

Very nice comment here about how the whole of Venezuelan society is structured around a close-knit family unit. Actually, I have found that most of Latin America is like this, at least in the white and mestizo countries. It’s also true in Brazil. I really don’t how true it is in the Black Caribbean because I don’t understand that part of the world very well.

Please note that a stable father is typically not a part of the Venezuelan extended family! Yet society carries on anyway.

Manuel Rodriguez: I think that the stigma about labeling “momma boys” to men with an healthy attachment to their mothers might be mostly about western culture. We could also add the culture of individualism and the atomization and lack of relevance of blood families.

See, in Venezuela, we have a matrifocal system that is present in the majority of the popular class families. The father usually has little if any relevance on the stability and development of the family. The children might have other male models (usually other boyfriends of the mother), but their weight is still not significant.

Boys not only end up being raised mainly viewing their mother as the source of stability of the family, but she is literally the base of the family unit.

The families are “nuclear” in the sense that usually it will be two partners and children in a household, with the possibility of grandparents and grandchildren. But there is a good connection with those you consider to be part of the family. You can go stay with your relatives at their home without any problems as long as you behave yourself, say if you have to travel somewhere near where they live to study or do some other business.

There is the “family welfare” where families usually have the responsibility of giving medicine, food, and money to their relatives in need. This has been present for as far back as anyone can remember, but during the pandemic, this system has been of vital importance for the survival of the Venezuelan people. This is in contrast to countries like Spain, where families simply dropping their elderly on nursing homes ended in tragedy when the pandemic hit those places.

Other thing is that Western countries, specially Anglos, view the family as having a very limited role in the lives of adults.

The family is seen as composed of a nuclear family of two spouses and their immediate children. Apparently, they are expected to be independent and disconnect from their raised family as soon as they turn 18. They may interact occasionally with their immediate family sometimes, but they are otherwise expected to depend on themselves and don’t get much help.

The cultural expectations in other cultures in the world usually are that children are to stay in the family household until they either get married or end up financially secure enough to live independently without issue.

In said cultures the extended family is considered part of the basic family unit. You are also expected to help and give support to any family member that is in need.

This is strengthened when there is a mentality of collectivism or tribalism of sorts, as usually those who are connected to the bloodline are part of the tribe.

Alt Left: On Capital Flight

James Schipper: It is certainly possible to transfer savings abroad, and that is not beneficial for ordinary citizens, but a lot of what rich people do is not beneficial to ordinary people. More important than what rich people do abroad is the income distribution.

Suppose that Ruritania is a closed economy. In a closed economy there can’t be capital flight of course. Let’s further suppose that the richest 1

Capitalists can certainly carry out an investors’ strike. If they really dislike or distrust a leftwing government, they can refuse to invest, but that is possible also in a closed economy. We shouldn’t become obsessed with balance-of-payment problems.

Concerns about balance-of payment are mainly justified when a country has limited export capacity but has to import a lot of essentials. In such a case, it may not only be necessary to have rigid controls on capital outflows but also to restrict the import of luxuries. If a family has limited income, then it should not allow dad to buy expensive cigars or mom to buy designer cloths.

Let’s take 4 rich Peruvians, Pedro, Pablo, Diego and Carlos. Each year, Pedro transfers 25,000 USD to a foreign bank. Pablo imports luxuries worth 25,000 USD each year. Diego employs 5 Peruvian servants with that amount. Carlos adds 25,000 to his Peruvian savings account each year.

There is no difference between Pedro and Pablo. Diego employs Peruvians, but the services produced by those employees are for him. Those 5 servants could be providing services for ordinary Peruvians. It is never enough to look at job creation. We should also look at what those jobs produce and for whom. Carlos is the only one who is doing what rich people should be doing: saving money in order to reduce conspicuous consumption and free up resources for investment.

If capital flight is no big deal, why do nations get so upset about it. Venezuela was losing $50 billion a year to capital flight, money that could have been invested in the economy. It was all going straight to Miami and Houston. Venezuela was so upset about this that they put in capital controls to keep people from moving money out of the country. But every time you do that, you seem to end up with an underground money economy and a dual exchange rate.

Capital flight -> capital controls -> dual exchange rates with black market exchange rate diabolically manipulated by the opposition in Houston precisely to ruin the economy -> fixed exchange rate instead of floating the exchange rate -> wild inflation.

And the capitalists went on strike anyway an refused to put any money into the economy. They ran their factories and firms at 5

The capitalists wave the threat of capital flight over the head of any leftwing government like a Sword of Damocles. They just did it was Castillo in Peru, and it forced him to reign in many of his more leftwing proposals. The main thing they need to do in Peru is nationalize the mining business. Mining is extremely profitable in Peru but all of the money goes to foreign corporate carpetbaggers and parasites and the Peruvians themselves hardly get a nickel.

Castillo merely threatened to renegotiate the contracts with the foreign companies so Peru got more of the money, and the oligarchy went nuts. That is because while the foreign-owned mining industry is disastrous for your average Peruvian, the Peruvian oligarchy, like most in the region, is a comprador oligarchy. They make a lot of money off of those mining contracts somehow or other, don’t ask me how. No matter how much the country itself is getting screwed by foreign corporations raping the country, somehow the oligarchy always positions itself between the corporations and the nation and makes money off of the pillage.

They Peruvian oligarchy said if you try to do the tiniest leftwing thing, we will take all our money out of the country. They also said that that would tank the stock market. That is another sword they wave over our heads. “We will tank the stock market!” They’re basically terrorists. “If you don’t give us what we want, we will use these economic bombs to blow up the economy!

Alt Left: Conservative Arguments against Deficits

Found on the Net:

In 2011, the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman characterized conservative discourse on budget deficits in terms of “bond vigilantes” and the “confidence fairy.” Unless governments cut their deficits, the bond vigilantes will put the screws to them by forcing up interest rates. But if they do cut, the confidence fairy will reward them by stimulating private spending more than the cuts depress it.

In other words, like all conservative economics, it’s nonsense. Or superstition. Or magic. Or they know it’s a big fat lie and they won’t admit it. Probably the latter.

Not to mention that there are no true conservatives anywhere on Earth who even believe in anti-deficit theory in the first place. All modern conservatives, given the chance in office, will balloon deficits wildly. In the US, this is due to another scam. Conservatives deliberately blow up deficits to cause an artificial debt crisis. Then the lying dogs start screaming about the deficits that they themselves created (without acknowledging that they created them) and demanding the destruction of most if not all social spending to fight the deficit crisis. The fact that they got away from this scam for decades is outrageous.

The corporate media of course is in on the whole scam and never blew the whistle on them even once. Americans, who are profoundly idiotic in terms of political economics, finally started to catch onto this scam under Trump a full 40 years after it was implemented under silver-tongued Scammer-in-Chief Ronald Reagan. In terms of political economics, Americans are some of the dumbest people on Earth. All over the world, people vote their class interests. Only in the US and a few other places such as Hong Kong and Colombia do they not do so. Americans are the ultimate class cucks.

Venezuealans and Nicaraguans, dumb spics in most Americans’ minds, have a far greater sense of political economics and class consciousness. No way on Earth could you put a scam like this over them. They won’t fall for it. It’s rather pathetic when dumb spics are vastly more intelligent on political economics than Americans are.

I guess Brazilians and Colombians are dumb enough to fall for it. But Peruvians, Paraguayans, Argentines, and increasingly Chileans ain’t falling for this crap anymore. Neither are Hondurans. Or apparently Mexicans. Salvadorans supposedly have great class consciousness but they just voted in a rightwinger named Bukele. Guatemalans are permanently class cucked and confused, possibly terrorized into supporting rightwing economics, though most of them don’t seem to have a clue about politics or economics. Ecuadorians are apparently easily fooled.

Outside the Western Hemisphere, no one falls for this crap except in the UK for whatever weird reasons they have. The Baltics became extremely class cucked as a reaction against Communism and it was deadly for them. Indians seem pretty class cucked. At any rate, if they have any money at all, they go hard rightwing on economics. You can’t put this scam over anywhere in the Arab World. They won’t stand for it. The Arab World is run by populists. Nor could you in Turkey.

For that matter, in most of the former USSR, it’s not possible to class-scam people. 70 years of the USSR guaranteed that class consciousness is pounded into the sense of all workers. This is what rightwing idiots don’t get about the fall of the USSR. They didn’t end up with this neoliberal paradise full of class cucks that they wanted. Instead, they ended up with a permanently militant working class and a permanently socialist or social democratic state. You can change the form (the state) but you can’t change the contents (what’s in people’s minds).

Alt Left: Who Kills More – US Liberal Interventionists or US Alt Right Nazis and White Supremacists?

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

Right. I banned him. He’s an Alt Right guy. They’re not with us. He hates the Left, so he’s not welcome here. Though I appreciate his anti-military, anti-corporate and especially anti-imperialist notions. I’d like to see more of the Alt Right take this up. I’m willing to make alliances with these guys. Yeah, they’re racists, but so what? How many people do these Alt Right guys kill and hurt every year? Almost zero.

How about liberal Democratic Party interventionists (imperialists)? US sanctions on Venezuela alone have already killed 100,000 people. We started a war in Iraq that killed 1.4 million people. We started another war in Afghanistan that killed 1.1 million people. And we are up to our necks with our ISIS and Al Qaeda allies in Syria, where we started a war that has killed 500,000 people.

Numbers of dead:

IS Liberal interventionists: 3 million over 20 years.

US Alt Right Nazis and racists: 30? over the same period.

Whose worse? Nazis and racists suck but I will ally with anti-military, anti-corporate, and especially anti-imperialist Alt Right White Supremacists over these liberal interventionist woketards any day of the week. Anyway the woke liberal interventionists literally kill 100,000 times as many people as Alt Right racists and Nazis.

Alt Left: Lying Western Media about “Clashes” in Lebanon

Did you notice that as soon as Victoria Nuland showed up in Beirut, snipers on rooftops appeared and started shooting at Hezbollah and Amal people? There were no “clashes” in Beirut, but the entire Western media is lying  to you about that. There were demonstrations by Hezbollah and Amal supporters in Beirut over a judge assigned to investigate something that never even happened in the first place – a stash of fertilizer blew up in the Beirut harbor. But everyone in Lebanon and even Iran has gone along with the lie that this is what happened because it’s better for everyone that way.

What really happened was the Jews dropped a nuclear bomb on Beirut and then set up a vast lie about a how a fertilizer stash blew up. The whole world officially went along with it. Not one nation dared to tell the truth  about what  happened. This is what the Malay Prime Minister Malathir meant when he said, “The Jews (Israel) control the world by proxy.” See anyone calling them on dropping that bomb? See anyone ever going against the ridiculous story that was put out? Of course not. Well, that’s what happens when you have the world damn world in the palm of your hand and everyone is either owned by you or afraid of you.

The Lebanese Forces are a Christian Phalangist movement whose members formed a proxy army allied with Israel when the Jews occupied Southern Lebanon. Their ideological mentor loved Hitler and had photographs of him in his high school locker. The current leader is a former general named Gaega. They are strongly pro-US and in my opinion they are more responsible than anyone else for bringing fascism to Lebanon.

About half of the Lebanese Christians are out and out Christian fascists. They have extreme hate for Muslims and especially for Iran, Hezbollah, and more than anything else, the Palestinians. These are the people who murdered 3,500 people in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982 while Ariel Sharon, head of the Jewish Army, watched with binoculars from a nearby building to make sure resistance to the killers didn’t get out of hand.

They are funded by Saudi Arabia due to the fact that they both hate the Shia and Iran. The Lebanese Forces put snipers on rooftops and fired on the above Hezbollah and Amal demonstrators, killing 6 and wounding 60 more. After this, Hezbollah and Amal militias arrived on the scene and started shooting back. Somehow this gets called “clashes.” Not one Western media report mentioned the Lebanese Forces fascists.

Not even one. That is because the entire Western media is in bed with fascist elements around the world in Ukraine, Lebanon, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Israel, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Peru, El Salvador, and Haiti. Mostly this is due to economic support for fascist elites and a democratic left. In a few places like Ukraine and Lebanon it is down to US geopolitical war against Iran and Russia which we have dragged our European slaves into.

On the other hand, arguably fascist states in Eastern Europe in Hungary and Poland are savagely attacked for not going along with the Western woke project.

If you notice, the snipers started shooting as soon as (((Victoria Nuland))) showed up. Mysterious snipers have a tendency to start shooting from roofs everywhere this walking malignancy shows up. Based on that, I think the US and maybe Israel had a hand in these snipers. Mostly I blame the Saudis. I’d say it was a US-Saudi plot to start a civil war in Lebanon with possibly input from Israel.

The US, the Saudis, and mysterious fascist snipers shooting at Shia Muslims to overthrow a pro-Hezbollah/Iran and anti-Israel government.

Alt Left: Mysterious NATO/CIA/Deep State/Jihadist or Fascist Snipers on Roofs That Shoot Both Sides During Unrest to Cause Chaos or Overthrow Regimes

Remember in Ukraine where mysterious snipers appeared when (((Victoria Nuland))) showed up and shot both the pro-Russian Berkut police and anti-Russian pro-Nazi protesters? That was a pure NATO operation, 10

The Lithuanians were holed up in a high tower and disguised as classical musicians. Some were female. They were photographed leaving Ukraine after the attacks with their guns in their instrument cases. The Ukrainian pro-Russian police were blamed but all of the bullets came from guns that they did not have as per an investigation by a commission of the Ukrainian Nazi government.

NATO, the CIA, the EU, and mysterious fascist snipers shooting both sides to install a fascist government and overthrow a pro-Russian one.

Mysterious NATO Jihadist Snipers Shooting Both Sides in Syria

Recall that in the Syrian Civil War, the war started with Saudi jihadist gunmen smuggled in with weapons stored in mosques who opened fire on both Syrian police, who were unarmed, and demonstrators. Reports indicate that NATO was deeply involved in this Saudi operation, as NATO helped them smuggle the weapons and vehicles across the border.

The Syrian police were blamed, but they had no guns. This was the demo that started the Syrian Civil War. So the Syrian conflict was violent from the very start. Within three weeks of the demos, there were already armed attacks on the Syrian Army. The scene continued for months with mysterious snipers on roofs targeting both police and protesters in cities in Syria.

Once again, NATO, the US, the CIA, and mysterious jihadist snipers shooting both sides to get rid of a Shia pro-Iranian and anti-Israel government.

Mysterious (NATO?) Snipers Shooting Both Sides in Egypt

During the Egyptian Revolution, snipers appeared on roofs attacking both police and protesters. There were rumors of NATO involvement here. Apparently the objective here was to get rid of the Mubarak government,  which had become a thorn in the side of the US.

NATO and mysterious snipers shooting both sides.

Mysterious CIA and Fascist Snipers Shooting Police and Protesters in Venezuela

During the coup against Chavez in 2002, rightwing fascist snipers on bridges attacked both protestors and police. Venezuelan police were blamed. NATO and the EU have long supported the armed fascist opposition in Venezuela.

The CIA and fascist snipers shooting cops and protestors to overthrow a Left government.

Mysterious (NATO?) Snipers Shooting Police and Protesters on Both Sides in Thailand

During the Thai civil unrest, mysterious snipers appeared on rooftops and shot both police and protestors. NATO was once again blamed. I’m not sure what the rationale here was, but the West was supporting one of the sides, either the red shirts or the yellow shirts, I have no idea.

It looks like this “mysterious snipers on roofs often shooting both sides, including police and protesters” thing is a CIA/NATO thing linked to US Deep State operations all over the globe. It looks like the Saudis are also involved, as are European fascist states like Georgia, the Baltics, and Poland. The goal is unclear but in most cases it is to start civil wars, increase unrest, and many cases, to overthrow regimes the US does not like.

Wherever Ms. (((Nuland))) goes, snipers on rooftops mysteriously appear, and they just so happen to promote US objectives. The objective in Lebanon was to drag Hezbollah into a civil war. The Western media are already lying like snakes about this, saying that the fighting was the result of “clashes” without laying blame on the US and Israel-supported Christian fascist Lebanese Forces who started it.

Alt Left: Nothing Worse Than a Fed

Tamerlane: FBI is even worse when compared to the police.

They definitely have more psychopaths than sociopaths in their ranks, possibly due to being 1 SD more intelligent than cops in terms of IQ, on average.

They enjoy using the powers the state gives them in creating plots and targeting vulnerable members of society. Sometimes the sick fucks run COINTELPRO just for the fun of it.

They also seem to employ a different kind of psychopath, the more sneaky and cowardly variety.

I’m not ecstatic about cops in general. I guess I feel about them the way I do about Jews and Blacks. I don’t really like them as a group, but I like a lot of individuals from the group. I just don’t like the group as a whole, as a collective. But all of those groups have perfectly fine people in them. And my longest relationship of 5 1/2 years was with a Jewish woman. And she agreed with most everything I said about Jews too. There are cops and there are pigs. There are Blacks and there are niggers. There are Jews and there are kikes. Two different things.

I really hate feds. There are some who only go after serial killers and child killers and murderers in general and whatnot, and I’m just fine with those.

Not real keen on the rest of them.

Not only that, but the FBI works with the CIA on their shenanigans. The FBI framed Libya for the Lockerbie bombing. Libya absolutely did not do that Lockerbie bombing. That’s settled by now. But the FBI deliberately framed Libya because the FBI is like the CIA in that they are crooked spooks who work for US foreign policy.

In Brazil, the FBI assisted in the “lawfare” that took down Brazil’s Lula. They made up false charges about him out of whole cloth and put him in prison for made-up charges. The FBI worked directly with Brazil’s fascist government (fascists love fascists) to frame Lula.

The Feds and the FBI worked with the Venezuelan fascist opposition to cook up the fake drug trafficking charges against the Maduro administration in Venezuela.

They were the ones who arrested the Chinese head of Huawei, Ms. Meng, on completely fabricated charges that wouldn’t matter even if they were true because she’s accused of violating US sanctions against Iran whereby US law somehow extends all over the globe! The US is trying to extradite a top ranking member of the Maduro administration for violating US sanctions against Venezuela. Since when does US law extend to Venezuela? Or Iran? All of those “violating US sanctions charges against foreigners are insane and in my opinion against international law.

I believe that a lot of these Muslim “terror plots” were frame-ups where the federal informants cooked up plots in order to entrap people. I wonder how many of those plots were even real as in not cooked up the fed pig informant.

The FBI was deeply involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King. That’s just a fact. J. Edgar Hoover was a crook. If he wanted you dead, you were dead.

Federal laws are ridiculous and stupid, way worse even then chickenshit state laws. The sentencing guidelines are insane. The recommended terms are far in excess of anything sensible.

Besides, if those fed pigs want to get you, they will get you. You do not want to have the FBI or any fed pigs for that matter coming after you in life. Local cops are bad enough, but you can often live with them, or at least I can. They’re negotiable. You can’t negotiate with feds. If they want you gone, you’re gone. I’ve never had any dealings with the FBI or other fed pigs in my life and I never want to. The farther away you stay from those guys, the better. I hate federal prosecutors too. I can’t believe that chickenshit charges they cook up against people all the time. Ridiculous.

They will come into your home, turn it upside down, and then sift through your whole life going back forever. I figure most people are breaking some sort of chickenshit law most of the time. And if you do a data dump on a lot of people’s lives, you can probably cook up some chickenshit charge against them. And if it’s a federal crime, I guarantee that the sentence for that crime is absurdly excessive.

I really despise all feds (except the homicide detective feds discussed above). Those are the worst pigs of all by far. Can’t stand them!

Alt Left: The Syriza Party in Greece: Anatomy of a Sellout

Interesting abstract from Academia. All papers on Academia can be downloaded and reprinted for free. Syriza was the radial left hope for Europe in the wake of the 2008 Depression in which Greece was hit perhaps worst of all. The Right says it was because of Greece’s tax and spend policies, but Greece’s taxes are not high, nor is it’s social democracy particularly robust. The true problem is massive corruption of the political classes at all ends of the spectrum combined with an absolute failure of the wealthy classes to pay as much as one nickel in taxes. In other words, The Latin American Disease (in part) because Latin America suffers from exactly these problems more than anything else.

Syriza had a very powerful voice in opposition to the Austerity Regime demanded by the EU out of Germany (Germany basically runs the EU and lays down the law). There were two ways out of the debt crisis. Either go into crisis austerity and sell off a good portion of their public lands and enterprises, or simply default on their debt and start all over again. Perhaps both would have been equally painful, but I think default would have been best.

As is, a good portion of Greece’s public lands and public enterprises (the health care system, national parks, electric grid, hydropower, a number of actual islands of the country itself) were sold off the lowest of capitalist parasites. Anyone think the national parks, electric grid, health care system, hydropower, and even the very islands of the nation itself will be any better off now that they are in the hands of a lot of greedheads? They’re not. Nothing good ever happens with any of these sell-offs of private enterprises.

Worse, the selling off of the very partrimony of Greece itself was combined with the worst austerity, elimination of health care and all social programs for the masses combined with massive job losses so the masses of unemployed could not count on any state help now that they could not pay their bills. In other words, the Greeks got the worst of both worlds. Austerity and selloff and they gained nothing at all other than emptied pockets and rifled and ransacked goods.

No one could pay for medical care or hospital beds either. Many people were thrown out of their homes because they could not pay the rent and shantytowns of former workers and even middle class people sprung up all over Greece. Some political parties, even the far Right Golden Dawn to their credit, stepped in to try to provide the social help that the state would not.

This was followed by the election of Syriza, which campaigned on not paying the debt and opposing austerity. As soon as they got in power, they quickly changed their tune. I don’t think they sold out so much as they did not have the guts to go through with the program. No doubt there were massive pressures on them to go through the standard austerity model. At any rate, Syriza did not default on its debt like Argentina and Iceland did (to little effect on their economies), and they implemented austerity with full force. They sold out the masses completely.

As they stayed in power, they moved more and more to the right. Now that they are out of power, they have moved even further to the right. There is a new rightwing government called New Democracy in charge about which I know little, except I assume they’re not real great. Syriza is now utterly unable to offer an alternative to ND, while ND has apparently completely failed in the COVID epidemic as most rightwing governments everywhere did, no doubt leaving many corpses in its wake.

We have the standard Latin American model here where the Right (call it the Conservatives in Colombia or ARENA in El Salvador) “the right wing of the oligarchy” is absolutely toxic, but the Left (call it the Liberals in Colombia, the AD and APRA “social democratic” traitors in Venezuela and Peru), etc. are simply the “liberal wing of the oligarchy,” which in practice means virtually no change at all.

AD in Venezuela has combined with the fascist Right to overthrow the Chavistas, backing every coup attempt of various flavors against the government. For all intents and purposes, they’re not much different from Guaido. AD was always just a party to split up the loot from the oil rents from the state oil company amongst the oligarchs and the upper middle class management of the company.

This is very discouraging and it sounds like Thatcher’s TINA (There is No Alternative) response to neoliberalism. Perhaps there is no alternative to neoliberalism and austerity in the EU model, which has always been based on neoliberal orthodoxy. Note that debt cannot exceed

If the situation in the EU is TINA, then Brexit is the way to go. Greece and a few others have been threatening to do that, but the NATO fascist military alliance (NATO has always been run by the US) is the imperialist glue that holds the EU economic community together. A neoliberal economic community held together by a fascist imperialist army. What else is new? Straight out of Milton Friedman (“Neoliberalism cannot be imposed democratically; it must be imposed by dictatorship”) himself. It is very hard to leave NATO. Notice even the Brits didn’t do that. NATO may be an abusive spouse for many of the nations inside the alliance, but if so, most NATO countries are Stockholmed wives.

I don’t know what to say except that this is yet another sellout of the Left.

For all of their faults, the governments of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Argentina have refused to go this route. At the moment, Peru is also challenging this model. The penalty has been repeated coup attempts in most these countries, economic wars, and sanctions, but at least they didn’t sell out. I still think this sort of resistance is the way to go, painful or not.

Our existences have dignity or they are worthless. The EU model is the death of dignity. At least with the Pink Tide, those nations can hold their heads up amidst the ruins and say

At least we are free. We may be poor but at least we are free.

You know that’s got to be worth something.

Outside of the homeland, there is nothing.

– A famous Baath Party intellectual from Iraq

Whatever beefs I had with Saddam, and I had plenty; Hell, at least he was a nationalist in a time when such patriots are scarce and viewed as traitors to the International Globalist Elite based on multinational corporate rule over the rule of actual states. Governments are increasingly irrelevant now that billionaires and corporations have more money and power than many actual countries.

SISP Conference 2021, Online, 9-11 September 2021

SYRIZA back in opposition (2019-2021): Towards a new political direction?

Grigoris Markou

Postdoctoral researcher, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Abstract

SYRIZA’s spectacular rise to power through a radical political proposal and a strong populist discourse has been the field of study of a large number of political scientists in recent years. Alexis Tsipras (Syriza’s leader) in opposition and in power expressed a strong inclusionary populist discourse, placing popular classes at a central position and opposing the political and economic establishment of the country and Europe.

SYRIZA, during its second term began to change its physiognomy, abandoning gradually its radicalism and embracing a typed of “political realism” and consensus, while it began to soften its populist intensity and passion. After the end of its rule (2019), it became clear that SYRIZA’s populism had nothing to do with the populist intensity and passion of the previous years.

SYRIZA (2019-present) continued to maintain some populist slogans and a kind of anti-elitism (e.g. “the many” against “the establishment”), but to a lesser extent.

Furthermore, a huge gap has been created between the party and the popular classes. SYRIZA can’t persuade, mobilize and lead the people against the right-wing government of New Democracy in a period of intense social discontent with the management of the pandemic and the economy by the Greek government and at a time when popular demands for democracy, justice, and labor protection are emerging.

In this presentation, I will present the main characteristics of SYRIZA’s political discourse after its defeat in the 2019 national election, attempting to find if the party continues to express a populist discourse or not through discourse analysis while underlining its new political direction. Furthermore, I will examine the reasons the rapid transformation of the party in a more mainstream and “realistic” direction.

Alt Left: The Catholic Church in Latin America

Do you think churches, private schools should pay property taxes? In Latin America, the Catholic Church probably doesn’t pay property taxes and usually supports the Far right conservatives that you and me greatly despise. I think the Catholic Church plays a big role in upholding the oligarchy land power in Latin America do you agree?

Um I’m not sure to what extent that is true. There’s also a lot of Liberation Theology being preached all over Latin America. Keep that in mind. The Vatican used to look dimly at it, but it’s very common at the parish and lay worker level. In Latin America you have murals of leftwing guerrillas waging battle led by Jesus Christ holding an automatic weapon. The mural will have leftwing slogans written all over it. There is a strain of Liberation Theology that can be seen as “Jesus Christ with a machine gun leading a guerrilla column into a war against the rich.”

The Sandinistas had a lot of church people on their side. One of their leaders was a former priest.

In Colombia, the priests helped the leftwing guerrillas. The ELN guerrillas were founded by Camilo Torres, a priest preaching Liberation Theology, the original “priest with an automatic weapon.” The ELN still has deep roots in the church. A lot of the churches in FARC territory support the FARC.

An Irish priest from the US led a guerrilla column in Honduras in 1983 until he was killed.

Same in El Salvador. The Salvadoran guerrillas had deep roots in the church. Remember when the death squads assassinated the five top priests in the country in 1989 for being “the brains behind the guerillas?” Remember when Bishop Romero was assassinated in 1980 for preaching Liberation Theology? The FMLN Leftist guerrillas in El Salvador were practicing Catholics.

The Chavistas in Venezuela are Catholics and Chavez was a practicing Catholic.

Towards the end of his life, Fidel Castro said he was a “cultural Catholic.” There is a lot of “Catholic Communist” thinking coming out of Cuba these days and now many Communist Party members are believers who attend mass. There were also many “Communist Catholics” in the Czech Republic.

Aristide of Haiti was a priest.

The Leftist leader of Paraguay was a former priest.

In Peru, a lot of priests at the parish level even supported the Shining Path!

Remember Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker newspaper? In the US, the Church has often been quite liberal.

It all depends on the country.

Yes, the church hierarchy traditionally supported the elites in part of a deal to let the elites take power and lay off the church, but this all changed with the advent of Gustavo Gutierrez “Theology of Liberation” published in 1965 advocating “the preferential option of the poor.”

A lot of the militarizes down there back in the 1980’s used to have this attitude of the Church as being a hotbed of Communist subversion.

Catholicism lends itself to both rightwing and leftwing thinking due to the nature of the Church. Church doctrine can be interpreted either towards the Right or Left depending on which type of thinking you wish to emphasize.

Protestantism tends to have a rightwing bias pretty much baked into it.

Alt Left: The People Choose Democracy over Aristocratic Rule in Latin America

Down in Latin America, once the Left takes over the state, they prove to be so popular with the poor majority that the oligarchic parties of authoritarian Right shrink to ~2

The Right literally cannot win in places that have tasted socialism like Nicaragua and Venezuela. The only way they win is by cheating, election fraud/rigging, and coups of various kinds – electoral, lockout, economic, legislative, judicial, and military. Or they run as Leftists and then turn hard right the minute they get in like Lenin Moreno in Ecuador.

In other places, people seem to be rejecting aristocratic rule.

A majority in Colombia seems poised to elect a fairly leftwing politician.

A literal Marxist, a Palestinian Chilean, has been leading polls in Chile for some time now.

A Marxist just barely won the Presidency in Peru.

The rightwing coup in Bolivia was overthrown, and the Left won handily again.

Argentina has been electing the leftwing Peronist Fernandez dynasty for some time now. The only way the Right won last time was because rightwing banksters on Wall Street deliberately crashed the economy so the Right got in on the protest vote.

In Paraguay, the last democratic election elected a Leftist, a former priest. He was overthrown in a legislative coup, and it’s been a rightwing dictatorship ever since.

Honduras elected a leftwinger, and a moderate one at that, in its last democratic election. The US immediately sponsored a coup, and it has been a rightwing military dictatorship ever since.

The Left has been winning in various Caribbean islands for some time.

Haiti has been under one form or another of rightwing dictatorship ever since US Special Forces removed President Aristide at gunpoint in a military coup. Aristide’s party, Lavalas, was extremely popular and got 9

The fascist Bolsonaro is now unpopular, and the moderately leftwing Workers Party is now ahead in the polls. The PT was removed in a judicial coup via lawfare with the help of the US FBI (I knew there was a reason I hated feds). The President and Vice President were literally put in prison on completely fake charges. This is the only Bolsonaro got in. However, Brazil definitely has a significant base for fascism as in Colombia for whatever reason.

Lopez Obrador or AMLO for short won the recent election in Mexico, a country long marred by extreme election fraud. He’s the most leftwing president in some time. However, he has governed from the Center. Nevertheless, the Mexican oligarchy (with deep ties to the Catholic Church) nevertheless has been threatening a coup ever since he took office.

The Right only won in Ecuador last time around because Lenin Moreno banned the leftwing party and exiled its leader, Correa. The government has stated that he will be jailed if he returns. The charges are faked. The Right only won last time around because the election was grossly unfair. There was no actual election fraud in terms of altering the vote, but the campaigning leading up to the election was grotesquely unfair.

Alt Left: Fascist States around the World in the Past Century

I will be leaving World War 2, where many such regimes were created in  Europe, out of this discussion because I don’t understand it well.

A discussion of fascism is very important because the Republican Party is already a fascist political party in the sense of a rightwing authoritarian party along Latin American oligarchy lines.

The Type of State the Republicans Are Aiming At

Similar regimes were installed in Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Iran, Turkey (a Mussolinist + Nazi extrerminationist model), Greece, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Zaire, Kenya, Liberia, Indonesia (a classic Mussolinist model), Philippines, South Korea, Brunei, Taiwan, South Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, Gabon, Angola, and South Africa, not to mention the many such regimes installed in Latin America, where the rightwing authoritarian or dictatorship regime has become a classic model. Many of these had a fake democratic facade over what was basically a dictatorship.

Nazi extreminationism with an ethnic component has been installed in Turkey and possibly Azerbaijan. Those models are governing to this day in the fake Croatian and Serbian states inside Bosnia. The present Croatian and Serbian regimes have overtones of WW2 like fascism, as does Hungary under Orban. Nazi-style exterminationist regimes, albeit with Communists and leftwingers substituted for Jews, have been installed in Iran, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan in the past.

One could argue that Israel is now a Mussolinist style fascist government, albeit with a facade of democracy in which various fascist parties compete to rule the fascist state.

Rightwing Authoritarian Models in Latin America in the Last Century

It’s not so much the Nazi, National Socialist or classic fascist models of World War 2, although Trump and Berlusconi do resemble Mussolini, and Berlusconi created a classic Mussolinist fascist state in Brazil along the lines of the previous years of Operation Condor in Pinochet’s Chile, Velasco’s Argentina, the generals’ Brazil, Salazar’s Paraguay, the Uruguayan dictatorship, and Banzer’s Bolivia.

Somewhat different but similar “kill the Communists” regimes were created in Ecuador in the 1980’s, Fujimora and Belaunde’s Peru, Venezuela in the late 80’s, Uribe and many others’ Colombia (where it has become the only form of the state and Uribismo is almost a classic fascist Mussolinist model), Somoza’s Nicaragua, Bautista’s Cuba, Trujillo’s Dominican Republican, Rios Montt’s Guatemala, and ARENA, D’Aubisson, and Duarte’s El Salvador, Haiti under the Duvaliers, where it became a model followed to this day, and the present government of the generals in Honduras.

The model has not yet been installed in much of the Caribbean, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Mexico, and the Guyanas, but it’s been generalized as the classic model in Latin America in general for over a century now. There are rumblings now to create another rightwing authoritarian regime in Peru and Mexico.

Counterrevolution is ongoing in Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela and has succeeded recently in Ecuador, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, and Haiti. There were recent rumblings in Argentina, where the large landowners (who were never broken up as there was no land reform)  were making threats of a coup if their riches were touched. There were failed attempts recently in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Another attempt is ongoing in Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Alt Left: Malcolm X on Gusanos (Worms) or Anti-Castro Cubans

Alt Left: Why We Fight (PFLP version)

Alt Left: Argument: There Is No Peaceful Road to Socialism

Transformer: I saw this on Facebook with a discussion about Communism and this is a statement from a Libertarian:

The Marxist delusion of no government always leads to absolute tyranny. The anarcho-communists sweep away tolerably governments and pave the way for the Stalins, Maos, Pol Pots, Castros, Mugabes, Chavezes, etc. It’s not that they justify Stalinism, but that they justify measures that always result in Stalinism, and they still don’t have a clue as to why that keeps happening.

I disagree with his statement that the governments before these revolutions were tolerable.

The CIA supported Pol Pot.

Yes, the US supported Pol Pot the whole time they were in and for many years afterwards as guerrillas.

You are certainly free as a liberal to Leftist to oppose Marxism. A lot of people on the Left, especially liberals, are against Marxist dictatorships. There’s a good argument against them. They’re not exactly democratic.

Chavez was not a dictator at all. Venezuela under Chavez was one of the most democratic countries on Earth. Mugabe wasn’t really a dictator. The opposition always ran in every election, and Mugabe always got the most votes not counting fraud. Same thing in Russia. Putin always gets the most votes whether he steals a few or not. Same thing in Belarus. The opposition runs every time and Lukashenko always gets 75-8

There’s never been any serious electoral fraud in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Haiti, Iran, Syria, or Peru or most places the US has alleged that massive electoral fraud allowed the Left to win. I can’t recall the last time the Left anywhere on Earth had to steal an election to win. It’s usually the Right who does that.

Anarcoms have never completed a successful revolution. The no government thing is supposed to be way off in the future and it’s never happened anywhere. The “Stalinism” is just the dictatorship of the proletariat. It’s part of Marxist theory. It’s not an aberration or anything. Look at Honduras, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Bolivia, Guyana, Peru, Mexico, Italy, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Iran, etc.

There’s no peaceful way to put the Left in power. Anytime a Left government comes in, there’s this nonstop war to overthrow it, usually culminating in a rightwing fascist coup. They always ruin the economy, first and foremost. This is why orthodox Marxists regard the peaceful road to socialism as either a sick joke or a great idea that is not possible in the real world. Lenin called advocates of the peaceful road to socialism “parliamentary cretins.”

Alt Left: Rural Land Reforms: An Overview

What’s odd is that imperialism went along with land reforms in a lot of other places such as Europe and the Middle East. All of the Middle East has done a land reform.

That was one thing the wave of Arab nationalist leaders who came to power in 1950-1970 did right away, including the Baath in Iraq and Syria, Yemen, Nasser in Egypt, the FLN in Algeria, Tunisia, and Qaddafi in Libya.

I believe there was some type of land reform done in Palestine too. If you read Ghassan Kanafani, the Palestinian Leftist, in the 1930’s, he talked about how terribly exploited the Arab fellahin or peasants were in Palestine.

If you went to Yemen in the 1960’s, there was a portrait of Nasser in every house.

I’m not sure if a land reform was ever done in Morocco. It’s been ruled by a fairly rightwing king for a long time.

A land reform was probably done in Lebanon, but I don’t have details. Likewise with Jordan.

Nothing grows in the Gulf anyway, so there’s no need for a reform.

I’m not sure about Sudan or Mauritania, but I doubt much grows in Mauritania except date palms.

In all of these places, land reform was a very easy sell for whatever reason, probably because neoliberal capitalism seems to be antithetical to Islam itself. The feudal lords of the former Ottoman Empire had tried to justify feudalism on the basis that in the Koran it says something like, “Some are rich and some are poor, and this is a natural thing” but that never went over too well.

The idea that in an Islamic country, the rich Muslims were viciously exploit the poor Muslims is nearly haram on its face. You just can’t do that. All Muslims are part of the ummah. All the Muslim men are your brothers and all the Muslim women are your sisters. Also individualism never made it to any part of the Muslim World other than the Hindu variety in Pakistan and Bangladesh, but that’s not really the same radical individualism that we have in the West. It’s just an ancient caste based system.

The first thing the Communists did in Eastern Europe was to do a land reform. You will never hear it here in the West, but until 1960, the Communist regimes in the East were very popular with industrial workers and also with the peasants.

In most of the world, peasants and rural dwellers are leftwingers. This is even the case in Western Europe in France.

The US is odd in that it’s farmers are so reactionary. That goes against the usual trend.

Yes, farmers are said to be conservatives, but that usually just means social conservatism. In most of the world, peasants are literally Alt Left: left on economics and right on social and cultural issues.

A land reform was definitely done in Iran.

Obviously one was done in the USSR, and the large landowners have not yet consolidated themselves in the former USSR, mostly because everybody hates them. Large landowners have taken over some of the state farms in Russia, but for whatever reason, they are not very productive. In fact, many of the state farms are still in existence. I am not sure what sort of arrangement they have now.

5

After World War 2, the US supported land reforms in some places as a way of heading off a Communist threat. This is one great thing about the Communists. So many great steps of social progress were only done out of fear or terror that if these were not done, the Communists would take over. Now that that threat is gone, one wonders what motivation the oligarchs have to give up anything.

In particular, land reforms were done in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. They went over very easily. And in fact, the subsequent economic growth occurred right on the back of these reforms. There is a good argument that you can never develop a proper economy without first doing a land reform.

First of all, you need to get rid of the problem of rural poverty.

Second of all, you need to feed your own people. Large landowners in these countries typically grow food for export or simply fallow the land and keep it as an income base or a source of wealth.

When crops are grown for export, there is a problem in that the nation does not grow enough food to feed its people. This is a problem in Cuba and Venezuela right now, and it should not be. These are very fertile countries and there is no need to import food, but they have gotten hooked on some sort of “crack” of importing their food for whatever reason, possibly because most of their farmland was being used to grow crops for export.

When a nation can feed itself, this means it can feed its urban workers. This is extremely important and it is part of the reason that Stalin went at such breakneck speed in his collectivization. He had to feed his urban workers so he could industrialize because even back then, he was looking into the future and seeing that he was going to have to fight Hitler.

I’m not quite sure why, but no country seems to be able to properly industrialize and develop as long as the problem of rural poverty exists.

And once you are feeding your own people, you have solved a lot of other problems. Money that would be wasted importing inferior food from the West, especially the US, can now be spent on actual development of a national economy. The elimination of rural poverty gets rid of a constant revolutionary bur in the side of the state.

The US has always opposed land reform in Latin America because large US corporations are usually involved in growing foods for export down there. See Dole Pineapple in Guatemala. We want all of their agricultural land to go for export crops so US corporations can grow those crops or make money importing them. And we do not want them to grow their own food. That way there won’t be so much land for export crops which we need to make money off of.

Also, we want them to spend all of their food money importing lousy processed food from the US. So we make money on food both ways – importing food from crops grown for export to the US and in exporting processed food to the Latin America. This processed food is not very good for you and it is implicated in a lot of health problems in these places.

This is why the US opposes most efforts at land reform in the Americas.

An exception was made in El Salvador. After 200,000 people died, the US and the Salvadoran oligarchs were forced to the negotiating table and a land reform was one of the first things they pushed. I recall a piece written soon afterwards where the reporter went out to the rural areas and interviewed recipients of the land reform. They basically said, “Well, at least we can eat now. It wasn’t like that before.”

In semi-feudal countries, there is debt bondage whereby large landowners rent out their land to sharecroppers or peasants who never seem to get out of debt. This is a very primitive form of development.

The Philippines is notable that there has never been a land reform. And of course they have a vicious Communist insurgency.

Nor has there been one in Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, Paraguay, Honduras, or Argentina. The first five countries are horribly screwed up. Colombia and Paraguay have active armed leftwing guerrillas, and Guatemala did for many years. Haiti is a disaster. Honduras has a vicious rightwing dictatorship that has murdered over 1,000 people.

Argentina is mostly urbanized, but the landed rural elite still runs the country. Any talk at all of land reform or even taxation of large estates as was done recently under Christine Fernandez, and the ruling class starts making ominous threats of a coup. I assume something similar is going on in Uruguay. Those countries are urbanized though, so large landownership is not such a problem.

I’m not sure if there has ever been a land reform in Brazil, but there is no dearth of large landowners.

The fact that Colombia, Guatemala, and Haiti are so backwards is largely because there has never been a land reform.

The land reform was incomplete in Venezuela.

It is interesting that every country that fails to do a land reform seems to end up with a Communist or Leftist insurgency at some point or another. It’s almost without fail. This goes to show you that most Communist insurgencies in the Third World are over the most basic things dating all the way back to French Revolution: land and bread (food).

As far as land reforms go, they were done in Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Peru.

I’m not sure about Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, Panama, Jamaica, Belize, the Guyanas, Chile, and most of the Caribbean.

And I’m not sure if one ever got done in the Dominican Republic after Bosch.

In El Salvador, 200,000 had to die in order for a land reform to take place. Roberto D’Aubission, the godfather of the Salvadoran death squads and the most favored visitor at the US Embassy, once said that “We will have to kill 200,000 people in order to prevent socialism in El Salvador.” What he meant by socialism was land reform.

It is notable that no land reform was ever done in India, nor in Pakistan or even Bangladesh. I had a friend whose parents were large feudal landowners in Pakistan who rented out land to farmers who ended up in debt peonage. In 1986, 14 million people a year were dying of starvation related diseases in the capitalist world. Most of that was in South Asia in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India. Most of these deaths were attributed to the problem of the private ownership of land.

There is a problem with the private ownership of land. In the US, we think this is sacrosanct, but on a worldwide basis, it doesn’t work very well. What do you need all that land for? What do you need more than, say, an acre and a house? Nothing, unless you are a farmer.

In China, all land is owned by the state. All homeowners lease the land, often on 100 year leases. I’m not sure how it works in the countryside.

In Mexico, much of the land is owned by the state also, a product of the land reform that occurred after the Revolution. One of the major demands of the Revolution was land reform. Pre-revolution, most peasants usually lived like serfs. The state land in Mexico is called ejidos.

If you ever can’t make it in the city, if you become unemployed or homeless, you can always go out to the countryside and take up residence in an ejido, which are something like communal lands that are formed by the group that makes up the ejido. You join this group, work the land, and get a share of the crop. At least you have enough food to eat. So in Mexico the ejidos are a stopgap measure.

In China too, if you can’t make it in the city, you can always go back to the rural areas, take up residence, and work the land. At least you will have enough to food to eat. It is illegal to be homeless in China. If you are homeless, the police pick you up and put you in shelters, which are something like college dorms. They also encourage you to go back to the countryside if you have relatives back there. In recent years, many people have moved from the countryside to the cities to make more money. Those that don’t make it can always move back to the farm.

There was debate a while back about privatizing state land, but it ran aground on the idea that the state ownership of land was necessary as a stopgap measure in the event of urban poverty. In addition, state ownership of land has prevented the development of a national oligarchy or plutocracy.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been adamant that the  development of a national oligarchy or plutocracy must be prevented at all costs. Once they develop, they are sort of like an infection in that they soon spread and take over society. The CCP has billionaire party members who are members of the People’s Assembly.

Guess what these “Communists” are advocating for? Reduction or elimination of taxes on the rich, massive reductions in social spending, state repression of labor, and the privatization of land along with most of the rest of the economy. I think this goes to show you that billionaires are the same everywhere. Whether in a Communist or capitalist country, a rightwing or leftwing country, billionaires always have precisely the same class interests that barely vary at all. It’s usually something like this:

Reduction or elimination of taxes on the rich, massive reductions in social spending, state repression of labor, and the privatization of land along with most of the rest of the economy.

This goes to show that class interests of various classes are nearly a  law in a mathematical sense and not even a theory of social science. This was what Marx was getting at when he spoke of the laws of economics. They are so predictable that we can almost class them with the laws, theorems, and corollaries of mathematics instead of the typical “true for now” theories of most of the sciences.

I have a feeling that a Hell of a lot more things are laws, too, especially in terms of basic human behavior. So many of these things seem almost unchangeable. Of course they would never apply to everyone, but it’s pretty obvious that they are general tendencies.

Alt Left: “The Macroeconomics of Economic Populism in Latin America,” by Rudiger Dornbush and Sebastian Edwards

I didn’t actually read the book, but James Schipper did. Below I will quote from an article from NACLA that critiques the book well.

James Schipper: Perón came back from exile, and then won the election with a landslide. Unless the Argentines are complete political idiots, this demonstrates that he tried to accomplish something for the masses. Ordinary voters may not understand much about economics, but they usually sense who is on their side and who is not.

The US, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia are three Anglosphere countries that keep voting for rightwing economics despite themselves. The masses have been harmed by neoliberalism in all of these countries, but every four years, they march off and vote for it again. I think part of the problem is that ordinary people are voting against mass immigration and other leftwing stupidities in all of these countries. They don’t realize that neoliberalism comes as an add-on to anti-immigrant policies in the Anglosphere. Voters in the Anglosphere are political idiots.

You can see why people keep voting for the Chavistas in Venezuela. Sure, the economy is a mess, but no one blames the government. 7

James Schipper: Many years ago, I read a book called The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America, in which it is explained how leftist populists in LA, despite their unquestioned commitment to improving the economic lot of the poorest segment of the population, often fail because they overreach.

Wikipedia has an article called Macroeconomic Populism, which explains briefly how overambitious economic populism can backfire.

I would agree that acting too fast too soon isn’t a great idea and a slower approach might work better. But we don’t see a lot of cases of economic stupidity like this nowadays in Latin America.

Yes, I think that book is not good. One man worked for the World Bank. Their basic attitude is “Don’t rely on government to try to fix economic problems and help the poor. It fails every time.” In other words, it’s hopeless. Massive inequality a problem? Sure. What to do? Nothing! Because everything you do is going to fail. I dunno.

Here is a critique of the book:

https://nacla.org/news/2012/4/20/latin-america-unravels-populist-putdown

The book is referred to in this book review of another book as “an outdated, far-right, academically dishonest book.”

From the article.

Rudiger Dornbush, and Sebastian Edwards, two University of Chicago-trained economists.

See? They were both trained at the University of Chicago. That’s the home of Milton Friedman, neoliberalism, the Chicago Boyz, the neoliberal whiz kids who caused so much destruction all over the world, especially in Latin America. UoC/Friedmanite economics doesn’t work. Period. It causes massive inequality, significant gains for the top 2

They complain about D and E’s portrayal of Chile:

The most astonishing example of the book’s studied ignorance happens to be one of the most indisputable and well-documented examples of U.S. intervention: Chile.

According to Chapter 7 of Dornbush and Edwards’ book, written by Felipe Larraín (currently Chile’s Finance Minister) and Patricio Meller, the “decline and full collapse of the [Allende coalition government] experiment during the years 1972-73 is a clear consequence of the ‘successful’ overexpansive policies implemented in 1971.”

Never mind that Nixon reacted to the 1970 elections determined to “smash Allende,” telling then-CIA director Richard Helms to “make the economy scream.” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh details the earliest destabilization campaigns, carried out even before Allende took office:

Approval was granted for a last-minute increase of the propaganda activities designed to convince the Chilean Congress that an Allende election would mean financial chaos. Within two weeks, twenty-three journalists from at least ten countries were brought into Chile by the CIA, and they combined with CIA propaganda “assets” already in place to produce more than 700 articles and broadcasts both in and out of Chile before the congressional election – a staggering total whose ultimate influence cannot be measured.

By late September, a full-fledged bank panic had broken out in Santiago, and vast amounts of funds were being transferred abroad. Sales of durable goods, such as automobiles and household goods, fell precipitously; industrial production also dropped. Black-market activities soared as citizens sought to sell their valuables at discounted prices.

Ok that’s a case of capital flight. Venezuela had the same problem. All I can say is that it upholds Lenin’s idea that the peaceful road to socialism, while a great idea in theory, simply never works in real life because the capitalists simply sabotage the economy.

Larraín and Meller mention Nixon, Kissinger, Richard Helms, I.T.T., and/or Pepsi precisely zero times in their scholarly analysis. Whereas U.S. Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry threatened that “not a nut or bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende,” doing “all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty.”

Like I said, they failed badly to include the US massive economic war it waged against Chile. The same exact program was used against Venezuela, with the same results. The sanctions on Zimbabwe and Nicaragua also caused hyperinflation.

The only hyperinflation I’ve seen lately was caused by capitalists waging economic war against the state or by US sanctions. Usually both are going on at the same time. In Venezuela, the capitalists won’t stop raising prices. They love the hyperinflation because they’ve used it to play the currency black market to make a bundle. And they deliberately created it by shutting down production and hoarding goods.

At one point, Maduro put the army in charge of enforcing price controls, and the inflation stabilized for a while, but then they were withdrawn and they went back up again. However, after floating the currency along with a drop in the value of real wages and a reduction of most people’s savings, inflation was subdued. I’d hate to see these guys’ analysis of Venezuela. In fact, Krugman is already saying that Venezuela and Argentina are modern cases of this macroeconomic populism.

The authors argue instead that all state efforts to create a decent economy will fail and the only thing that will work is neoliberalism.

The authors explain that “the message emerging from the papers in this book is clear: the use of macroeconomic policy to achieve distributive goals has historically led to failure, sorrow, and frustration.” That’s why they helpfully disabuse Latin America of its “naive confidence in the ability of governments to cure all social and economic ills.”

However, neoliberalism doesn’t work either:

Second, it is worth noting that Cambridge development economist Ha-Joon Chang has analyzed the effects of these supposedly self-defeating macro policies. He finds on the contrary that “developing countries did not do badly at all during the ‘bad old days’ of protectionism and state intervention in the 1960s and 70s. In fact, their economic growth performance during the period was far superior [3.

…And even that rate was partly due to the rapid growth of countries in the region that had explicitly rejected neoliberal policies sometime earlier in the 2000s  – Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela.” In fact, when Dornbush and Edwards published their book in 1991 denouncing “overly expansive” macro policies, Latin America and the Caribbean – largely compliant to IMF diktats at that point – had already averaged an entire decade of negative 0.

If you are going to read books about economics, I recommend Ha-Joon Chang. As you can see, neoliberalism in Latin America failed completely. Even its proponents admitted that it failed, but their attitude was the usual, “We didn’t give it time enough. Give it some more time and it will start working.” Yeah, right.

Larraín and Meller focus their attention exclusively on the macroeconomic policy errors of Allende’s Unidad Popular (UP) government. Its efforts to “increase real wages and to improve Chilean income distribution failed completely,” they contend, dryly adding that it “took eight years, up to 1981 (during the ‘peak of the boom’), for real wages to recover the level they had held in 1970 before the UP government.”

Larraín and Meller omit from this account Pinochet’s post-1973 reign of terror in which tens of thousands were imprisoned and killed and an economic policy during the dictatorship that led to virtually no growth in per capita income by 1986, 13 years after the coup.

See? Neoliberalism didn’t work either. It took until 11 years after Allende for real wages to reach the level they were under Allende. Then there was an economic crash. I believe it took until 1989 for wages to reach the level they were under Allende again. That’s just a complete failure of neoliberalism over 20 years.

Perhaps the paper’s most artful flourish is the cynical use of the impersonal, passive voice. Nixon directed a comprehensive program of economic sabotage literally bearing Secretary of State Kissinger’s signature. The U.S. funded all major anti-government strikes, the CIA penetrated all of Chile’s political parties, and it courted the military to foment a putsch.

From D and E:

Real wages dropped spectacularly, by -11.

It was all Allende’s fault. All of the economic sabotage and the economic war the US waged to make the economy scream? That did nothing at all! Seems like a very bad analysis.

Guys like D and E are still writing today:

Today, U.S. scholars carry on the dubious tradition of lambasting Latin American populism, whatever its prevailing definition. Due to South America’s general drift to the left in recent years, academics make increasingly strained attempts to “recognize” and discredit it. In an October 2011 paper entitled Decreasing Inequality Under Latin America’s ‘Social Democratic’ and ‘Populist’ Governments: Is the Difference Real?,”Juan Montecino of the Center for Economic and Policy Research highlights the “arbitrary and ill-defined nature” of this endeavor.

Montecino politely dismantles the findings of economists Darryl McLeod and Nora Lustig, who purport to show that “social democratic” regimes did better than “left-populist” ones in reducing inequality in recent years. He shows that their empirical results are reversed when one runs the same regressions using data from the Economic Commission for Latin America. The paper raises questions as to whether their categories capture “anything more than a general antipathy toward one group of governments.”

In other words, they faked the data.

Unsurprisingly, this antipathy is directed toward three of the four countries Ha-Joon Chang highlights for experiencing growth after rejecting neoliberal policies: Argentina, Ecuador, and Venezuela.

Their enemies now are those three countries. Simon Johnson attacks Latin American populism in the case of Argentina:

Johnson has referred to Argentina as “a country that struggles over many decades (and whose leaders frequently rail against the world) and for which episodes of reasonable prosperity and new economic models are punctuated by gut-wrenching crises.”

In the case of Argentina’s last gut-wrenching crisis in 2001, however, the “IMF’s fingerprints” were all over it, wrote macroeconomist Mark Weisbrot, CEPR’s co-director and Argentina expert, in late 2001. “It arranged massive amounts of loans – including $40 billion [in 2000] – to support the [overvalued] Argentine peso,” writes Weisbrot. Then it “made its loans conditional on a ‘zero-deficit’ policy for Argentine government.”

By doing so, the IMF was able to “convince most of the press that Argentina’s ‘profligate’ spending habits [were] the source of its troubles.” Finally, the IMF – an organization Tim Geithner recently considered essential for promoting U.S. foreign policy – implausibly claimed it had always been against the overvalued peso and that the loans were made in order to placate the Argentine government.

The IMF caused the problem with orthodox neoliberalism and then blamed the government for “profligate spending” because they ordered it to read zero-deficit, a goal which itself caused the crisis.

See? They’re making it up.

Second, Johnson seems to portray the country as wracked by serious, ongoing difficulties. But Weisbrot et al. demonstrate that since defaulting and devaluing, Argentina – widely considered ‘populist’ – expanded 9

Their paper also demolishes the myth repeated by many economists – including McLeod and Lustig – that Argentina’s success was largely the effect of a serendipitous commodities boom.

See? Populism worked great in Argentina. It also worked great in Venezuela (before the economic war combined with the collapse in oil prices killed the economy), Ecuador, and Bolivia.

The devastating policies of the past in Latin America, as well as the more successful policies of vastly more independent governments over the past decade, are intimately tied up with Washington’s control over the hemisphere and the recent collapse of its influence – especially in South America. Roger Morris, a staffer at the National Security Council until mid-1970, clarified such considerations for Seymour Hersh:

“I don’t think anybody ever fully grasped that Henry [Kissinger] saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than Castro. If Latin America ever became unraveled, it never would happen with a Castro. Allende was a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America…Chile scared him.”

The devastating economics of the past in Latin America were caused by the US waging economic war on countries that practiced populist economics. This same populism has worked much better now because the influence of the US has greatly fallen in the continent.

The U.S. government has long imposed double standards on the permissibility of social reforms. While instrumental to Allende’s overthrow abroad, the Nixon administration could boast progressive domestic achievements, including the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, widely considered one of the most important anti-poverty programs in U.S. history.

Similarly, Lyndon Johnson enacted Great Society programs at home but sent thousands of troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to quell an uprising demanding the restitution of the deposed social democratic president, Juan Bosch. A liberal wishing to implement land reforms, Bosch was the subject of an FBI espionage and interception operation authorized by J. Edgar Hoover in the months preceding the rebellion, as Bosch sat exiled in Puerto Rico.

See? Liberalism at home. Fascism abroad. That’s the policy prescription of the US under Democrats and liberal Republicans. Also note the FBI overthrew him. The FBI was deeply involved in the lawfare against Brazil that resulted in the false charges being filed against Lula that put him in prison. See? The FBI literally overthrew Lula in Brazil. The FBI are not just pigs; they’re the worst pigs of them all – feds. And it is a deeply political and always reactionary organization. Fuck the FBI.

Perhaps unknowingly, Johnson is simply keeping within the permissible framework of an intellectual culture that has always accommodated and justified Washington’s hypocrisy. To my knowledge, Johnson has yet to apply his support for “standing up to the banks…proposing a more responsible course of action than that preferred by the banking elite,” and “greater transparency in financial transactions” to the IMF, which has conducted most of its deliberations, meetings, and consultations in secret.

Simon Johnson is pro-IMF, like the authors of that book.

On the The New York Times website, he offhandedly dismisses Latin American populism with a reference to an outdated, far-right, academically dishonest book – all in an article that challenges the U.S. elite by praising populism. This is a compelling example of the imperial double standard that keeps “pro-populist” commentators from seeing what is going on in developing countries.

The book you are praising is referred to an “outdated, far-right, academically dishonest book.” I believe that is correct.

But even if the Times’ readers never learn of Latin America’s protracted struggle for self-determination against U.S. power, the region is now a breeding ground for the most constructive values associated with populism. More than a decade of successful revolts has allowed for the elections of independent left governments in most of South America and has brought enormous gains to the poor majority through greater economic sovereignty and democratic social reform. Or as Kissinger might put it, Latin America has unraveled.

See? For the last 20 years, excellent populist economic policies in Latin America have brought enormous gains for the poor majority. According to E and D, it should have been catastrophic.

Alt Left: The US Imperialist Regime Change Playbook: Engage in Violent and Seditious Activities Towards the Targeted Government, Provoke Repression, and then Impose Sanctions, Fund Contras, or Sponsor a Fascist Coup to “Restore Order and Democracy”

In Venezuela and Nicaragua, the US staged violent riots with armed insurgents that attempted to overthrow the government, and then slammed sanctions on the governments when they cracked down on the seditious traitors. Obviously when you crack down on seditious traitors, it’s hard to be real democratic about it, as you start to throw lots of traitors in jail, shut down their treasonous organizations and political parties, forbid the seditious political parties and politicians from running for office again, and often have to start censoring the media because of the frankly murderous lies that the opposition yellow press prints, which actually results in getting a lot of people killed.

During these seditious coup attempts, the reporting is completely dishonest in the US and about as fake as you can get. Outrageous acts of murder committed by the putschists are breathlessly reported by the treasonous local and overseas US press and having been committed by the government, working people into a fever pitch. Opposition fascist liars flood social media, riling everyone up.

But do you see how they provoke repression? This is the imperialist playbook. Provoke repression with illegal and seditious activities, and then scream dictatorship when the law enforcement arms of the state try to restore some order. Wave after wave of sanctions were slammed on the Nicaraguan government by Democrats and Republicans both. When it comes to support for imperialism and alliance with the forces of violent revolutionary fascism and reaction around the world along with rightwing and fascist dictatorships in power, support for fascist states and forces is a bipartisan affair.

The US supports the fascist opposition in Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, Belarus, and Ukraine. The US supports the fascist states of Turkey, Israel, India, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Brazil, Honduras, and Haiti and opposes the anti-fascist forces fighting against them. Face it, America loves rightwing dictatorships and fascist governments and opposition forces.

Alt Left: The Nicaraguan Violence of 2017 Was Actually a US-Sponsored Fascist Coup Attempt

I was following the fascist coup in Nicaragua in 2017, which was written up as some righteous civil disturbances and riots against a brutal and vicious leftwing Sandinista dictatorship run by Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario. Really it was just a fascist coup attempt by the 2

There was one report after another of outrageous murders and attempted murders by the government. They all shocked me in their depravity.

The government had set an opposition radio station on fire, killing everyone inside!

Whoops. It turns out that the fascists had set a government radio station on fire, killing 10 government employees inside.

There were regular riots at the universities, where rich brats were said to be barricaded inside against murderous government forces inside.

I did some research and it was actually..

Whoops! The fascist students who had taken control of the university and were attacking the government forces and supporters.

Everything I read turned out to be the exact opposite of the way it was reported.

Government forces set a house on fire, killing a family of four inside!

Whoops! It turned out that this took place in an opposition controlled neighborhood where government forces were not present and were instead five miles away. Opposition rioters had raided a two story house full of Sandinista supporters and set it on fire, killing a family inside.

Roadblocks with armed insurgents were set up all over the country. People coming by were questioned, and government supporters and employees were taken out of their cars, beaten, tortured, and sometimes killed.

Finally, there was a fake human rights report issued by Amnesty International that got everything wrong and attributed almost all of the violence and deaths to the government, when really it was the other way around, and 8

Slowly but surely, the government took the country back. When it was all over, 300-400 people were dead. The government was pretty reasonable considering that they were dealing with an attempted by armed mobs of rioters representing only 2

Most other countries would have been much more brutal. Nicaragua didn’t even arrest that many people, and most of those traitors have already been released. Out of 4,000 opposition organizations, four were shut down by the government for the obvious role they played in the sedition. The US reacted with outrage to this and said that the Sandinista government, which typically got favorable ratings of 70-8

The openly seditious media was allowed to continue to publish, even though most of them should have been shut down. The openly treasonous political parties that engaged in an attempt to overthrow the government by force were not shut down and were allowed to continue to run for office. I would have shut them all down.

Alt Left: The Left Won in Mexico

AMLO’s leftwing party won a majority of the legislature just the other day. He hasn’t been a very Lefty president. He ran as one but I don’t think he has been governing as one. But just to show you that Mexico is a part of Latin America, the rich and middle class raised a huge uproar over this man’s victory. And so has the US and especially the US media.

And an overtly fascist and putschist reactionary elite of the Mexican ultra-rich, associated with the most conservative strands of the Catholic Church and social conservatism, appeared on the scene calling for a fascist coup to overthrow the “dictator” AMLO. US papers have been full of articles about how AMLO is a “dictator” and has authoritarian tendencies. Apparently it’s complete nonsense. Even the more honest members of the opposition say there’s obviously nothing undemocratic about him. He’s as democratic as any Mexican President and perhaps more so.

Also, there’s been wild cartel-related mass violence and homicide raging across Mexico for 20 years now. These break into all out warfare between gangs and the police and army, who are often on the take and working for the gangs. The gangs also kill journalists or local politicians who get in their way. The same insanity has continued under AMLO, possibly even at a lower level, and while it was barely mentioned before, not AMLO is letting the cartels spin out of control and is allowing violence and homicide to rage across the land. For this reason he needs to be ousted.

But they get people all riled up about this more or less lies. Anyway, crime is rarely a state’s fault and once crime goes completely out of control, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it short of imposing an extreme totalitarian and authoritarian dictatorship. In El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Brazil the mass crime and high homicide rates have nothing to do with the governments. They occur under both left and rightwing governments.

Leftwing governments leave and rightwingers come in and the crime stays the same. The opposite happens and crime stays the same. But heavy crime is only weaponized against leftwing governments. Crime in Venezuela is just as bad as in rightwing El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, but only in Venezuela has it been the fault of the governments. All of those governments have tried everything they could, but when crime goes completely out of control, there’s not much the state can do short of outright dictatorship.

I was shocked but then not so much. Of course the Mexican Right is fascist. It’s just that they haven’t had a real Left government in since Cardenas in 1936. The ghosts of the Revolution are dead and the party of the Revolution, the PRI, turned corrupt and rather un-revolutionary, though the basic changes of the revolution were allowed to remain unchanged.

When the PRI couldn’t win an election, they simply stole them. The Leftist PRD, running Cardenas descendant, won the election in 1986, but the PRI declared the election flawed and said it had to be counted over. The government retreated for two weeks and said nothing. When it was over, a PRD victory had suddenly turned into a PRI win. In other words, they stole it. The “liberal” New York Times cheered it on and said there had been massive fraud in favor of Cardenas while it cheered for the “democracy” of the PRI stealing an election.

Alt Left: The Playbook of US Imperialism: Everything They Say Is the Opposite of What Really Happened

This analysis is based on the theory that US imperialism and Western imperialism for that matter is basically fascist. Not that our societies are fascist themselves because we have managed to insulate ourselves from this. But European jerkoffs spend most of their time running around the globe trying to deny the Third World even the barest social democracy that has made Europe so livable.

Modern Western Liberalism: Liberalism at Home, Fascism Abroad

How else you can you explain how Europe attacked social democracy in Latin America in Mexico, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, El Salvador, Honduras, Peru, and Colombia? Social democracy at home, fascism abroad. This is the project of the Europeans nowadays, and NATO spearheads this project. In the US it is similar, social liberalism at home, fascism abroad, at least for the Democratic Party. Canada has something between social liberalism and social democracy, and their politics is for this project at home and fascism abroad.

When reporting about hot button issues abroad in the West, keep in mind that everything you read about countries the West is hostile to is really the opposite of what really is or what really happened.

Everything Is the Opposite of What It Really Is

With fascists and fascist supporters like the US, everything is the opposite of what it really is.

Elections That Never Make Sense

Rightwing governments that use fraud to steal elections are restoring democracy.

Leftwing governments that win elections always win due to fraud because of course they cannot win any other way. As soon as they get in power, no matter how much freedom they allow, they are always authoritarian dictatorships. The elections that government has, even if they are models of fair elections, are always marred by massive fraud.

Rightwing governments that overturn these legitimate elections and steal them for the Right are always uncovering the massive fraud. The resulting election theft is called by the New York Times and US government “restoring democracy.”

When the Venezuelan fascist coup overthrew the democratic government of Hugo Chavez in 2002, the US government and the New York Times lauded the “restoration of democracy and end of dictatorship” that the fascist coup (the fascist coup was a restoration of democracy) against a democratic government (the democratic government was a dictatorship) represented.

The US/NATO Fascist Playbook: Mysterious Snipers Shooting at Both Sides

Fascist gangs usually supported by the US and/or NATO, a fascist military organization in Europe, open fire on both security forces and and either left or rightwing rioters. Fascist forces often fire on their own people and blame it on the government as a pretext for a coup to overthrow the government. This is what happened in the US-supported fascist Maidan Coup in Ukraine. When the fascist gangs open fire, the US turns it into leftwing security forces opening fire on leftwing mobs and security forces.

See the 2002 coup in Venezuela, where fascist gangs operating from overpasses shot and killed 32 people, all Chavista protestors or Chavista Venezuelan security forces, then feverishly blamed the government forces for shooting at their own supporters and comrades in arms. The US media tripped over itself reporting how the Left had opened fire on itself, massacring 32 of their own people. It took some time to straighten it all out.

Sanctions

The local fascists and the US also destroy the economy with economic war or sanctions, and then the US and the fascists scream that the Left government has destroyed the economy with its “socialist policies.” Of course it was really the economic war and the sanctions, but no matter. Even notice how all US articles on the Iranian and Venezuelan economies blame the government for the economic and social crisis that was deliberately caused by US sanctions?

Syria

In Syria, gangs of Al Qaeda-linked Islamists (Salafist Islamist like Al Qaeda and ISIS linked forces resemble fascists in many ways) raided villages full of government supporters and murdered everyone inside. Then these same forces screamed that the Syrian government had raided an opposition village and killed all the opposition people inside. The US and Western media then flooded the news with reports that the war criminal Assad has committed another massacre.

There have been 10-20 huge massacres of whole villages in the Syrian Civil War. The US, the West and the Islamists all claim that they were all done by Assad. If you go to Wikipedia and look up all of these massacres, it will tell you that they were all done by Assad.

I researched every one of those massacres in depth.

They were all done by the Free Syrian Army, who are Al Qaeda linked Islamists who burned down churches in every city and town they conquered. The villages massacred were inhabited by Sunni government supporters, Alawites, and Christians. All three groups were feverish supporters of the government. The US continues to state that all of these cases were massacres of opposition supporters by Assad’s forces.

That’s like I set your house on fire and then stand outside screaming about what an arsonist you are as you try to put out the fire. I call the fire department and they arrest you for arson while you’re hosing the building and thanking me, still holding kerosene and matches, for being such a good citizen as they walk by back to their trucks.

The Ties Between Fascism and US Imperialism Are Deep

This is basically how the US and all other forces linked to Western imperialism run their foreign policy. And every government in Europe that is a member of NATO, I’m talking to you. NATO is basically a fascist army. As you can see, the ties between fascism and imperialism are deep. In modern imperialism, the West goes around the world installing fascist and rightwing dictatorships and supporting fascist forces that are trying to overthrow leftwing governments. Not all of the governments it supports are fascists, but all are rightwing, at least in Latin America.

Alt Left: Right and Left in Islamic and Catholic Societies

If you’re not careful, the media will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and cheering the people doing the oppressing.

Malcolm X

This is precisely the function of the media in a capitalist society. The Chinese media is not like this because, duh, China is not a capitalist country! Nor is the Iranian media because Iran is not a capitalist country. In fact, Iran is almost something like “Islamic Communism.” I’m not wild about Ayatollah Khomeini, but he did have a strong social justice streak.

The Revolution was populist, pro-independence, and anti-imperialist. Iran is almost based on a Muslim version of Liberation Theology or “the preferential option of the poor.” The social safety net is huge in Iran. Also, much of the economy is run by the state. It’s actually run by religious charities, often with ties to the military and the IRGC. I believe these religious charities do not operate at a profit. Small businesses are not bothered at all, as in all Muslim countries. I was reading Ayatollah Khameini’s tweets for a while on Twitter, and I could have been reading Che Guevara. Basically the same message.

Islam is just not friendly to neoliberal economics or radical individualism. It is a very collectivist religion in a very collectivist society.

Neoliberalism hasn’t caught on much of anywhere in the Muslim world other than Indonesia and the Southern Philippines, and they had to murder 1 million Communists in cold blood to get there in Indonesia and the Moros have always rejected Catholic rule in both a political and economic sense. it is notable that the Maoist NPA are also huge in Mindanao, home of the Moros.

Pakistan, too, has inherited the selfish economics and even feudalism in land tenure straight from Indian Hinduism. They even have caste, which would be considered an aberration in any decent Muslim society.

All of the Arab countries are basically socialist at least in name, and that was never a hard sell there. It’s true that 100 years ago, the Arab lands were mostly feudal in nature, with big landowners and peasants in debt bondage. They rich had co-opted the religious authorities like they always do, and the mullahs preached that Islamic feudalism was right and proper because the Prophet had said, “It is normal that some are rich and some are poor.” But it was always a hard sell, and it had a very weak foundation.

After independence, socialism was instituted in most if not all Arab countries at least in name. In particular, huge land reforms were done in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Palestine. I assume something like that was done in Algeria too. It was a very easy sell, and everyone went along with it without a hitch. The mullahs quickly changed from support for feudalism to support for socialism.

Hamas rules Gaza and I was shocked at how huge the social safety net is. The many religious charities run the safety net, which is distributed under the rubric of Islam. This is done instead of the state doling it out.

Mohammad himself didn’t have much to say about economics, but he wasn’t a neoliberal capitalist or a feudalist.

In Christian societies, the rich have utter contempt and hatred for the poor, who they regard as little more than human garbage. If you want to see this philosophy in action, look at the classism in Latin America. As all Muslims are part of the umma, and hence, as all are brothers and sisters, it is simply unconscionable that wealthy Muslims would be able to openly hate poor Muslims. You simply cannot treat your fellow Muslims like that. It’s not officially haram but it might as well be.

European Style Fascism in the Middle East

It is instructive that the only place in the Arab world where neoliberal economics and in particular Libertarianism took hold was in Lebanon, and even there, it was only among Catholic Maronites. Most Arab Christians look east to Antioch (and before that, Constantinople) to the Eastern Orthodox church, which is really just the eastern wing of Catholicism.

The Maronites, though, deride Antioch and instead look to Rome. They see themselves as European people instead of Arabs. Many deny that they are Arabs and instead refer to themselves as “Phoenicians.” It is interesting that the only real classical fascism in the Arab World  took hold in the Lebanese Maronites, where the Gameyels imported it from Europe in the 1930’s.

The Jews of Israel also developed a very European form of fascism starting with Jabotinsky and his book The Iron Wall in 1921. This man was an open fascist. He is considered to be the spiritual father of the Likud Party. During the 1940’s, the armed Jewish rebels split into leftwingers who were almost Communists and rightwingers who were more or less fascists.

The Kahanists today look a lot like a European fascist party. And in fact, the entire Israeli rightwing around Likud, etc. looks pretty fascist in a European sense. So Israeli Jews are really Jewish fascists or fascist Jews. It has never been an easy ride for liberal and secular US Jews to support the Orthodox religious fanatics and rightwingers if not out and out fascists in the Likud, etc. in Israel. This was always completely unstable, and after that latest war, it’s finally starting to fall apart. But the seeds of destruction were already there.

But note that the Jews of Israel very much look to the West and see themselves as Europeans (which many are for all intents and purposes). They align themselves with the Judeo-Christian European society that many of them came from.

Half of Israeli Jews are Mizrachi Jews from the Arab World, and they have always had a Judeo-Islamic culture. However, when they moved to Israel, this was dismantled by perhaps not entirely. They rejected it due to the association of Arabs and Islam with the enemy, which is correct.

Economics and Catholicism

This radical classism and near-feudalism in Latin America was supported by the Catholic Church, which was always a very rightwing institution because they were always in bed with the rich. There were always Left splits in Catholicism like Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker. The Catholic clergy in the US has tended to be quite leftwing.

There is a long history of “Catholic Communism” in the Philippines, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, the Basque Country, France, Italy, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, Cuba, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay. The IRA was a leftwing Catholic armed group. A lot of priests were caught hiding IRA cadre. So was the ETA in the Basque Country of Spain.

Catholic Leftism never caught on in Poland and Lithuania due to hatred of Russia and the USSR. Nevertheless, both are more or less socialist countries.

Even today there is an active “Catholic Communist” movement in Cuba that is very lively. In Honduras and Colombia, Catholic priests actually led guerrilla bands. Liberation Theoloy is something like “Jesus Christ with an AK-47.” The Leftist who recently took power in Paraguay was a former Catholic priest.

The ELN was founded by a priest, Camilo Torres, and many Catholic clergy even supported the Shining Path! Edith Lagos, a 20 year old woman, was the leader of a very early Shining Path column in Peru. She was killed in 1980 and the entire town of Ayacucho, 30,0000 people, came out for her funeral which was held at midnight. The lines of mourners stretched through the whole city. All of the priests in town blessed her body, and she was given a proper Catholic funeral.

I believe that the PT or Workers Party of Brazil has a large Liberation Theology component. The Catholic clergy had an excellent relationship with the FARC in Colombia. Of course, the Catholic clergy played a big role in Venezeula, and Hugo Chavez himself was a practicing Catholic. The FMLN Salvadoran rebels were explicitly Catholic, as were the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. One of the Sandinists’ top leaders, Tomas Borge, was a Catholic priest. Jean-Paul Aristide in Haiti was a Catholic priest. Catholic believers are now allowed to join the Communist Party in Cuba, and near the end of his life, Fidel Castro said he was a “cultural Catholic.”

After Vatican 2 and Liberation Theology began to spread out via the seminal documents written by Gustavo Gutierrez in Brazil, “A Theology of Liberation,” otherwise known as “exercising the preferential option for the poor,” it began to spread in Latin America. It started with local priests and especially Catholic lay workers in impoverished areas and then slowly spread. Even today, Catholic layworkers and especially seminaries are very leftwing, while the Vatican itself is not. A lot of seminaries are hotbeds of homosexuality, and the gay priests and lay workers are quite open about it. It is estimated that 1

Alt Left: Why Has a Sexual Preference for Pedophilia Been Wired into So Many Men?

2

I realize that figure is shocking, but bear with me. It’s been born out by study after study. The studies compared male reactions to females under 13 with reactions to females 16+.

Whenever anything is that common, there is probably a genetic tendency for it. Also, age preference in males cannot be corrected by any experimental means. Things that cannot be corrected in the lab are usually thought to be hardwired and biologically based.

So why are 2

It appears that there is a genetic preference for pubertal age girls that has been encoded in males and is present in a sizeable minority of them. The reasons for this are up for grabs, but among the Yanonamo Indians of Venezuela, men usually grab a wife at age 12 and often fight other men for girls that age. Sex may not take place for a few years later, but at least they nab them very young.

Perhaps there was a preference to select pubertal girls and sequester them away from other men for a bit until they became fully fertile at age 16, at which time she would be locked into that man and all of her children would be his.

Historically, early life was indeed short, nasty, and brutish, and perhaps primitive life still is. By age 40, every Yanonamo man has committed at least one homicide of another man. If you’re a pacifist you simply don’t make it to age 40. You die young, killed by other men. Kill or be killed. The law of the jungle.

Alt Left: The Death of Social Democracy in Europe

If you haven’t noticed, there’s no more social democracy or democratic socialism in Europe. Probably the only thing left is Belarus, Moldova, Turkey, and Russia. Possibly Iceland because they told the banks to go pound sand. Greece elected a Leftist government, Syriza, that quickly went full-blown neoliberal, reportedly out of necessity. What has happened to social democracy is something that any Marxist could have predicted – the incompatibility of even trying to have any sort of socialist society in the midst of a capitalist economy.

The fate of social democracy is the what has always been the fate of social liberalism in the US and its counterpart in Canada and Australia. All of these variants have never been anything but reactionary on foreign policy – smashing the slightest sign of liberalism anywhere in the world if it even dared to peek its head out. Many governments in Latin America were overthrown for the crime of raising the minimum wage.

And most of these were overthrown by “liberal” Democratic governments. Bill Clinton set the stage for the overthrow of Aristide. Aristide’s crime? He dared to raise the minimum wage. He had investments in some factories there. So did Hilary. Hilary overthrew Honduras. The crime? Raising the minimum wage.

Even FDR, the most progressive President of the 20th century, was a raving reactionary freak on foreign policy. “Somoza may be a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch.”

Teddy Roosevelt was progressive at home but an imperialist brute overseas. “Walk softly and carry a big stick.”

The standard formula for all of these countries has always been some form of liberalism at home combined with hard right or ultra right policies that favored rightwing dictatorships, death squads, the genocide of the Left, and out and out fascism overseas. Liberal at home, reactionary abroad. And now Joe Biden, one of the most liberal Presidents in modern memory, is already treading down the same worn path.

And now the social democracies have undergone the same transformation that social liberalism, etc. has had from the start. One gets the feeling that liberalism or socialism at home in a capitalist country will always have to co-exist with ultra-right, pro-fascist politics overseas. In other words, a foreign policy of imperialism.

Most of Europe is whored to the ultra-rightwing NATO. The EU is for all intents and purposes the civilian state and NATO is the Defense Ministry of that state. Even Sweden, Denmark, and Norway are hard right countries when it comes to their NATO alliance. Finnish foreign policy has always been rightwing, a legacy of their hatred for Russia. Dutch, French, British, and Spanish foreign policy have been horribly rightwing forever now under social democratic and conservative governments both. Indeed in Europe, there is little difference between the two.

Spain strides around Latin America like a brute. Apparently they still think they rule the place as they once did.Most of this involves threats, arm-twisting, sanctions and whatnot every time countries try to assert more control over their resources, which are inevitably being exploited by Spanish corporations. Bolivia’s nationalization of oil and gas is instructive in this regard. The social democratic Spanish government was just as reactionary as the conservative one.

The French are cruel and colonialist towards their former colonies and do not allow any independent governments to form there, especially in Africa. The French and Canadians were deeply involved in the overthrow of Aristide in Haiti, apparently for the crime of raising the minimum wage. In addition, France is still demanding that Haiti repay it for its losses when the slaves of Haiti were freed and the slave-holding families were massacred. France is a social democracy.

The Dutch held a phony inquest in the M17 false flag shootdown where a Ukrainian fighter jet shot down an airliner in order to blame it on Russia. The EU was also deeply involved in this plot and especially the coverup. As were the British and in particular the BBC, the official organ of the British state. The British stole $4 million in gold from Venezuela by confiscating it. British foreign policy mimics US foreign policy in every reactionary thing we do. The UK is a social democracy.

Italy led the charge against Qaddafi and helped steal billions of his gold reserves. Italian corporations also quickly tried to get on Libya’s oil. Italy is a social democracy.

10

So you see, these countries may have some sort of socialism at home (increasingly threadbare) but in foreign policy, it’s straight up full-blown reaction and imperialism, support for rightwing dictatorships and out and out fascists. The reason is simple. The economies of all EU countries are based on their multinational corporations.

Multinational corporations want nothing but rightwing dictatorship, preferably fascist, when they cannot elect hard Right democratic states. These corporations will not tolerate the slightest socialism or even liberalism overseas because they all operate on a predatory model towards the Third World.

Hence the foreign policy of all of the EU “socialist” countries is all about what’s good for the corporations that run their economies. Their corporations wish to go abroad and rape, ruin, exploit, destroy, and stripmine the economies of the Third World by exploiting their resources such that the corporations get almost everything and the countries themselves barely get a nickel.

This has always been the model and it always will be the model. So the EU social democracies have the same problem of the Democratic Party – while they can be leftwing at home to some extent, they all go hard rightwing and pro-fascist and rightwing dictatorship overseas due to their fealty to the corporations that run their economies.

Alt Left: The Assassination of Politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Colombia in 1948

This is the information contained in the huge update I just made in this post. I just updated the post with a lot of information about the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 which led to the massive riots called The Bogotazo, after which a decade of mass killings called La Violencia took place. The assassination of Gaitan, even more than the banana workers strike, jump-started the movement of the armed Colombian Left in the form of the Colombian guerrillas.

In 1948 in Colombia, a very popular presidential candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán of the Liberal Party, was assassinated for the same reason that given for the overthrow of Arbenz of Guatemala seven years later. The Liberal Party was one of two fascist parties of the oligarchy, along with the Conservative Party. See below for more on them.

The Liberal Party was anything but. Yet Gaitán was an interesting figure, part of a socialist movement in the party who advocated very popular candidate who promised major changes in Colombian society a battle against social, political, and economic inequality. He was also a feminist who advocated the uplift of the status of Colombian woman in society. In addition, he broached the subject of land reform, a hot button issue in Colombia.

In fact, as in so many other places in Latin America such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, the endless Leftist guerrilla war against the government is more of a fight over land than anything else. To this day, the Colombian oligarchy has refused to do a land reform, in part because this is where most of their money comes from.

Even Venezuela has had only partial success at a land reform, as it has proven too difficult to break up the big estates or latifundias. Instead, since much of the land lies idle and fallow, peasants have conducted land invasions of fallowed land in the latifundias, which has resulted in a lot of conflict.

Death squads funded by the latifundia oligarchs have murdered over 150 peasant leaders since Chavez came in over the last 20 years. Parts of the Chavista Movement have been aligned with the rural rich for whatever reason, and they have been involved in repressing these peasant movements also.

He was murdered by the Colombian oligarchy or ruling class, which has stayed in power by mass murder for 75 years now. They were even massacring people earlier, as there was a mass slaughter of striking workers at banana plantations in the northwest in a place called La Magdalena in 1928.

Even this early, the US was waging a Cold War against the USSR. The US became very alarmed by the strike, as the plantations were owned by the US United Fruit Company. United Fruit and the US government described the strikers as subversives and Communists. The US threatened to invade if the strike was not put down by the Colombian government.

Under orders from United Fruit, the Colombian military attacked the workers. Many striking workers were killed. The event was memorialized by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his famous novel 100 Years of Solitude. The event was a watershed in Colombian politics, as an actual Colombian Left was formed around this time.

Gaitan was an excellent speaker and his rallies drew large crowds of union members and poor people. He was characterized as a demagogue, like Juan Peron, who was already rising to power in Argentina. He was also a budding nationalist. He was criticized by the Conservative Party, the right wing of the Liberal Party, and even the Communist Party, which regarded him as a competitor for the interests of the workers.

In 1933, he split with the Liberal Party and formed the Unión Nacional Izquierdista Revolucionaria (National Leftist Revolutionary Union). In 1946, he proposed a Gaitanista Program. It advocated many things:

Development agencies for the advancement of the social, political, and economic advancement of peasants in the countryside. Policies to redistribute wealth in Colombia. Nationalization of public services, a progressive income tax, and the development of a national economy. A land reform and new pro-labor laws.

In terms of foreign policy, it advocated an economic union of Latin American countries so they could serve the interests of their people instead of that of the oligarchies and foreign carpetbagging corporations. His project could be best described as anti-plutocratic and anti-imperialist.

He was assassinated in 1948 by a “lone gunman,” Juan Roa Sierra, along the lines of Lee Harvey Oswald. Two ex-CIA agents have confessed that it was really the CIA that was behind the operation. The assassin took orders from two named CIA agents and the assassination plan was called Operation Pantomime.

This was probably one of the first of countless assassinations of liberal and leftwing figures the world over by the CIA undertaken as part of the Cold War. Sierra visited Gaitan in his office in  the morning and at 1 PM, he shot Gaitan dead.

An enraged mob then set upon Sierra, who was protected by an Army colonel. He was chased to a store where  he holed up. The mob smashed into the store and dragged him outside. He was beaten and stabbed so many times that his corpse was unrecognizable.

At the time of his assassination, a meeting of the Pan-American Conference led by US Secretary of State George Marshall. At this meeting, all members of the group agreed that fighting Communism was their number one concern.

The despicable Organization of American States or OAS, a fake organization of Latin American countries that is actually run by the US and serves to promote the interests of the US and its neo-colonies in Latin America.

At the same time, the Latin American Youth Congress was taking place. It been organized by Fidel Castro of Cuba and was funded by Juan Peron of Argentina. A young Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a law student at the time and was eating lunch at the time  Gaitan was killed. He rushed to the scene and arrived just in time to see Sierra lynched by the mob. He memorialized the event in his book, Living to Tell the Tale.

It is possible that Gaitan, like Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, was a patsy for an assassination carried out by the US Deep State in the case of the former and by the FBI itself in the case of Ray. Gaitan suffered from schizophrenia, could not fire a gun properly, the gun in his hand was not capable of firing accurately, and he was standing quite a distance away from Gaitan while the murder occurred at a short distance. Further, Sierra was not seen anywhere near the assassination. The first time  he was spotted, he was in between two police officers.

The Colombian government quickly blamed the USSR and the Colombian Communist Party for the murder. They also tied in the young Fidel Castro with the plot. This version seems very unlikely.

Notice that this CIA assassination took place under “liberal Democrat” Harry Truman.

The murder of this candidate was followed by a wild  riot known as the Bogotazo. Many of the rioters were armed and the riots left much of downtown Bogota in ruins. The riots left 1,800 people dead. This was part of a larger reign of violence in the countryside which had started in 1930. By 1948, Bogota was full of peasants fleeing the violence in the countryside.

Alt Left: Updated: How the Armed Colombian Left (the FARC and the ELN) Came to Be

I just updated this post with a lot of information about the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 which led to the massive riots called The Bogotazo, after which a decade of mass killings called La Violencia took place. The assassination of Gaitan, even more than the banana workers strike, jump-started the movement of the armed Colombian Left in the form of the Colombian guerrillas.

In 1948 in Colombia, a very popular presidential candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán of the Liberal Party, was assassinated for the same reason that given for the overthrow of Arbenz of Guatemala seven years later. The Liberal Party was one of two fascist parties of the oligarchy, along with the Conservative Party. See below for more on them.

The Liberal Party was anything but. Yet Gaitán was an interesting figure, part of a socialist movement in the party who advocated very popular candidate who promised major changes in Colombian society a battle against social, political, and economic inequality. He was also a feminist who advocated the uplift of the status of Colombian woman in society. In addition, he broached the subject of land reform, a hot button issue in Colombia.

In fact, as in so many other places in Latin America such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, the endless Leftist guerrilla war against the government is more of a fight over land than anything else. To this day, the Colombian oligarchy has refused to do a land reform, in part because this is where most of their money comes from.

Even Venezuela has had only partial success at a land reform, as it has proven too difficult to break up the big estates or latifundias. Instead, since much of the land lies idle and fallow, peasants have conducted land invasions of fallowed land in the latifundias, which has resulted in a lot of conflict.

Death squads funded by the latifundia oligarchs have murdered over 150 peasant leaders since Chavez came in over the last 20 years. Parts of the Chavista Movement have been aligned with the rural rich for whatever reason, and they have been involved in repressing these peasant movements also.

He was murdered by the Colombian oligarchy or ruling class, which has stayed in power by mass murder for 75 years now. They were even massacring people earlier, as there was a mass slaughter of striking workers at banana plantations in the northwest in a place called La Magdalena in 1928.

Even this early, the US was waging a Cold War against the USSR. The US became very alarmed by the strike, as the plantations were owned by the US United Fruit Company. United Fruit and the US government described the strikers as subversives and Communists. The US threatened to invade if the strike was not put down by the Colombian government.

Under orders from United Fruit, the Colombian military attacked the workers. Many striking workers were killed. The event was memorialized by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his famous novel 100 Years of Solitude. The event was a watershed in Colombian politics, as an actual Colombian Left was formed around this time.

Gaitan was an excellent speaker and his rallies drew large crowds of union members and poor people. He was characterized as a demagogue, like Juan Peron, who was already rising to power in Argentina. He was also a budding nationalist. He was criticized by the Conservative Party, the right wing of the Liberal Party, and even the Communist Party, which regarded him as a competitor for the interests of the workers.

In 1933, he split with the Liberal Party and formed the Unión Nacional Izquierdista Revolucionaria (National Leftist Revolutionary Union). In 1946, he proposed a Gaitanista Program. It advocated many things:

Development agencies for the advancement of the social, political, and economic advancement of peasants in the countryside. Policies to redistribute wealth in Colombia. Nationalization of public services, a progressive income tax, and the development of a national economy. A land reform and new pro-labor laws.

In terms of foreign policy, it advocated an economic union of Latin American countries so they could serve the interests of their people instead of that of the oligarchies and foreign carpetbagging corporations. His project could be best described as anti-plutocratic and anti-imperialist.

He was assassinated in 1948 by a “lone gunman,” Juan Roa Sierra, along the lines of Lee Harvey Oswald. Two ex-CIA agents have confessed that it was really the CIA that was behind the operation. The assassin took orders from two named CIA agents and the assassination plan was called Operation Pantomime.

This was probably one of the first of countless assassinations of liberal and leftwing figures the world over by the CIA undertaken as part of the Cold War. Sierra visited Gaitan in his office in  the morning and at 1 PM, he shot Gaitan dead.

An enraged mob then set upon Sierra, who was protected by an Army colonel. He was chased to a store where  he holed up. The mob smashed into the store and dragged him outside. He was beaten and stabbed so many times that his corpse was unrecognizable.

At the time of his assassination, a meeting of the Pan-American Conference led by US Secretary of State George Marshall. At this meeting, all members of the group agreed that fighting Communism was their number one concern.

The despicable Organization of American States or OAS, a fake organization of Latin American countries that is actually run by the US and serves to promote the interests of the US and its neo-colonies in Latin America.

At the same time, the Latin American Youth Congress was taking place. It been organized by Fidel Castro of Cuba and was funded by Juan Peron of Argentina. A young Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a law student at the time and was eating lunch at the time  Gaitan was killed. He rushed to the scene and arrived just in time to see Sierra lynched by the mob. He memorialized the event in his book, Living to Tell the Tale.

It is possible that Gaitan, like Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, was a patsy for an assassination carried out by the US Deep State in the case of the former and by the FBI itself in the case of Ray.

Gaitan suffered from schizophrenia, could not fire a gun properly, the gun in his hand was not capable of firing accurately, and he was standing quite a distance away from Gaitan while the murder occurred at a short distance. Further, Sierra was not seen anywhere near the assassination. The first time  he was spotted, he was in between two police officers.

The Colombian government quickly blamed the USSR and the Colombian Communist Party for the murder. They also tied in the young Fidel Castro with the plot. This version seems very unlikely.

Notice that this CIA assassination took place under “liberal Democrat” Harry Truman.

The murder of this candidate was followed by a wild  riot known as the Bogotazo. Many of the rioters were armed and the riots left much of downtown Bogota in ruins. The riots left 1,800 people dead. This was part of a larger reign of violence in the countryside which had started in 1930. By 1948, Bogota was full of peasants fleeing the violence in the countryside.

The Bogotazo led eventually to La Violencia, a truly crazy 10 year period from 1954-1964 in which Liberals and Conservatives, which ideologically are both simply fascist parties, with the Liberals masquerading as social democrats to the extent that they are even members of the Socialist International, massacred each other in huge numbers for no particular reason at all.

The Liberals and Conservatives typically trade off running the country. Although they hated each other to the point of slaughtering hundreds of thousands of each other, the odd thing is that despite their names, ideologically and in governance, there is little difference between. They are both far rightwing parties of the oligarchy.

The armed Left in the form of the ELN, which was created in 1964, theorizes that La Violencia was simply a way for the elite to slaughter the politically active working class.

After La Violencia ended in 1964, a small group of people tired of being massacred settled in some property in West-Central Colombia and declared themselves a semi-autonomous republic. They were also heavily armed. They said that and armed themselves mostly to keep from being massacred. And they did set it up as a “Communist republic” but it was only a small patch of land of no particular consequence and the group’s numbers never numbered greater than 200.

They named this place Marquetalia. Manuel “Sure Shot” Marulanda, the leader of the FARC for the next 40 years, was one of the founders of this commune. The Colombian government became very alarmed that 200 people had called themselves Communists and settled some lands that they freaked out and called for Uncle Sam to come help.

This was under the “liberal Democrat” Johnson Administration. The US also became very alarmed and we sent several generals and a troop of Green Berets down there.

At this time, the Green Berets were advising the Guatemalan government in putting down a Left insurgency that began there in 1960. They put it down via massacres of the civilian population. There’s nothing noble about the Green Berets. They’re simply the US government version of a Latin American death squad.

Anyway, a significant army detachment was mobilized and Marquetalia was attacked with US advisors by their side. There are suggestions that the US and Colombia even used chemical weapons against the commune.

The Marquetalians fought back but were defeated, suffering many casualties. The survivors retreated into the mountains of Colombia. These are really mountain jungles as the mountains are covered in a jungle-like near-rainforest and it’s impossible to find anyone or anything in there.

There they decided that all peaceful attempts at change, including setting up a semi-autonomous commune, were impossible, so they could either sit in the villages and wait for the government to come murder them or they could take up arms so they could at least fight back when the army and death squads came.

The group was called the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and they are still active to this day, 56 years later. At one time around 2000, they controlled ~5

The ELN (National Liberation Army) was formed at the same time, in 1964, in Eastern Colombia under obscure circumstances that I’m not aware of.

The original philosophy was Liberation Theology and their leader was Camilo Torres, the original “priest with a machine gun.” Liberation theology can be thought of as “Jesus with a machine gun” and in fact there are murals in Latin America showing exactly this. The idea is that Jesus supported “the preferential option for the poor” and that even armed struggle to achieve this goal was not only valid but very Christian.

One of the original theorists was an educator named Paulo Friere in Brazil who published a famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed – also published in the same year that the ELN and the FARC were formed in 1964 -along these lines, advocating a liberation theology component to be the focus of the curriculum in Latin America. Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez could be considered the father of Liberation Theology. He wrote a book called The Theology of Liberation around this same time.

To this day, although the ELN are Leftists, they are still officially a Christian organization and they have many supporters among the Catholic clergy in Colombia, as does the officially atheist FARC.

Alt Left: About That Long Electricity Outage in Venezuela in March, 2019

Found on the Web: When I first read this story, I thought of the power outages in Venezuela the past year. Those attacks must have hit hard, especially patients in hospitals or care residences.

Last year there were a number of attacks against the Venzuelan electric system. The system runs via hydropower from dams. The hackers somehow had access to the software that ran the dams. They took the dams electricity production capability out, so Venezuela had little no electricity for 3-4 weeks.

Of course the despicable Western media played this up as yet another failure of Venezuela’s perpetually mismanaged “socialism.”

The message: All forms of socialism, including (or especially) social democracy, lead to utter failure and a collapsed economy, sort of like the way that we associated the Soviet model of Communism with abject economic failure. In other words, install social democracy in your system like 9

In reality, Venezuela is barely a socialist country as almost the entire economy is in private hands and is run by the capitalists, who of course have been waging economic war on the economy since 2002. Just about the only thing the state runs is the oil industry, and that was nationalized in 1976, long before Chavez took and during the period that the Western press crows about being the Golden Age of Venezuela.

It is important to note that like in the fake Roaring 20’s, when only 2

Most people were poor and they had no running water, no safe housing, no secure employment, no sewer systems (the shit from the toilets simply ran downhill in the gutters of the slums of the big cities, few education choices as education funding was starved, and no access to medical or dental care at all, as all of this was privatized and public medicine was starved for funds.

For much of this time, Venezuela was run by “social democratic” parties which were actually members of the Social International such as AD (Accion Democratica or Democratic Action). In Latin America, don’t be fooled. Just because a party calls themselves socialist or social democratic doesn’t mean jack.

Many Latin American social democratic parties simply enforce elite rule, which their leaders and members benefit from. To give you an example, Juan Guaido’s political party, probably the farthest righting party in Venezuela, calls itself social democratic and they have actually joined the Socialist International. The International is rapidly becoming meaningless. They need to start throwing out rightwing parties and parties that govern from the right while using the fig leaf of socialism. They’ve started to a bit of that lately.

I know quite a bit about those outages in Venezuela. The attack against the hydroelectric system was very well-planned. The people who did it were Venezuelan exiles in Canada and Houston, Texas (a lot of the opposition moved to Houston in addition to Miami). The opposition is very, very good, and they sit up there in the US plotting schemes to destroy the economy.

For instance, for a long time the fake exchange rate was being set by an opposition person in Houston who ran his own exchange rate site. He always deliberately inflated the street exchange rate in order to cause a currency crisis, which would devastate the economy. A lot of things caused that exchange rate crisis, but that guy sitting in Houston sabotaging the exchange rates to cause a monetary crisis was no small part of that.

The attacks were staged out of Canada and Houston. The people who did it had very intimate knowledge of those systems, mostly because those systems were using software made in Canada. The people in Canada had access to the source code of that software.

Perhaps the company itself was in on the sabotage in the same way that the voting machine companies are in on rigging the voting machines to steal elections for Republicans. In that case, Republican operatives have taken over the voting machine companies, and the election hacking is done by those companies like E S & S themselves in coordination with people like Karl Rove and the Bush and Romney families. All of those computer machine companies are owned by the Bush and Romney families, and Karl Rove also has a huge stake in them.

So it’s quite possible that that Canadian software vendor that sold the software which ran on Windows XP, was taken over by Venezuelan opposition people to gain access to the source code so they could hack those systems. With knowledge of that code, they hacked the systems from Canada and Houston. They were very good, excellent hackers. It’s not known if they had state help from the US and Canadian governments, although I definitely would not rule it out.

The civilian programmers who did this are criminals in the literal sense. Ideally they ought to be caught and tried for murder for the death of all of those Venezuelans in hospitals and nursing homes who died due to the power outages.

The information about how the attacks were done from Houston, Texas and Canada came via Russian intelligence. Notice the Canadian connection. Trudeau in particular has gone full fascist in his fanatical support for the Venezuelan opposition fascists.  Even worse, his foreign secretary, who is actually a member of the actual social democratic party in Canada (the liberal party is not officially social democratic), a fairly leftwing political. She has been a full-throated supporter of  US imperialism and Canada has supported all of the recent fascist coups undertaken by the CIA.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Oleg Syromolotov stated at the  time:

According to the country’s legitimate government headed by President Nicolas Maduro as well as information from other credible sources, the electricity sector of Venezuela came under attack from abroad on March 7 of this year. We provide all necessary assistance to Venezuelan friends on the basis of requests from the legitimate government.

This attack was done via comprehensive remote influence on the control and monitoring systems of the main power distribution stations where the equipment produced in one of the Western countries has been installed. They and the instigators of sabotage are responsible for the deaths of people, including of those in hospitals which were left without electricity.

Alt Left: How the US Staged Fascist Coups in Many Countries the World Over in the Last 70 Years

After World War, the Cold War was started and the murderous Dulles Brothers Installed the Policy known as Containment. This was implemented between 1946-48. As part of this policy, the US overthrew nationalist, social democratic, and even liberal democratically elected governments all over the world as part of the “War on Communism.” We replaced them with rightwing dictatorships. Although it is arguable, in general all rightwing  authoritarian regimes or dictatorships are probably fascist. Rightwing dictatorship = fascism.

These regimes were found most of Central America in Guatemala after 1954, in El Salvador and Honduras since forever, and in Nicaragua under the Somozas.

They were found in all of South America at one time or another. We can see them in the generals after 1964 in Brazil, the democratic facade duopoly regimes in Venezuela in Colombia (especially after 1947 and again in 1964, Ecuador, Peru until the generals’ revolt in 1968, Bolivia under Banzer after 1953, Paraguay under Strausser, Argentina and Uruguay under the generals in the late 80’s and early 90’s, and Pinochet in Chile.

They were also seen in the Caribbean in Cuba under Bautista, the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, and Haiti under the Duvaliers.

In Southeast Asia, they were found in Thieu in South Vietnam, Sihanouk in Cambodia, the monarchy in Laos, the military regimes in Thailand, Suharto in Indonesia, the Sultan in Brunei, Marcos in the Philippines, and Taiwan under Chiang Kai Chek.

In Northeast Asia, a regime of this type was found in South Korea from 1947-on.

They were found South Asia with Pakistan under Generals like Zia, in Central Asia in the Shah of Iran, and in a sense, the Arab World with Saddam (Saddam was installed by the CIA), King Hassan in Morocco, the Gulf monarchies, and Jordan. Earlier, they were found in the monarchies in Libya and Egypt that were overthrown by Arab nationalists. Also, Israel played this sort of role with a democratic facade.

We also found them in the Near East in the military regimes in Turkey (especially Turgut Ozul) and for a while in Greece under the colonels in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

NATO formed the backbone of a “rightwing dictatorship” in the background of Western Europe (especially Italy), where Operation Gladio NATO intelligence essentially ran most of those countries as a Deep State behind the scenes. These regimes were found in Spain under Franco and in Portugal under Salazar along with its colonies.

These regimes were not so much in evidence in Africa except in South Africa and Rhodesia and most prominently, Mobutu in Zaire and Samuel Doe in Liberia.

The fascist forms of these rightwing dictatorships varied, most being nonracist fascism but a few being racist fascists (Turkey), and others being Mussolinists (Suharto in Indonesia with his “pangesila”)

Alt Left: The Nature of Latin American Rightwing Dictatorships (Fascist Regimes) in Latin America

The Venezuelan elite are classic Latin American elite fascists, a somewhat distinct type. Most of the elite down there has this “Latin American fascist” orientation.

It’s generally not race-based, but the ruling elite tends to be lighter-skinned than the darker masses, even in Haiti. Instead, it’s more like the “rightwing authoritarianism” or “rightwing dictatorships” that we saw so many of in the Cold War in Latin America and elsewhere.

error

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)