Category: Japan

Japanese Versus Chinese Influence in Southeast Asia

Polar Bear: I’ve always wondered why Japanese don’t have the stranglehold Chinese have in SEA?

Your answer, among other reasons,  may be found in your second sentence:

Polar Bear: They have the potential and did so in a fascist way during WWII.

There ya go. Furthermore, none of those countries have any Japanese blood. There is little to no Japanese blood in Taiwan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia, or even Southern China for that matter. There is quite a bit of Chinese blood in all of those places, in particular in Thailand, Vietnam, Burma, and of course Taiwan. There is also a fair amount of Chinese blood in the Philippines and Indonesia. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma all have heavily Sinicized cultures, some dating back thousands of years in the case of Vietnam.

If we want to go even further back, all speakers of Austroasiatic languages came out of a homeland in Yunnan, China 5,000 years ago. This includes almost all Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians, Thais, and Burmese, and also includes Northeast Indians and some Indian aboriginals.

All speakers of Austronesian languages came out of Taiwan 4,000 years ago. Before they were in Taiwan, they were in the part of China across the strait. This includes all Filipinos and Malays, most Indonesians, the Papuans who live along the coast, and all residents of the Pacific Islands. Although it’s uncertain how much Chinese culture was retained after thousands of years, all of these people have an ultimate homeland in China. Really all of Asia came out of a Chinese homeland!

Even Japanese and Koreans came out of a Chinese homeland in the parts of China around the Bohai Sea and the Shandong Peninsula where they had their homelands 8,000 years ago.

The Vietnamese language itself is 7

Vietnam and Thailand were also largely settled by Chinese invaders, 2,300 years ago in the case of Vietnam and 900 years ago in the case of Vietnam. Both nations are about half Chinese genetically.

By contrast, Japan has been an inward hermit Kingdom forever. They didn’t even bother invading and conquering other lands. That’s how inward they were. They only opened up to most of the world in the 1870’s and even then most reluctantly. They think they are better than any other race of humans. Why conquer inferiors? Why even visit their lands, if only on vacation? Why trade with inferiors? What could you possibly learn from inferiors, other than how to be more stupid?

It’s an inward attitude similar to the one that the Ottoman Empire had towards Christian Europe for millenia. Visitors would come to the royal court and show the Emir the great inventions from Christian lands. He would look at them or hold them in his hands and study them and then give them back to the visitors and shrug his shoulders.

Anything invented by the infidels couldn’t possibly be any good and besides, why would we wish to learn anything from infidel inferiors anyway? Let the infidels make their fancy toys. These things are of no concern to us superior Muslims. It’s an unfortunate attitude that set the Muslim world back for many centuries and left them mired in backwardsness.

The only place on Earth with a good amount of Japanese blood is Hawaii. Some of the other islands in Polynesia or especially Micronesia may have some Japanese blood too. I am thinking of places like Guam and Saipan.

And, yes, when the Japanese finally decided to interact with the rest of Asia, they did so in a totally fascist manner, invading, conquering, and in many cases, mass murdering or even genociding the natives who they saw as utter inferiors. Most of the places that were conquered by these fascist Japanese militarists are not real happy about being treated like that, and the Chinese, Taiwanese, and Koreans are still pretty pissed off.

I’m not sure how the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Burmese, and Filipinos felt. I doubt if they were happy but they don’t seem to have made a big deal out of it. The Chinese are stark raving furious about it to this day, especially when they are made aware of atrocities like the Rape of Nanking. Further, the Japanese have not been real great about saying they were sorry.

Alt Left: Karl Marx, “The Genesis of Capital”: The Creation of Capitalism and Its Link to Modern Land Reform

This fascinating document is available in booklet form as it is only ~35 pages. It is an excerpt from the larger Capital volume. It’s not an easy read but it’s not impossible either.

Some of the writing is gorgeous. I read one sentence to my very anti-Communist liberal Democrat father and he swooned over the prose. That one sentence was both perfect and beautiful, though it dealt with some terrible.

In many places, this is forceful – see the fencing of the Commons in the 1300’s, done deliberately to force the peasants into the capitalist mode or production. Indeed theorists said that if the peasants could not be shoved into capitalism, there would be no capitalism, for their would be no workers. It was essential to destroy the peasants ability to live off the land for themselves in order to force them into worse circumstances as industrial workers.

We see this very same rhetoric employed today in India – where it is argued that the tribals in Chattisargh and other places must be uprooted from the lands, have their lands stolen from them to give to mining and forest industries, and forced into the capitalist mode in cities in order to properly develop the economy. It is argued that India cannot develop its economy until the Adivasis have been destroyed. Note that as with the ancient peasants, the Adivasis will live much poorer lives in the cities than the were in the rural areas.

In Colombia, we see something very similar. In Colombia, small farmers own a lot of land. They are able to subsist off this land and they do not need to participate in the larger economy. They grow enough food for themselves and some city people. The process of the Colombian revolution and the genocidal response of the Colombian oligarchy to it is all throwing the peasants off of these small plots, stealing their land at gunpoint (the paramilitaries are used for this), and terrorizing or killing them if they refuse to hand over their land.

The land is then confiscated by latifundias or large landowners who by and large control the Colombian economy. They grow coffee, bananas, etc. and raise cattle for export, generating money for the economy in the process.

In fact, this process has been going on all over Latin America for over 200 years as sort of a slow-motion process of ethnic cleansing and land theft. Smalholders are able to live off the land in Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Paraguay, and Brazil, and this is seen as unacceptable as they only grow food for themselves and possibly for city-dwellers but the produce cannot be exported.

These countries wish to develop an export model of agriculture based on the large scale production of food crops for export mostly to the US. In return, their ability to produce their own food is destroyed, in my opinion, rendering their economies completely backwards. The people are then rendered vulnerable to the purchase of imported food from the US, often packaged or canned food that is not very good for you.

As you can see, the country gets screwed and the US wins both ways. By destroying the basis for feeding themselves, the US wins an export market for its processed foods. By replacing these with food crops for export to the US, the US gets to make money by importing and selling these food crops. In return the country gains nothing.

Only a small landholding and import-export elite (maybe 2

And in the process, of course, the country generates a revolutionary movement, often an armed one.

This can be seen in areas of Colombia. In one particular part of Southern Colombia, most of the rural peasantry had been thrown off the land and most of the land was now held by a few large landowners who were raising cattle on the land. The peasants had been terrorized off of their stolen land and formed ghettos in a large city nearby, which increased the poverty rate and the slump percentage of the city by a lot. Here they were poor, unhealthy, poorly fed and clothed, living in slums in shacks with no sewage systems, clean water or electricity.

These slums began to generate a lot of street crime as they tend to do. Outside of the cities on the main roads, there were soldiers and paramilitaries everywhere and one went from one armed roadblock to the other. Curiously enough, a large guerrilla movement had developed among the few remaining peasants and in teeming slums. Armed guerrillas extorted the latifundias for money that they called “war taxes.” The latifundias now paid a lot of money for paramilitaries to patrol their lands.

In the slums, an urban guerrilla movement was developing. Police, soldiers and paramilitary members were attacked with bombs, RPG’s and automatic weapons all the time and took significant casualties. The war had now moved to the city where there was no war before. Bomb and gun attacks hit city police stations on a regular basis. Death squads and army units roamed the land and the unarmed Left in the form or human rights activists, labor union members and organizers, community organizers and activists, environmentalists, campesino organizations, organizations of slum-dwellers and indigineous leaders were murdered and tortured to death on a regular basis.

The idiot US and the West see this as a process of “Communist guerrillas trying to subvert Colombian democracy, shoot their way into power, and set up a murderous Communist dictatorship which will destroy freedom and prosperity in Colombia”. The vast majority of Americans and others in the West actually buy this bullshit. Many on the Left refuse to support the Colombian guerrilla, insisting that they are anachronistic and that they should try to seek power peacefully. However, since the FARC disarmed, former members and members of newly formed political parties have been massacred like flies. So state terror blocks all road to peaceful change, leaving no alternative but the way of the gun.

Obviously the ridiculous analysis of this situation that Westerners believe has no basis in reality. The Western media cheers on the genocidal Colombian state and says that the Colombian democracy is waging a war against irrational and bloodthirsty terrorism, typically linked with drug trafficking to describe them as criminals and destroy their legitimacy.

As long as this process goes on, Colombia’s economy will stay forever backwards.

It is necessary to do a land reform in the rural areas before any country can prosper economically. Indeed this “socialist” project of land reform which the US spent decades in the Cold War slaughtering millions of people to stop was actually implemented by the US in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan in order to fend off a Communist threat. Oddly enough, it ended up creating the basis for subsequent booming development in those places.

Land reform was and is the basis for the Communist and Leftist revolutions and guerrilla forces in South Vietnam, Thailand, Colombia, Nepal, Peru, Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Paraguay in the past 55-65 years, with some of the revolutions happening later 40 years ago. In Paraguay this process has just started several years ago when a FARC split has taken up arms agains the state.

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.

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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: Fascism and National Socialism: An Attempt at Some Definitions

Fascism:  An Attempt at a Definition

You can define a fascist country as an ultranationalist ethnic nationalist nation founded on a blood and soil mindset with an ideology based on Lazarus, the bird that rises from the flames. In fascism, there is a nationbuilding effort whereby the nation is seen to have fallen apart, typically by too much liberalism, pacifism, degeneracy, chaos, or economic problems.

The fascist comes in saying that they are going to bring back the glorious days of the founders of the land. So from the ruins of the present, the past will be mined to create a national myth and this mythos will be used to rise the country up from the ashes of ruin to the greatness it deserves.

Typically the unfortunate present moment is blamed on others, minorities or other countries that are singled out for hostility and blame.

Military missions of conquest are not unusual as the nationalist myth often if not always says that the borders of the land used to extend further than they do. Hence the project is Greater Ruritanian and reuniting all of the former Ruritanian lands which were stolen by the Other, the non-Ruritanians. In addition, if there are any Ruritanians residing in nearby lands, the project will be to reunite those areas with the homeland.

Fascism is typically conservative as the present moment is seen as tainted with modernism and democracy, both of which are associated with cultural degeneracy. Traditional sex roles are reinstated and the woman’s role is resigned to the kitchen, church, and home.

There is an exaltation of heroism, aggression, raw power, and even brutality, often in defense of the homeland. There is a self-sacrificing tendency where to die for one’s land is the greatest honor. And there is an exaltation of violence, usually for repression or invasions but sometimes in a Sorelian sense, violence simply for the sake of violence because violence is seen to have a mythic cleansing power especially over the permissive, excessively free, and degenerate present.

The military is exalted, battles of the past are discussed and exalted,  and often defeats are spun as victories as in the Battle of Kosovo with the Serbs in 1389. Men are exalted to be masculine, heroic, and sacrificing. Effeminate men, sexual outliers, crossdressers, and homosexuals are typically persecuted as grotesque and degenerate aberrations from tradition sex roles, which are seen as nearly divine.

School curricula are rewritten and often you end up with textbooks full of lies from front to end as in the nationbuilding in Poland after WW2. Statues are built to the greats of the land. Often there is Garden of Eden effect such that humanity is seen to have arisen exactly in the country.

At other times, the land is seen as the center of the Earth around which all other lands revolve. Examples in the Land of the Rising Sun in Japan and the land of the Four Winds in China.

The Land of the Rising Sun implies that when the sun rises in the morn, it first shines on Japan, hence Japan is the first nation to be brightened and in a sense becomes a satellite around which other lands revolve.

The Land of the Four Winds in China refers to the belief that the north, south, west, and east winds all arise directly in China itself and flow outward to the rest of the world from there. So China is the source or ground zero for all of the wind and moving air in the land. It’s literally the center of the world if not of the universe.

Trumpism is indeed fascism. Make America Great Again. See how that is talking about the ruins of the present and going back to an earlier time when the nation was great.+

A lot of out and out nationalist lying about history, minorities, languages – Hell, you name it, nationalists lie about it – usually goes into the construction of this mythological great past.

It’s called blood and soil because the ethnicity is seen as the “sons of the soil” or land itself, land that has been fertilized with the blood of the ancestors especially in n nationalist impulses where they fought invaders or minorities.

The blood also refers to the fact that there is only one ethnicity in fascism.

In Ruritania, all of the minorities have to become Ruritanians. Stop wearing minority clothing, practicing minority festivals and and lifestyles, give up the minority religion and especially stop  speaking the minority language.

Hence all minorities will become Ruritanians simply by assimilating to Ruritanian culture. Standard fascism gives minorities a break in that they are merged with the ethnic group even though they are a different ethnicity.

Racist Fascism or National Socialism

Racist fascism or Nazism is much worse because the minorities don’t stand a chance as their very blood itself itself is tainted, hence there is no way to escape minority status and become a Ruritanian. They are dealt with by segregation, expulsion, or murder, which can be genocidal.

They will be repressed, arrested, beaten, impoverished, uneducated, and often the state will move Ruritanians into their neighborhoods to drown them out. They will be tortured, their homes will be demolished and their neighborhoods will be bulldozed. Often their churches and monuments are targeted for destruction.

The intelligentsia  and the leadership of the land may be attacked and even killed, sometimes in  large numbers. This is done so the minority will be leaderless and even without thinkers.

They will also be killed, often in small numbers, but sometimes in much larger numbers, into the tens and hundreds of thousands or even a million as in National Socialist Rwanda. There were millions, 15 million, exterminated by the Nazis in World War 2. You keep hearing about the 6 million Jews, but did you realize that another 9 million people were also murdered? Well, they don’t count because they’re not Jews so they’re not special, as only Jews are special or “chosen.”

They are also often expelled from the land as their presence is seen as a literal toxin upon the body politic. Hence words like cockroaches, vermin, rats, infection, disease, virus, plague are used to describe the minority group. Nazis referred to Jews as rats and vermin and disease metaphors were also often used.

It is often stated that the nation has an “infection” – that is, it is literally infected with the minority group, which is a plague upon the land itself. Look around you and see how people act during plagues. Also, what do you do with a tumor? You cut it out. So you cut the minority out of the land, slicing them away with a scalpel. How do you treat an infection. You pour drugs at it to kill the infectious agents. Hence mass killing  of minorities is can be seen as germicidal and even a measure of positive public health.

The dehumanization makes it easier to mistreat them or even kill them.  After all, in Rwanda they were not killing humans. They were literally killing cockroaches. Six foot tall cockroaches with two arms and two legs, but cockroaches nonetheless. What do you do if you see a cockroach? You stomp on it and grind it into the floor. Hence “grinding the minority into the floor” is transferred to the minority group and mass murder is nothing more than squashing bugs on floors. Human bugs but bugs nonetheless.

Alt Left: The Capitalist Mindset: The Left Has No Right to Rule

Trouser Snake: So what’s the endgame? Just access to more markets to continue the capitalist Ponzi scheme?

Pretty much. Some people never learn. And the people on Earth least likely to learn are capitalists. It’s like they’re drug addicts, hooked on a crack or heroin drug called capitalism. They’re as blinded as an addict.

And they’re incapable of being peaceful. They are actually mandated to destroy any form of socialism on Earth, and as far as the social democracies, well, they’ll get to those later. They simply refuse to compromise with the Left at all, and their view in general is that the Left has no right to rule.

It is this raw, pure Latin American model of ultra-capitalism or pure neoliberalism that is presently dominant in the US in the Republican Party. As this form of capitalism leads to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer at a rapid and profound pace, it also inevitably leads to a left revolutionary reaction of some sort. This is so predictable as to almost be a law of politics along the lines of some of our physical laws like gravity.

However, this basic capitalist mindset has been subdued in most places:

  • In Europe by a social contract to ward off Communism, now fading.
  • In Canada, Australia, and New Zealand by similar social contracts, now possibly also fading.
  • In Africa by African nationalism, a local capitalism that is intertwined with such, a strong resistance to the exploitative, rape and ruin policies of colonialism, by the Marxist roots of some of the early post-colonial leaders and some independence struggles, by extreme poverty which lends itself to socialist movements, and possibly by what was probably a very collectivist tribal culture pre-colonization.
  • In the Middle East and North Africa by Islam in general, which is very hostile to extreme capitalism as anti-Islamic and an attack on the notion that all Muslims are brothers and are mandated to help each other, and also by Arab nationalism in particular, with its strong anti-colonial bent and roots in Marxism.
  • In Turkey by Islam, oddly enough. Erdogan is actually a social democrat along the lines of most Islamists (see the explanation under the Middle East and North Africa entry above).
  • In Russia and much of the former USSR by the Soviet experience which was much more popular with the people than you are told here, by and nationalism, in particular, Russian and Armenian nationalism, and by a longstanding collectivist culture with roots in a long-lasting feudalism and the underdog mindset of the masses that resulted.
  • In Japan, where corporations took over the role of the social democratic state as per Japanese ethics, nationalism, and in-group preference – our people are the best people on Earth, so we must show solidarity with each other and not let each other starve. Which model is presently falling apart. There is also a basic, possibly ancient, Asian collectivist mindset, which had been previously opposed by feudalism. However, it is easy for a collectivist culture to toss feudalism aside as feudalism is so anti-collectivist. Feudalism was a poor fit in Asia – note the experience in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos- similar to how it never worked well in the collectivist Arab world and was easily overthrown in Russia.
  • In India, where a long-standing anti-colonial ethic and independence struggle with socialist roots goes along with a long with long-standing leadership of the non-aligned countries.
  • In Central Asia, by Islam (see above) and in Iran by the Iranian revolution.

As you can see above, the capitalist morons in most of the world weren’t thinking straight, but then when are they ever? They think about as well as any addict of anything. In the Arab World, Russia, and Asia, they set up feudalism, the worst form of pre-capitalism, which generates such hatred that when it is overthrown, most former serfs go socialist or Communist.

Further, they tried to wedge feudalism into collectivist cultures, which never works, as they are the opposite of each other. This feudalism where it was longstanding led obviously to extreme forms of socialism or sometimes Communism because feudalism is so brutal and extreme that it leads, logically, to brutal and extreme counter-reactions.

This is along the lines of the theory that the more brutal and extreme the system, the more brutal and extreme the counter-reaction to that system is.

You could hardly find a country where ultra-feudalism was more ingrained in the modern era than Cambodia, along with extreme hatred between the urban and rural people. The reaction? The Khmer Rogue.

The vicious slaver regime in Haiti was overthrown by the Haitian Revolution, where all 25,000 Whites on the island were murdered in cold blood.

In the Chmielnicki Rebellion in Poland in the 1500’s, a vicious peasant rebellion took place in which not only were half the Jews killed for being allied with the feudal lords, but 1/3 of the population of the entire country was killed. Of course, all you hear about here in the West is those 25,000 Jews who were killed. I guess all those dead Gentiles didn’t count. Gee, I wonder why that is.

There were various peasant or anti-feudal serf revolts in the Inca Empire. From what little we learn of these revolts, the serfs rebelled, seized power, and killed all of the Inca feudal elite. Peasant rebellions are not only murderous, but they tend to be exterminationist.

I could go on but you get the picture.

Elsewhere, foolish capitalists imposed their capitalism via an ultra-exploitative colonial model which is guaranteed to generate extreme hatred, rebellion, and underdog views among the colonized (if not exterminationist anti-colonial rebellions – see the Haitian example above), which leads to inevitable independence struggles usually premised on underdog philosophies like socialism and Communism. By colonizing most of the world, capitalist morons insured a post-colonial world with socialist tendencies and hostility to highly exploitative neoliberalism.

Places in the World Where Extreme Capitalism (Hyper-Neoliberalism) Holds Out

Latin America is one of the few places in the world that capitalism is so extreme as to oppose even social democracy, and this is all due to the proximity and overwhelming presence of a colonial ethic under the presence of the US.

Of course, we have long had such a model here in the US, but its  savage nature has been masked by a ferocious war on Communism cleverly turned into a war on socialism, social democracy, and even petty liberalism. The great wealth of the country has also masked the brutal features of this system, as there was so much money that even the losers in the system were able to eek out a piece of the pie, although this aspect is fading  fast – look at the homeless swarming our streets.

Further, a system of social liberalism (not social democracy but headed down the road) was installed in the New Deal (as an anti-Communist social contract along the lines of the European social contracts) and further entrenched by the Great Society, here driven in part by powerful new anti-racism on the part of the state. These band-aids over the cruel neoliberal model in the US successfully kept the inevitable “peasant rebellion,” or left revolution to be more precise, postponed for a very long time.

Of course, as ultra-neoliberalism moved along its standard path of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer (greatly increased economic inequality), an inevitable left revolution started to take form. This can be seen in the Bernie Sanders insurgency in the Democratic Party, Operation Wall Street demonstrations, and even the misdirected but Communist-led BLM and anarchist-led antifa riots this summer. Once again this violence is a form of peasant rebellion and is absolutely inevitable as wealth inequality reaches a certain point.

There are a few other places outside Latin America:

  • In the Philippines, though the new president calls himself a socialist and had good relations with the Maoist NPA guerrillas.
  • In Indonesia, which however recently elected a social democrat.
  • In Thailand, where long-standing military rule tamped down class struggle, which now rages uncontrolled in a very confusing way.
  • In South Africa, where a racist White ruling class did not want to share anything with the Black underclass, and Communism, socialism, and the Left period was associated with the Black struggle for self-rule and the guerrilla war which followed. However, the ANC government is full of former Communists and people with Marxist roots.

Alt Left: The US Has Always Supported Fascism Except for a Few Years in the 1940’s

America loves fascists, that’s the bottom line. And it’s worse America loves fascists, that’s the bottom line.

And it’s worse than that. Capitalists love fascism. Capitalists have never opposed any fascist state or rightwing dictatorship. Nor have any conservatives ever opposed a single fascist state or rightwing dictatorship.

Now that does not mean that the US is a fascist country, at least in its domestic policies.

Its foreign policy is a lot harder to figure. The US been supporting fascism overseas ever since US corporations started migrating overseas, first in Latin America, in search of greater profits, as capitalism demands that they must do. We may well be a fascist country at the moment. Trump is a fascist and the Republican Party is now a full-fledged fascist party, whereas before this aspect of itself was somewhat submerged, hidden, or put on the back-burner.

But the US has always been a pro-fascist country. We supported fascism from 1910 all the way through the 1930’s. The New York Times praised Hitler when he took power. Corporations in the UK felt the same way. He was killing and imprisoning the Left, and making the country safe for wealth and capital. Which is all any capitalist ever wants.

It is only when fascism became racialized, expansionist, and colonial in part due to rage at not being invited to the party when the European powers were racialized and expansionist as part of the divvying up, enslavement, and looting of the word outside of Europe by the European powers.

Japan and Germany were left out of this block party, so they decided, “Hey it’s our turn now. You guys have your colonialism, now we will have ours.” As the West continued to hold all of its colonies, the Axis powers were correct. Indeed we had to be forced into the war by the Japanese attack that we literally provoked and forced them into.

World War 2 was the only time in history that the US has ever used its military might to attack fascism, mostly because fascism had been getting rather out of hand, uncontrolled, chaotic, and destructive.

Right before the war, the US was pro-fascist, and no sooner was the ink dry on the surrender papers when the US started recruiting former Nazis, Mussolinists, and fascist Axis collaborators in Eastern Europe, but also in Italy, Greece, and Turkey. We immediately hired these Nazis to be our army for the dirty war we declared on the Soviet Union probably a day after the Yalta Agreement.

And no sooner were the Japanese fascists defeated that we started funding and training the Japanese fascist collaborators in South Korea to fight communism. The truth is that no one hates Communists more than fascists. Fascists think they should be killed on sight. More non-fascists are a bit more squeamish or at least not as extremist. So we recruited this brutal and amoral fascists to be dirty-fighting (Nazi-like) soldiers in our war against Communism. The first fascist armies funded by the West started operations in the Baltics and Ukraine only a few months after the Armistice.

So we only fought fascism for four years, from 1941-1945. Before that until 1910, we had supported it. And from 1945-on, the US supported any and all fascist countries or guerrillas everywhere on Earth.

After 1989, US liberal Democrats said this fascist dirty war was the lamentable but sadly necessary policy of the Cold War. Now that the Cold War was over, we didn’t need to be so evil anymore, and now we could go back to being the shining city on the hill.

Except the fascist Cold War didn’t end in 1989. It’s still going on to this day in the sense that it has reverted to the pre-World War 2 policy of supporting rightwing authoritarians and attacking any and all manifestations of the Left. All of the Left countries that were targeted in the Cold War remained targets after Gorbachev.

So the Cold War was never about fighting the evils of Communism in the form of the USSR. The Cold War was simply another phase of the fascist war on the Left everywhere on Earth that the US has waged since 1910. The enemy was never the USSR. The enemy was always socialism, or in many places, even social democracy or social liberalism.

So while we have traditionally not been a fascist country, we have always been a pro-fascist country. We didn’t practice it, but we supported itself everywhere it appeared on Earth.

Alt Left: Ever Wonder Why North Koreans Hate the US So Much? Here’s Why

Only half a decade after the WW2 armistice, we got involved in the Korean War. Before that war started, we turned a blind eye to and even directly assisted South Korea’s Syngman Rhee’s genocidal massacres via execution of 800,000 “Communists” from 1945 until the start of the Korean War.  These were actually leftwing guerrillas and their civilian supporters waging a legitimate war against Rhee’s repression.

The guerrilla was set off by the massacres of peaceful civilian protestors on Jeju Island in 1947. Outraged, the islanders took up arms. Rhee, with close US support, waged a brutal counterinsurgency, razing most of the capital city, killing 30,000 people, mostly civilians, and forcing almost the entire rest of the population to flee the island in terror.

During the Korean War, the US committed the most unspeakable crimes against humanity, including using chemical and biological weapons against North Korea, similar to what Japan had done to China 10-15 years before. In fact, we got the idea for this directly form Japanese war criminals, most of whom were immediately hired by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies after the war, in part for their knowledge of WMD’s.

Even the bombing campaign against North Korea was probably one of the most criminal acts of the 20th Century. A general bragged that every human being walking openly and any standing building in Korea was a target to be destroyed or killed. General MacArthur (I always hated him) demanded and almost received permission to drop 40 atom bombs on China after the Chinese entered the war.

Pyongyang was burned to the ground with incendiary weapons like napalm similar to the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 in which we murdered 100,000 Japanese civilians with firebombs in only a few days. Most of the houses were actually made of a form of paper, so the firestorms caused by the firebombs raged wildly through the city.

We actually killed 3 million North Koreans in that war, which was 1

If you want to know why North Koreans hate and especially fear us so much, there’s your Goddamn reason. General Mattis was terribly worried that he would have to implement a war plan involving dropping 40 nuclear bombs on North Korea in case of a North Korean attack, so you can see that if we  fight another war against North Korea, we will just as vicious and evil as before, if not much worse. This why you see the near-fanatical hatred and fear of the US, along with the frenzied mass buildup of one of the  impressively militarized North Korean army, the 4th largest military in the world.

An Interesting Mostly Southern Chinese Phenotype

A good friend of mine who resides in Singapore. He is very interested in his background and gave me his photo to analyze.

Looking at it, I believe he is definitely Southern Chinese fore the most part. His father is Hainanese and has a rather distinctive genotype that looks something like his son’s. His mother is a certain type of Malay that dates back to the 1400’s and is significantly mixed with European blood, mostly British and Dutch, as Europeans have a presence in the area dating back centuries. I believe that they are called Pernakans. He also has some female relatives that look very Malay. I do not know who the older man to the right is, but he looks quite Malay to me.

I think my friend ended up looking more Chinese than Malay. The Hainanese are definitely a Chinese type people. Whether they also have a Vietic type SE Asian component is not known as I do not know the history of Hainan.

Although my friend definitely has a strong Southern Chinese look, he also has another component that makes him look, well, different. I’m not going to attempt to describe this element, but it does make him look somewhat “odd,” “interesting,” or “unusual, ” from a Southern Chinese POV. A typical Southern Chinese would say that he looks like a Southern Chinese, but he’s not like us. A Southern Chinese has more of a Modern Mongoloid look. My friend is mostly modern Mongoloid, with some elements of transitional Mongoloid or archaic Mongoloid – this is what the Malays are after all – added in.

The evolution from Negritos to moderns occurred much later in Malaysia, much taking place in only the last 5,000 years. The Senoi are an example of an archaic group that is definitely Australoid yet nevertheless more progressive than the Negritos. These are the “dream people” of psychological and anthropological literature, though modern research has shown that they do not incorporate dreams as much into their waking lives as we previously thought and that the extent to which they do this was much exaggerated.

There are also Negritos (or original Asians) in Malaysia. In fact, there is a group in Malaysia that genes that date back to 72,000 YBP. This is actually before the main Out of Africa event, yet is has now been shown that other small groups went out of Africa before then.

Most of these groups were devastated by the vast Toba volcanic explosion in India 72,000 YBP that exterminated almost all humans in South and Southeast Asia. It is thought that only 1,500 of this group survived the explosion. This means that humans went through a severe genetic bottleneck no doubt accompanied by massive selection pressure and huge genetic effects. Whether this explosion’s effects extended to Central Asia (probably), the Middle East (maybe), or East Africa (unknown) is not known. At any rate, this original group departed from East Africa near Somalia and Djibouti.

The main OOA group left out of here too. No one quite knows what these people looked like but they have appeared somewhat Khoisan. The Khoisan are the most ancient group in Africa with genes dating back 52,000 YBP. Further, their click language to me seems like a good candidate for the original human language. It does seem to be quite primitive. Before that, we clearly used sign language. Neandertals could not speak due to their hyoid bones. The great apes also have this problem. So when Neantertals vocalized, they may have sounded like great apes.

The Sasquatch, which I believe is an archaic hominid related to Heidebergensis which somehow survived, has a very odd speech pattern (it speaks on the inhale, bizarrely enough – try it sometime) and a friend of mine who shot and killed two of them told me that the juveniles were using extensive sign language. They ran half the time on all four and half the time on two legs, which is very odd. Sasquatches can run up to 30 mph on all fours. That must be quite frightening to watch but it can be seen in the Port Edward Island Sasquatch footage. Anyway, enough about Bigfoot for today!

It’s not known how far modern human language dates back. Sergei Starostin feels it cannot date back more than 50,000 because so many cognates remain that we can actually construct a bit of Proto-World. One Proto-World term is “tik” meaning one, to point, index finger, etc. From this comes our word to teach. Imagine a teacher pointing at a blackboard with his index finger. I worked on an Indian language a while back and they had a very archaic word found only in the earliest vocabularies – tik, meaning “the point of a spearhead. I cannot prove it but I believe deep down inside that this is from the same root. I

It’s more of a gut feeling or intuitive thing, and intuitions are often wrong because they overgeneralize, throw out logic altogether, and rely exclusively on notoriously unreliable and subjective (the very word subjective implies emotional response) feelings, especially deep or gut feelings that can be described as “Gestalt.” I’m a birdwatcher and we use something called Gestalt to identify fleeing glimpses of a bird.

All we can see is what philosophers like Heidegger might call “the essence” or essential nature of the bird rather than it’s surface characteristics which are too fleeting to identify. Heidegger discusses surface versus essence interpretations of objects a lot. It seems hard to figure out but it’s easier than you think.

Logic relies on surface or appearance, including the human definition we have given to the object.

Intuition on the other hand pretty much throws out the surface stuff and looks for the “essence of the thing” or the “deep meaning” or “true meaning” of the object. We are getting into Plato here with the concept of “pure objects” that actually do not exist in reality.

An example of Platonic pure objects would be what I call the Masculine and Feminine spirit (see the brilliant and wrongly derided Otto Weininger’s “Sex and Character” for more. And Weininger comes from Nietzsche in my opinion and leads to Heidigger, also in my opinion. He seems to be a sort of a bridge between the two. Note that all were Germans, Weininger an Austrian, but oh well.

The Masculine Spirit and the Feminine Spirit is one way of dividing the universe or world in a binary manner. Not that there are not other binary methods of chopping the world into opposite halves, but this is just one of them.

I would argue that the world is half Masculine principle and half Feminine principle and that neither is better than the other and the marriage of the two opposites creates a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts, hence the human pair bond where each pair of the male-female couple fills in the missing blanks or parts of the other one, each creating a whole person in the other where only a “half person” had existed before.

We are also getting into Taoism here, but the ancient Chinese were awful damn smart, so you ignore them at your peril in my opinion. Furthermore, the Taoist maxim of how to live your life – “moderation in all things” is an excellent aphorism, not that many of us ever do it. It’s clearly the route to a long lifespan.

To do the opposite is to burn candles at both ends, life fast, die young, and leave a pretty corpse, which sounds very romantic and appealing when young (it did to me) but which sounds increasing idiotic and even suicidal for no good reason with each advancing year past 30. I now find it laughable, pathetic, and openly suicidal and delight in mocking the concept. But I survived another 30 years past the expire date on that concept, so perhaps my new attitude is simply the inevitable product of living out that maxim twice and hence nullifying it.

There are a number of Southern Chinese groups with more of an indigenous look, sometimes prognathous. These date back to the original indigenous elements in Southern China and SE Asia, who all date back to the Negritos. The Montagnards of Vietnam are definitely one of these indigenous types. The indigenous went from

Indigenous (Negrito) -> Proto SE Asian (with Melanesian component) -> modern SE Asian (Modern Mongoloid with archaic components. This effect is quite pronounced in the Vietnamese, who were completely overrun by a Chinese invasion 2,300 years ago after which there was much interbreeding and a huge infusion of Cantonese words, which now make up 7

However, the core vocabulary of of Vietnamese remains Austroasiatic (a language family nevertheless with Southern Chinese roots derived from the archaic Mongoloid peoples of the region 5-7,000 YBP, who later moved into SE Asia. This core vocabulary is shared by the Munda branch of Astroasiatic, completely isolated India, particularly Eastern (Mongoloid) India. The fact that Vietic shares a common core vocabulary with the geographically separated Munda proves the existence of Austrasiatic.

In fact, it is the final convincing argument. Anyone who says that Austroasiatic does not exist is a fool.

Further, the evidence for Austroasiatic, a proven family, is no greater than the existence for Altaic, and in fact Altaic may be better proven. The “numerals” argument against Altaic is belied by the 13,000 year old Afroasiatic language, the numerals of which are a complete disaster.

Numerals are more often innovated and replaced than people think. Often the old cognates survive in archaic words or words used for related concepts, but it’s not unusual at all for the main term to be an out and out innovation. Most Altaic numerals are innovated, but there are a few cognates. Further most of the numerals have cognates in related or archaic words.

This is the most archaic layer of Austroasiatic. Some of these peoples are archaic Mongoloids with a strong Australoid component. A branch of these Australoids called Carpenterians went from India to Australia 11,000 YBP and become part of the Aborigines. Another group of archaic Australoids were called Murrayans. They came from Thailand 17,000 YBP and went to Australia. It is not known what Australians looked like before that but no doubt they were quite primitive. It’s long been thought that they have more Erectus component than the rest of us, but I’m not sure that is proven. Certainly their appearance resembles that.

The Murrayans are the core element of the Ainu, who went to the Philippines 16,000 YBP in an unusual, Caucasian appearing type, and then moved to the Southern Japanese islands north into Japan 13,000 YBP, quite possibly replacing an ancient Negrito type already there. This Negrito type definitely existed in Southern China and may well have existed in Korea. Some Australoids or especially Australoid-Mongoloid mixes can have a superficial “Caucasian” appearance, but that’s just parallel development, coincidence or more probably the fact that the possible human phenotypes is only a small subset of the possible ones.

It is this coincidentally “Caucasoid” appearance that led many observers to believe that the Ainu were somehow ancient Caucasians (Norwegians, joked one anthropologist was) that got stranded from the rest of Europoid flock way over on the other side of Asia. In fact, the Ainu are Australoid by skull and Mongoloid by genes. Their language, like the Japanese language, has an ancient Austronesian layer that has led many to falsely conclude that the Altaic Japanese language is actually an Austronesian one. The argument is even better with Ainu, the deeper group of which has not been shown to my satisfaction.

Alt Left: Socialism, Communism and Neoliberalism in High and Low-IQ Societies

Clavdius Americanvs: I don’t believe socialism is necessarily better for low-IQ societies, but it definitely helps redistribute the misery so things are more bearable for the general populace.

Socialism and even Communism is always better for low-IQ countries. There’s not even any debate about it. I suppose you can say that neoliberalism functions somewhat in the West, but it doesn’t work at all in low-IQ countries. It’s just fails spectacularly, however, the top 2

Clavdius Americanvs: I really don’t think socialism at the moment is a great idea for low-IQ countries. But it can arise if the ruling capitalist class is entrenched old money and not very permeable. Latin America used to have a race-based CASTE system for Christ’s sake! Entrenched old money isn’t really capitalist at all – it’s feudalism masquerading as a free market. I don’t believe Latin America is capable of anything else.

Well this is all neoliberal capitalism ever turns into – something that looks a lot like feudalism. Libertarians can’t figure out this law of capitalism and keep pining for this just and proper pure capitalism that never exists. Take the non-aggression principle. They can’t figure out that aggression is at the very heart of capitalism. No aggression, no capitalism.

Will capitalist countries ever allow socialist or communist countries to exist? Of course not. They try to overthrow them, often with violence, as soon as they show up. In the US, overthrowing socialist and even social democratic countries is a bipartisan affair, with even left Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders joining in with glee. Ocasio-Cortez is right. The Democratic Party is a center-right party and we don’t have a left party in the US. When was the last time? Henry Wallace? How did that work out? A party coup that put Truman in instead.

Clavdius Americanvs: I foresee any regime, even a socialist one, to eventually become feudal simply with a new ruling class not descended from the old one.

Probably not and it never happened in any Communist countries that I can think of. Many social democratic countries simply went corrupt and put the old ruling class in and continued calling themselves socialists. This happened in Venezuela, Peru, and Mexico.

Down in Latin America even the rightwing parties often call themselves socialists or have leftwing words like Labor, Liberal, Progressive, People’s, Popular, Workers, Revolutionary, etc. in their names because that’s often the only way to get elected. Rightwing parties down there even campaign on leftwing themes. All rightwing parties down there, even the death squad parties, campaign on helping the poor and alleviating poverty. Of course they never do it, but they have to say it or they won’t have a chance.

Clavdius Americanvs: The only hope is a secular rise in IQ for the countries so they can all produce more under capitalism.

I don’t think that will work either. The highest IQ countries are either Communist or “National Socialist” as in South Korea and Japan. I’m not sure what Taiwan is. Hong Kong is about ready to go Communist. Vietnam is Communist. All of Europe is nominally socialist or social democratic. It doesn’t look like even high-IQ countries want neoliberalism. Now if you talk about a market instead of “capitalism,” we can talk. After all, I am a socialist and I support a market myself.

Clavdius Americanvs: Afterwards, they can go the European route and turn into social democracies when they can afford it.

No one goes this route anymore – capitalism -> social democracy. Obviously the US is headed that way and Europe formerly did, as did Indonesia, with the Philippines heading that way slowly. And almost all poor countries nowadays are socialist or social democracies in name if not in form. No poor country wants to start out capitalist anymore. Neoliberalism is a luxury good, only affordable by the rich.

Clavdius Americanvs: Only with higher average IQ’s can entrenched ruling classes be otherthrown.

What happened in Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Laos, Cambodia, Eritrea, South Yemen, and Cuba?

Clavdius Americanvs: A population needs to be smart enough to produce and become aware of its social contract with the government. I doubt most leftwing participants in Latin America or any low IQ country really understand what they are signing up for in terms of a social contract.

Of course they do. Why do you think they all vote for the Left. Even at this late date, 7

Clavdius Americanvs: Low-IQ peasants just don’t want to starve or be beaten by armed thugs of their aristocratic overlords. They are somewhat aware of what they can get, but have no clue as to what they are giving up.

What they are giving up never worked for them anyway and probably never will.

Alt Left: Does Neoliberalism Even Work In High-IQ Societies?

Clavdius Americanvs: As for why right-wing Alpha societies turn feudal? IQ must be factored in. Low-IQ countries that go the right-wing capitalist way simply don’t have enough high-IQ types to make it in the free market. So the bulk of the population Alpha or not ends up starving, or a serf, or both. The few high-IQ Alpha males and their relatives are the victors in the winner-take-all game of capitalism.

Well they did this the world over in Latin America, Southeast Asia including the Philippines and Indonesia, Taiwan, and South Korea. They did it in some African countries like Rhodesia and South Africa, and Morocco. It doesn’t work. You have to impose it by a rightwing dictatorship because otherwise no one votes for it. Neoliberalism has never even been imposed on most of Africa or the Arab World because literally nobody wants it. It’s hardly even been tried in Europe either.

If it works so great in high-IQ countries, why do the Europeans,  Russians, and Chinese all reject it?

Even the Japanese and South Koreans don’t have neoliberalism. The Socialist Party has literally been in power for much of the time in postwar Japan, and the Communist Party is surprisingly large.

Even in South Korea, South Korea was only created after 300,000 armed Communists were exterminated in that country from 1945-1950. When North Korea conquered almost all of South Korea during the Korean War, armed South Korean communist guerrillas sprung up immediately in every conquered zone. They were already there and waiting for the North Koreans.

After the South Korean government took back all this territory, they rampaged around the country, seeking out and killing many of the people who had taken up arms and their supporters. Again over 300,000 were killed. There was also a Communist uprising on Jeju Island around this time that was put down viciously. Obviously Communism was quite popular in South Korea from 1945-53.

Alt Left: Behaviorally Alpha Societies Tend to Be Socialist and Good for Workers, the Poor and Men in General

Transformer: Do you think Southern Euro behavior Alphas are not such great societies for working poor people like in Latin America, do you agree? I think that Paternalism and Authoritarianism is a big reason why there is such political instability and economic inequality in Latin America.

https://www.aei.org/articles/from-popular-sovereignty-to-the-reality-of-state-paternalism/

https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Regimes-Latin-America-Dictators/dp/0742537390

https://items.ssrc.org/from-our-archives/industrialization-and-authoritarianism-in-latin-america/

In Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and North Africa, and even traditional Southeast Asian and Asian cultures, there are not a lot of problems for working poor people. Al of these societies are very much pro-worker, pro-poor,

Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and North Africa: All of these societies are collectivist, not individualist, and they are very pro-worker, pro-poor, pro-common man populist. In addition, almost all societies over there are socialist in name or in deed.

Feudalism was always an uncomfortable fit in the Arab World and it took a lot of mangling of Islam to try to justify it. As soon as the Arab World went free, it all went socialist right away. Despite tremendous efforts by Western neoliberal dipshits to try to shove neoliberalism down Arab throats, it refuses to take hold. Almost no one wants it. The fact that neoliberalism is grotesquely anti-Islamic is probably the main reason. Furthermore, neoliberalism is very hard to impose on a collectivist culture, though it is possible as in Latin America and the Philippines.

Men in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand are traditionally very Alpha. Most of Southeast Asia has been socialist for 50 years now. Radical capitalism was an aberration for SE Asia because all of SE Asia has always been a very collectivist culture. Check out Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald about how the collectivist nature of Vietnamese society made the Viet Cong almost impossible to defeat.

Very unequal Thailand is a recent aberration but it’s been run by military rule and juntas for most of recent history. Communist guerrillas were extremely succesful in Thailand during the Vietnam War. The Pentagon said there were just a few guerrillas but people who went over there to study them found that they were everywhere, especially in the North.

For some reason they faded away but recently class war has returned to Thailand with a vengeance with the wars between Yellow Shirts (rightwing middle class) and red shirts (workers). Of course the Yellow Shirts are winning because the army supports them, but still, rightwing individualist economics is an aberration in collectivist Thailand.

In China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia the men seem to be quite Alpha. The Philippines and Indonesia have retained Latin America-style systems with extreme inequality and authoritarianism

Japan and Korea were probably barely feudal. Obviously they were never individualist and even their capitalism is very collectivist and uses a lot of state involvement in the economy all the way down to actual planning of the economy.

China was under rightwing economics (feudalism) for much of its history. Communism was an easy sell in China because it was always an extremely collectivist culture.

In addition, capitalism never took hold, as feudalism was the only form of rightwing economics the Chinese knew. The feudalism was so bad that many to most Chinese peasants were effectively slaves and quite a few actually were slaves. 8

The Philippines was a colony forever, and after independence, somehow feudalism developed. The Philippines is a collectivist culture that has developed a very Latin American-style economic system probably due to being colonized by Spaniards. Everywhere the Spanish colonized, they wrecked. However, they have also had armed Communist rebellions almost non-stop from 1945-on. The most recent president, Duterte, says he is a socialist.

Indonesia was another country that went hard rightwing, in this case classical fascist, after independence, however not before murdering 1 million Communists as the Communists were the most popular movement in the country. Obviously Communism hasn’t been popular since and in fact it is illegal to have that political opinion. However, the last couple of presidents did refer to themselves as social democrats.

Both the Philippines and Indonesia are horribly class-cucked. In addition, both are subject to a reactionary merchant ruling class in the form of overseas Chinese, a feudal-type people who retained the pre-Communist feudal culture of China when they left long ago. Not having been subject to a revolution, they are a feudal type ruling class that mirrors the Latin American ruling class in many ways.

Feudalism can absolutely arise in a collectivist culture whereas US style rightwing individualist neoliberal economics has a difficult time getting a foothold.

So societies where all the man are Alphas are often very good for poor and working class men and I would argue that they are good for men period for obvious reasons.

I think that Paternalism and Authoritarianism is a big reason why there is such political instability and economic inequality in Latin America.

Why would societies where all men are Alphas end up paternalistic? Why would authoritarian societies be bad for poor and working class people and for men? Southern and Eastern Europe have traditions of authoritarianism and very pro-worker populist governments.

North Africa and the Middle East is still very authoritarian, and it is very good for poor and working class people and for men. Russia is somewhat authoritarian and has been authoritarian for much of its history. For the last hundred years, Russian society has been very good for poor and working class people and for men. All of these places have traditions of relatively equal societies and strong redistributionist economics.

Paternalistic governments help their people. Rightwing governments in Latin America tend to be anything but paternalistic.

It is true that some societies where most men are Alphas have evolved a rightwing authoritarian, often semi-feudal system, however, many other such societies have not done so. Societies where most men are behaviorally Alpha oddly enough seem to be collectivist societies (someone explain this to me). But the rightwing authoritarian societies where most men are behaviorally Alpha actually look more feudal than US-style neoliberal, although they sometimes preach the latter.

PUA/Game: Statistical Alphas, Behavioral Alphas, Chads, and Behavioral Alpha and Behavioral Beta Societies

First of all, some basic definitions:

Statistical Alpha: 15-2

Behavioral Alpha: Displays “Alpha behavior.” This may vary. In some societies like the Middle East, a majority of the men probably display Alpha behavior. Not limited to 15-2

Chad: An 8-10 on the 1-10 looks scale. Often does well with women but not necessarily, as certain other variables can mess him up. Mental Chads, Shy Chads, Odd Chads, Introverted Chads, etc. can definitely have problems with women. Sure some woman usually grabs them and rapes them sooner or later, but they can have long incel periods. A Chad could very well be a virgin or an incel. In fact, on incel forums, they discuss the phenomenon of the Chadcel.

Alpha behavior is probably learned, and Alpha behaviors are best acquired early in life, hopefully by high school or at least college age.

Chads are basically genetic. There’s no reason to brag about your Looks. They’re a gift from God. You didn’t do one thing to deserve them. You just lucked out in the genetic lottery is all.

However, I do think that men do better in societies where more men are Behavioral Alphas. They do better with women and male-female relationships are a lot better. There’s not much hypergamy, there aren’t many incels, and women don’t cuck men, monopolize Chads, or marry Beta Buxxers and then shut down the pussy, etc. The men are naturally masculine and the women are naturally feminine and both sexes seem to like each just fine that way. In addition, the men seem to love women (at least they are very sexually attracted to them), and the women seem to love men.

Societies Where Most Men are Behavioral Alphas (Male Rule Outside Northern and Western Europe and the Anglosphere)

On the other hand, these are typically patriarchies, and societies with many Behavioral Alphas are not great for women, face it. Some societies where most men are behavioral Alphas include Spain (though suffering from a wild feminist insurrection and the beginnings of a soyciety, though heavily resisted by the men), Portugal, Italy (feminism failed there, though that may be changing as new reports indicate the possibility of a soyciety arising there of all places), Greece, the Balkans, and frankly Eastern Europe and the Baltics.

Russia, the Caucasus, Turkey, Arabia, Mesopotamia, the Gulf, and the Levant. North Africa too. Of course we must include all of Black Africa. All of Latin America obviously. Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia. Central Asia and South Asia – Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and even India and Nepal. The Stans. I actually think SE Asian men are behaviorally Alpha. And traditional Korean, Japanese and Chinese societies were very behaviorally Alpha, and the older men still are.

Cucked Soycieties Where Most Men Are No Longer Behavioral Alphas (Behavioral Beta Soycieties under Female Rule in the West)

The soycieties where the men are no longer mostly behaviorally Alpha and have become behaviorally Beta are obviously most of the West as in Western Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Asians in the West, especially in the US. These are really the only places where Female Rule (Feminist Rule) has been implemented, though the infection is spreading, not diminishing, and the target is the whole world, as it is with all totalizing ideologies.

The result of Female Rule is an extreme reduction in:

  • Behavioral Alphas.
  • Sex for young single men.
  • Patriarchy.

Obviously all three of these are related.

The latter is often replaced by the rise of an oppressive matriarchy in its place. Why? Because in society just as in the home, someone has to wear the pants. If the women take the pants off the men, they won’t throw them in the corner or burn them as they probably should. They put them on themselves, turn into men, and turn the men into women.

Basic heterosexual behavior always exists. If the norm is toppled, the inverse simply takes its place. Someone’s got to rule and someone’s got to be ruled. Pure equality among the sexes is obviously not possible. Even Gloria Steinem admitted that!

What’s true among the sexes is probably true for society too, as basic sexual behavior is probably mirrored in some odd way in our sociopolitical world. There’s no escaping sex. It never ends, even in your 80’s.

Alt Left: Conservatives Say That Inequality in Latin America Is Caused by Socialism

Transformer (to Jason): I notice you don’t write about Latin America a lot.

I was hoping for Robert to respond to this article but would like your thoughts. I think the issue of inequality in Latin America is very deep. Conservatives like to blame the left and Communism (think Fidel Castro and the current Venezuela government under Maduro), but the situation is more complex.

Conservatives say inequality is caused by socialism and Communism? See what liars they are? Conservatives are the biggest shmucks. See? They can’t even lie properly. The best liars are at least somewhat believable. Conservatives are like the 13 year old pathological liar. He’s just a kid and you can safely dismiss almost everything he says. Seeing as they are such awful liars, why do so many people fall for their laughable, pitiful lies?

It’s the greed, right? Conservatives sell greed. They say support conservatism if you want to make lots of money or keep all the money you have. Support liberalism is you like being poor and having most of your money taken away and wasted on boondoggles and ne’er do wells, many of them disgusting criminals, and the rest at least repulsively amoral and stupid.

I guess if you are selling greed, stupid humans will believe everything you say. Tell him if he wants to be rich he will realize it’s pitch dark outside when it’s 95 degrees and high noon, and he’ll go outside and insist it’s true. Tell them he can keep all his money if he’ll only acknowledge that the sun comes up in the west and sets in the east, and he’ll swear they knew it along.

The truth is the opposite. The more socialism you have, the greater the economy. Venezuela before the crash was the most equal country in Latin America. Belarus and the Scandinavian countries are some of the most equal countries on Earth, with GINI indexes of 25-30, which is about where any country should be.

I admit that conservatives have their good points about their Latin American capitalism, but saying that Latin American inequality is caused by socialism isn’t one of them.

The more rightwing economics you have down there (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter), the more unequal things get. This is because capitalism is exactly how Marx said it was. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer is the natural, typical, expected, and totally ordinary outcome of any pure capitalist system. You could almost write a Goddamned mathematical law about it. I know you can plot it on a linear chart.

The only countries that split up their wealth in any sort of fair way other than, “Everything for the top 2

I think it’s clear that some sort of mixed economies with private, cooperative, family, and public enterprises work best of all. And the commanding heights of the economy must be ruled by the state. This is one thing the Chinese got right. And incidentally, in Japan and even South Korea, it is much the same. And both of the latter countries model their economies in part on, believe it or not, Nazi Germany. There were a lot of terrible things about the Nazis, but their economy was not one of them.

In such a system, the state owns the commanding heights and has the last say in everything. And both quite-capitalist countries use state economic planning to guide their economy. So it’s not true that a planned economy does not work. When state and private actors work together to guide the economy of the country forward, the results are very good.

Discussions about the Risks of a Shutdown

First of all, this is all moot anyway because we’re already opened up as it is, so I don’t understand why it’s even a discussion. Also, I have not yet seen a good discussion from the Left about to what extent we can shut down the economy and how we could get away with it, if at all. So I don’t know what I’m talking about here. I don’t know how long or to what extent we can lockdown the economy and the risks that might flow from that. So the things I’m suggesting might not even be feasible.

Here is another problem. You can open the economy back up all you want, but a lot of people are just going to boycott it. A lot of people are almost too scared to even go outside and are limiting their trips out of the house, shopping expeditions, socializing, etc. So if you open up but everyone stays home out of fear, you’re still stuck in a lockdown.

Gathering venue employees are clubs, bars

These are open but it’s not working. They’re spreading a lot of disease. They don’t need to be open if they are physical Typhoid Marys.

Regardless, they are securitized (turned into an investment for others) and resold. Small business loans are often securitized as well.

That should not even be allowed. Those are toxic investments that caused the last crash. They can fuck off to Hell and back.

No not really. The big banks already made their money on the loans.

Nope, the mortgages are all owed to banks, I believe. Or yeah, they securitized them and then sold them off to suckers? Ok, that’s what caused the last crash. It ought to be illegal but if that blows up again, it’s fine to me. Also I would imagine that almost 10

It’s small banks,

No such thing.

credit unions,

They don’t loan out a lot of money. I’m not sure that they do a lot of mortgage and large business loaning. They’re owned by their customers. They’re mostly just there to serve us, as we own the place anyway. I’m a member.

depositors

Ever heard of a thing called the FDIC?

investors that can get fucked

You mean the top 1

Lehman and Bear Sterns were allowed to die. That’s not happening again.

We can just take some banks over and make them public. It’s a better idea anyway. Most of China’s banking is public. Works great last time I checked. Also, they did better weathering that 2008 crash than any other country for the very reason that their banks were public.

In Japan, the commanding heights of the economy are owned by the state as they were in Nazi Germany.

In South Korea, the corporations and the state are all wrapped together in things called cheobols.

Get rid of the stock market. Germany barely has a stock market. They have a sort of a market, but almost all of the stocks and investments are owned by 2-3 large banks. That’s probably the way to do it. The stock market is toxic and evil. Shut it down.

Alt Left: Libertarianism and the Alt Left: Prospects for an Alliance?

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: Peronismo definitely won’t fly in Libertarian circles. Argentina is used as a case study for a failed nationalized protectionist economy.

That’s probably not even true. They did great during the Peron years.

I think that the Trump years in general and this COVID-19 response in particular, both of which have been characterized by neoliberal or Libertarian policy and a Libertarian response to a crisis, respectively, has proven the abject failure of the neoliberal or Libertarian model. As if it had not been proven failed by the 2008 crash, which was caused wholly by this model.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: To unify all the nomadic tribes of the Alternative Steppe, three things are need. First, a rejection of central economic planning would have to be declared by right and left wingers. Second, constitutional or legislative limitations on the power of government to regulate. Essentially, castrate the FDA, FCC, FAA etc.* and legalize drugs

I absolutely will not go for either of those. Central planning is working great in China. Even South Korea, Japan, and Germany engage in central planning.

And we will never go along with gutting regulations. Alt Leftists are regulators. We are really Big Government types in a lot of ways.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: And third, a solution to the immigration problem.

There is no solution to this problem.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: The social-economic model, even if never explicitly stated as such, would be capitalism for corporations, socialism for individuals, and tyranny at the border, which is the inverse of what we have now. Warren Buffett agrees.

It’s the capitalism for corporations part that we are going to object to. That’s the whole problem right there.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: The Democrats will stay hopelessly in shambles for the next few elections until minority GDP and population both over take that of whites.

I wouldn’t count on that if I were you.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: Deregulation is hard for leftists to accept because of the strong tendency to falsely conflate wealth redistribution with government regulation.

It is in fact that only thing that redistributes income at all. Absent that you just have never-ending growth of inequality until you pretty much have feudalism. Neoliberalism (or Libertarian economics) has failed everywhere it’s been tried. It’s only success stories are when it’s mixed with socialism. Most of the world rejects neoliberal economics. The US is a holdout. There aren’t many others.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: I suggest aptitude AND loyalty testing for immigrants to keep the stupids or anti-westerns out.

That’s fine.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: No explicit racism, but it would effectively bring in only Christian Caucasians from Europe, Africa and the Middle-East, liberal East Asians and light-skinned Hispanics.

We would object to this part. Of course we want mostly high-quality immigrants, but they don’t have to be any particular race. High-quality immigrants of any race should be just fine.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: Currently, strong regulation of consumer goods & services exists because, ex post fact, individuals can’t afford to sue companies for the damages their products may have caused. As IQ’s, automation, access to on-line information, and personal income increase worldwide, people could rely less on byzantine jurisprudence.

I don’t understand any of this.

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: But as I see the tsunami of technology and globalization approaching to totally demolish the justification for our current system, I can’t help but take preparations for the utopia. We must agree on which anarchist utopia to usher in, lest our system turn into a Blade Runner dystopia.

The future will not be any type of anarchism. In fact the future will see a greater role for the state.

Alt Left: Social Democracy Only Works in Homogeneous Societies Is Often but Not Completely True

RL:

The US and a handful of other countries are literally the only countries on this planet that regard social democracy with outrage and want nothing to do with it.

A commenter responds:

Mithridates: Yeah, I suspect much of this attitude stems from the ethnic divisions within the US that no one is ever allowed to talk about in any sort of frank or intellectually honest manner. Of course the Pluto/Mammon-worship inherent in the American mythos is a influential factor as well.

But let’s explore the first:

Basically, Ethnos A, the group responsible for most of the country’s productivity, is forced at gunpoint to redistribute a portion of their wealth to Ethnos B (and C in some regions), and a good portion of Ethnos B takes that money, pisses it away on all sorts of stupid instant gratification fuckery and doesn’t add much of anything to the country’s overall productivity; in fact, a sizable minority of Ethnos B behaves in public like zoo animals.

And then A’s gets called horrible bigots if they object to this, and especially if they object to being forced to live within shouting distance of B’s.

Most of the countries with working social democratic economic arrangements tend to have been ethnically homogeneous for most of the period when these systems were in place. And now these countries have tried the mass immigration experiment, and the same sort of shitty results is happening in those places that we here in the US have been experiencing for many decades now.

Natural Law says that humans are extra-clever social primates who are predisposed to be open to sharing among others they consider to be kin. There’s a certain other Ethnos I won’t mention by name or even a single-letter set of punctuation marks that exemplifies this principle very clearly.

Anyway, expecting all members of an Ethnos to consider the entire planet’s population of clever hominids to be a part of their kin group is quite an aberrant expectation; only weird ideologies can invert what to everyone else is a common sense understanding of Natural Law principles. And finally, loving one’s own kin does not necessarily mean hating other kin-groups.

Of course everyone has always known that this is the dirty little secret for Americans’ hostility to socialism. This is why all of the American White Nationalists are also hardline economic Rightists, Republicans and Libertarians despite this being bad for most Whites. Race trumps economics for a lot of folks. Whereas in Europe, most of the nationalist groups, even the White nationalists, are explicitly socialist.

You’d be pissed to, eh?

Actually I am fully aware of this argument, but I’m not pissed at all. For one thing, I have never been part of the wealthy White group, so Whites with money can go pound sand. They are my class enemies. I think in terms of economics. Screw race. Do the rich Whites want to help the poorer Whites? Of course not. So why should I support them. Also I know quite a few low-income Whites who use those redistributive programs that Whites hate so much.

On the other hand, I am not a typical White person. I am very hard to the Left; in fact, I am an out and out socialist.

Many countries have health care for all despite being ethnically diverse. However, in a lot of these countries, public health care and education is simply underfunded, so the dominant group, whoever they may be, simply goes to private hospitals and schools. India is an excellent example of this as is much of Latin America.

All of the Arab World has social democracy under the rubric of Islam, or in the case of Lebanon, ethnic peace, and Lebanon is unstable for ethnic/religious reasons. And some Arab countries with prominent religious of ethnic minorities are very unstable or at war.

All of North Africa has social democracy except Morocco, although minority Berbers are dealt with by denial of their existence and roping them into the main group, Arabs. Ethiopia has tremendous ethnic diversity and some religious diversity, but they have a good working socialist system. Eritrea is the same but the main divide there is religious rather than ethnic.

Zimbabwe has a good working system although it has many tribes. Argentina and formerly Bolivia and Ecuador has or had working social democracies, although all three countries had serious instabilities; in all cases the rich objecting to sharing with the poor and with a racial element in Bolivia. A number of countries in Latin America do have social democracies, but they don’t work very well because the rich don’t want to share with the poor.

In a number of those countries such as Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Haiti,and Mexico also have an ethnic element in that the dominant rich group tends to be Whiter or lighter-skinned though not usually White per who don’t want to share with the poorer, darker, folks who are more mixed with Indian and in some cases Blacks.

A number of countries in Latin America have homogeneous populations, but the rich still don’t want to share with the poor, so that doesn’t solve everything. And historically speaking, most nations were quite homogeneous, nevertheless the rich still shared just about fuck all with everyone else and needed an actual revolution to be convinced to do so.

Russia and China has very good working social democracies although they have many minorities, although China and to some extent Russia has some ethnic warfare. Ukraine has a good system despite minorities and ethnic warfare. Vietnam, Cambodia, Bhutan, and Laos have good systems despite having anywhere to a couple to many ethnic minorities. Malaysia has a working social democracy and it has a large ethnic divide. Japan has minorities with an excellent social democracy.

Most of the former Soviet republics probably still have working systems although most have large minority populations.Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran have social democracies and minority groups. However, in Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran are currently embroiled in ethnic separatist wars.

Most of the countries with non-working systems are not only rightwing but also quite poor. Hong Kong is an exception. The government is very rightwing, but there are not ethnic problems. It’s all one ethnic group, but the rich ones hate the poor ones, just as it was traditionally.

Some are just poor. Most of Africa has social democracy, but it often doesn’t work well due to poverty. To some extent this is true in Pakistan, Mongolia, Yemen, Moldova, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Burma, and Thailand. It is also true in Ecuador, Guatemala, most of the Caribbean, Chile, and Paraguay. In these places, social democracy doesn’t work more due to poverty than to diversity.

Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Southern and Northern Chinese: How to Tell Them Apart

How the Hell would I know? They’re all just a bunch of gooks to me! J/k. Don’t report me to SJW  Central Control please!

SHI: One should just go with a Vietnamese or Northern Chinese girl if you’re craving a Korean. Can’t tell the difference anyway.

SHI is a connoisseur of women, and I am more like a common sewer when it comes to women, but I will respect his judgement nevertheless.

Northern Chinese look very much like Koreans, and I very much doubt if there is a good way to sort them out. Koreans do have very prominent high cheekbones. That’s their Mongolian heritage as they pretty much came from Mongolia long ago. They along with the Japanese settled on the northeast coast of China in the Shandong area 7-8,000 years ago (believe it or not) and stayed there for many years. See recent excellent work by Martine Robeets on this.

The Koreans may have moved in from there 3-5,000 YBP, and Japanese invaded Japan in a huge wave 2,300 YBP. These people were called the Yayoi. The Yayoi are actually thought to have moved first from Shandong to Korea and then south from Korea to Japan a couple thousand years ago. But Northern Chinese and Mongolians are more or less the same thing.

The Japanese came from this same Mongolian stock, but they bred in so deeply with the Ainu that they definitely look different from Koreans. But they both also look quite similar, and it’s not easy to tell them apart either. In addition, there are a lot of mixed Japanese-Koreans in Japan. They’re almost a cliche.

Viets definitely look different from either Japanese or Koreans. They are also full of Chinese, but they are full of Cantonese Southern Chinese (“the barbarians” as the Northern Chinese refer to them), and Southern Chinese look a lot different from Northern Chinese.

Viets are a mixture of a more Austroloid type exemplified by the Montagnard tribesmen (look at a photo of them sometime). Actually the Montagnards are more like Australoids transitioning to Mongoloids or early SE Asians. Completed modern SE Asians are Mongoloids with some lingering traces of their Australoid heritage.

2,300 years ago, a huge wave of Southern Chinese conquerors spread through Vietnam and thoroughly bred in with the population. Nevertheless there was a Chinese minority in Vietnam in recent who tended to run the businesses (as usual). They were quite persecuted after the Communists took over, and most of them fled as boat people.

Australoids: The Ainu and the Earliest Amerindians and Caucasians

Peindish: If the Jomon arrived 15KYA, who were the inhabitants of Japan stretching back 30-40KYA?

It’s said this older population had haplogroup D and the newer Jomon group at around 15KYA had haplogroup C, but haplogroup is not a good indicator of race, since you can have a haplogroup of another part of the world and be 99.9

The Ainu have legends of “Koropokkur,” describing them as very short people who fished for food and lived under butterbur leaves. Either this is some Negrito-like population or it’s the Nivkhs who were pushed by the Jomonese further north into Sakhalin.

What do you think?

Yes, I always thought they were some strange sort of Northern Negritos.

I think the Jomon showed up 13-14,000 YBP.

I don’t know about the prehistory of the Nivkhi. Are they short?

There is some recent data connecting the Nivkhi with some of the earlier Native American populations. It’s thought that the early ones could have come by boat across the Alaska coast down the Western Canadian coast to the Western US coast. They have a petrified shit in a cave in Oregon that is older than 14,300 YBP. That’s older than Clovis, so that’s interesting right there. The Clovis barrier is gone. Let’s just hang it up.

Also, those early people who were in the Americas around 10-12,000 YBP looked something like Negritos or Australoids at least in facial features. There are some remnants in the far south of Chile – the Yaghnan – and there were also some extinct groups in Baja California that were very primitive.

Kennewick Man found in Washington State from 9,000 YBP looks like an Ainu or a Maori, or more specifically, a Moriori, the more archaic and Australoid or Melanesian people who were exterminated so cruelly by the Maori ~1830’s-1840’s.

The Ainu are also Australoid facially. They are sort of a Northern Australoid. Look closely at them. Look at how much they look like Aborigines. Kennewick Man was said to look “Caucasoid,” but that is an illusion, as some Aborigines can look vaguely like this.

In particular, a cross between an Australoid and an Asian can look remarkably “Caucasoid.” Check out some of the Taiwan Aborigines or the Ainu for that matter. The Ainu also were long thought to be Caucasoid, but their genes are Asian, and their faces are actually Australoid. If you go back 9,000 YBP, almost everyone in Asia appears Australoid.

I believe a skull from the Caucasus from 33,000 YBP looks somewhat Australoid. That’s the funny looking bald headed guy that everyone was laughing about, as people were calling him the first Caucasian.

But he was part of the first Caucasians, the Caucasians having arisen 40-45,000 YBP via crossbreeding between 1/3 African population settled in Asia and 2/3 very early Chinese population that may have been quite Australoid. So Caucasians were created by 1/3 Black person and 2/3 Asian person. Most White Supremacists probably don’t want to hear that though ha ha.

The Secret to China’s Success – The Capitalists Are Kept out of Politics

China isn’t really a capitalist country. Why not? Because the capitalists are not in politics. They don’t run the country. The market or the capitalists are a tool to develop the forces of production instead of a form of Politics as they are most everywhere else, where they manage to conveniently screw up most everything for the masses.

The Communist Party rules China and the Hell if they are going to let the capitalists take over their country and run it into the ground like they do everywhere else. Instead the market is simply a tool, and the capitalists are barred from politics as they ought to be.

Capitalists should just make stuff. They’re pretty good at that. Once they gain political power, they seem to blow up everything and turn it all to Hell. Want some evidence? Open your eyes and look around at the capitalist world. See?

In China the capitalists have to go along with the Communist Party’s plans. New labor laws? Suck it up, capitalists. New pollution controls? Better fix those smokestacks, capitalists. The capitalists don’t have any say in this because if you let them take over, they always vote to ruin labor and destroy all the environmental laws because that’s what the profit motive demands.

Capitalists in China have to follow the Party’s five year plans. They have to do what the government says, or orders, for that matter. If the capitalists defy the party and don’t do as they’re told, the Party will just go in and confiscate all their property.  They’ll steal all your stuff. So that’s good motivation to get along and go along. Then they will either nationalize it or turn it over to one of their friends who is a bit more obedient.

There is a Party committee that sits on the board of directors of all large corporations. Large corporations are frequently bought out and nationalized. The state must own a proportion of all foreign corporations that set up shop in China. Apple wants to set up a factory? Fine, but the government gets a piece of that.

The banking is almost all controlled by the state. This is how China among a few other countries weathered the bankster economic crash of 2008. The state owned the banks so China was not plugged into world capitalist finance.

Japan is similar. There are a few very large banks at the top of the economic pyramid, and they are owned by the state.

Like in Korea, economic decisions about the development of the country are made by teams made up of the government and corporations. Korea’s giant conglomerates are nearly state-owned in part.

The Russian government is similar. It either owns outright or owns 5

A number of China’s state corporations are among the largest companies on Earth. They are right there in the Forbes 100 or even in the Forbes 50. They are immensely profitable and they generate a tremendous amount of money for the state, which is then used to develop the country or distributed to the people in one way or another. What’s wrong with that?

The Chinese state spends a staggering amount of money developing their country.  They do things quite easily, quickly, and even cheaply there – such as developing deep water ports or high speed rail systems – that either take forever and cost a fortune in the US or are simply not done, as they are economically unfeasible.

For instance, the US has decided that high-speed rail is not economically feasible in the US. How is it economically feasible in China, Japan, and Europe then? That argument is senseless.

China is presently pouring vast amounts of money into the rural areas, as they have been neglected. A lot of rural people move to the cities to seek their fortune. A lot of them don’t make it. China allows them to keep their farms as insurance when they do this, so rural folks who don’t make it in the cities always have the fallback of moving back to their farms. Hey, at least they can eat and survive.

This is where having the state own all the land in China comes in. Since the state owns all the land, the rural farms can remain as a backup insurance policy for rural workers who migrate to the cities and don’t make it.

If land in China was privately owned, that backup would not be available, and Chinese cities would be teeming with awful slums made up of rural dwellers migrated to the city. This sad scene is typical all over the capitalist world. But maybe it’s not necessary.

As noted, all land in China is owned by the state. Every inch of it. This is important as the private ownership of land is one of the main reasons that the India – Pakistan – Nepal – Bangladesh South Asian region is such a shithole. The best single thing India could do would be to abolish the private ownership of land.

In China, you get to own your house but not the land it’s built on. Sure you can lease out state land, even for a long time, but you can’t own it. In Netherlands, similarly all land is owned by the state. It’s not a bad idea.

A vast amount of the Chinese economy – 4

The state owns the vast irrigation system that underpins the entire rural economy. If that were privatized, all Hell would break loose. Think about it. You can’t have private corporations running the irrigation networks. Hell, we don’t even have that in the US.

The state used to run small schools and even medical centers in most rural villages, although they are getting away from that. Education is free through the graduate level. This also helps free graduates from being mired in poverty in debt for years or decades after they graduate. They keep their money to spend in the economy instead having most of their money go via debt bondage to parasitical bankers who don’t create anything of real value anyway.

Most capitalist banks in the West are giant loan-sharking institutions or casinos in the sky. Speculation isn’t real investment. It’s like going to the casino. If everyone just goes to the casino, this is good for the economy how? This is what happens when all that’s left of your economy is the economic mirage called “finance.”

Similarly, China now covers almost all typical medical care that people need. The state pays 8

This is a black mark to me, but it’s still better than our for-profit medicine system that wastes incredible amounts of the productive forces on overhead and executive payouts.

Medicare’s overhead is

Once again, when the state covers your medical care, workers can not only relax, but they also don’t have to go into debt, bankruptcy, and poverty to  pay their medical bills. All of which helps whom? The vultures called for profit hospitals and insurance companies?

Why should sick people be financially ruined and living on the streets because they were so sick that they had to give every time they owned to some human shark in a corporate suit? In what possible world is this a just or even acceptable outcome?

Instead of being ruined, losing everything they own, and going homeless due to medical bills, with state health care, workers can keep working at their jobs and keep their money and their wealth as the state foots the doctor bills. So these workers remain productive and continue to spend money in the real economy. Win-win.

Alt Left: “The Strange Death of White Helmets Founder James Le Mesurier Leaves Many Questions to be Answered,” by Paul Antonopoulos

It’s been obvious for a long time now that this guy was a spy, we only didn’t know for whom, although British intelligence was always suggested. I doubt if the White Helmets never rescued any civilian casualties of Russian and Syrian attacks on rebel areas. These raids cause a lot of civilian casualties, and there is a lot of footage of White Helmets people rescuing civilians injured in bombardments.

On the other hand, it’s long been true that they only operate in Al Qaeda areas. It’s also long been suspected that they were behind the many chemical weapons false flag attacks in Syria. Recently, 40 members of the White Helmets testified in a court in the Netherlands that the Syrian government had not conducted any chemical weapons attacks in this war and that all of the so-called attacks were simply false flags, typically created by their organization, the White Helmets.

About this guy’s death. My understanding is that a fall from his second story balcony would not have killed him. He may have gotten some broken bones. Further, his injuries are not at all consistent with a fall from a balcony. His injuries also are not consistent with suicide.

It looks like he was murdered by persons unknown, possibly another intelligence agency, and his body was left under his balcony in order to make it look like he committed suicide by leaping off his balcony.

Precisely five days before he was apparently murdered, Russia released a statement saying that Mesurier was a long-time intelligence agent in the employ of the horrible British intelligence agency, the MI6. They’re as horrible as the CIA, if you are interested. Pure monsters. They have literally murdered innocent people in order to frame enemy countries with the killings. He was outed as a Western spy, and five days later, he turns up dead. Hmmm.

Despite the conjecture in this article that he was killed by Western intelligence agencies with whom he worked or allied with, I really don’t know at the moment who killed this guy, how or when. We may never know. Spy deaths are like that.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this guy. If you’re selling life insurance policies, I doubt if you would want to sell one to a spy. Spies tend to have a habit of turning up dead under very mysterious circumstances in homicides that are never solved.

Double agents in particular have an extremely short life expectancy. I don’t have much sympathy for double agents at all. To me they are like idiots who climb Everest or jump out of airplanes. They are deliberately engaging in extremely risky behavior with a significant chance of death, so why should I care if they die? I mean they played with fate and lost. Moral: don’t be so stupid.

The Strange Death of White Helmets Founder James Le Mesurier Leaves Many Questions to be Answered

By Paul Antonopoulos
Global Research, November 13, 2019

 

James Le Mesurier, the founder of the Al-Qaeda affiliated White Helmets, known as an “aid organization” in the West but known everywhere else for fabricating chemical weapon provocations in Syria, was found dead in Istanbul on Monday under dubious and confusing circumstances, and many question marks are being raised about his death. 

Journalist Ramazan Bursa claims that the suspicious death clearly demonstrates the White Helmets’ connection with intelligence organizations, particularly Britain’s MI6.

The connection between the M16 and the White Helmets is often overlooked by the Western media, but on Friday, the Russian Foreign Ministry made a startling revelation. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova revealed that

“The White Helmets co-founder, James Le Mesurier, is a former agent of Britain’s MI6 who has been spotted all around the world, including in the Balkans and the Middle East. His connections to terrorist groups were reported back during his mission in Kosovo.”

A few days later he was found dead…

Of course, Karen Pierce, the UK Permanent Representative to the UN, denied the Russian allegation, claiming that they were “categorically untrue. He was a British soldier,” before describing the mercenary as a “true hero.” The claim he is a “true hero” is a curious choice of words considering he has a long history of working alongside terrorists, as Zakharova correctly highlighted.

He served in the NATO war against Serbia to defend the ethnic-Albanian terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 2000, who have now turned Kosovo into a heroin ‘smugglers paradise,’ and a hub for human trafficking, organ harvesting, and arms trafficking in the attempt to create an anti-Russian “Greater Albania.” However, it was not in Kosovo where he achieved his fame, but rather his dubious work in Syria.

Not only did he establish and develop the White Helmets, but he secured significant funding from the UK, U.S., Turkish, German, Qatari, Dutch, Danish, and Japanese governments, and helped raise money on Indiegogo.

His deep connections to the British military and his expansive experience as a mercenary serving Gulf dictatorships made him the perfect figure to establish a “rescue group” aimed at legitimizing terrorists operating in Syria and to push for a regime-change intervention.

Along with the White Helmets’ ties to terrorist organizations and faking chemical weapon incidences, the group also has a role in the execution of civilians and using children in their propaganda campaigns. Mesurier was without a doubt a man with deep connections and deep pockets, with every resource available to him from international intelligence agencies and significant experience in supporting terrorists in conflict zones.

The argument that the White Helmets are not a civil defense team, especially as they never operated in government-held areas despite claiming to be neutral in the war, can easily be made.

Despite the constant colonial media claims that the White Helmets are a true civilian rescue organization without terrorist links, Syrian film producer Kareem Abeed was not allowed to attend the Academy Awards to support his movie about the White Helmets, “Last Men in Aleppo,” as his visa application was officially denied by the U.S. government as he was “found ineligible for a visa under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.”

The very fact that the U.S. found White Helmets members nominated for the Academy Awards to be a risk in the country shows that the White Helmets are just another classic example of Washington weaponizing terrorists to advance their own agenda, just as the KLA were used against Serbia or the mujaheddin that morphed into Al-Qaeda were used against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

Although the White Helmets played a pivotal role in the propaganda campaign against Syria from 2013 onward, they now have nothing to defend or any purpose to serve, as they only operate in areas that are undeniably controlled by Al-Qaeda affiliated groups and other radical elements, in a very, very small area of Syria. They can no longer portray themselves as an innocent organization that only helps civilians, as there is now endless evidence of their ties to terrorism, foreign intelligence agencies, and doctoring of footage.

If we consider that the founder of the White Helmets and the deceased in Istanbul is a former British intelligence officer, we can clearly see that the White Helmets are is a network of civil defense organizations in which British Intelligence is involved and is supported by other intelligence agencies. The dubious death of a former British intelligence member living in Istanbul with his family is thought-provoking and must raise serious questions.

It is also thought-provoking that this person is based in Istanbul. The death of Mesurier could have been reported as the death of a British citizen or the death of a former member of the British intelligence, however, Turkish media reported it as the death of the founder of the White Helmets.

In other words, the Turkish media seems to have tacitly admitted that White Helmets are not an innocent non-governmental organization. Of course, after Turkey’s invasion of Northern Syria, there were some changes in the Damascus-Ankara relationship. The West’s approach to the Turkish invasion of Northern Syria may have also played a role in changing the attitude towards the White Helmets.

A security source claimed that Mesurier had fallen from the balcony of his home office, with his death being treated as a suspected suicide, with a third person – a diplomat – claiming the circumstances around his death were unclear, according to The Sun.

This also comes as BBC journalist Mark Urban said in a series of now-deleted tweets that it would not “have been possible” to fall from Le Mesurier’s balcony, with him also Tweeting that “there’s a good deal of suspicion it may be murder by a state actor, but others suggest he may have taken his own life.”

Essentially, no one knows just yet whether it was murder, suicide, or an accident. This has not stopped the British media from alluding that there may be a connection between the “Russian smear campaign” made on Friday and his death on Monday.

However when we look at the way the incident took place, there is every suggestion that this incident was murder, given that there were cuts on his face, fractures on his feet, and that he was found dead on the street, according to Turkish media. The probability of murder becomes stronger.

The question then shifts to who might have done it? It is too early to say who did it, and anything can only be considered speculation, but the West does have a rich history of making their assets disappear when they are no longer needed.

The White Helmets no longer have a purpose to serve in Syria with the inevitable victory of government forces over the Western-backed terrorists. Rather, the danger the White Helmets pose is a full-scale revelation on how deep their ties with Western and Gulf intelligence agencies and terrorist organizations go. Although revelations are slowly beginning to emerge, Mesurier no doubt had a wealth of knowledge on many dirty secrets related to Syria and the imperialist war against it.

Alt Left: Fake News: Iran Attacked Two Tankers in the Gulf with Sea Mines

I am sure you heard about this nonsense. All of us were shocked when we heard about this because we didn’t believe that Iran would do something so insane. It shocked us to our bones. Turns out of course that Iran, being stable and sane, never did anything of the sort.

First we heard almost immediately that the ships were attacked by limpet mines, which are sea mines. Then photos mysteriously showed up showing a hole in one ship and a “limpet mine” stuck to the hull of the same ship on the opposite end of the ship.

The US claimed that this was evidence that Iran had attacked the tankers with sea mines. Next a grainy video showed up showing an Iranian boat that was said to be removing the “limpet mine” from the hull of the ship.

There were many problems with this analysis. First of all, no one but no one but no one ever bombs a ship with limpet mines above the surface of the hull.

Limpet mines are always placed below the hull underwater because that is the only way that they work. I believe that if you put the mine above the hull above water the mine doesn’t even work – people say it just pops out of its place on the ship instead of blowing up.

That is because limpet mines work on wave action. So only a retarded person would put a limpet mine above the hull line above water. Apparently Iranians are all retarded.

Next the video indeed showed an Iranian ship removing the object – supposedly the limpet mine – from the ship. However, this ship was a rescue ship that had come to rescue the people on the attacked ship. Why would the Iranians attack the ship and then rescue the people from the very ship that they had attacked? Who ever does that? No one, ever.

Next no rescue ship would ever remove a sea mine like that. There is only one man removing the mine. There is a standard protocol for removing sea mines. It involves several men operating at once and a variety of procedures meant to keep the mine from blowing up and killing the men. None of these procedures were being followed and any Iranian rescue ship would know to follow standard procedure when removing a sea mine.

It appears that the object was not a sea mine at all. Instead it was probably just some decoy that the US stuck on the ship.

Furthermore, the fact that Iran quickly came to rescue the men on the attacked ship implies that Iran didn’t attack the ship – someone else did. Who attacks a ship and then sends a rescue ship to save the men on the very ship that they just attacked? No one does that.

Next we have the testimony of the men on the ship. Two ships were attacked – one Norwegian and one Japanese. The Japanese ship was supposedly attacked at the very moment when the Japanese premier was in Iran discussing how Iran-Japan relations and trade could be improved.

Why on Earth would Iran attack a Japanese ship at the very moment when the Japanese leader was in Iran discussing improving ties? Makes no sense at all!

The Norwegian ship that was attacked was owned by a very wealthy man who is known as Iran’s best friend in Norway. His company conducts much of Norway’s trade with Iran and he has a very close relationship with the Iranian regime. Why would Iran attack the ship of their best friend in Norway? It makes no sense.

Next we get to the witnesses. We have no testimony from the men on the Norwegian ship,  but the men on the Japanese ship said that they saw “flying objects” flying towards their ship that flew towards the ship and then exploded when they hit the ship.

So they said that the weapons that hit the ship were flying objects or flying weapons of some sort. They observed these flying objects flying in towards the ship and then hitting the ship! Well there is your first hand testimony.

I have some news for you. Mines don’t fly. Land mines don’t fly. Sea mines or limpet mines don’t fly. No mines fly. The fact that the very witnesses to the attack said they were hit with flying objects means that at least that ship was not hit with limpet mines.

And this was the same ship that had the apparently fake limpet mine stuck to its hull that got removed by the Iranian rescue ship. The Japanese premier later stated that he did not think his ship was attacked by mines. Instead it was attacked by some sort of flying objects.

However, US experts kept popping out of the woodwork insisting that the damage was obviously done by limpet mines because that was the sort of damage that limpet mines do.

And more lying allies of the US, mostly the European poodles, were saying that the US was right and Iran bombed those ships with mines. All while the witnesses were saying that they were hit with flying objects! These experts seemed to be lying to me.

Intrigued, I looked up damage from sea mines, including limpet mines. Sea mine damage to a ship has a characteristic appearance that is broadly similar across all types of mines, including limpet mines. I also looked at limpet mine damage. One thing was painfully obvious. The available damage photos of the attacked ships looked nothing whatsoever like any sort of sea mine, limpet or otherwise.

A post on a Russian forum pointed to a video where a US ship was shot up as part of US Navy target practice. The are holes in the ship that the video says were caused by drone missiles, in this case Hellfire missiles. The drone missile damage looks precisely like the damage shown on the ship “attacked by Iranian mines.”

The witnesses said that the ship was hit by flying objects. The damage assessment looks more like a drone missile hit than anything else. A logical conclusion is that the ships were hit by drone missiles. But whose?

It just so happens that there was a US drone hovering right over both of the ships at the time that they were attacked. The presence of this drone is idiotically being used to explain away the Japanese eyewitnesses.

Apparently there was a drone overhead so this caused the eyewitnesses to mistake the drone overheard for flying objects that flew towards their ship, hit the ship, and exploded! US news articles were actually using this nonsense to explain away the eyewitness statements that the ships were hit by flying objects.

And at that very time, Iranian boats fired on the US drone overhead. The US made a big deal of this, screaming that Iran had attacked our drone. However, this  made me think. Suppose that US drone had fired missiles that hit those ships, part of a false flag attack to posit a sea mine attack and blame Iran?

It fit in perfectly with the flying objects and the damage assessment that looked like a drone missile hit. Not only that but there was a US drone conveniently right in that exact area at the time of the attack for no obvious reason at all.

The solution was simple. The US drone attacked both ships with drone missiles. The US then, or previously, placed stupid fake limpet mines idiotically above the hull on one of the ships.  The mine on the  ship was fake.  That was why the Iranian ship could remove it so easily with no harm. Iran never attacked those ships. That’s why they sent a rescue ship – because they were not the attacker!

No we come to the other part of the mystery – Iran firing on the US drone overhead. Consider this. Iran sees the US drone overhead fire drone missiles at both tankers. Iran was alarmed – remember they even sent a rescue ship – so alarmed that they fired on the attacking drone to protect the ships or retaliate against the drone for the attack.

It all fits together quite nicely, doesn’t it?

Of course the entire US media continues to lie and say that Iran bombed both of those tankers with limpet mines, even though we have just proven here that that did not happen.

Alt Left: 53 Admitted False Flag Attacks

It’s disgusting how the minute you say the phrase false flag, people grab their foreheads and start groaning. All false flags are automatically conspiracy theories and they’re all pathetic nonsense made up by the tinfoil hat crowd. Granted a lot of so-called false flags never happened and instead were actual attacks carried out by whoever claimed responsibility for them. This is particularly true with Islamist terrorist groups.

Their attacks often terribly brutal and aimed directly at civilians. Many of their attacks in the West have been called false flags, but none of them were. It has also been common for a long time to ascribe most of the worst Palestinian terrorist attacks to Israeli false flags.

The truth is that the Palestinians, like the Islamists, are quite depraved enough to do their own horrific terrorist attacks. Their attacks are depraved enough that Israel has no need to fake depraved attacks to frame the Palestinians.

But as you can see, false flags definitely occur. I never thought that the US government did these attacks very much, but we and the rest of the West (NATO) have been going on a wild false flag spree ever since NATO’s war on Russia started heating up.

It’s been one false flag after another and one attempt to blame Russia and pro-Russians for atrocities willfully committed by the other side. This is different from a false flag. In this case, Party A attacks the enemy, typically enemy civilians, or a shell goes astray and there’s an atrocity. 

Instead of admitting that they did it, they blame the enemy who they are fighting, usually for committing an atrocity against their own supporters, which of course makes no sense.

There were many such attacks like this in the Syrian Civil War when the Free Syrian Army committed massacre after massacre of villagers who supported Assad and then turned around and blamed Assad for each and every one of these crimes. 

As it turns out, Assad did not commit any of these civilian massacres because that’s just not his style. His forces don’t rampage into villages, even of rebel supporters, and slaughter civilians in brutal fashion one by one.

If they think a civilian needs to be dealt with, Assad’s forces simply arrest them and may well put them in a military prison, where they could well be tortured and mistreated until death or executed. I’m not saying Assad is a nice guy; it’s more that his style simply does not include savage massacres of entire villages or chemical weapons attacks for that matter.  When it comes to depravity, Assad has his own style.

I can’t believe that number of attacks falsely blamed on the enemy and out and out false flag and fake attacks that the US did in Ukraine and Syria. We seem to be entering into a new era of warfare where false flags are the normal ways to fight wars.

It’s appalling and terrifying because foolish Americans insist that these attacks never happen. By believing that they give their own government carte blanche to do as many false flags and false blaming of the enemy of allied attacks as they wish. And the government knows that in any fake blames or false flags the US or its allies pull off, they know that they can count on the support of every corporate media outlet in the US to go right along.

In fact, every mainstream media outlet in the West period is on board with any false blaming or false flags the West wishes to pull off. In that sense the entire media of the West is completely controlled by the states of the West, their militaries, state departments and intelligence services. It’s downright terrifying.

53 Admitted False Flag Attacks

By Washington’s Blog
Global Research, September 03, 2019
Washington’s Blog and Global Research 24 February

Relevant article selected from the GR archive, first published in February 2015.

Not Theory … Admitted Fact

There are many documented false flag attacks where a government carries out a terror attack … and then falsely blames its enemy for political purposes.

In the following 53 instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admitted to it, either orally or in writing:

(1) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931 and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the “Mukden Incident” or the “Manchurian Incident.”

The Tokyo International Military Tribunal (2) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that under orders from the chief of the Gestapo, he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles to justify the invasion of Poland.

(3) Nazi General Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering (4) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 while blaming the attack on Finland as a basis for launching the “Winter War” against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.

(5) The Russian Parliament, current Russian President Putin, and former Soviet leader Gorbachev all admit that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940 and falsely blame it on the Nazis.

(6) The British government admits that between 1946 and 1948 it bombed five ships carrying Jews attempting to flee the Holocaust to seek safety in Palestine, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the pseudo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings (and see this, this and this).

(7) Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this).

(8) The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.

(9) The Turkish Prime Minister (10) The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change.

(11-21) The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO with the help of the Pentagon and CIA carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.

As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” (and see this).

Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred. And watch this BBC special. They also allegedly carried out terror attacks in France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and other countries.

False flag attacks carried out pursuant to this program include by way of example only the murder of the Turkish Prime Minister (1960), bombings in Portugal (1966), the Piazza Fontana massacre in Italy (1969), terror attacks in Turkey (1971), the Peteano bombing in Italy (1972), shootings in Brescia, Italy and a bombing on an Italian train (1974), shootings in Istanbul, Turkey (1977), the Atocha massacre in Madrid, Spain (1977), the abduction and murder of the Italian Prime Minister (1978), the bombing of the Bologna railway station in Italy (1980), and shooting and killing 28 shoppers in Brabant county, Belgium (1985).

(22) In 1960, American Senator George Smathers suggested that the U.S. launch “a false attack made on Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to go in and [overthrow Castro].”

(23) Official State Department documents show that in 1961, the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. The plans were not carried out, but they were all discussed as serious proposals.

(24) As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes) and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba.

See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

(25) In 1963, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote a paper promoting attacks on nations within the Organization of American States such as Trinidad-Tobago or Jamaica and then falsely blaming them on Cuba.

(26) The U.S. Department of Defense even suggested covertly paying a person in the Castro government to attack the United States: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on Guantanamo.”

(27) The NSA admits that it lied about what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964… manipulating data to make it look like North Vietnamese boats fired on a U.S. ship so as to create a false justification for the Vietnam war.

(28) A U.S. Congressional committee admitted that as part of its “Cointelpro” campaign, the FBI had used many provocateurs in the 1950s through 1970s to carry out violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists.

(29) A (30) The German government admitted (and (31) A Mossad agent admits that in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddaffi’s compound in Tripoli, Libya, which broadcast fake terrorist trasmissions recorded by Mossad in order to frame Gaddaffi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter.

(32) The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council (33) An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, “French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit against Author”).

(34)    The United States Army’s 1994 publication Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces  updated in 2004 recommends employing terrorists and using false flag operations to destabilize leftist regimes in Latin America. False flag terrorist attacks were carried out in Latin America and other regions as part of the CIA’s “(35) An Indonesian fact-finding team investigated violent riots which occurred in 1998 and determined that “elements of the military had been involved in the riots, some of which were deliberately provoked.”

(36) Senior Russian military and intelligence officers admit that the KGB blew up Russian apartment buildings in 1999 and falsely blamed it on Chechens in order to justify an invasion of Chechnya (and see this report and this discussion).

(37) According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.

(38) The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings.

(39) As reported by BBC, the New York Times, and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that the government murdered seven innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police in order to join the “War on Terror.”

(40) Senior police officials in Genoa, Italy admitted that in July 2001 at the G8 summit in Genoa they planted two Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing of a police officer in order to justify a violent crackdown against protesters.

(41) The U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks as shown by a memo from the defense secretary as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq War.

Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime, that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties.

Top U.S. government officials now admit that the Iraq War was really launched for oil…not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction. Despite previous “lone wolf” claims, many U.S. government officials now say that 9/11 was state-sponsored terror; but Iraq was not the state which backed the hijackers. Many U.S. officials have alleged that 9/11 was a false flag operation by rogue elements of the U.S. government.  

(42) Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the White House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country.

(43) Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”

(44) United Press International reported in June 2005:

U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers.

Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

(45) Undercover Israeli soldiers admitted in 2005 to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on Palestinians as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protests by the Palestinians.

(46) Quebec police admitted that in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers (and see this).

(47) At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plainclothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence.

(48) Egyptian politicians admitted (and see this) that government employees looted priceless museum artifacts in 2011 to try to discredit the protesters.

(49) A Colombian army colonel has admitted that his unit murdered 57 civilians, then dressed them in uniforms and claimed they were rebels killed in combat.

(50) The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, says that the head of Saudi intelligence Prince Bandar recently admitted that the Saudi government controls “Chechen” terrorists.

(51) High-level American sources admitted that the Turkish government – a fellow NATO country – carried out the chemical weapons attacks blamed on the Syrian government, and high-ranking Turkish government admitted on tape plans to carry out attacks and blame it on the Syrian government.

(52) The former Ukrainian security chief admits that the sniper attacks which started the Ukrainian coup were carried out in order to frame others.

(53) Britain’s spy agency has admitted (and see this) that it carries out “digital false flag” attacks on targets, framing people by writing offensive or unlawful material … and blaming it on the target.

So Common…There’s a Name for It

“False flag terrorism” is defined as a government attacking its own people, then blaming others in order to justify going to war against the people it blames. Or as Wikipedia defines it:

False flag operations are covert operations conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed to appear as if they are being carried out by other entities.

The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one’s own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations and have been used in peace-time; for example, during Italy’s Strategy of Tension.

The use of the bully’s trick is so common that it was given a name hundreds of years ago. The term comes from the old days of wooden ships, when one ship would hang the flag of its enemy before attacking another ship. Because the enemy’s flag, instead of the flag of the real country of the attacking ship, was hung, it was called a “false flag” attack.

Indeed, this concept is so well-accepted that rules of engagement for naval, air and land warfare all prohibit false flag attacks.

Leaders Throughout History Have Acknowledged False Flags

Leaders throughout history have acknowledged the danger of false flags:

“A history of false flag attacks used to manipulate the minds of the people! In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death.”
– Adolph Hitler

“Why of course the people don’t want war… But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship…

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
– Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

“The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened.”
– Josef Stalin

The original source of this article is Washington’s Blog
Copyright © Washington’s Blog, Washington’s Blog and Global Research, 2019

Alt Left: The “Worthless Degree” Narrative Is a Rightwing Meme

People pushing the “worthless degree” narrative so popular nowadays might like to know that this is a rightwing meme.

Rightwingers absolutely hate university education period (or at least want to make it all private or nonprofit so only the rich could get a university education) and beyond that, they hate more than anything else the schools of Humanities which they regard as hotbeds of liberalism, Leftism, and Communism who brainwash the young.

Just pointing out that the liberals taking this point of view are pushing a rightwing meme. Not that that means it’s invalid, but to me it implies that it needs looking at.

I mentioned earlier that Japan was thinking of phasing out all Humanities degrees. Japanese are natural-born STEM nerds anyway, so I can see why they feel this way. This was actually a directive that was issued by the government in 2015.

Perhaps due to criticism, the government subsequently withdrew this policy and issued a statement that said in our modern era, Humanities degrees were absolutely beneficial, but not before ~2

Alt Left: About Those “Worthless Social Science Degrees”

The argument that social science degrees are absolutely worthless for getting a job in modern society has been coming up for decades, but it has grown louder in the last ten years.

Supposedly these degrees are absolutely useless in terms of finding a job, so they are a  waste of money. Further, they are a waste of society’s money.

This argument mostly comes from conservatives, but some liberals have taken it up too. I’d like to point out that the roots of this argument lie in laissez faire free market neoliberal capitalism. So all of you making this argument are in bed with Milton Friedman. I hope you’re happy.

This is so because the only degrees that are said to be worthwhile are those degrees that are useful in a sociopathic hyper-individualistic anything goes free market economy such as we are blighted with here in the US.

The only degrees that are worthwhile are those that will get Bill Gates,  Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos, Howard Schmidt, Jeffrey Epstein, Steve Jobs,  or other semi-sociopathic heartless maniac billionaires to hire you for whatever capitalist scam they are cooking up at the moment.

And everything else, everything that doesn’t allow you to be a cog in a lying, cheating, thieving corporate world, is completely and utterly useless. Because the Market is everything and everything is the Market.

In such a society it should not be surprising that conservatives, mostly conservative males, say that anything other than a math, science, tech, business or management degree is utterly worthless.

Japan is thinking of phasing out all of its social sciences in the next decade or two. There have been many calls to reduce or eliminate social science programs at US universities. These calls go right along with the total commodification of life that we are experiencing.

Furthermore, they display a contempt for knowledge and the scholarship needed to obtain it as a core value of human existence. Why are we here anyway? How about to learn? That would be one of my arguments. Not that most folks have any use for much learning, but the species as a whole does. It’s a value. No you can’t slap a dollar sticker on it and it often has little or no monetary value.  In modern society that means it is utterly worthless. Why? Because it doesn’t make a buck.

Alt Left: All That Glitters Is Not Capitalist: Various Types of Non-Capitalist Forms of Production That Work Well

Rahul:

I would argue that being pragmatic while being a communist is almost impossible. Communism doesn’t work, because humans are too greedy.

A mixture of a bunch of ideologies is probably the way to go.

If you are talking about hardcore Communism with the state running everything and no market or private enterprise as in the USSR, nobody wants to go back to that anyway. Even most Communists don’t want to go back to that.

But otherwise, you are just wrong. Most Communists nowadays see some sort of a role for a market. There are lots of ways to do this.

For instance, in Venezuela, various neighborhood groups and communities operate bread factories, farms, on and on. They sell the bread at a small reasonable profit to the community. The proceeds and profits are invested back into the enterprise and used to pay the salaries of the employees.

The farms and animal husbandry industries work along the same lines. A community will be organized as a commune. They will raise chickens for eggs or pigs or they will grow various crops.

They then sell the eggs, pigs, or crops to other communities for a reasonable profit. The proceeds and profits are invested back into the company, used to pay the salaries of the workers, and if there is anything left over, they are invested in the community itself – new sidewalks, new roads, a new health facility, water treatment, a community center, on and on.

The Venezuelan communes are considered to be a non-capitalist form of development.

Communists all around the world have supported this model. The Chinese Communists are operating a form of market socialism that utilizes a market mechanism. The Vietnamese Communists are doing the same. The Cuban Communists are doing something similar.

Most Communists also support the cooperative movement, where workers own the enterprise and compete against other firms, including capitalist firms. The enterprise either sinks or swims.

The proceeds and profits are best collected by a regional bank, which reinvests them in the enterprise, uses them to pay salaries, or even gives bonuses to the workers. So a very successful enterprise that made a lot of profits could end up having some workers who were making some good money if they were pocketing some of the profits.

When you give the workers the control over what to do with the money – whether to sink it back into the enterprise or to take it home as increased paychecks, workers tend to choose to take home the bigger checks. This is what happened with Yugoslavia’s otherwise very successful worker self-managed Communism.

The workers would not put enough money back into the firms to keep them going, and the firms would start to deteriorate to the point where they were no longer operative. So everyone was out of a job. But no worries as everyone got a bigger paycheck!

In the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque Country in Spain, a similar system has unfolded and has been successful for a long time now. There, the workers elect their own management, which is a great idea in my opinion. You would think that workers would elect management that let them slide and screw off, but they elect very good managers.

The decisions about what to do with the proceeds and profits – whether to sink them back into the enterprise or to take them home in higher worker wages – is left up to management and ultimately large regional banks.

These large regional banks are the ultimate owners of all of the Mondragon cooperatives. These are public banks so they are not run on the typical profit motive. They resemble more the customer-owned credit unions in the US which give much better customer service than the capitalist banks do.

I’m not even entirely sure that credit unions are a capitalist enterprise. How can you have a capitalist enterprise that is owned by the consumers of its service? That does not seem possible.

The banks tend to make the best decisions for the firm. Keep in mind that Mondragon cooperatives utilize a non-capitalist form of development.

The problem with Mondragon is that they have to compete against capitalist firms. So all of the cutthroat behaviors that capitalists engage in to reduce costs and maximize profits – exploitation of labor, shafting consumers, investors and the public at large – means that Mondragon is forced to some extent to lower their own costs however they can to keep pace with these firms.

So Mondragon is a non-capitalist system that is still privy to the logic of capitalism in which they are ensnared.

In North Korea in the far north of the country there is a lot of private gold mining going on now in new-found reserves. They are often just one man enterprises of small groups of men working together.

The state’s footprint up there is small, and the state has stepped aside and simply lets these miners mine whatever they want. They only ask for a 2

In North Korea and Cuba there are now farmer’s markets where farmers can bring their produce directly to farmer’s markets to sell to the public. These are generally not capitalist enterprises. These are just farmers selling the product of their labor to consumers (other workers) buying their crops. There’s no tendency to maximize profits, as the prices are set by the market.

The entire cooperative sector all around the world is a non-capitalist form of development. The workers actually own the firm so there is no exploitation of labor, which is the definition of capitalism. No exploitation, no capitalism.

In this way these cooperatives have gotten rid of the division between Labor and Capital which is the backbone of any capitalist system because capitalist systems work by marking up the products of workers’ labor and then adding onto it something called surplus value when is then pocketed by the capitalist as a profit.

So a worker producing a product that is paid say $20 in labor has his product taken by the owner of the firm, which then proceeds to mark up the worker’s labor cost to $25-30, and thereby make a profit. This is called the Labor Law of Value, and it has been proven to be the backbone of the capitalist system.

As you can see here, the worker is not getting the full value of the product he produced. He produced a product worth $25-30, and he only received $20 for it, with his owner taking the $5-10 surplus value and pocketing it as profit.

Independent contractors such as electricians, plumbers, painters, attorneys, physicians, accountants, etc. are not usually capitalists at all. Instead these are just workers – albeit highly paid workers – who are simply selling their labor time to  others, mostly workers, who purchase their labor time when they hire them or use their services.

Middlemen and traders who simply intervene between the producer and walnuts and the seller of say walnuts, adding on their profit, are not capitalists. Those are simply traders or merchants. They are not exploiting anyone. They can be thought of as a form of workers who act as go-betweens vis a vis producers and sellers, adding their small amount on as a fee for helping to get the two together.

Finance capital or people who buy and sell stocks are not usually capitalists. These are like people who trade in rare books, stamps, coins, precious metals, or anything else.

The stocks and bonds are like rare coins or precious metals. They simply try to buy them at a lower rate and sell them at a higher rate, which merchants have been doing forever even long before capitalism. They have no employees so they are not exploiting anyone.

Music groups and other performers, authors, artists, sculptors, etc. are mostly just workers who sell their labor time as performers or the product of their labor as books, paintings, sculpture, DVD’s, etc. Most of these people, even bands, do not hire employees.

Now granted the book publishers, record companies, galleries, etc. are marking up the labor time and labor products of these entertainment workers and taking the surplus value, hence they are capitalists.

A big rock music band can be thought of simply as performers (workers) who make a musical product and sell it to fans, mostly other workers, who enjoy their entertainment product so much they are willing to pay good money for it. So most bands, artists, authors, sculptors, etc. are not capitalists. They’re just workers for the most part marketing their labor time or the products of their labor time.

Now granted finance capital and speculative capital, while generally not capitalist, are nevertheless regarded as “parasitic” industries because they don’t produce anything.

They can be thought of as gigantic casinos in the sky (the stock market in particular can be seen this way). Speculative capital produces nothing and often has bad effects on society. Look at the wildly inflated housing markets on the US West Coast and in New York and Paris for example.

In China under what they call market socialism or socialism with Chinese characteristics, a Communist party cell sits on the board of directors of every large corporation. When corporations get a certain size the state usually takes them over in a sense. However, the managers have large leeway how to operate their company.

All private enterprises are underneath the state or the Communist Party. The CP sees the market or the private sector as a tool for the development of the productive forces. However, the capitalists are underneath the state. They have to do what the state says.

They have to adhere to 5-year plans. Yes, the 5-year plans that were said to be so devastating to the USSR and other Communist countries are working great in China.

The government, the party, and the private sector all work together on economic goals. In this way it is similar to the state capitalism of South Korea and Japan or even Nazi Germany.

That state capitalism is a non-capitalist form of development because the state works closely with the capitalists on economic goals which are supposed to serve the nation and not just the petty temporal demands of capital for maximal profits come Hell or high water, forget about consumers, workers, society, the environment or the nation.

Under state capitalism, the state controls the commanding heights of the economy. In Japan this boils down to a several huge banks which effectively run all economic development in Japan.

Nazi Germany was similar. Yes, you could have your corporation but you had to do what the state said, or they would just take you over and confiscate your firm. So the firms in Nazi Germany in effect all worked for the state.

In China, if firms do not follow guidelines and do as they are told, the state will simply go in and seize the firm, confiscating all of its assets. The state will then take over the firm or hand it over to  a more obedient capitalist. You see here that the state rules capital. Capital has to do what the state says.

Here in the US, the market is not a tool for the development of productive forces. Instead it is a form of politics. In other words, the market or the corporations basically run society. The market is over the state. The state has to do what the corporations demand, or the corporations will get rid of the state and put in a new state.

The state obeys the demands of capital and not the other way around. Capital, the market, and the corporations are our true rulers in the US. The government simply acts as if they are employees of capital. The state does not rule us except to the extent that it carries out ruling directives that Capital gives to the state to enforce on the people.

In China state firms are often run by local municipalities. So if we had their system,  say Los Angeles and San Fransisco might both have steel mills. These mills would then compete against each other and against private firms both domestic and foreign. It’s sink or swim for all public firms in China.

Firms that are more successful see their incomes rise and more workers move to those cities to be part of those enterprises.

The workers still officially own the enterprises, but the city takes 9

Keep in mind that this can be a good paycheck, as cities running successful firms pay their workers more.

There are large cities in Southern China with 700,000 workers where 1/3 of the population works for one of the many enterprises that the city runs. The residents of the city, who are also workers for the city, have a say in how these firms are run.

For instance, they try to fight corruption, since it hurts the firms, which hurts the city, which hurts them in the end. So the firms of the city in a sense are under the control of the people who live and work in there in the sense that their input is used to make decisions about how to run the firms.

A Look at the Chinese Model of Communism – Market Socialism

You are starting to see a lot of articles in the capitalist press bashing China now, saying their economy is not as good as they say, that it cannot be sustained, and that it is headed for crash. They base this on a comparison to other Communist countries, but those economies fell behind far before China’s did. China has sustained Communism under various forms, including presently under market socialism, for 70 years now. That’s as long as the Soviet Union, and the Soviets started stagnating a long time before that. China is an example of a smashing success for a Communist country, and the capitalist press is freaking out because that shows that their anti-Communist propaganda has been crap for all of these years. Incidentally, Deng Xiaoping emphatically stated that he was a Communist. Deng’s idea was to create “a rich Communist country.”. In an interview in 2005, a top party official was asked if China was still committed to spreading Communism all over the world. “Of course,” the minister beamed. “That is the purpose of the Communist party (CCP).” Incidentally, China still has 5-year plans and the whole economy is planned. The business sector has to go along with the plan, and if you do not go along with it, they can confiscate your business. A party committee sits on the board of all large corporations. The government owns every inch of land in China. The state invests an incredible amount in the economy and also overseas where it makes vast investments. This is because some Chinese government companies are very profitable. A number of Chinese government companies are on the list of largest companies in the world. Capitalists in the US openly complain that they cannot compete with Communist Chinese government  corporations, crying that they get subsidies so it’s not fair. So here we have US corporations openly admitting that they can’t compete with Chinese government Communist state-owned companies. 4 Much of the state sector is owned by small municipalities, and this works very well. Further, cities compete against each other. For instance, City A’s steel mill will compete against City B’s steel mill, and both will compete against a private sector steel mill, if there is one. Successful enterprises bring in a lot of money to the city, which it uses to upgrade the city, which results in more workers moving there, which grows the economy more with more workers and more demand. There are also still a number of pure Maoist villages in China that are run completely on a Maoist line. Everything is done as it was right out of the Mao era. I understand that they do very well, and there is a huge waiting list to move to those villages. I did a lot of research on China recently, and the party is literally everywhere you look every time you turn around. The party itself still runs many enterprises all over the country, especially in the rural areas. There are party officials in every village and city, and they take a very active role in developing the municipality in every way, including culturally. They have an ear to the ground and are typically very popular in the villages and cities. Party officials lobby the state to try to solve any urgent problem in the area. The government is always spending a lot of money all over China on public works, on fixing various environmental problems, or on really any societal problem or issue you can think of. This of course includes economic development, which tends to be state-led. I read synopses of many dissertations coming out of Chinese universities, and most were on how to deal with some particular societal problem or issue. Many others dealt with technology and industry. So a lot of the research on technology and industry that is driving economic development is coming straight out of state universities. Instead of leaving it up to the private sector to deal with the problems in society, create public works, and even plan the economy, the government does all of that. Incidentally, the way the US leaves the planning of the economy, such as it is, up to the private sector is insane. All sensible economic planning in any nation will always be done by the state with a view towards allowing the country to prosper. Capitalists have no interest in whether the country profits or not, so they engage in no economic planning at all. Leaving economic planning up to the whims of the capitalists is economic malpractice. There are 1,000 protests every day in China. Yes, there is corruption and there are government abuses, but if protests last long enough, the party usually gets alarmed and tries to do something about the problem because they don’t want serious unrest. This is party that does everything it can to serve the people and try to remain popular with citizens by giving them as much as they can and doing as much for them as possible. The party spends every single day of its rule literally trying to buy off unrest and keep its citizens satisfied. It’s illegal to be homeless in China. If you end up homeless in China, they will try to put you in a homeless shelter, or if they cannot do that, they will send you back to your village because most homeless are rural migrants who moved to the city. The state is now investing a vast amount of money in the rural areas because these places have been neglected for a long time. The state still wants to own all the land because they want to keep the rural areas as a secure base where rural migrants to the city can always return if they fail in the city. How can a government in which 4 The state spends an unbelievable amount of money on public works all over the country all the time. Many projects that in the US have “conclusively proven” to be too costly to be implemented have been done in China quickly and easily. And China’s per capita income in less than 1 Most ethnic minorities are still allowed to support their culture, and in most cases they are allowed to have education in their native language. In these areas, the native language is co-official with Mandarin. In recent years, the Chinese government has begun to support a lot of the Chinese dialects, of which there are over 2,000 main ones, many of which are actually separate languages. Cantonese is still an official language in Hong Kong, and it is widely used in Guangdong. The other major Chinese languages or macrolanguages still have millions of tens of millions of speakers. Lately the Chinese government is telling people they can preserve their dialect as long as they also speak Mandarin. Many schools now have classes in the local dialect. Cheap medical insurance is available and it covers 8 This is a serious problem but it is much better than earlier in the Deng Era when millions were dying from lack of health care. However, the state still need to cover everyone. They got away from universal coverage  when they moved away from Maoism early in the Deng era. In addition, tens of thousands of schools, many of which were built during the Cultural Revolution, were closed early in the Deng era. The introduction of a market had a lot of problems in the early days. The capitalist press was cheering wildly as thousands of schools were closed all over China, medical care was cut off from or reduced for hundreds of millions of people, while millions of Chinese died from lack of medical care. This was all cause for celebration! Isn’t capitalism wonderful? What’s millions of humans dying from lack of health care as long as a few rich people can buy ridiculously expensive, useless items that they don’t even need? A recent good survey done by a Western polling firm found that 8 The economic model of China is called Market Socialism and a lot of modern day Leftists and even Communists support it and agree that this is the way forward for the left and Communist movement. Like all words, the word Communism has no inherent meaning. It means whatever people who use it say it means. So the definition of Communism can clearly change with the times as Communists update their definitions of what the word means. China cannot be called capitalist in any way. Their model is far more socialist than anything in any European social democracy. It also goes far beyond the US in the New Deal and of course beyond beyond the social liberalism and its more left analogue in Canada, not to mention beyond social democracy in Australia or New Zealand. Interestingly, Japan is not a capitalist country. They don’t have neoliberalism. That country does not operate on the capitalist mode of development. Instead the resemblance is, I hate to say, to Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany also did not have a capitalist mode of development. I’m not sure what you call it, but it’s not capitalism. For instance, in Japan, the commanding heights of the economy, including almost all of the banks, is owned by the state. The state still plans the economy. They plan the economy together with the business community and the state allocates a lot of funds and loans to areas of the economy it wishes to develop. There is probably a similar model in South Korea, which also is not capitalist and instead operates on a series of monopolies that are owned currently by large corporations and the government. The South Korean economy is also planned, and the plan is worked out by the government and the business sector working together.

NATO, the WTO, and the Prospects for Resistance to US-EU Militarized Economic Hegemony (the Axis of Resistance)

Interesting comment from a reader.

Thinking Mouse: But the enemies of NATO are corrupt crooks at worst and non-pragmatic idealists at worst. I think historical materialism influences morality too, we don’t posses our beliefs, but our beliefs posses us, and beliefs live upon the technology of an certain mode of production. On a positive note, the world does seem to become more multipolar with the emergence of China, Turkey, Japan, Russia, India and large parts of Africa. I don’t think these nations will get Independence, but just more fair deals with America thanks to their ability to defend themselves. Eventually when technology and infrastructure spread across the world, will the proletariat take their fare share from the petit and normal bourgeoisie! Africa might have large riots about tax evasion and the WTO´s forced laissez faire in 20-40 years, or maybe anti corruption will be more gradual.

First of all, I would like to thank the comrade for his excellent comment. It is smart and informed comments like these that make this site so great. Who are the enemies of NATO? Venezuela, Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Syria, Iran? Anybody else? Who cares if they are corrupt? Nations have a right to self-determination. Anyway, a lot of NATO allies and even members are corrupt and even murderous or genocidal.

“China, Turkey, Japan, Russia, India and large parts of Africa”

Exactly. This is why Russia is so important. China is not allied with NATO at all. Isn’t Japan a de facto NATO ally or member? And isn’t India a NATO ally? Turkey is a NATO member that is now on the outs with the rest of the alliance. It’s still the Sick Man of Europe after all these centuries. I agree a lot of Europe seems to be not actively allied with NATO. What about Egypt and Sudan? Haven’t they signed on to the anti-Iran bullshit?

“Eventually when technology and infrastructure spread across the world, will the proletariat take their fare share from the petit and normal bourgeoisie!”

We can only hope, comrade! Or barring that, at least dream. Instead of ruling society, I think proletarians should aim for something a lot lower – simply getting something more like their fair share in society.

Africa might have large riots about tax evasion and the WTO´s forced laissez faire in 20-40 years, or maybe anti corruption will be more gradual.

Corruption is endemic in all of Black Africa, is it not? Tax evasion? You mean African elites do not pay their fair share? How long has the WTO been enforcing neoliberalism in Africa? I thought only the IMF could do that. Why would the riots be 30 years off instead of sooner?

Why Do Some Countries Lack a Class Conscious Working Class?

John Engelman: Contrary to what Karl Marx said, for most people most of the time loyalties of nation, race and ethnicity are stronger than loyalties of class. The working class in the United States has always been more diverse than the working class in European countries. It is becoming more diverse with the influx of non whites.

To get class consciousness you really need a homogeneous working class. It helps if the working class is ethnically distinct from the upper class. In Scotland the upper class is English, or Anglicized Scottish. That is to say Scottish, but educated in England, and often speaking with English accents. The clear majority of Scots vote for the British Labour Party. English workers are more likely to vote for the British Conservative Party. The argument is circular in a sense because as you look around the world, generally what you see in most cases is an ethnically homogenous working class. Would you describe the working classes of Latin America as homogeneous or diverse? They seem to be a mixture of White, Indian and Black and the mestizo, mulatto and Zambo mixtures, correct? Yet the diverse working classes down there have high working class consciousness despite their diverse nature. Aren’t North African and Gulf countries fairly mixed between Blacks and Arabs? Certainly in Arabia, lands with diverse working classes of Kurds, Arabs and Iranian working classes are all very left. I believe Sri Lanka even with the vicious Tamil versus Sinhalese war, the diverse working class is leftwing. In Burma the working class is very left although there have been wild ethnic wars sputtering on for decades. In Russia and other nations of the former USSR, there are many ethnic minorities, but the workers are still working class. A recent exception is Ukraine where workers have gone radical Right. The former Yugoslavia is still very leftwing even after all of the ethnic conflict and even slaughter of past years. Spain’s working class is very radical despite an armed conflict in the Basque region and separatists in Catalonia. The different religions hate each other in North Ireland, but the Scottish Protestant workers are as class conscious as the Irish Catholic ones. Switzerland is divided between three ethnic groups – French, Germans, and Italians – yet it is a very leftwing country. The extreme tribalism in Africa has not prevented the working classes from being class conscious. Is the working class of England voting Tory yet? Or do you just mean that they are more likely to vote Tory than the Scots are? Most workers in Europe, Arabia, North Africa, Africa, the former USSR, China, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Japan, South Korea, Nepal are the same ethnicity as the ruling classes of those places, yet workers have a high degree of class consciousness in all of those places. The places where working class consciousness has been harder to develop were those that had a Chinese ruling class as in Philippines and Indonesia. I think we need to come up with some better theories about the poor class consciousness of the US working class. If you are looking for examples elsewhere, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, Australia, the Baltics and Colombia are places with quite poor working class consciousness. In Australia it is recent as US style conservatism is imported. A similar trend is underway in Canada and has been since Thatcher in the UK. But the UK is in nearly a revolutionary situation. A lot of the working classes are militant and radicalized, while a lot of the country has at the same time gone Tory. When Thatcher died, there were anti-rich riots in housing estates across the land. Thatcher was burned in effigy in the streets. Can you imagine that happening in the US? The recent riots in the UK also had a class undercurrent. I was dating a British woman at the time, and she told me that local storeowners who treated the community well were spared by rioters. Rioters focused on stores selling upscale goods to the rich. Many corporate outlets were also smashed. She told me that a number of those outlets had a reputation for not paying taxes to the UK by hiding money offshore. She said the rioters knew who those companies were, and they were brutally singled out. Many outlets were burned to the ground. Can you imagine heavily Black rioters in the US having class consciousness like that? The Baltics are a case of entire nations full of complete idiots who hate Communism so much that they went into an extreme overreaction against Communism and turned against anything socialist, left, liberal or mildly progressive. Fascist heroes including many Nazis with a lot of Jewish blood on their hands were celebrated. Communist parties were outlawed, and Russian minorities were viciously maltreated. Radical rightwingers were elected in all of these lands, and Chicago Boys Friedmanite experiments were undertaken. The results were predictable. In the recent economic crash, the most neoliberal European countries were the most devastated of all. Estonia was eviscerated, and Latvia was almost wiped off the map. 1/3 of the Latvian population left the country, including almost all of the educated people. The Philippines and Indonesian cases are up for discussion, but these are Latin American situations of a ruling class of a different ethnicity than the working classes holding forth brutally and anti-democratically over the people. In addition, the workers have little consciousness. Taiwan has a similar legacy where extreme hatred of Communism resulted in being ruled by reactionary fascist anti-Communists for decades. There is a nascent Left now, but it has little power yet. The wealth of the country seems to have gotten in the way of working class consciousness. Probably the extreme anti-Communism helped too, as any working class movement could be quickly portrayed as Communist.

Japanese Would Rather Freeze than Be Impolite

In Japan, you leave a door open, and after a bit, people will start saying things like, “My, it certainly is cold in here, isn’t it?…Why is it so cold?…etc.” They may look at you pointedly when they say this. You are supposed to get the hint and go look at the door and figure out if you left it open or not.  They are so damn polite that they would rather sit in the cold than ask you to close the door!

What Is Capitalism? What is Socialism? A Look at Some Noncapitalist Modes of Development

Mayur: I am all against uninhibited and all pervasive capitalism. Of course,the government enterprises should have an active role to play in the economy which should, however, vary from time to time. All the citizens should have access to the barest essentials, but strictly on need basis. Besides, I am all for giving teeth to the working class. But communism, in my opinion, is a bit unnerving. In the societies which are quite addicted to liberty, people will find it unbearable to have the government’s boot on their throat everywhere,all the time. Capitalism existing side by side with socialism, that’s what I advocate. Wealth distribution and wealth creation both are important. There has to be a good incentive to create wealth, and, the economic inequalities have to be made tolerable. Enterprise, prosperity, and, the general well being of the masses. Something for everybody.

Yes this is what I want as a socialist. To me socialism just means anything less than totally unregulated capitalism. Socialists are people who are willing to limit the profits of the capitalists. Of course capitalists are people who believe in no limits their profits.So anyone who believes in limiting the profits of capital is anti-capitalist in a sense. Those people who want to let a market exist but to limit the profits of capital are called socialists. Socialists also believe in redistribution. This means taking or even stealing money from the rich to give to the middle classes, working classes and the poor. This is antithetical to all models of capitalism. All models of capitalism call that theft. Really what I am talking about here is social democracy. Also, you can have workers running enterprises for themselves and keeping the profits. This is socialism to me. Socialism to me is compatible for the profit motive. Capitalism to me is exploitation. No exploitation, no capitalism. Just because someone makes a profit, they are not necessarily capitalists. One man businesses are not capitalist. This is simply a worker selling his labor power on the labor market to other workers. Labor markets are compatible with socialism as is single proprietorships. The Cooperative Mode is a noncapitalist mode. Actually the Japanese model, which is similar to the economics of Nazi Germany or National Socialism, is also a noncapitalist model. My credit union is owned by the its consumers. That is a noncapitalist mode of development. Many nonprofits do extremely well and hire many workers. That is a noncapitalist mode of development. This thing that some call State Capitalism is actually a noncapitalist mode of development. Some call Russia State Capitalism. The Chinese model is also a noncapitalist mode of development. This has also been called a form of State Capitalism. City and town operated businesses can often be run very well especially if they compete against other cities and towns. This is the Chinese model. This is a noncapitalist mode of development.

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