Interview with CPI (Maoist) Spokesperson Gopalji on the Current State of the Revolution in India

Great interview with an Indian Maoist spokesperson from the Monthly Review. The interviewer is hostile, as you might expect. The talk took place in Jharkand. We don’t hear much about Jharkand these days, but lately the Maoists have seriously overrun almost the entire state. The lower half of Bihar to the north is also seriously overrun as is the far east of West Bengal.

I believe that the situation in Jharkand is different from Chattisargh. Chattisargh is almost all adivasi tribals, but I think there are more Dalits involved in Jharkand – that is, it’s not a totally adivasi rebellion.

The spokesman answers a lot of good questions.

No, they are not opposed to mining and industrial development, only such that harms the interests of the people.

In the Maoist army, cadre of all different castes sit down at the same table and eat together. You won’t fight that scene in many other places in India. That right there is an excellent blow against caste. The spokesman actually mentioned caste and Dalits quite a bit, probably because of the dynamics of Jharkand. That’s a good thing, because they have been criticized by Dalit groups for ignoring the caste question.

The Maoists have their work seriously cut out for them. They need to expand a lot, and this Green Hunt offensive is a great opportunity. They need to move into urban areas from small towns to cities. They need to establish a foothold in the universities among professors and students, and also in the K-12 public schools. Making inroads with urban workers and slum dwellers is a must. Also, they need to move out of Eastern India and into the center and west of the country. But organization will be a lot more difficult in the West in Punjab, Gujarat and Rajasthan.

This interview answers a lot of questions about the Maoists and counters a lot of state propaganda. It’s long at 52 pages, but if I could get through it, than you can too.

In this wide-ranging interview, Gopalji discusses many important issues including: The development of Revolutionary People’s Committees and the Maoists’ efforts to establish fully liberated base areas; the agriculture, education and health projects the Maoists have built; how they conduct military operations to avoid harm to local people; Operation Green Hunt and moves towards a fascist police state; the challenge of developing the revolutionary movement in the plains and among the working class and petty bourgeoisie in the cities; how the Maoists plan to defeat the powerful Indian military and state; and what a New Democratic state would look like in India.

Interview with Gopalji, Spokesperson of the Special Area Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in a Forest in Jharkhand, Eastern India

by Alpa Shah

Communism in the rest of the world seems to have collapsed. What hope do you have of achieving a socialist state in India?

The claim that there is no hope for socialism and communism, that they are dead, is mere propaganda unleashed by the imperialists and the apologists of capitalism. The 20th century saw the first round of revolutions led by the working classes and the toiling masses of the communist parties in various parts of the world – the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Revolution in Vietnam and many more. The 21st century will see a new wave of revolutions led by communist parties such as ours in India.

Massive socio-economic and political transformation takes time. The bourgeoisie took at least 400 years to achieve victory over feudalism and even then they entered into unholy alliances with the feudals in order to fight the working classes. These alliances are still prevalent today in many countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America in order to stop the revolutions of the toiling masses led by the communist parties.

After the Great Depression II, the recent economic crisis, there are very few takers of the bourgeois philosophy TINA, ‘There is No Alternative,’ to capitalism. Many intellectuals, many people in the developed countries, in the capitalist countries, have turned to Marx’s Das Kapital. Recent developments in the world have proved the theory of Marx, the invincibility of Marxism and the inevitability of socialism and communism.

Only socialism and communism can eradicate hunger, poverty and inequality and solve problems, such as that of climate change, which our planet is facing. In India we are trying to achieve a New Democratic Revolution as part of the world’s socialist revolutions.

What stage are you at in the Indian revolution?

In general we are in the phase of guerrilla warfare. This means that the armed struggle against the state is the principal form of struggle and armed organization is the principal form of organization.

In some places, such as in Dandakaranya and in some parts of Jharkhand, we have formed Revolutionary People’s Committees (RPC’s), which are the organs of alternative people’s power. If this continues, we will be able to build base areas.

Base areas are places where the enemy, the ruling classes (that is the Indian big-bourgeoisie and the landlords) do not have any organ of power – any military, any police force, or any administrative apparatus – and where people develop their own organs of power, their own army and their own administrative apparatus to implement economic policies of the people by the people’s government. Our immediate target is to build base areas in certain pockets of our country.

What are the strategies you are using to achieve a base area?

Our guiding ideology is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Our strategy is ‘protracted people’s war’. Comrade Mao taught us that the poor nations, the nations where semi-colonial, semi-feudal systems are in existence, should take the path of protracted people’s war – making bases in the countryside and then encircling the towns from the countryside.

This is the strategy taken by the communist party here in India and it is the strategy taken by Maoists in semi-colonial, semi-feudal countries all over the world. In India, there are certain changes; it is not exactly similar to pre-revolution China. So we have made certain changes in our tactics to suit the changes in our concrete conditions.

What are the main differences between the conditions that existed at the time of the protracted people’s war in China and the conditions in India now?

Internationally we are operating in a world where there is no socialist country or bases to seek help from. After the WWII, various national liberation struggles forced the imperialists to renounce the old form of direct colonial rule. So they resorted to neocolonial forms of exploitation. Internally, India now has a centralized and militarized state that has reached the remotest parts of the country. Transport and communications are far more developed. Chieftains who had their own armies dominated the Chinese countryside.

In India we don’t have such a situation. The loathsome caste hierarchy with a strict Brahminical order is the backbone of Indian feudalism and there is uneven development in every aspect of the socio-economic and cultural realms. The Indian ruling classes ruled this country for over 60 years in a so-called ‘democratic’ framework. India has a much bigger urban petty bourgeois class and a huge working class force.

It is a county of numerous nationalities at varying degrees of development. India has a long history of revisionist practice that still has considerable influence over the toiling masses and these revisionists have proved themselves an apologist of this reactionary rule.

There are also big differences in the process of building the army and the base areas. In China they already had a base area and an army. Even before the formation of the Communist Party, the Kuomintang was leading a bourgeois democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism. We had neither a base area nor an army when we began. We started with a small squad and have been able to form a People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army.

So our struggle will be longer and different. Additionally, we have vast plain areas that need a somewhat different treatment than hilly and forested regions. The importance of urban work and the need for organizing the working class is greater in our country. Apart from organizing a strategic united front of the four classes, we are also making a special effort to organize adivasis, dalits, women, minorities and various nationalities.

The Indian bourgeoisie exists in some form even in remote parts of India. We see the effects of capitalism in all the nooks and crannies of remote villages here – people who want motorbikes, mobile phones, notions of private property, individualism. What hope do you have of creating an alternative set of values in the world?

The people know that our party is fighting for an India structured around principles of equality. We want an India where individuals cannot amass capital and private property while simultaneously driving large sections of the society into poverty. We are here to make a corruption-free India where corruption, dishonesty and lies have no place; and where honesty, labour and truth are rewarded.

They also know that we are fighting against discrimination based on gender, caste, religion and other sectarian identities. For instance we encourage inter-caste marriages. We want a society where no one is bigger or greater on the basis of his or her birth.

While the effects of capitalism and its affiliated values are certainly in the rural countryside, a vast section of the society is against their corrupting and deteriorating effects. By and large the peasants and the workers support the values that we are fighting for. They participate in the struggles, based on these values, that our party organizes. They are fond of our cultural troops, read magazines and listen to the audio-cassettes and the CD’s that we release.

Our supporters also appreciate and promote the values that are perpetuated within the party. For instance, caste hierarchy has no place in our community. People from different castes eat from the same plate amongst our cadres: a concept that is generally unthinkable for many people outside our party.

Women are treated equally to men and there is no division of labour based on gender roles within the party. Our cadres are not paid a salary; they live a simple life that meets basic needs without unnecessary luxuries. They appreciate the values and visions of living that are being created within the party and are here to promote them beyond the party. There is much hope that these values will spread like fire across the Indian countryside, despite the efforts to trample them out by the Indian big bourgeoisie, because our supporters are increasing on a daily basis.

Why are you boycotting elections in your strongholds?

The Indian parliament and constitution actually represent the big bourgeoisie class and the big landlord class – not the people, not the toiling masses or the middle classes of India. So for any basic change, if you want to bring any basic change in the lives of the ordinary masses, you must first bring a new constitution and a parliament based on that new constitution.

So any action like participation in elections will actually strengthen the same reactionary parliament that is causing havoc, which is causing tragedy to the lives of the ordinary people. That is why we call upon people to boycott the elections. They must boycott the parliament itself that is reactionary and anti-people.

India is often declared one of the world’s largest democracies. Clearly you disagree?

India is not even a bourgeois democracy. It is actually a semi-colonial and semi-feudal state. The vast majority of people in India do not have any democratic rights. The transfer of power from the British in 1947 went into the hands of the comprador Indian bourgeoisie and the big landlords – the tested servants of the colonialists. In fact these two classes served the British imperialists in pre-independence British India.

The vast majority of the people did not get any rights. The new government talked of land reform but in practice they did not give land to the actual cultivators. People did not acquire equal opportunities in the case of jobs, or in access to health and educational facilities. Corruption has become a way of life in India. Now crores of people are dying of hunger and diseases.

People are not allowed to speak openly and to organize, although they have written provision for so many things in their constitution. In fact the constitution carried majority of acts from colonial rule and has been prepared under their instructions. How can a bureaucracy, which was serving colonialism till yesterday, become democratic, pro-people and patriotic overnight?

So this claim of independence of 1947 is actually not for large sections of the Indian people who achieved no democratic rights. Moreover, today the Indian parliament obeys the dictates of the WTO and the World Bank. It is actually carrying out the instructions of US imperialism – the chieftain of world imperialism.

The Indian ruling classes claim that India is a federal and secular republic. But how federal are they? The Kashmiri people are fighting for the implementation of the provision of the plebiscite for a separate Kashmir and the people of the Northeast are fighting for their cause, for their own nations.

Observe how brutally the Indian government is treating them. Analyze the center-state relations. They claim that the provincial governments have so many powers. But actually the power is centered in Delhi and center-state relations are very feudal. The central government is least interested in decentralizing power to the state governments. When capital is concentrated in the hands of the comprador big bourgeoisie, backed by imperialists, how can you expect the decentralization of power?

As far as the claim of being a secular country is concerned, you have seen the state initiated and promoted massacres of the minorities over the years. Their claims that India is a democratic, federal and a secular republic are a big farce.

What does democracy mean for you?

Our immediate aim is to achieve a New Democratic Revolution. In a New Democratic India, power will be in the hands of a four-class alliance – a strategic united front where no one class is in power – the workers, the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie.

This new state will liberate the peasants from the clutches of feudalism. It will liberate national capital from finance and comprador capital, confiscate finance and big capital and assets, and write off the foreign loans. It will seize the surplus land from the landowners and distribute it among the landless and poor peasants. It will eradicate each and every instance of imperialism and feudalism in the realm of economy, culture and politics.

The New Democratic Revolution will thus bring a truly federal and secular democratic republic of India that will give the oppressed nationalities a right to self-determination and even to secede. That India will not favour any religion: religion will be a private affair. It will bring an India in which people have not only equal opportunities in jobs, medical and educational facilities but also the objective conditions for everyone to avail of them.

The united front of the four-class alliance will be organized under a decentralized organ of power of the people called Revolutionary People’s Committees (RPC’s). RPC’s will represent the majority of the people of India and will be elected by a truly representative body of the people. In fact in the countryside where our struggle is currently strong, particularly in Dandakaranya and Jharkhand, this united front, whatever classes we have in the villages, are already being organized under Revolutionary People’s Committees (RPC’s).

In Dandakaranya we have RPC’s at a village level, at a block level, and in one or two places at the district level too. These are in rudimentary form at present, they are just emerging.

In the last elections you blew up schools and hospitals in the areas where you have a strong presence. Why?

In our areas of struggle, the state’s paramilitary forces are establishing police camps in the schools. You will find hundreds of schools in the struggling areas where the enemy forces have built up camps. We blow up only those schools where the police regularly establish military camps for their combing operations – not all the schools.

The case of blowing up a hospital is rare. It is in fact very rare to have hospital buildings in the countryside and even in those cases where there may be hospital buildings, they are not functioning as hospitals: the doctors never visit them and there are no medicines.

As far as schools are concerned, this government is least interested in educating the boys and girls of the toiling masses. You can see the conditions of the education system, the way in which they are privatizing the whole education system and how the boys and girls of the ordinary people of India are unable to have advanced studies.

In some places where we have blown up schools, we talked to the villagers, to the supporters and sympathizers of the movement, before blowing them up. And in some places we are rebuilding the schools. Please be clear that when we blow up schools we make sure there is no one in the school and that we are also running many of our own schools in the countryside.

If the government stopped using the schools as military camps, there would be no need to blow up the schools. The High Court recently passed a verdict that schools should not be used as police camps. But even after this verdict the security forces have not vacated the schools. Many schools in the countryside are actually being built for military purpose, and the police humiliate the students and hamper the studies there. That is why we are forced to blow up a few schools.

India has made huge investments in developing the nation. Why are you so critical of the government’s development program agenda?

There are two things. First is the development programs of the government and second is more broadly their concept of development.

All these development programs are actually a part of their strategy of Low Intensity Conflict (LIC). This is a reform and dole program. The Indian government is least interested in the development of the common people. Even according to their own estimates, 7

This is the case after 62 years of so-called Independence! In 2000-2001, the average availability of food grains for an Indian was 157 kilograms, now it is hardly 140 kilograms. So this is the pathetic condition we have. On the other hand, a few Indians are becoming billionaires and the Indian state is boasting of that.

What the Indian government is actually trying to do through these developmental works is to create their social base in the form of petty contractors and other middlemen – becholia, we call them. Their aim is to divert youth who are naturally coming towards the revolution. So many youths are being diverted to petty contracts. These are sugarcoated bullets. Just observe the development projects in the countryside.

Even today, more than 6

Even this much-publicized NAREGA, National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, is a big flop because it has so many lacunae in it. Corruption is everywhere. People are not getting wages. The claim is to give employment for 100 days per person. But people are not getting employment even for 10 days. Moreover, NAREGA neither provides a permanent and stable form of employment nor does it challenge the power structure of inequality in our countryside.

So what they are trying to claim as developmental projects are not developmental at all. They are part of their strategy of Low Intensity Conflict to fight the armed struggle, the struggle of the people of India.

More broadly, there is much to criticize in their concept of development. The development of the country should not be related to Sensex and GDP growth rates. The government thinks that the development of the comprador big bourgeoisie, landlords, a few bureaucrats and multinationals is the development of the country.

For us the development of the people is actually the development of the country. They are least interested in solving the fundamental problems of the people. Their development is dependent on imperialism that just prevents our country from becoming self-dependent. Following the instructions of the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, the government is promoting the policies of globalization, privatization and liberalization. They are trying to sell out our natural resources, our land, our forests, to the Indian big bourgeoisie and their imperialist masters.

Coincidentally, the natural resources are mainly concentrated in the areas of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Orissa where the Maoists have a strong presence. More than 8

I will give you some examples. In Singur they sold land with the help of the so-called left government to the Tatas. In Nandigram they sold it to an Indonesian bourgeoisie, the Salem group. And in Lalgarh they sold it to Jindals. And in all the three places, we organized movements against this naked selling of cultivable lands of the peasants and against the displacement of the peasants. And in all the three places they were forced to withdraw.

In Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh we are fighting against the plunder by the comprador big bourgeoisie of iron ore and coal. And in these areas, the adivasis, mainly the adivasis but also the nonadivasis, the moolvasis, will be forced to vacate their homes and villages.

They will be displaced in great numbers as they have been in the past for the sake of so many ‘development’ projects. So now we are fighting against this plunder. We are fighting this implementation of liberalization and privatization. That is why they are saying that we are against this kind of development. Now it is for the people to see who is against the development of ordinary citizens.

So are you against the development of mines altogether?

No, we are not against the development of mines or the installation of plants and factories. We are against the plunder of our natural resources, our motherland, by the Indian big bourgeoisie and their imperialist masters who are plundering them only for their own profit. The Indian government is not interested in opening plants and mines for the betterment of the people.

The people in these areas – they will be forced to vacate their areas. The people will be thrown out. They will become wage earners in towns. They will be displaced in great numbers as they have been in many development projects earlier. In earlier cases where they built mega projects in Bokaro, Tata, and other places, people couldn’t get sufficient compensation – most people did not get land or homes or proper jobs in the plants that were built. Hundred and thousands of people, adivasis and moolvasis, were displaced.

So what is the guarantee that this will not happen again? That is why we are organizing people against such plunder and such loot of our natural resources. We won’t allow the plunder of our land and our natural resources by the imperialists and their allies, the Indian big bourgeoisie.

Under a Maoist government a few things will be kept in mind before opening plants and mines in these areas.

First, such plants and mines are nationalized and must be used for interest of the country. They must not be open for the profit of certain capitalists, bourgeoisie and multinational corporations.

Second, in general the cultivable lands should not be taken for mining and other things.

Third, if taking such land is unavoidable, then proper compensation must be given to the affected families. They should be given appropriate compensation for the land. They should be given jobs, they should be given homes, and some lands for cultivation. The New Democratic state will look after the welfare of the displaced people.

Fourth, these mines and plants must be eco-friendly. You must consider the ecological factors while opening these plants and mega projects as this is becoming a vital thing in our lives, in the lives of the human civilization.

And fifth, people must be taken into confidence before you start such projects; they should be taken into the management of such plants and mines. In our state, when we will build a New Democratic India, we will take into account all these things.

You say you are against the corruption. However, it is widely reported that you fund yourself through the black economy of development schemes coming in through the state. How do you justify participation in the very systems of corruption that you are against?

This is not corruption. This is taxation. In the areas of our struggle, we are the authority that is serving the people. We therefore tax those who are amassing wealth through major development programs and their contractorship in order to use this wealth for the service of our masses. We are using the funds to accelerate our struggles and we are using them in radical reform programs under the leadership of RPC’s.

We have rules and norms around how we tax people. For instance large schemes and operations are taxed more than smaller ones. We don’t tax the building of schools, hospitals, small tanks, tube wells etc. We also have rules and norms around how we use the fund collected. So we are not simply collecting money for private gain – that would be corruption. We are collecting money for the service of our toiling masses.

Your struggles against corruption, against caste discrimination, against feudal values are also the struggles of human rights organizations and NGOs. How do you differentiate yourself from such organizations?

Social, political and cultural values are based on the economic structure. Unless you change the economic system any talk of reforming social-cultural and political values is just a farce. The NGOs and the government human rights organization fight cases on an individual basis and from within the system. Feudal and imperialist values are part of their system.

These organisations are being nourished by the system itself. Unless you eradicate the system, you overthrow the system, you can’t have another system that will promote an alternative set of values, the democratic values. Fighting individual cases of caste discrimination or discrimination against women, or discrimination against dalits and adivasis, won’t take us far; it won’t eradicate the system.

You must eradicate the whole system. And in order to eradicate the whole system of feudal and imperial values, you must seize power. The NGOs and the human rights organizations don’t go for the seizure of power. They fight within the confines of India’s pro-elite constitution. In most cases they work only as safety-valves for the state whose credibility is eroding fast. That is the limitations of their conception.

In areas of Jharkhand where the party has been around for 20 odd years, what are the concrete achievements of the Maoists?

The first and foremost achievement is that the toiling masses, the landless laborer and the poor peasants, have emerged as a political and military force in India. In our struggling areas feudal authority has been demolished to a great extent. The struggling people have developed a guerrilla army of their own in the form of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army.

The second important achievement is the dignity and place in society that the dalits and adivasis have attained in the face of the historic discrimination they have endured. Wrong practices such as abuses against women, abuses against dalits and adivasis, and the dominance of the upper castes and outsiders in the forest areas are all changing now.

The third is the emancipation of forests that were under the control of the forest department, the corrupt and repressive forest officials. Even the lower level staff were quite repressive and they were controlled by the forest mafias and landlords. The forests are now completely liberated and the people are free to use the forests according to their needs. We have been able to control deforestation.

The fourth is the achievements of the antifeudal struggle. People in our struggling areas are enjoying democratic rights. We have seized thousands of acres of the lands of landlords and in many places, most of the places, the landlords have been ousted from the villages. In many places we have implemented land ceilings – sometimes radical ceilings – decided by our party locally. And surplus in lands have been distributed amongst the landless and poor peasants. In many places, the peasants are cultivating the land.

The wages in Bihar and Jharkhand in agriculture were very low. The wages for the collection of kendu patta and other forest materials such as mohalaun patta were also very low. So we organized people to demand a hike in wages. Now people have a comparatively better wage rate. Usury, that is mahajani, has been widely abolished. You won’t find the old kind of mahajan or money lender any more in the struggling areas.

In our struggling areas we have stopped theft and dacoity. Apart from this, we have abolished the auction of tanks, river beds, bazaars, orchards etc by the government to big contractors. Now these resources are free for the people to use.

In our areas of influence there is almost no communal riot. The Sangh goons just cannot dare to organize this. In a few places where they have dared, we have punished them as in the case of Swami Laxmanand in Kandhamal, Orissa.

Another important achievement is that till now we have been able to restrict to a great extent the implementation of various Memorandums of Understandings that the state government and central governments have signed with the big bourgeoisie and the multinationals – so they have not been able to plunder the land, loot the resources, as comfortably as they might have thought they could.

As far as our developmental schemes are concerned – unless you seize the power centrally, it is not possible to implement pro-people policies thoroughly. But even then, in places where we have formed RPC’s, we have tried to develop pro-people economic policies.

For instance, we are promoting the formation of cooperatives in agriculture and other related occupations. Secondly we are trying to develop methods of cultivation in the backward areas – we are digging up canals, wells and tanks – mostly through shramdan – voluntary labour. And we are opening schools and hospitals. We are giving medicines at subsidized rates. These things we are doing where we have formed RPC’s. But all these things are in rudimentary form.

The Indian Government has labeled you a terrorist organization. How do you respond to this?

The first thing is that this labeling is a part of a so-called ‘War on Terror’ unleashed by the US imperialists. The Indian ruling classes are fast emerging as favorites of US imperialism in South Asia. Actually the ruling classes of India are vying with the Pakistani ruling classes to be the favorites of US imperialism.

So what does US imperialism mean by terrorism? Any movement, or any mobilization or any act of protest that goes against the interest of US imperialism, that goes against the hegemony of US imperialism, which goes against the grand design of US imperialism of a new Empire, is being labeled ‘terrorist’ by US imperialists.

The governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America are labeling the nationality movements, and the movements of the toiling masses in their countries, as terrorist. In India too, the ruling classes are labeling the movements waged by the people under the leadership of the Maoists, the nationality movements in the North Eastern Provinces, and the nationality movement in Kashmir as terrorist movements.

The labeling of the Maoists as ‘terrorist’ gives more power to the police to arrest any person who is progressive and democratic – he/she need not be related to any mass organization of CPI(Maoist). The police forces are able to pick people if they speak against any undemocratic method, any repressive method, of the state. This includes journalists, lawyers, intellectuals and civil liberties activists. So first of all, we severely condemn this labeling.

Second thing is that there are some significant differences between us and those who commit terrorist acts. Terrorist activities generally cause indiscriminate killing, including the killing of innocent people. We condemn such killing and we are totally against such actions in which innocent peoples become victims.

We have never supported even a small action that harms an innocent villager. Wherever our armed unit has committed such a mistake, we readily come out to make self-criticism on such things. We are totally against the killing of innocent citizens; we are against indiscriminate killing.

Moreover, we are not going to make India into a theocratic state. Religious fundamentalism is often observed in terrorist acts: some organizations using terrorist activities claim that they are working towards building a theocratic state. This is entirely the opposite of what we want to achieve in the New Democratic India.

Our ideology is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. We are fighting for a truly federal, secular and democratic Republic of India. The labeling of CPI(Maoist) as a terrorist organization is very malicious. It is full of cunning through which the Indian government wants to befool the people, deceive the people, by sheer propaganda.

As far as our functioning is concerned, the terrorist labeling is not going to affect us. Our party in any case has been functioning underground from the very beginning. So the only thing that the ‘terrorist’ label will achieve is that that it will give more power to the police forces to harass the common people, especially in the struggling areas.

The government has just declared that they are going to wipe you out totally in three years’ time. The largest military offensive against the Maoists has begun. What are you facing?

We condemn the Indian government’s military offensive against the Maoists. This plan is totally in tune with the imperialists – actually the Indian government has planned this offensive at the behest of US imperialism. This United Progressive Alliance government, under the leadership of the Congress party, is quite fascist in nature. When Chidambaran says that we won’t talk about development before the Maoists are wiped out, you can observe the reactionary content and the fascism of his intentions.

Repression campaigns are not new to us. We have faced so many repression campaigns in the past. But this is the greatest one. They are deputing 75 battalions of paramilitary forces along with an equal number of state forces to fight the Maoists. The rein of the operations is in the hands of the central government and the Central Reserve Police Forces are in command.

They are in addition preparing so many commando forces – like the Special Task Force, Jharkhand Jaguar and Cobra, the Indian Reserve Battalion, the Special Auxiliary Police, in the line of the Greyhounds. And they have established many jungle warfare schools at various places.

In Chhattisgarh they have started the military campaign in September 2009 – you know in one month they killed at least 27 people in two massacres – 27 innocent people. They burnt 12 villages. They looted, they raped and the burnt. Thousands of people have been force to flee, to vacate their villages. They are fleeing to Andhra Pradesh and Orissa.

In Lalgarh they have deputed 7,000 forces in just one district. And they are just killing innocent villagers. In Jharkhand they have also begun. You know the result is that they are going to involve even the army and the air force in so many disguised ways. You know all this means that they are going to kill many thousands and thousands of innocent people.

And the whole area of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal that is very rich in mineral resources and that this government is trying to sell to the imperialist comprador big bourgeoisie and other big contractors will then be clear for them.

There are many aspects of this offensive, this repression campaign. There is not only the military side; there are other sides too – what we call in Hindi, sam, dam, dande, ved (fear, temptation, punishment and division). So they are also strengthening their intelligence network. They will spend much more money in developing coverts and developing intelligence sources from the local people: police informers. And they won’t keep any record – this is the instruction of the central government – they can spend much money on this work.

Next, they have passed many black laws and they have allowed state governments to pass black laws to suit their needs. So actually what we are going to have is a complete police state in India. And again the centralization of power in Delhi will be observed more.

The state governments will lose much of their powers in the enforcement of laws and in maintaining what they call ‘law and order’. So the government is obviously not taking this movement as a democratic movement, and when Chidambaran says CPI(Maoist) is a terrorist organization, their stand is clear.

What they will add to these campaigns is the vicious propaganda against us that they have already been spreading. For instance, the notion that leading Maoist leaders are making money and there has been a large embezzlement of party funds by the party leaders. They spread the rumor that there is sexual anarchy in the party; that the Maoists are against development; and that Maoists are promoting the cultivation of opium; and that Maoists are obstructing the Public Distribution System.

They want to brand us as criminals; they claim that we kill innocent people. Every day you will see advertisements by the police in the form of news reports in the newspapers. Sometimes there are hoardings in the towns – propagating so many incorrect things about our party and our movement.

Moreover, the corporate media – both the TV channels and the newspapers and the other forms of the media that are controlled by the corporate world – are supporting the government and putting forward the government’s stand in spreading propaganda against our party, and against the leadership of our organization. The corporate media is supporting the government wholeheartedly.

So in the coming days we will see that this military offensive will bring India to a complete fascist state where not only the struggles raised by the CPI(Maoist) but also the struggles raised by the ordinary citizens against displacement, against the job losses resulting from privatization, against hunger, against anti-people economic policies – particularly agricultural policies – and many such struggles will face brutal state repression and all will be clubbed in one term, ‘terrorist’.

Any honest struggle will be branded terrorist; that is what you will see in the coming days.

Armed struggle involves a lot of deaths along the way. There are media reports that a thousand people a year are dying as a result of Maoist-related violence. How do you justify the death of so many people?

First, who are those whom the party eliminates? Annihilation is the last choice. We only annihilate those reactionaries – the landlords, the police agents and the members of the gangs raised by the government – who do not accept their crime and do not surrender before the people’s courts. The government and the corporate media create propaganda against us – that many people are killed in Maoist-related violence. I don’t know the exact numbers they are claiming and what they are propagating but a part of it is malicious propaganda against us.

Second, see the other side of the picture. What are the hundreds of thousands of army personnel and paramilitary forces doing in Kashmir and the North East? Each and every day they are killing youths in fake encounters. What are the paramilitary forces and state police doing in the areas of Maoist struggle – particularly in AP, and in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand? They are killing youth in hundreds.

And do you remember the pogroms of the minorities organized by the ruling classes? The anti-Sikh riots in 1984, the recent murders of thousands of Christians in Orissa, and the 2002 riots in Gujarat? How many people have the Hindu chauvinists and the state forces killed?

Right from 1947, from Indian independence, the state forces were very much hand in glove with the Hindu chauvinist forces. The corporate media and the media persons should expose the other side of the picture too – how the minorities are butchered in state-sponsored pogroms; how the people belonging to the oppressed nationalities in the North East and Kashmir are being eliminated; how the dalits and the adivasis in the struggling areas of central India are being killed by the state forces in organized killings in the name of Salwa Judum and such projects.

And lastly, do you know that during the last few years, 500,000 peasants have committed suicide because of anti-people economic policies? In the last one year, 2008-2009, thousands of peasants have become daily wage earners?

Many people are dying of hunger. This republic, as Utsna Patnaik calls, is a ‘Republic of Hunger’. So who is responsible for such deaths? Who is responsible for the death of thousands of people dying out of starvation and hunger, from so many diseases? People are left with no other option. No one is going to listen to you. This violence has been imposed by the state on the people of India.

You are waging a war against one of the world’s emerging global economic superpowers. India is a very strong state. What hope do you have of achieving success?

There are two parts to this question. It is true that the Indian state is very powerful. We are quite aware of the strength of our enemy.

However, in a war, arms and armed personnel are not the most important things. The most important thing is the people. Who is getting the support of the people? We think that we have been waging guerrilla war for the last 40 years with very, very little armed strength. It is because of the support of the people in these states that we have been able to consolidate ourselves.

And naturally because we are a party of the people, we are a party of the common man, the toiling masses, so the appeal of the program of our party is much more than those of the comprador and those of the ruling classes. So the most important thing is the support of the people. It is people’s support that will ultimately decide the fate of the war.

The second important thing is sticking to the guerrilla policies, the guerrilla methods of warfare. If we could implement the guerrilla policies of warfare completely and thoroughly and in a more and more meticulous method, and if we continue to win the support of the people of our country, we do believe that we will win this war.

If we can achieve these two things then it won’t be possible for the ruling classes of this country to abolish us, to finish us, as they are claiming. There is every chance that we will survive not only this offensive, but also many such offensives, and defeat them.

As the war intensifies, though, as the military campaign of the government rises, inevitably a lot of ordinary poor peasants are going to get caught in the war in between. You have your AK47s, your landmines, and your 306s to protect you. But there are going to be a lot of bloody deaths of ordinary villagers in the process. How can you justify this?

Sorry, you are putting the question in the wrong way. This is not a war between the CPI(Maoist) and the Indian state. This is a war between the people of India and the Indian state. What is CPI(Maoist)? What is the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA)? It is nothing but the organized strength of the people.

So if they harm the CPI(Maoist), if they harm PLGA that is fighting under the leadership of CPI(Maoist), then actually they are harming the organized strength of the people. And the people understand this and that any such war is not a war against a party, it is a war against the people – we should look at the whole situation in this perspective.

In the same way that you do not distinguish between the CPI(Maoist) and the people, surely you cannot differentiate between the people and the present Indian government? For example, many of the policemen who are your main targets are coming from the same houses as some of your own supporters and cadres. So why are you killing policemen from poor village backgrounds in the process of the war?

It is true that in ambushes the policemen who are killed generally come from humble backgrounds. However, they have only ever been targeted when they have been on their area domination operations, on their combing operations, and they have come to suppress the people and the people’s movement.

I can give you a few examples. You know there are many policemen and armed personnel living in our struggling areas who are serving the police department and army elsewhere. Their families are our supporters. Whenever these officers return to their home village in festivals or on vacation, you will not be able to cite a single example when our party has harmed them.

Secondly, rarely have we harmed any home guards that are from the villages.

Third, we restrain ourselves from harming the zila police, the district police, who are actually in the main the local people. Whenever we have ambushed the policemen, we have ambushed them when they are coming as combat forces, when they come to suppress the people, when they come to suppress the people’s movement – only then they have been targeted.

In a war, if your enemy is using the persons who come from your own class, it is inevitable that they will become a target of the offensive. Our appeal to the policemen, to the army personnel, is that the state they are serving is not their state. The ruling classes they are serving are actually against the interest of their families. So it is better they come out from this reactionary army, reactionary police department, and join the PLGA.

P Chidambaram, the Home Minister, has been calling you to the negotiating table. Why don’t you go?

P Chidambaram actually proposed that the Maoists must lay down arms before they call them for any kind of negotiations. Then, after a massive protest by the intellectuals and progressive persons, he is now saying that the Maoists must abjure violence before the government can call them for any kind of negotiations. This simply means that the government is putting conditions that are unacceptable to us.

You just can’t have negotiations at gunpoint. You have your paramilitary forces inside the struggling areas and you are making statements daily that you will depute more and more paramilitary forces into those areas and you will depute choppers and all that. Then you say that the Maoists must come to the negotiating table: you know this is just unacceptable. In many press statements and press conferences time and again we have made it clear that we are not averse to negotiations.

But, for any kind of negotiations – history tells us that for any negotiations – you must have an atmosphere for the negotiations. In this particular condition it means that if you have your forces in the struggling areas and if you make threatening statements every day, it means that you are trying to have negotiations at gunpoint – that you are expecting us to surrender actually.

What conditions do you want for negotiation?

There is only one condition – that the government must make an atmosphere that is congenial for negotiation. Concretely speaking it means that the government must withdraw the paramilitary forces from the struggling areas, one. The government must release the revolutionary leaders and cadres and must treat them as political prisoners, number two.

The government must lift the ban from our party and the government must not prevent the democratic mass movements. These things are the basic things, but we can talk of so many things – such as the government must suspend the memoranda of Understanding that they have made with the big bourgeoisie and the imperialists. These are not the conditions – these will make the situation favourable for any kind of negotiation.

What’s Going On In Iran? (With Emphasis on Iranian Nationalism and Iranian Secessionist Movements)

Repost from the old site.

Updated February 6, 2008:

Most people do not realize that the famed Shah of Iran was actually a blood and soil, Persian supremacist, ethnic nationalist, primordialist, volkisch, fascist along the same lines as Hitler’s Nazis and Milosevic’s Serbs. Yet it is true – in fact, the Shah even formed an alliance with Nazi Germany.

The Nazis attempted to form all sorts of alliances with people they mistakenly regarded as genetic inferiors – including Bosnian Muslims, Palestinian and Iraqi Arabs, Ukrainian, White Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian rightwing nationalists, Iranians and some of the upper-caste peoples of East India.

The East Indians, of course, are part of the original Aryans – the light-skinned invaders who descended from the steppes into India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Afghanistan at various times in the past 3,500 years. In India, they displaced the native Indians – the Dravidians or South Indians – and pushed them to South.

They also twisted the Hindu religion by adding on their casteism, which was apparently not present in the original pre-Aryan system. Originally, in the caste system, those at the top were the lightest-skinned and the lowest castes tended to be the darkest. It is interesting that over thousands of years the Brahmins have become progressively darker.

The Nazis were fascinated that these Brahmins regarded themselves as fellow Aryans and even sent researchers over to India to measure skulls and analyze the facial characteristics of statues and engage in other peculiarities of Nazi racial research. The Brahmin class of India has always returned the favor and many have long been supporters of Hitler, Nazism and fascism in general.

The fascinating article linked above deals with something that is little known to most Americans – a neat summary of many of the views expressed by what are best termed Iranian nationalists. Americans have no understanding at all of this ancient, proud culture.

The piece notes the Western deceit that modern nationalism began with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1600’s Europe, when the principle of inviolable national borders was first codified. In fact, this is a Western narcissistic view. Other nations, in particular Persians and Iranians, have a long history of what could be called nationalism, depending on how one defines the term, dating back maybe 2500 years to Cyrus the Great.

US idiots like George Bush and the council of clueless super-Zionist advisors whispering in his ear provoke this ancient culture at their peril.

The piece goes on to discuss the Minorities Question in modern Iran. Most people do not recognize that Persian and Iranian are not synonymous. Persian is an ethnic group, but Persians only constitute 5

US imperialism and Kurdish nationalism make much of Azerbaijanis supposed desire to break away from Iran, but there is not much truth to that. Those who say such things do not understand history. It is true that there is an Azerbaijani minority that invokes irredentism and wishes to break away from Iran and reunite with “northern Azerbaijan”, the independent state of Azerbaijan.

But the majority of Azerbaijanis have no desire to do such a thing. People do not understand that despite the racist Persian ethnic nationalism of the Shah, Azerbaijanis have typically ruled Iran for many centuries now. In fact the Supreme Jurisprudent Ayatollah Khameini is an Azerbaijani.

The Sassanid Empire was one of the most prominent empires in the world from 200-600, a rival to the Roman Empire. This culture, to many, represents the pinnacle of Iran’s power in the world. Its religion was Zoroastrianism and it was characterized by great tolerance towards religious minorities, especially Christians and Jews.

The Sassanids were defeated in the mid-650’s by invading Arab Muslim armies, many Iranians were put to the sword, and many Iranian nationalists have resented the resulting forced imposition of Islam ever since. According to these nationalists, there is a difference between those societies where Islam was “native” – supposedly Arab societies, and those where it was imposed by force – supposedly all non-Arab countries.

This greatly simplifies matters, and in many ways is false. For instance, Islam has deep roots in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Muslim India, Eastern China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Albania, Kosova, Bosnia, the Caucasus and in Sub-Saharan Africa.

So the case of Iran is not generalizable. In most cases, where Islam conquered non-Arab lands, many of the natives converted and become passionate Muslims. In fact, some of the world’s most ferocious and fundamentalist Muslims have traditionally come from non-Arab lands like Afghanistan and Pakistan. But in Iran, something different happened: Islam ran up against Persian nationalism.

To understand the conflict between Iranian nationalism and Islam is essential to understanding modern Iranian culture. The Khomeinists have enraged Iranian nationalists by declaring wholesale war on Iranian nationalism. According to the mullahs, there is no need for Iranian nationalism since Islam supplants it. Iranian nationalists are often theologically diverse, secular, atheists, agnostics, or even Zoroastrians.

Even worse, the mullahs seem to have imposed a pro-Arabism on Iran. This is sure to infuriate Iranian nationalists. Iranian nationalists have always had a resentful and bigoted attitudes towards Arabs (and some towards Muslims – who they regard as having a barbaric Arab religion).

When you hear an Iranian nationalist hurl an insult like “lizard-eating Mohammadens”, this is the rage they are mining. It is the rage at a primitive culture of desert barbarian wanderers – so barbaric, in fact, that they “ate lizards” – that invaded the glorious, superior, Sassanid Zoroastrian Empire and destroyed it, supplanting it with inferior Arab Islamic culture and religion.

The mullahs have not only waged war on symbols of Iranian nationalism, but they have also tried to import Arab culture and language, much to the fury of Iranian nationalists. Since, to Islamic fundamentalists, Arabic is the language of Islam (a bigoted and irrational construct on its face), they tend to promote Arab culture and language over native culture and language.

This tends to produce friction between Islamic fundamentalists and non-Arab nationalists in the non-Arab parts of the Muslim World. For instance, it is often difficult to find a copy of the Koran in any language other than Arabic. And many non-Arab Muslims claim that Arabs, especially Gulf Arabs, look down on them and despise them when they go Mecca on hajj.

The Arab chauvinism in Islam has been a long-term hindrance to spread of the religion. Furthermore, for centuries after the conquest of Islam, the greatest Iranian poets, authors and scientists – beloved by all Iranian nationalists – were ordered to be killed by the fundamentalist Islamic morons ruling Islam at the time. Few of these heroes of Iranian culture were killed, but the fact that their deaths were even condoned stings.

It is important to note that Shia Islam was also imposed at the point of the sword sometime later and many Sunni Iranians were put to death.

The remains of this violent religious imposition can be seen today, when one notes that Sunni Islam (Iran is only about 7

All of these parts of the Iranian state remain largely outside of the regime’s control, and Sunnis continue to complain, legitimately, of discrimination by Iranian Shia Muslims.

The rage between Iranians and Arabs is difficult for outsiders to fathom, but is essential to understanding the region. Sunni Islam is synonymous with Arab identity and nationalism, as Juan Cole astutely notes, in the same way that White Christianity is synonymous with American nationalism. Hence, the secularism of Arab nationalists has always been a bit of a lie.

The Arab masses and regimes are Sunni. Shia minorities have traditionally been suppressed in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and even in Lebanon. This is the root of the Sunni-Shia conflict that rages ferociously in Iraq today.

See here for a particularly bigoted and insane example of Sunni Iraqi bigotry from the interesting blog of a secular Iraqi woman. Note that she ridiculously claims that Shia Islam was invented by the Iranians to destroy the Sunni Islamic civilization of the Arabs.

I realize that sounds like the ravings of a mentally ill person, but this is how many Sunni Muslims, especially Sunni Arabs from Mesopotamia, the Gulf and the Levant, regard Iran and Shiism.

When we understand this sick, crazy, racist hatred, we can understand why Saddam attacked Iran, and why he was supported in that war by all of the states in the Arab peninsula. We can understand why the secular King of Jordan intones darkly about a “Shia Belt” snaking ominously from Iran, across Iraq, to Syria and Southern Lebanon under Hezbollah control.

We can understand the insane, Nazi-like massacres of crowds of Shia civilians – men, women and children of all ages – in Iraq by both the Sunni Islamist guerrilla animals and Saddam’s secular, Shia-hating fascist Arab nationalists. We can understand why the government of Yemen launched a murderous war on the Zaidi Shia of northern Yemen, who constitute 4

We can understand why the Sunni Muslim states of the Gulf are supporting the preliminary plans for a US attack on Iran, and why these states and the Iraqi Sunni-Nazi rebels will stand up and cheer till they can’t talk if the US invades Iran. We can understand why the viciously racist Sunni Arab bigots of Iraq intone darkly, “We will never be ruled by the blackhats (the Shia)”.

While the Arab attitude towards Iran and the Shia has always been one of sheer, Nazi-like racist hatred, the Iranian attitude towards Arabs has tended to be one of the disdain of a supposedly superior people for a supposedly inferior one.

I have droned on enough on this subject, and we need to move on to the rest of the post. If you wish to dive into this fascinating matter further, click the link above and take a crash course in Iranian history, the minorities of Iran and modern-day Iranian nationalism. I hope you enjoyed this excursion.

April 7, 2006

Iranshahr, Sistan-Balochistan Province: Sunni Islamist guerrillas shot and seriously wounded Hojatoleslam Yusef Mohammadi Soleimani, a top cleric who represents Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the Centre for Higher Education here.

April 8, 2006

Iranshahr, Sistan-Balochistan Province: 6 armed Sunni Islamist guerrillas abducted Eshaq Nezamdoust, a local Iranian official who was in charge of distributing oil products here.

April 9, 2006

Iranshahr, Sistan-Balochistan Province: Sunni Islamist guerrillas shot dead 2 Iranian army officers here, Mostafa Ahmadi and Behzad Qolipour.

May 4, 2006

***** Many of you are probably aware of the furor over Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the figurehead President of Iran, and his comments regarding Israel and the Holocaust. This much-distorted comments are grist for the propaganda for a campaign to get the US to wage a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, primarily for the benefit of the Zionist state in Israel.

If the US won’t do it, “mad dog” Israel says, then Mad Dog Israel herself may be forced to take matters into her own hand. Ahmadinejad shoots off his mouth quite a bit and says some dumb things, but it’s important to note that he is just a figurehead with little power. Remember when reformist Khatami had the same office as Ahmadinejad, and all the Iran-haters said that Khatami had no power anyway?

Well, shoot, Ahmadinejad has the same power as Khatami. If Khatami had no power than Ahmadinejad also has no power, logically speaking. In Iran, the office of the President seems to be mainly utilized these days to vent off steam from the unhappy population, to give them somewhere to channel their dissatisfied energies.

Ahmadinejad’s comments in question concern his purported remarks to “wipe Israel off the map” and his Holocaust denial. First of all, let us note that Holocaust denial in various forms is not unusual at all amongst Arabs and Muslims, especially Islamists.

Furthermore, many misguided non-genocidal persons on both the Right and Left, are caught up in the nonsense of Holocaust Denial and Holocaust Revisionism. Lamentable as it is, it does not necessarily make one a new Hitler.

As far as Ahmadinejad’s comments to wipe Israel off the map, Juan Cole makes clear that he was apparently paraphrasing Khomeini’s remarks from 25 years ago, when the Ayatollah compared Israel to the Shah’s regime, and said in poetic Persian that “the Occupation regime over Jerusalem shall vanish with the page of time”. Cole is adamant that there is no killing of anyone, much less military action, implied in that remark.

Nevertheless, led by the Jewish Lobby and their Gentile fellow travelers on the Fox TV circuit, the US neoconservatives have been hammering out a devious propaganda campaign designed to paint Ahmadinejad, and Iranian Muslims in general, as insane suicidal maniacs out to finish the work that Hitler started.

The supposed evidence is the Holocaust revisionist remarks and the “wipe Israel off the Earth” remark, which Cole has convincingly demonstrated that it is being misquoted. Supposedly, Ahmadinejad is a member of a Shia mystical sect that believes that the 12th Mahdi, or hidden Mahdi, who supposedly vanished on the site of holy Shia mosque in Samarra that was recently detonated by Al Qaeda, is going to return soon.

This religious belief is roughly analogous to the Christian crazies who think that the “end times” are here and Jesus is coming back soon. The common thread in both loony beliefs is that the world is coming to an end. Because Ahmadinejad believes in this nonsense and supports suicide bombers fighting the Zionist regime in Israel, the Israeli Lobby paints him, and an entire nation of Shia Muslims, as suicidal nutcases.

They want to get a nuclear bomb in order to suicidally fire it at Israel, which in the process will destroy Iran with the inevitable US and Israel nuclear retaliation. Clearly, this is a serious question: Is Iran actually capable of such an insane act? We can’t afford to be wrong about our answer here. I have thought about this for months now, and I do not believe that Iran or its leaders are suicidally insane.

I realize there are ominous consequences if I am wrong, including the deaths of maybe 100,000 Israeli Jews. But I am willing to stick my neck out here, just for the sake of argument. I would also like to take this time to argue passionately against any kind of lunatic US or Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program, a disastrous idea with truly dangerous consequences. ******

May 13, 2006

**** Kerman Province, Between Kerman and Bam: Armed terrorists with the radical Sunni Islamist group Jundallah (Army of Allah) disguised themselves as cops and set up a roadblock on this highway deep inside Iran and stopped motorists and pulled them out of their vehicles. 11 males were lined up next to a ditch and executed. A 12th man was killed when another vehicle was sprayed with gunfire as it drove past.

A 12-year-old boy was wounded by gunfire, but instead of finishing him off, the terrorists strung him up on a power pylon. He survived, but was badly traumatized. Afterward, the terrorists fled into the Kofout Mountains southeast of Kerman.

May 15, 2006

Kerman Province: Iranian Basij and Revolutionary Guard paramilitaries tracked down and killed 10 terrorists who murdered 12 drivers in cold blood on the Kerman-Bam highway 130 miles from where Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran come together (see May 13 entry for details).

May 19, 2006 **** Syria: Syrian officials arrested dozens of leaders of the various Shia Arab Ahwaz fronts who are waging guerrilla war in Iran’s oil-rich Ahwaz Province. I cannot support this struggle, which is simply designed to steal much of Iran’s oil wealth. However, the Arabs in this region fought bravely in the Iran-Iraq War and suffered heavy casualties.

They complain that they do not see much of the oil wealth in this region. The area was heavily damaged in the war, and the Iranian government hasn’t even rebuilt it very much. The Arabs also complain of discrimination. There is some truth to all of this, but one of Iran’s top military leaders is an Ahwaz Arab.

If Iran had any sense, they would institute affirmative action to hire Ahwaz Arabs, rebuild the Ahwaz region and let the area see much more of their present share of the wealth. This conflict has always been fed by Arab nationalist fascists like the Baath fascists in Iraq, whose hatred of Iran borders on the insane and pathological.

Furthermore, in recent days, US and British Special Forces and intelligence are in the region assisting the insurgency. By arresting most of the top leaders of the insurgency, Syria is spitting in the eyes of Arab nationalist bigots all over the Arab World, and is throwing its lot in with Shia solidarity (Syria is ruled by a Shia sect) and Syria’s alliance with Iran. *****

Making Sense of Kosovo

Repost from the old site.

Updated March 25, 2008:

Via Joachim Martillo, we have Backgrounder on Kosovo/Kosova.

This is one of Martillo’s pieces that I am going to support in full.

Almost the entire Western Left, and part of the libertarian Right, seems to be opposed to independence for Kosovo. This is a most sorry state of affairs and has a rather shameless history. I am very happy that Martillo has come out in favor in independence for Kosovo, no matter how problematic it may be. I am afraid he did so only because he is a Muslim, but no matter.

A background in the Balkan Wars of the 1990’s is helpful, if not essential, in understanding the declaration of independence by Kosovo.

It is also important to understand where the Workers’ World Party, of which Sarah Flounders is a member, is coming from. I don’t know a lot about them, but this Wikipedia article is a good primer.

WWP is a Trotskyite split dating from 1958. They split from the Socialist Workers Party, a standard Trotskyite group.

Their reasons were: the candidacy of Henry Wallace for President in 1948, support for Mao’s revolution in China and defense of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

The SWP opposed all of these.

Mao is opposed by all Trotskyites, mostly on human rights grounds but also on the usual ultra-Left basis of not being socialist enough. Wallace’s candidacy, a revolutionary candidacy in the US in that an explicitly socialist candidate actually ran for office and got lots of votes, was probably opposed on ultra-Left reasons that he was not a Communist.

The invasion of Hungary would have been opposed on the basis that the USSR was “Stalinist”.

Trotskyites have always had a reputation of not being very pragmatic. In some ways, they are the ultimate splitters.

The WWP retains some Trotskyite leanings in that they are highly critical of Stalin. However, after Stalin died, they supported the USSR. Many Communist parties chose sides after the Soviet-China split, but the WWP continued to call for a union of all socialist countries, no matter what their ideology. In this sense, they are somewhat unique.

They also started supporting all states that were seen as resisting US imperialism. This led to difficult stances such as supporting Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

It is in this context that they opposed the breakup of Milosevic’s Communist Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s and thereafter supported Milosevic on the basis that he was a Communist. In this they reflected the views of most Communists and Leftists the world over – they supported the fascist Milosevic just because he was a Communist.

WWP is also behind International ANSWER Coalition, which led many antiwar marches. Ramsey Clark has unfortunately been associated with this group. I do not think much of the WWP.

Fascism is a nasty virus, and like many viruses, it can grow in most any human being and certainly can unfold in any society. This is what makes it such a dangerous and deadly enemy. In many ways, Russia is now a fascist state. Even Communist Vietnam has fascist tendencies of various types. It can even be argued that break away from Iran and take most of Iran’s oil wealth with them. Iran should not be expected to put up with that. A similar situation exists in Angola with Ahwaz, the Basque Country, Catalonia, Corsica, Brittany, Wales, Scotland, the here and here), Burma (separatists here , here, here, West Papua nor to its rule over Aceh, and its criminal performance in suppressing these rebellions cements those negations.

India never had any right to rule Kashmir and certainly does not now. Palestine at least ought to declare Kosovo-style independence. This blog has always supported the struggle of the Sahrawis in Spanish Sahara. The island of Bougainville deserves support for its separatism from Papua New Guinea.

In Russia, the republics of the Caucasus deserve support in their drive for independence. This includes the Chechens, the Ingush, the Dagestanis, Karachevo-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria. The Tuvans seem to deserve the right to secede also.

The situation of the Mari, Chuvash , Bashkirs , Udmurts and Tatarstan are much more difficult because none of these republics exist on Russia’s borders. States should not be forced to carve out enclaves inside their own borders. All secessionists need to cleave off lands on the borders of existing states or even split existing states. The notion of independent islands wholly surrounded by a single state is preposterous.

In India, the nations of the northeast were never part of India and their secessionist movements should be supported. Nor can India ever be said to have existed at all until 1949, as under the British it was merely a collection of 5,000 separate princely states with ever-shifting borders.

In China, the cause of Taiwan and Tibet is clearly moral and East Turkestan also seems to have a valid cause. Abkhazia and South Ossetia should be allowed to cleave off from Georgia, and they already have anyway, de facto, though Russia is supporting these movements for only the most cynical reasons. The Tamils of Sri Lanka deserve support, despite their terrible tactics.

I have much more of a problem in supporting Islamist separatists in the Philippines and in Thailand. First, their tactics are horrible. In both cases, Islamists, as they always do in wars, are simply massacring non-Muslim civilians in countless numbers.

The Koran provides justification for mass murder of non-Muslims in wartime, so this is typical behavior of most Muslims when they go to war with non-Muslims. The historical antecedents are too painful and numerous to count. Furthermore, the war against the non-Muslims often takes near-genocidal proportions.

There are examples in this century from Indonesia (Muslims massacred animists in West Papua and Christians in slaughtering Christians in the 1840’s-1860’s) and Iraq (more mass murders of Assyrians in Iraq in the mid-1800’s) and the worst of all in India around 500 years ago, when Muslim invaders murdered up to and possibly more than 50 million Hindus in the worst genocide that the world has ever seen. Quoting Will Durant:

The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

This continues a tradition set in the early days of Islam, when invading Muslims often committed massacres of non-Muslims in various places they conquered. Notable examples occurred in Palestine and in Iran. The only conclusion is that when Muslims fight wars with non-Muslims, they are frequently genocidal conflicts, and this genocidalism is sadly sanctioned by language in the Koran itself.

As such, it is difficult to support a bunch of Islamist murderers in the Pattani region of Thailand and in Mindanao in the Philippines. In Mindanao, Muslims are only 2

Hawaii deserves to go free, but the movement has no support except among Hawaiians, about 2

In most cases, like baby birds from the nest, these colonies need to be tossed out on their own. Most are welfare cases anyway that take in far more from the Western state they are umbilically attached to than they donate in services. In other words, to the colonizer, they are a gigantic money drain.

This begs the question then of why these colonies even exist, since the logic of colonialism, which is all about the loot, demands that money-losing colonies be cut adrift. In some cases, there are imperial reasons, in others, there is simply the logic of colonialism. Once a nation becomes a colonist, the power rush is as addicting as crack. It’s a tough habit to break.

Two essential rights are at stake here.

First is the right to self-determination. This has even been ratified by the UN.

The other is a totally phony “right of a state to be secure within its borders”, which was dreamed up by states after World War 2 in their paranoia over national secessionism. This principle has no standing, as state borders have been shifting forever, and many states have only the most dubious standing for drawing their borders wherever they did.

It’s clear that the only progressive stand worth taking is in favor of self-determination. However, we should make exceptions in certain cases as above, and only real nations should have the right to secede. The right to secede should not be granted on economic or purely political grounds (such as the rightwing state of Zulia in Venezuela the rightwing Sarah Flounders’ article below entitled Washington Gets a New Colony in the Balkans is fairly typical of the criticism of the Kosovo declaration of independence.

While the USA does a lot of evil in the world, the breakup of Yugoslavia may at least initially have been a project of the German government, which for historical reasons was much more interested in an independent Slovenia than the USA was.

Neocons like Joshua Muravchik fairly quickly saw a possible opportunity to cultivate a pro-Israel Muslim population (either Slavic or Albanian) in a divided Yugoslavia. Finding such a Muslim population has been a holy grail of Zionism since Herzl created the character of Reshid Bey in Old New Land (Altneuland).

Sorting out the various claims about Kosovo requires awareness of the changing boundaries of the region. Here are two maps of the Ottoman Vilayet of Kosovo:

The first map of the Ottoman vilayet (province) of Kosovo, from 1875-1878. Kosovo is now much reduced in size from this vilayet.

The second map of the vilayet of Kosovo, from 1881-1912, shows shifting boundaries once again. Kosovo today is much smaller than this vilayet.

Claiming that Kosovo is the historical center of Serb culture is somewhat tendentious. The Ottoman Vilayet of Kosovo was larger than present-day Kosovo, and its borders shifted during the 19th and early 20th century.

Territory that had been Ottoman Kosovo is today divided among Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Greece. Kosovo regions that were in some sense the historically important Serb centers have for the most part been incorporated into Serbia, Montenegro or Macedonia. Here is a current map of Kosovo:

A current map of Kosovo, much shrunken from its former vilayet. When Serbs scream about Kosovo, you really need to ask which one they are talking about.

Ethnic Albanian Kosovars could probably legitimately argue that they rebelled from the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 in order to achieve independence or union with Albania, whose independence European Great Powers endorsed in 1913, but the Serbian government opportunistically used to rebellion to expand Serbia at their expense.

The Serb obsession with controlling all of Kosovo results from the development of a nationalist mythology that focuses on the Battle of Kosovo (Косовски бој, Kosova Savasi, Bitka na Kosovu, Beteja e Kosovës, or Schlacht auf dem Amselfeld).

The mythology has little connection to the facts. Lazar’s army (the “Serb” side) included Croats, ethnic Albanians (who were mostly Orthodox at that time period) and probably Bosnians. Murad’s army (the “Turkish” side) included a large contingent of Serbs.

The population composition of Kosovo/Kosova in the 14th century and later is disputed. It was not unusual for a close relative of someone with a Serb name to bear an Albanian name. Later Serb literature refers to Albanized Serb populations, but the description is dubious. Bilingualism was simply common, and the ethnic boundaries that exist today really only came into existence in the 19th century.

The following paragraphs are propagandistic:

Yugoslavia was born with a heritage of antagonisms that had been endlessly exploited by the Ottoman Turks, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and interference by British and French imperialism, followed by Nazi German and Italian Fascist occupation in World War II.

The Jewish and Serbian peoples suffered the greatest losses in that war. A powerful communist-led resistance movement made up of all the nationalities, which had suffered in different ways, was forged against Nazi occupation and all outside intervention. After the liberation, all the nationalities cooperated and compromised in building the new socialist federation.

There simply is not much evidence of Ottoman exploitation of ethnic or religious antagonism either from Ottoman or non-Ottoman sources. The Ottoman rulers generally tried to discourage local Balkan hostilities because they were administratively costly and interfered with tax collection.

The omission of any mention of Czarist Russian imperial interference shows bias.

Terminology like Jewish and Serbian peoples is questionable. Yugoslavia contained Jewish populations of Ashkenazi ethnicity and of Ibero-Berber refugee ethnicity. The term “Jewish people” comes from Zionist propaganda. While there is a Serb ethnicity, there is no Serbian ethnicity because people of many different ethnicities live within the territory of Serbia.

The implicit attempt to connect Jewish and Serb losses during WW2 is misleading. Serb politics in the lead-up to WW2 had clear fascist and Nazi currents.

While many Serb political leaders wanted to work with Germany, the German government rebuffed them because too many Germans and Austrians blamed Serbs for WW1 and the subsequent dismantlement of the pre-WW1 German and Austrian Empires.

German and Austrian hostility toward Serbs increased during WW2 and probably influenced German policy toward Serbia during the 1990s.

The situation of Kosovo before NATO intervention was a mess. It has remained a mess, and there is no particular reason to believe that independence will lead to improvement.

Kosovo’s ‘independence’ Washington gets a new colony in the Balkans

By Sara Flounders Published Feb 21, 2008 8:13 PM

In evaluating the recent “declaration of independence” by Kosovo, a province of Serbia, and its immediate recognition as a state by the U.S., Germany, Britain and France, it is important to know three things.

First, Kosovo is not gaining independence or even minimal self-government. It will be run by an appointed High Representative and bodies appointed by the U.S., European Union and NATO. An old-style colonial viceroy and imperialist administrators will have control over foreign and domestic policy. U.S. imperialism has merely consolidated its direct control of a totally dependent colony in the heart of the Balkans.

Second, Washington’s immediate recognition of Kosovo confirms once again that U.S. imperialism will break any and every treaty or international agreement it has ever signed, including agreements it drafted and imposed by force and violence on others.

The recognition of Kosovo is in direct violation of such laws – specifically U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, which the leaders of Yugoslavia were forced to sign to end the 78 days of NATO bombing of their country in 1999. Even this imposed agreement affirmed the “commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Serbia, a republic of Yugoslavia.

This week’s illegal recognition of Kosovo was condemned by Serbia, Russia, China and Spain.

Thirdly, U.S. imperialist domination does not benefit the occupied people. Kosovo after nine years of direct NATO military occupation has a staggering 60 percent unemployment rate. It has become a center of the international drug trade and of prostitution rings in Europe.

The once humming mines, mills, smelters, refining centers and railroads of this small resource-rich industrial area all sit silent. The resources of Kosovo under NATO occupation were forcibly privatized and sold to giant Western multinational corporations. Now almost the only employment is working for the U.S./NATO army of occupation or U.N. agencies.

The only major construction in Kosovo is of Camp Bondsteel, the largest U.S. base built in Europe in a generation.Halliburton, of course, got the contract. Camp Bondsteel guards the strategic oil and transportation lines of the entire region.

Over 250,000 Serbian, Romani and other nationalities have been driven out of this Serbian province since it came under U.S./NATO control. Almost a quarter of the Albanian population has been forced to leave in order to find work.

Establishing a colonial administration

Consider the plan under which Kosovo’s “independence” is to happen. Not only does it violate U.N. resolutions but it is also a total colonial structure. It is similar to the absolute power held by L. Paul Bremer in the first two years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

How did this colonial plan come about? It was proposed by the same forces responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia and the NATO bombing and occupation of Kosovo.

In June of 2005, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed former Finnish President Marti Ahtisaari as his special envoy to lead the negotiations on Kosovo’s final status. Ahtisaari is hardly a neutral arbitrator when it comes to U.S. intervention in Kosovo.

He is chairman emeritus of the International Crisis Group (ICG), an organization funded by multibillionaire George Soros that promotes NATO expansion and intervention along with open markets for U.S. and E.U. investment.

The board of the ICG includes two key U.S. officials responsible for the bombing of Kosovo: Gen. Wesley Clark and Zbigniew Brzezinski. In March 2007, Ahtisaari gave his Comprehensive Proposal for Kosovo Status Settlement to the new U.N. Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon.

The documents setting out the new government for Kosovo are available here. A summary is available on the U.S. State Department’s Web site. An International Civilian Representative (ICR) will be appointed by U.S. and E.U. officials to oversee Kosovo.

This appointed official can overrule any measures, annul any laws and remove anyone from office in Kosovo. The ICR will have full and final control over the departments of Customs, Taxation, Treasury and Banking.

The E.U. will establish a European Security and Defense Policy Mission (ESDP) and NATO will establish an International Military Presence. Both these appointed bodies will have control over foreign policy, security, police, judiciary, all courts and prisons. They are guaranteed immediate and complete access to any activity, proceeding or document in Kosovo.

These bodies and the ICR will have final say over what crimes can be prosecuted and against whom; they can reverse or annul any decision made. The largest prison in Kosovo is at the U.S. base, Camp Bondsteel, where prisoners are held without charges, judicial overview or representation.

The recognition of Kosovo’s “independence” is just the latest step in a U.S. war of reconquest that has been relentlessly pursued for decades.

Divide and rule

The Balkans has been a vibrant patchwork of many oppressed nationalities, cultures and religions. The Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia, formed after World War II, contained six republics, none of which had a majority.

Yugoslavia was born with a heritage of antagonisms that had been endlessly exploited by the Ottoman Turks, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and interference by British and French imperialism, followed by Nazi German and Italian Fascist occupation in World War II.

The Jewish and Serbian peoples suffered the greatest losses in that war. A powerful communist-led resistance movement made up of all the nationalities, which had suffered in different ways, was forged against Nazi occupation and all outside intervention. After the liberation, all the nationalities cooperated and compromised in building the new socialist federation.

In 45 years the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia developed from an impoverished, underdeveloped, feuding region into a stable country with an industrial base, full literacy and health care for the whole population.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Pentagon immediately laid plans for the aggressive expansion of NATO into the East. Divide and rule became U.S. policy throughout the entire region. Everywhere right-wing, pro-capitalist forces were financed and encouraged.

As the Soviet Union was broken up into separate, weakened, unstable and feuding republics, the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia tried to resist this reactionary wave.

In 1991, while world attention was focused on the devastating U.S. bombing of Iraq, Washington encouraged, financed and armed right-wing separatist movements in the Croatian, Slovenian and Bosnian republics of the Yugoslav Federation. In violation of international agreements Germany and the U.S. gave quick recognition to these secessionist movements and approved the creation of several capitalist mini-states.

At the same time U.S. finance capital imposed severe economic sanctions on Yugoslavia to bankrupt its economy. Washington then promoted NATO as the only force able to bring stability to the region.

The arming and financing of the right-wing UCK movement in the Serbian province of Kosovo began in this same period. Kosovo was not a distinct republic within the Yugoslav Federation but a province in the Serbian Republic. Historically, it had been a center of Serbian national identity, but with a growing Albanian population.

Washington initiated a wild propaganda campaign claiming that Serbia was carrying out a campaign of massive genocide against the Albanian majority in Kosovo. The Western media was full of stories of mass graves and brutal rapes. U.S. officials claimed that from 100,000 up to 500,000 Albanians had been massacred.

U.S./NATO officials under the Clinton administration issued an outrageous ultimatum that Serbia immediately accept military occupation and surrender all sovereignty or face NATO bombardment of its cities, towns and infrastructure. When, at a negotiation session in Rambouillet, France, the Serbian Parliament voted to refuse NATO’s demands, the bombing began.

In 78 days the Pentagon dropped 35,000 cluster bombs, used thousands of rounds of radioactive depleted-uranium rounds, along with bunker busters and cruise missiles.

The bombing destroyed more than 480 schools, 33 hospitals, numerous health clinics, 60 bridges, along with industrial, chemical and heating plants, and the electrical grid. Kosovo, the region that Washington was supposedly determined to liberate, received the greatest destruction.

Finally on June 3, 1999, Yugoslavia was forced to agree to a ceasefire and the occupation of Kosovo.

Expecting to find bodies everywhere, forensic teams from 17 NATO countries organized by the Hague Tribunal on War Crimes searched occupied Kosovo all summer of 1999 but found a total of only 2,108 bodies, of all nationalities.

Some had been killed by NATO bombing and some in the war between the UCK and the Serbian police and military. They found not one mass grave and could produce no evidence of massacres or of “genocide.”

This stunning rebuttal of the imperialist propaganda comes from a report released by the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte. It was covered, but without fanfare, in the New York Times of Nov. 11, 1999.

The wild propaganda of genocide and tales of mass graves were as false as the later claims that Iraq had and was preparing to use “weapons of mass destruction.”

Through war, assassinations, coups and economic strangulation, Washington has succeeded for now in imposing neoliberal economic policies on all of the six former Yugoslav republics and breaking them into unstable and impoverished mini-states.

The very instability and wrenching poverty that imperialism has brought to the region will in the long run be the seeds of its undoing. The history of the achievements made when Yugoslavia enjoyed real independence and sovereignty through unity and socialist development will assert itself in the future.

Sara Flounders, co-director of the International Action Center, traveled to Yugoslavia during the 1999 U.S. bombing and reported on the extent of the U.S. attacks on civilian targets. She is a co-author and editor of the books: Hidden Agenda:U.S./NATO Takeover of Yugoslavia and NATO in the Balkans.

Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

References

Durant, Will. 1972. Story of Civilization, Vol.1, Our Oriental Heritage, p.459. New York.

The Saudhouse

Repost from the old site.

Are the Saudis behind Muslim terror most everywhere, or does it just seem like it?

After all, 8

And support for Al Qaeda is high in the Kingdom. A good 5

There were also times during the worst of the AQAP operations that the Saudi security forces just let AQAP escape from their very hands. This was due to huge support for AQAP inside the Saudi security forces themselves. What’s happened since? With the death of the horrible Muqrin, the AQAP leader, the organization seems to have temporarily given up armed struggle inside the Kingdom.

The very decision to initiate armed struggle inside Saudi Arabia was very difficult for bin Laden, since there had always been an implicit agreement between Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia to keep its attacks outside the Kingdom. That was part of the deal. The decision to initiate attacks inside Saudi Arabia was a momentous one, and was possibly controversial with its supporters.

For a long time there, maybe two or three years, there were regular shootouts with AQAP and the Saudi security forces, and the security forces lost a lot of men. During the peak of the conflict, AQAP had men in the streets at night and ruled whole districts of major cities when the sun went down, and the security forces just stayed out.

So what’s happened to AQAP? Why did they quit attacking the Saudi state? That’s an interesting story right there. Has anyone written about it? John Bradley? Anyone else?

Fatah Islam, an insane Salafist offshoot of a Palestinian group that took over a refugee camp in north Lebanon and shot up Lebanon for a few weeks last year, leaving lots of dead Lebanese soldiers and a wrecked camp, was 3

Everyone knows that Iraqi Al Qaeda is full of Saudis, that one of its leaders is a Saudi, that Saudis are the nationality with the most suicide bombers in Iraq, that Saudi preachers, even government preachers, praise the Iraqi guerrillas every week with no consequences.

In Saudi Arabia, there have been 1000’s of funerals of Saudis killed in Iraq. Probably at least 3,000 young Saudi men who went to fight there have come home in boxes. The funerals are a big deal in Arabia. Check out John Bradley on the Net for more.

How about all the Gulf money pouring into the Iraqi insurgency? Do you realize that that money only goes to radical Salafist type groups that are synonymous with Iraqi Al Qaeda for all intents and purposes? This is what has given the Iraqi guerrillas their Wahhabi – Salafist character and killed the secular and Leftist groups that were fighting in Iraq through 2003.

Afghanistan and Western Pakistan, home of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and like groups, is flooded with Gulf money, and all the money goes to Wahhabi mosques. These mosques churn out the Taliban types like assembly line plants.

The IMU in Uzbekistan, most active before 2001, but later transplanted to the FATA in Pakistan where they are still active as pretty much an arm of Al Qaeda, was created by young Uzbek men getting influenced by insane and evil radicalism in Saudi-funded mosques.

There is a major dust-up in Chechnya these days about Wahhabism and how much it has penetrated the Chechen guerrillas and Chechen society. Chechen religious leaders are preaching against Wahhabism, which, it is true, is alien to traditional Chechen religious culture. No one really knows how many Wahhabis there were in the Chechen guerrillas, but their communiques have gotten more Salafist in tone as time has worn on.

They used to say that 1

Al Qaeda is still very big in Yemen, and they carry out major operations from time to time, operations that could not go down without penetration of security forces. A group of AQ in Yemen recently broke out of prison, and security forces involvement seems likely.

The Saudis are in Iran as we speak, preaching Wahhabism in the Ahwaz and converting the Shia Arabs to Sunni Wahhabism. And what upshot is this likely to have? Anything good?

Zarqawi’s group penetrated deep within Jordanian security forces and nearly carried out a mad acid attack on Western embassies in Amman. Zarqawi and his group of Shia-killers have mass support inside Jordan, among the tribes and among the regular folks. His ideology came straight from Jordan itself? Oh really now?

Why Hamas and its rise, and the decline of the PLO? All the Gulf, especially Saudi, money, goes to Hamas. They won’t give a dime to the secular groups. Looking for someone to blame for the radicalization of Palestine? Forget Iran and Syria. Look no further than the Gulf.

The hatred for the Shia that characterizes the Sunni radicals in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, is to some extent all fed by the Saudis. In Pakistan, the homicidal anti-Shia war was actually initiated in the 1970’s by Saudi-brainwashed Sunnis.

The entire Sunni world as a whole contributes to the Shia-hatred in a much lesser way, though it has become louder since the Iraq War. These were seeds that were always there in Sunni society, but have been given a homicidal and even genocidal watering with Saudi money and especially propaganda.

What created the mad Salafist insurgency in Algeria? Was it just homegrown Algerian fanaticism? Did the Gulf have nothing to do with this? Why do they now call themselves Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb?

What can you say about a place where the women can’t even drive a car? You call it Saudi Arabia. And there is good evidence that the women are not too happy about this state of affairs, but the Kingdom is a very complex place.

The Saudhouse, the Saudhouse. Oh, such corruption. The prince who spent his 20’s frying on LSD and smashing up other people’s stuff with his motorcycle. The princes who drink and whore around and all of that opportunistic male homosexuality. The thieving princes who steal land, homes and businesses right and left, and no one can do a thing about it.

In the Kingdom, the girls’ colleges are known for lesbians on the make, and lesbian love affairs and their ferocious breakups tear up the girls’ high schools. All of the princesses on pills, depressed, somaticizing, and their frustrated and lesbian love affairs in the South of France, why will no one speak of these things?

Situational bisexuality among males is everywhere there, and a Kuwaiti female friend estimated it at 5

Nobody will ever say anything about the Saudhouse. Wherever you find Al Qaeda, you find Saudis, and Saudi money. To this day. And that is all there is to it. Why will nobody say a thing about this?

Oh we know, we know. We know about the advisors of the emirs of Qatar who have deep connections with Al Qaeda, who had connections with some of the folks involved in 9-11. We know about the 27 pages in the 9-11 Report that were torn out because they had to do with the Saudis. They discussed the role of Saudi Arabia or its citizens, or both, in 9-11.

The US government buried them and Americans haven’t asked to see them. Why? Americans don’t care? What are we, sheep?

The whole US elite is corrupted. By Saudi money. By Saudi oil money, as they bat the tennis balls in Washington, DC with the princes. Who? Dick Cheney. Colin Powell. The Bushes. On and on. The oil and the money, addicting as crack.

The Saudi terror. The Saudi Sunni terror.

Why will no one discuss this wound that moans so loudly as it limps through our injured world?

Excellent News Out of Palestine

Update: AAB has now denied responsibility for the attack.

A mysterious new group called Al Aqsa Brigades (Imad Mughniyeh Faction), along with a strange group called the Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Arabs, Iran, Islam, Israel, Israel-Palestine Conflict, Middle East, Palestine, Race/Ethnicity, Radical Islam, Regional, Religion, Shiism, South Asia, Sunnism, Syria, Terrorism, The Jewish Question, War17 Comments on Excellent News Out of Palestine

Indian State Goes Officially Fascist

The Indian state has now gone officially fascist in the wake of the Operation Green Hunt against the Maoists. Many unarmed opposition movements and leaders, who apparently have nothing whatsoever to do with the armed Maoist movement, are being called “Maoists” and arrested on ridiculous charges.

One wonders exactly what the laws are on this matter? Supporters of this shit government, tell me, what exactly is legal and what exactly is illegal in terms of these Maoists? Surely if you are a member of their armed force, that is illegal. If you are a member of the CPI-Maoist political party, that is illegal too.

What else is illegal? If you talk to a Maoist, is that illegal? What if you interview one? What if you let them stay in your village? What if you say, “I like these Maoists and I support them.” Is that illegal? It’s almost impossible to tell what is legal and what is illegal anymore in this conflict.

India is going to turn into another shit death squad terror state like (past or present) Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Paraguay, Brazil, Panama, Philippines, Indonesia, Russia and Turkey.

Arundhati Roy is an outspoken Leftist from India who has written some penetrating articles on the Maoists there. Does she support them? Well, I suppose so, though she’s rather coy about it. Is that illegal? Who the Hell knows!

The Indian state is now going after Roy, an acclaimed author, with full force. State-sponsored demonstrators appeared outside her home throwing rocks. Two politicians in Chattisargh state has issued complaints for her arrest on charges of “supporting the Maoists.” A top Hindu fascist BJP politician in Chattisargh called for Roy to be shot on sight. The head of the Salwa Judum death squads called for legal action to be taken against Roy.

The Pakistan-Peruvian Axis, Part 2

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

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

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

More on the Pakistan-Peruvian Axis

More on what I call the Peru-Pakistan Axis. The Peru-Pakistan Axis is a region of Arabized peoples who have been culturally Arabized due to Arab influence. It includes non-Arab nations and regions like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, the Caucasus, Turkey, the Christian Arabs, Cyprus, Greece, Albania, Southern Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, especially the parts not heavily Africanized. From The Study of Racialism site:

A long time ago, I dated a girl whose parents were from Reggio di Calabria – which is right at the tip of the toe of the boot in Italy. A few years later, when I was studying French, I read Née en France – Histoire D’une Jeune Beur by Aïcha Benaïssa. As I read that book, I realized I was imagining the author’s family as family of the girl I dated.

The cultural similarities were very strong, with the the domination of women by the family, the belief in the “evil eye” and spells, and the controlling father who in turn fears his own mother, the separation of the women and the men, the older women trying to play matchmaker, the elevation of female purity/virginity etc.

One can see how there is an underlying common culture which has existed probably since pre-Roman times that has simply had Islam/Christianity superimposed upon it.

Can We Please Put an Anti-Communist Lie to Rest?

The capitalist West’s war against Communism has been pretty vicious. There are few lies that they have not bothered to toss about. Most here in the West simply uncritically swallowed all of this stuff no questions asked.

I would like to take to task at least bit one anti-Communist dogma: That Communism (and by analogy socialism) has failed, and one of the reasons for that failure was that people hate it.

We really need to ask, “Failed how, and in what way?” If you ask your average person how it is that it failed, you won’t get much of an answer.

One of the ways we can determine if a system failed or not is if the people themselves accepted it or enjoyed. Anti-Communist dogma long held that the people living under Communism were miserable. But this is now coming under question. An earlier post laid out well that after 20 years, large sectors of Eastern Europe, in some cases a majority, prefer Communism to the capitalism that replaced it. Keep in mind that these are folks who experienced both.

More evidence is forthcoming from a new poll from Tajikistan, indicating that 7

Another poll says that 6

Ok, so if it failed, it wasn’t because the people hated it, right? In many cases, large sectors of the population, even majorities, preferred it to capitalism. So we can’t say it was a failure based on lack of popular support.

How about another argument? This argument says that no one has ever immigrated from a capitalist country to a Communist country, with the exception of a few Western Communists. But this is not the case. After Germany split into West and East halves, many West German Communists left their half and immigrated to East Germany. I’m not sure how long they stayed. This info comes from a German friend of mine from Hessen. She told me that most of her Communist relatives in the West took off for the East.

In Cuba, we have yet another case. Eastern Cuba is now full of Blacks from Jamaica and Haiti who have fled capitalist Haiti and Jamaica (largely failed states) for Cuba. They reportedly like Cuba much better than Haiti and Jamaica.

A better way to look at it is that Communism and capitalism (as economic systems) are different systems, both of which can and often do have immense problems and also immense benefits. Some humans prefer to live under Communism while others prefer to live in a capitalist system. The type of person who prefers to live under one system or the other probably depends on personality and life experience.

A rightwing friend of mine told me that it’s true many people prefer Communism, but he said that they are the “lazy failures” of society. I’m ok with his objection. I just wish that the capitalist media of the West would agree that a lot of humans prefer Communism over capitalism. Then we can argue about who they are and why, whether or not they are “lazy failures,” etc.

As for the larger question of whether Communism failed or not, that goes beyond the preferences of those who lived under it and deserves another post.

Dead Issues

Gang Bang Funeral

In some societies necrophilia was enacted owing to a belief that the soul of an unmarried woman would not find peace; among the Kachin of Myanmar, versions of a marriage ceremony were held to lay a dead virgin to rest, which would involve intercourse with the corpse. Similar practices existed in some pre-modern Central European societies when a woman who was engaged to be married died before the wedding.

Good God, how horrible!

Cool Sculptures

Acts of necrophilia are reportedly displayed on Moche artifacts of Peru.

Yuck.

Wisdom of the Ancients

Herodotus writes in The Histories that, to discourage intercourse with a corpse, ancient Egyptians left deceased beautiful women to decay for “three or four days” before giving them to the embalmers. This practice originated from the need to discourage the men performing the funerary customs from having sexual interest in their charges.

Indeed, the same famous work discusses one Pharaonic era undertaker whose particular kink was screaming for his “Mummy” while doing the deed.

Birds and the Bees, or Animals Do It Too

Necrophilia is known to occur in animals, with a number of confirmed observations.

Kees Moeliker allegedly made one of these observations while he was sitting in his office at the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, when he heard the distinctive thud of a bird hitting the glass facade of the building. Upon inspection, he discovered a drake (male) mallard lying dead about two meters from the building. Next to the downed bird there was a second drake mallard standing close by.

As Moeliker observed the couple, the living drake picked at the corpse of the dead one for a few minutes and then mounted the corpse and began copulating with it. The act of necrophilia lasted for about 75 minutes, in which time, according to Moeliker, the living drake took two short breaks before resuming with copulating behavior.

Moeliker surmised that at the time of the collision with the window the two mallards were engaged in a common pattern in duck behavior which is called “rape flight.” “When one died the other one just went for it and didn’t get any negative feedback – well, didn’t get any feedback,” according to Moeliker. This is the first recorded case of necrophilia in the mallard duck- though not the only recorded case of homosexuality within the bird family.

The Cane Toads: an Unnatural History film shows a male toad copulating with a female toad who has been run over by a car. He goes on to do this for eight hours, although the entire eight-hour act is not depicted in the movie, thank God.

In the case of a praying mantis, necrophilia could be said to be part of their methods of reproduction. The larger female will sometimes decapitate or even eat her mate during copulation. However, this only happens in 5-3

Dang man, a queer necrophiliac birdbrain odd duck, a ugly toad fucking a toadly chick for a full eight hours without even getting bored, worrying about genital warts or stopping to eat a fly, and male praying mantises with their brains in their dicks. I’ve heard of guys thinking with their dicks before, but that’s ridiculous.

Alt Left: How Do You Get HIV Anyway?

I figured everyone knew all about how AIDS is transmitted, but considering the dismal state of sex ed in schools and elsewhere these days, I guess not. Plus, with all the focus on “heterosexual AIDS,” people just want to scare you away from sex period, and they don’t want to get into details about how you get it, because then you might think it’s low risk and go for it.

So it’s time for an educational post about HIV.* Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know this stuff. It’s not as if they’re handing out brochures on the street corners.

A commenter asks:

Also, why do gays get Aids more than Heterosexuals?

Answer: They get fucked in the ass by other guys. Fucking a woman in the ass is also a great way to give her AIDS.

AIDS = Anal Injections of Deadly Sperm.

That’s a sick joke.

Semen has a lot of HIV in it. When you fuck someone in the ass, the anus is very sensitive and has only a thin layer of protection. There is often a little bit of bleeding during anal sex. The sperm is ejaculated into the anus, and it just goes right into the bloodstream through those thin walls and tiny tears. Generally, this is no big deal, but if the semen has HIV in it, that’s pretty much a guaranteed HIV infection .

The guy who is fucking has a much less chance of getting HIV from the ass of the other person with HIV. That’s because the HIV has to go into your dick, and that’s hard to do because your dick is pretty solid. Also the HIV is mostly in semen. There won’t be much HIV in someone ass, unless there is bleeding.

When a guy fucks a woman’s pussy, well, the pussy evolved to get fucked regularly, so it can take a good pounding no problem. It has really thick walls. So even if semen is ejaculated into a vagina, it’s kind of hard to get AIDS that way because it’s hard for the semen to penetrate the walls of the vagina and get into the bloodstream.

Sometimes if sex is really rough or violent, the woman can have minor bleeding in her vagina. Sometimes there are tiny tears in the vagina too, and you can for sure get HIV from getting fucked in the pussy, but it’s not all that easy.

All of the women getting HIV in porn got it from getting fucked in the ass without a condom. That’s a much easier way for anyone to get it, even hets.

It’s hard to get HIV from giving blowjobs. There have been a few cases, but it’s rather rare considering how often the act occurs and how few cases there have been. All known cases were in gay men who were giving blowjobs 100’s of times to scores to 100’s of men, many of whom probably had HIV.

There’s lots of HIV in semen, but it’s just swallowed and goes into the stomach, where your stomach kills it like that. It would be hard for HIV to get into your bloodstream from your mouth or throat. Maybe if you have a really bad sore throat or better, a little bleeding in your throat it would be easier.

It’s basically impossible to get HIV from getting a blowjob. There is almost no HIV in saliva.

Handjobs are safe sex. You can’t get HIV from giving one or receiving one.

It’s really hard to get HIV from fucking a woman’s pussy if you’re the guy. It’s possible, probably more likely if she is on her period because there is bleeding and your dick contacts the blood, which has tons of HIV in it. Vaginal secretions have HIV, but only a small amount. It’s hard to transmit HIV from a vagina to someone else.

Objections have been raised to this, pointing out that HIV from straight sex is common in India, Thailand and Africa. However, in Thailand and Africa at least, there are completely different forms of HIV than the types of HIV found in the West. Those types seem to be easily transmitted heterosexually, but the type in West seems to be hard to transmit heterosexually.

It’s almost impossible to get HIV from eating pussy, but one guy got it. He had sex with an HIV-positive prostitute every day for six months, and that was his only sex act, since he was an older guy who was impotent (Weird!). Realistically, it’s next to impossible to get it this way, much less likely than fucking a woman.

You can’t get HIV from finger fucking or banging a woman. It’s safe sex.

You can’t catch HIV from kissing someone or getting kissed.

For the reasons above, HIV is almost never transmitted via lesbian sex. One case has shown up in lesbians, but those two women were doing things like shoving dildos up one woman’s ass and then sticking the dildo up the other woman’s ass. Sticking a dildo up your ass can cause bleeding, and if you then stick it up the other woman’s ass, it can go into her bloodstream via her anus easily since there is some blood with a lot of HIV on the dildo.

Another thing we can look at is HIV infection in swingers. Swingers are people who are part of a lifestyle where they have sex with lots of people, sometimes including group sex. All of the HIV cases in swinger males that I am aware of were in bisexual men. A number of swinger women did contact it from straight sex with these guys. There are plenty of women out there having sex with men who they know are bisexual. This is definitely high sex behavior in women, since these guys are at high risk for HIV.

*How do I know so much about this stuff? I’ve been studying AIDS since it came out in February 1982. I remember it before it was even called AIDS – it was called GRID – Gay Related Immune Deficiency. Back then, they had no idea what caused it, only that certain groups were getting it (like Haitians). This gave rise to jokes like, “What’s the worst thing about AIDS? Trying to convince your parents you’re Haitian.” LOL.

Around 1992-94, I used to go to a medical library at St. Agnes Hospital in Fresno, California. Those places are really cool! You’re supposed to be medical professional to go there, but this Black guy who ran the place and he liked me and let me in anyway. Mostly he was freaked out that a non-medical person would even want to go to a place like that.

They had a journal in there called something like, The Journal of AIDS. It’s the ultimate journal on HIV. I read about 8-10 years back issues of that journal, 100 issues or so, and that’s where I learned much of what I know about HIV. Most of the above post came from my readings in 10 years of that journal.

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Are Iranians White?

It’s certainly a reasonable question, as White nationalists in general answer a resounding “No!” to that question. But even they are funny. Stormfront threw out 300 Armenians on the grounds that they were non-White. However, this decision was very controversial, and after a while, the Armenians were quietly let back in.

They have a Pan-Europeanist policy, which is one of the few noble things about that site.

Recently there were a lot of Iranians on the site, and though I believe Stormfront does officially state that Iranians are not White, there has been a quiet hands-off “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about them, and the Stormfronters quietly let the Iranians stay in what boils down to an open secret. In other words, Stormfront offically states that Iranians are not White, but unofficially, they turn a blind eye to Iranians joining and even organizing themselves on the site.

Iranians are funny people. In 1978, I drove an ice cream truck for a living. There were a bunch of Iranians were who driving trucks too. We were all sort of budding capitalists. You lease the truck every day, buy your ice cream, mark it up, and hope for the best. A lot of us supplemented our incomes by selling dope, including me.

The Iranians were very good at this, selling joints for $1 each mostly to the many Mexicans in the parks of Santa Ana (Santa Ana was a heavily Mexican city even 30 years ago).

Once at the end of the day (we lined up at the end of the day to have our coins rolled and get our payout in easy cash) I asked them if they were Arabs. They were adamant. “We are not Arabs!” Later I learned that they don’t like Arabs much. It’s a superior versus inferior thing. The Iranians think they are better and that the Arabs are inferior, a bunch of animals.

At worst, Iranian nationalists call them “lizard-eating Mohammadens.” Image is heathen Arab Muslims charging out of the deserts of Arabia to destroy the great and proud Iranian culture. And it’s true that the Muslims did devastate Iranian culture, but they did this to all non-Muslim cultures they encountered. After all they were Jahiliyyah or grounded in ignorance.

The modern Islamic state has reinstated this view, downplaying traditional Iranian culture, making Arabic practically a 2nd official language, etc., all of this infuriating Iranian nationalists.

The real hardcore Iranian nationalists often abandon Islam altogether and claim to be Zoroastrians, the true ancient religion of Iran.

Iranian nationalists are interesting people.

Iranian nationalists hate Arabs, so you might think they like Jews, but they hate Jews about as much as they hate Arabs. They especially hate Israel. “Marg bar Israel!” is a common cry on Iranian forms (“Death to Israel!”) And the guys yelling this stuff were older professional guys in their 40’s with young kids, secular, and while respectful of Islam, not very religious.

Why the hatred of Israel? Probably, if you are an Iranian nationalist, even a secular one, Israel is seen as your mortal enemy. That’s a logical assumption.

The harder-core Iranian nationalists also dislike Pan-Turkic types, since the Turanian lunatics usually claim some or all of Iran.

The saner Iranian nationalists hate not Arabs but Arab nationalism. Arab nationalism is funny. It’s Leftist, secular, supposedly anti-racist, but they are bristling with hatred for Iranians. Saddam Hussein’s Arab nationalist uncle, who profoundly effected his views, wrote a famous tract, somewhat humorously titled, Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Jews, Persians and Flies.

The hatred of Arabs towards Persians is similar to that of Gentiles towards Jews or Blacks towards Whites: resentment against a group that thinks they are superior. A common claim, similar to anti-Semitism, among Whites is, “The Iranians are trying to dominate the Arab World!” It’s true that the Iranians opposed Arab nationalism, but who could blame them? The Pan-Arabists were a bunch of anti-Iranian racist shits.

What’s funny about this is that there are Iranian genes running all through the Arabs of the Levant, Mesopotamia and Arabia. It is particularly the case with the Mesopotamian Arabs. The Arab Shia in Southern Iraq have a lot of Iranian blood. One of the reasons Saddam persecuted them so harshly is he thought that they were Iranian fifth columnists. In general, it wasn’t really true, but there was reason to be concerned.

In recent years, as Iran and its Shia allies have turned into the greatest defenders of the Palestinians, the Arab nationalists are in a tough spot. They hate Iran, but how can they deny that Iran is the best defender of the Palestinians in the pitiful and sold-out Arab and Muslim world? There are particular conflicts with Hamas, a Sunni fundamentalist group which is strangely also pro-Iran, and Hezbollah, whose defense of the Palestinians puts the Sunni Arabs to shame.

These realities have forced the Sunnis into all sorts of cognitive dissonance that as usual does not make much sense.

I’ve known a few Iranians. They definitely look like White people. Their skin is often very pale White, especially the females (Why is that?). Some charts strangely enough put them right next to British, Danes and Norwegians genetically. No one knows what to make of it, but we were all together in Southern Russia 4,500 years ago. Some of us took off south to Iran, and others went into Europeans to constitute the modern Europeans. We are born of the same modern roots.

I’ve asked a few Iranians, “You’re White like us, right?” You might think they would get pissed, but they usually give an instant yes or break into a huge smile. They clearly consider themselves “Europeans outside or Europe.” One even told me explicitly that.

Scientifically, it’s an reasonable assumption.

Genetically, Iranians probably have little if any Black in them. Your average German has more Black in them than an Iranian. They do have some Asiatic genes, but probably not many.

The Iranians are actually an interesting link to populations further east. There is a close link between Italians and Iranians (Italians are probably the closest Europeans to Iranians) and then there is another close link between Iranians and Indians, especially North Indians.

So the linkage goes like this (all groups separated by only one arrow are closely linked, but groups separated by more than one arrow are not so close):

Core Europeans -> Italians -> Iranians -> North Indians

So, neither core Europeans nor Italians are all that close to North Indians per se, they can become closer to them through this linkage process.

Iranian genes are common in the region, even outside of Arabia. Many Afghans have Iranian blood and it’s quite common in Pakistanis too. There is a lot of Iranian blood in the Caucasus. Most of your Chechen, Dagestani, Ingush, etc. types seem to derive from some sort of Iranian-Turkish mix. The Ossetians are actually a transplanted Iranian group living in Russia and speaking a language related to Iranian.

There is Iranian blood running through the Stans – Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It’s probably most prominent in Tajikistan.

Persians are only 5

The Kurds and Balochis have serious separatist tendencies. The Arabs (Ahvaz) just fight for more rights as an oppressed minority. Azeri separatism has not really gone anywhere, since the Azeris are actually a dominant minority in Iran! The Talysh have separatist tendencies, but in Azerbaijan, not in Iran.

I don’t support the separatism of the Balochis and Kurds in Iran as long as Iran is under imperialist assault, but if this were not the case, I would think they deserve the right to self-determination. Iran is correct to suppress Arab separatism and the desire to take Iran’s oil and gas wealth with them to a separate state.

Another Huge Maoist Attack in India

The Indian Maoists engaged in another massive attack in India, once again in Chattisargh, Ground Zero for the Maoist insurgency in India. A bus filled with state police, containing 40-60 people was blown up by a Maoist land mine, killing at least 50 of those aboard. The attack probably took place in the Dandakaranya Region, which was where the previous devastating attack took place.

One problem for the Indian Maoists is that they have not yet set up any base areas. However, word is that they are just now finally setting up a base area in the Dandakaranya Region. I have seen videos of Maoist forces swarming over the dirt highways in this region. There are huge columns of both sexes that seem to have scores or hundreds of members.

The people in this region are Gonds, and they speak the Gondi language. The Gondi language is in bad shape, as it has never had any state support. The Maoists have started to support the Gondi language, and the state has finally started to do so too, to “stop the Maoists.”

The problem is the same as with all civic action programs. They throw the starving people a few crumbs to ward off revolution, but crumbs don’t fill your stomach. So revolution is warded off, but the system barely changes at all. Instead, it makes just a few rudimentary changes around the edges. If the state would really fundamentally change to ward off the Maoists, that would be nice, but it’s never going to happen.

There is a lot of talk on this site about economic growth in India. True, there has been some impressive growth in recent years. But only 5-1

One problem is that the Maoists are going to need to expand beyond tribals in their war. An obvious target is the Dalits or low caste untouchables. However, 8

The Maoists have actually been very pragmatic about religion, and have not said much about Hinduism. Maoist ranks are full of religious Hindus, and the Maoists have not even been able to get rid of caste in their own ranks. Maoists do not wish to engage in the issue of caste as they see it as too divisive. They want Hindus to join their movement, and an all-out war on caste will leave them tagged as a Dalit movement.

Dalits are angry at the Maoists in both Nepal and India since their leaders are high caste Brahmins. But Brahmins have always led movements for good or bad in both countries. And the more advanced classes tend to lead revolutions, while the oppressed and less advanced classes tend to be foot soldiers. The leaders of Sendero Luminoso look like White Peruvians, but a look at the ranks of Sendero’s foot soldiers shows deep Indian features in almost every guerrilla you see of either sex.

The Maoists have a huge presence in southern Bihar, Jharkand, Chattisargh, western West Bengal, northern Andhra Pradesh, eastern Orissa, and far western Maharashtra. They’re going to need to expand quite a bit outside of this region in order to make some good gains. The state is waging a huge offensive against the Maoists. The offensive could either wage deadly blows against the Maoists or it could paradoxically cause them to dramatically increase their power in the land. It will be interesting to see what unfolds.

Great Article on North Korea

This is a great new article on North Korea, an interview with a fine North Korea scholar, Colin Marshall, an American who teaches at a university in South Korea. He has been intensively studying North Korea for 20 years now, mostly by reading their official publications.

A few points:

First of all, he disagrees that this is a classic Marxist-Leninist state anymore. North Korea recently removed the word “Communism” from its Constitution. Indeed, many Leftists and even Communists have washed our hands of these guys a long time ago. Instead, he argues that this is a state that results when the Far Left and Far Right meet in a sort of a circle. So, it is kind of a Marxist-Leninist-Fascist state, if such a thing is even possible.

The state is based on a racist rhetoric (Marshall sees North Korea as possibly the most racist state on Earth right now) that sees the Koreans as the pure people, untainted by evil, who are being menaced by these evil forces, specifically the Americans. The South Koreans are included in this racist view of the world. Kim Jong Il and his father are romanticized as some kind of blood and soil fathers of the people.

Even with access to outside media in recent years (Yes, many North Koreans can now access outside media) the overwhelming majority of North Koreans still buy into this philosophy. Even if they realize that many of the stories about Kim and his father are not true, they believe in them the same way that some believe in religious stories – that the story may not be factually true, but it represents the essence of what Kim is all about.

The article also plays up the paranoid, belligerent and irrational nature of the state, whose view revolves around the Korean War and specifically the US bases and military in South Korea. South Korea is seen as a good land of the great pure Koreans that has been colonized by the evil Americans. I’m not sure if Kim even wants to negotiate a peace treaty with the US, because then he would have little to rally his people around.

In recent years, North Koreans have begun to realize that most South Koreans live pretty well, and regime propaganda about the horrible lives of South Koreans was not true. Now the regime has to justify to the people why it is that their lives are in general so much worse than South Koreans’. This cognitive dissonance may well set off a new war.

The author says it’s true that the North has a command economy, but fascist Germany and Japan had command economies too. He draws some analogies to the fascist and extremely militaristic states and the North Korean state.

North Korea is not nuts enough to attack the US or Japan. This is what the crazy anti-Communist North Korea haters in the US continuously harp on. However, they may well be nuts enough to attack South Korea, and that’s a disturbing thought right there.

The North Korean military is a vast military machine, the 4th largest on Earth. They are well-fed and supplied with a tremendous amount of innovative vehicles and weaponry, some of which would boggle your mind. They also have excellent skills at information warfare. They are not to be dismissed or messed with at all.

The article, ultimately, was depressing. I’m not sure how the world can appease or accommodate North Korea. This is important because if we don’t, we may see more risky type provocations on their part, with potentially ominous consequences.

The regime is definitely desperate for money. I’m not sure what can be done about that either.

Are Whites Necessary For Modern Civilization?

A White nationalist commenter comments on the Neandertal thread:

Robert, I don’t get your strange form of ethnocentrism. You claim to think “we’re the best,” as a sort of superstition, while knowing that we’re not really the best; while in many respects “we’re the best,” is obviously true. You can’t compare Black supremacist ideology with White supremacist. The former may take things a bit too far and sometimes be a bit off the facts, but the latter is simply laughable.

Whites may not be perfect, but they do have a fairly high IQ and the most impressive track record in terms of scientific progress and high culture.

As far as the West not always being dominant– the Chinese had not discovered that the Earth was a sphere or that the sun was larger than the Earth by 1600 AD. We beat them to it by more than a millennium.

They were also amazed by Euclid as they had nothing comparable in mathematics; they had no system of formal logic or precise scientific method; excluding the Great Wall, no ancient architecture to compare with our great Cathedrals and monuments etc. you could go on and on. The Asians today have more great pianists to play Chopin, but where is the Asian Chopin? They are impressive people, but clearly less innovative.

The Arabs had a bit of a renaissance partly due to having better access to ancient Greek manuscripts; but it was short lived. Who’s following in the tradition of Classical Civilization today?

This whole “the West has only been ahead for a few hundred years,” line is silly. We really are in a different league than everyone else.

I get your point about it being in ill taste to constantly harp on and on about your own group’s superiority. But when we’re under attack – being flooded with nonwhites and told that Western Civilization really isn’t anything to be proud of, and even if it is, nonwhites will do just fine preserving the West despite having historically shown little to no ability to do so – well then we need to start making the case for being able to do something they can’t. The facts are on our side, we just need to have the nerve to use them.

If we want to preserve the civilization we love we’re going to have to accept that we can’t avoid hurting nonwhites’ feelings by telling them that they’re unable to maintain Western Civilization on their own.

As far as my form of ethnocentrism, well, it’s completely normal. Most ethnicities do think that their people are better or the best. It’s normal thinking. Many of these folks are also often non-racist to anti-racist. The two things are quite compatible. I don’t want to get into scientifically proving that we Whites are superior. What for? It’s a disgusting enterprise, and probably won’t be fruitful anyway.

I have some extremely serious problems with this line of thinking. For starters, its presumptions.

I do not think that NE Asian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Siberian, Taiwanese, Singaporean, or Vietnamese people lack the ability to produce a great modern civilization. They can clearly do so. I see them as continuing to be able to produce great and modern civilizations into the future. I don’t even have a problem with the civilizations produced by SE Asians in general.

I doubt if the problems of Indians, South Asians, Central Asians and Arabs are due to their genes. After all, the UAE right now is one of the most spectacularly modern places on Earth. Saudi Arabian cities look like Tuscon suburbs. Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait are quite similar. What’s so inferior about that? Sure, Islam is fucked, but there’s nothing in these folks’ genes that keeps them from producing great modern societies.

The North Africans should do pretty well too. Last I heard Libya is quite a modern country.

The Turks and the people of the Caucasus can produce modern societies, as can the Iranians. Iranian weaponry now is considered to be dangerously lethal by both the US and the Israelis. Recall the Iranian anti-ship missile that destroyed the Israeli warship off of Lebanon in the last war. Kickass product.

The Pakistanis and Indians produced nuclear weapons. No small feat that.

I do have a lot of worries about the abilities of Africans to produce great societies, but it’s basically their problem, not mine. We are not going to let Africans flood in here anyway.

Furthermore, looking at history is not too relevant. Sure, Africa did not produce much in the past, on their own. But Africa is no longer isolated from all outside influences. The great leaps of knowledge, science and innovation that occur in the rest of the world are readily available to educated and skilled Africans soon after they are invented or thought up. Therefore, Africa has a much better chance to become successfully modern than in the past.

Caribbeans, I don’t know. Trinidad and Tobago has a PCI of $20,000/year with totally free health care for all and 10

As suggested in the African example above, the modern world is changing so much that it can hardly be compared to older worlds. Technology is global, and it reverberates around the globe like lightning, as does knowledge in all forms. The smart people anywhere produce innovation and knowledge, and then these facts and things move around the planet faster than you can blink your eyes.

They are made available from more skilled societies to societies that are not as skilled. Therefore, the differential IQ factors are somewhat modulated as knowledge and innovation produced in high-IQ societies flows to lower IQ societies for free.

The Hispanics are flooding in, it is true. Their societies seem to be rather chaotic and violent, but if you go to their capital cities in the wealthier districts, you will think you were in any large US city. There’s no real observable difference. Their problems are mostly due to issues of wealth distribution.

It’s hard to use national IQ’s to calculate national potentials. For instance, Cuba has

Medical discoveries and breakthroughs occur regularly in Cuba and are published in scientific journals. Cuban biotechnology, a high-IQ industry, competes effectively with biotech from huge Western corporations and sells its excellent competitive products the world over.

All of these achievements have been done with a Cuban IQ of 85, lower than that of US Blacks, who White Supremacists consider to be a failed people, mostly due to an IQ of 86.8 or so. If Cubans can do so well with an IQ lower than US Blacks, how can US Blacks be a failed people due to IQ?

I don’t really believe that other societies produce inferior musicians or music, but maybe my tastes are different from yours.

What I would like to do is to eliminate illegal immigration and reduce legal immigration. I don’t care what race or ethnicity comes here, as I don’t buy your arguments that they are genetically inferior per se.

I would say that the combined average IQ of the immigrants we let in cannot be lower than the US average (either 98 or 100 right now, depending on scale used). So if 100 immigrants of whatever constellation of groups is let in, let their combined average IQ be 98-100. If the Jamaicans, Nigerians, Filipinos, Mexicans, Palestinians, Indians, Thais and Algerians we let in all average 98-100 IQ, what’s the worry? I don’t buy your argument that a 98-100 IQ person from one of these ethnicities is still somehow genetically inferior to a 98-100 IQ White American.

You say that Whites are going extinct and we are being flooded with non-Whites, but how are you going to save the White West? Even if you cut off all non-White immigration, you will still be only 6

Not to mention cutting off non-White immigration will be politically impossible. All the non-Whites will oppose it. Now you need to get 7

Do you honestly think that you can pull that off? It sounds impossible. Both political parties, the entire MSN media, etc will be deadset against it and will flood society with propaganda against it calling those who support it KKK, White Supremacists, Nazis, racists, etc.

Kazakh Girls

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abPit0-noG0&feature=related]

These are some of the most beautiful women on Earth. Their genetics is very complex. On some charts, they make it barely into the Caucasian square as Northern Turkics, yet on others, they look quite a bit like Mongolians.

Genetically, they average 2/3 NE Asian (mostly Mongolian and Turkic) and 1/3 Caucasian. The Caucasian is of Iranic element. Take a nice dose of NE Asian girl and add a healthy lesser mixture of Eurasian Caucasoid, and you end up with these startling beauties.

It’s hard to say what they look like.

They seem to resemble Japanese women a lot to me, but Mongolians say they look a lot like Mongolian chicks. If you use your imagination, you can even see Amerindian in them. Looking around some more, some look Korean, and others seem to look something like Thai or Cambodian women. Many of them seem to be simply unclassifiable, since you’ve never seen women who look quite like this. Probably more than anything else, they look like some of the Cantonese-Caucasian Amerasian mixes you see around here in the US.

We Whites, even us Pan-Aryanists, can’t really claim them, but the Asians seem to claim them as fellow Asians. They’re a tribute to hybrid vigor!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tghJbSom7TQ&feature=related]

The ones in the video above are models from beauty contests, but the picture quality is sort of crappy. The girls in the first video are more ordinary looking.

Here’s to Kazakh girls!

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Neoliberalism and the Creation of Oligarchies

One of the things that you seem to reliably end up with via the neoliberal model is some sort of an oligarchy of one type or another. One might even argue that this is the purpose of neoliberalism. It probably isn’t, but neoliberalism is definitely in service of an elite group.

The Neoliberal Era since 1980, perpetuated by World Bank and IMF policies, supported by both US political parties, most parties ruling parties on Earth and the entire world MSM media, has a reliable record. Everywhere it has been implemented, it has resulted in the creation of wild inequality.

One can argue that inequality is just fine or even natural, but isn’t it obvious that extreme inequality is destabilizing. Things can only get so unequal before you get a revolution of one sort or another. Take away Marxism now that history has ended, and the peasant revolts will go on.

Marxism was revoked in Thailand, but instead we have the Red Shirt Revolt, exemplified by the urban and rural poor, now armed and waging street battles in the middle of Bangkok. The Red Shirt Revolt has arisen in the context of wild inequality in Thailand via neoliberal reforms of the past few decades. Malnutrition in Thailand continues at around 30-4

Latin America has largely turned its back on neoliberalism after two or three decades of trying it on for size. Not only did it only benefit the top 2

Neoliberal creation of oligarchies:

In Indonesia, free market economics in 80’s and 90’s led to a

Figures are similar for the Chinese minority of the Philippines, a

7 men, 6 of them Jewish, the oligarchs, now control 6

HBD bloggers like to say that the

Let us assume that the Chinese are smarter. Let us put their IQ generously at 110. The Island SE Asian IQ is 86. That is a 25 pt difference. According to Richard Lynn, a 25 IQ point difference in some models equals about a 3.5X greater intelligence. So let us assume that the Chinese are 3.5X smarter than Indonesians and Filipinos. They then have a right to 3.5X more money than native Island SE Asians. That would give the Chinese a right to 10.

Some of my friends say, “Well the Chinese work harder.” I find this dubious. Indonesians and Filipinos work very hard. Down there, you don’t work, you don’t eat, real simple. For this model to work, the Chinese would have to work 23 times harder than the Indonesians and Filipinos. Does anyone believe that this is the case? Let us generously say that they work twice as hard. No problem. But 23 times as hard? Forget it.

These extremes of wealth accumulation by market dominant minorities cannot be justified logically either by appeals to their brains or industriousness. It’s simply not fair. In fact, it’s outrageously unfair.

Let us look at it from another point of view. What people anywhere on Earth would allow a minority, not even of the native people, but instead foreigners, of

Everything I said about the Overseas Chinese in Island SE Asia goes for the Jews in Russia. You can call them anti-Semites all you wish, but why should the Russian people put up with Jews owning the whole place? Jews who not only see themselves as not Russians, but also have no allegiance to the state and are often filled with hostility towards the natives.

Their loyalty, if any, is to their co-ethnics in Israel, the US and the UK. When the Russians start to crack down on these Jewish crooks, they quickly shift all the money they stole to their buddies in the US, the UK (Rothschilds) and Israel. There are TV dramas in Israel that deal with the fleecing of Russia by the Jewish oligarchs, and they are extremely popular with Israeli Jews. Fine, it’s paybacks. But why should the Russian people sit still while a hostile minority is robbing the country blind?

The Total Failure of Indian Capitalism

Facts:

In India, 4

In North Korea in the mid-1990’s, there was a terrible famine that killed 600,000 people . At the very worst of the famine, the malnutrition rate in North Korea was only as bad as it is year in and year out in India. Yet the MSM never tells you about starvation and malnutrition in India, only in North Korea. In 1986, 14 million people a year were dying from the effects of malnutrition, mostly in the South Asia region of which India is the most prominent part. There’s no reason that think that figure has improved with time.

Tens of million Indians live on the streets of India! Yes, that is right, they do not have homes, and they are homeless, living on the streets. This where they eat, drink, bathe, fuck, shit and piss. This is India: millions up millions live, camped out like animals, on the streets of the cities.

Even if you can get a place to live in the slums of Indian cities, it is little better than the streets. Raw sewage flows in the streets and during floods, often fills the homes in the slums. People end up standing in ankle deep sewage water that has filled their home. This is India, every day of every year.

More facts:

6

Indian health care is a failure. State health care exists, but a friend of mine said that if you have money, you get out of a state hospital and into a private hospital. Why? State hospitals may well be a death sentence. You will get treated little if at all. If you have money to bribe the doctors to actually treat your loved one, you stand a better chance. In most rural areas, there is no health care period.

In many rural areas, there are no schools. The state may build a schoolhouse, but the teacher never shows up, and he still gets paid anyway. Many villages have no schools period. In those that do, they are ridiculously underfunded, and most drop out as very young children to go to work. Child labor is everywhere in India, as is out and out slavery. The state does nothing to stop it.

Untouchables in India.

The life of the untouchables or Dalits in India is so horrible that it virtually beggars description. This state of affairs is mandated by the Hindu religion, and there is no hope in sight. If you get rid of caste, you get rid of Hinduism. Hinduism probably cannot exist without caste. Hindu ideologues like to argue that a casteless Hinduism can exist, but it seems dubious. No caste, no Hinduism. Since caste is an integral part of Hinduism, one wonders exactly what good this religion is, and why it should even exist at all.

Any thoughts? Why should Hinduism exist?

Almost as bad as caste oppression, mostly in the rural areas, is the opposite, caste based affirmative action. Dalits and other low castes now have affirmative action policies mandated by the state. This would not be so bad, but things at the university level are not positive. For instance, Dalit and low caste gangs at universities threaten professors to pass Dalits and low castes or at least give them passing grades. Those teachers who refuse to comply may be attacked and beaten. Increasingly, a diploma from an Indian university has dubious value.

100 million excess deaths in Indian 1947-1979.

Lately 4 million excess deaths per year. People are always saying what a failure Communism is.

One way to test this theory is to look at China and India. In 1949, their developmental figures were nearly identical. Since then, China has completely surpassed India in every way. This was true even during the Mao era. In fact, by 1979, Indian capitalism was causing 4 million excess deaths a year as opposed to the alternative model in China. In other words, the Chinese “murderous” Communist model, if adopted by India, would have saved 4 million lives per year.

Failure to adopt the Chinese model resulted in 4 million deaths per year in India above and beyond the Chinese model. Note that the 4 million excess deaths even holds after the numerous excess deaths caused by Chinese Communism. So, the Indian model had killed about 100 million Indians by 1979 since 1949 – this is above and beyond the deaths in China, including famine deaths in the Great Leap Forward.

Extrapolating from 1979-2010, we can estimate another 100 million deaths in India, for a total of 200 million excess deaths in India (above and beyond deaths caused by Maoists in China) since 1949, directly as a result of Indian capitalism.

There are proponents of the Indian capitalist model on this site. They urge to “just give us some time.” With a bit of time, Indian capitalism will soon develop and provide a great standard of living for everyone. Look, you guys have had your chance. 60 years is long enough. You had your day in the sun, you blew it, and it’s time to try something new.

True, India is getting some great economic growth these days. But during the period of this wild economic growth, from 1995-present or the past 15 years, the malnutrition rate in India has been flat at 5

Some wonder why I support the Indian Maoists. A stark look at the figures above ought to tell you why. The Maoists are the only folks in India who have a plan to even begin to deal with these issues. Let’s give them a chance.

North Korean Famine in Context

Some asshole commenter, who is now banned, writes, in reference to the Communism Starves the People Bullshit post:

Go move to North Korea and see if you starve, moron.

There is little starvation in North Korea these days. Even at its very worst in the 1990’s, it was only as bad as India is year in and year out. Yet you never hear about starvation in India, do you? Only in North Korea. Further, 600,000 died, not 2 million or however many they are throwing about. I’ve done research on the famine, and I’m having a hard time figuring out how the North Korean government could have avoided it at the time. If someone can show me how the North Korean government could have avoided the famine of the 1990’s, please do so in the comments.

Rations are rather tight these days, especially in the countryside, but not many people are actually starving. However, it’s not uncommon for rural workers to tire easily due to not getting enough food.

North Korea is embargoed by the entire world. They can only trade with a few other countries. The US threatens to attack any country that trades with them, and we’ve had them under strict embargo since Day One. Furthermore, we are still officially at war with them, and we are constantly threatening to attack them, especially with nuclear weapons. This forces them to spend 3

North Korean GNP is back up to around 15-20 billion/year. That’s the level they were at in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but now their population is greater.

Lack of arable land means that it’s dubious if North Korea can ever feed itself, but many states on Earth can’t feed themselves and must rely on food imports, so there is nothing new there. North Korea is probably limited by the fact that it’s ability to import food is constrained.

The Stalinist pure Communism has been dead in North Korea for 10-15 years now. Much of your average North Korean’s income now comes from the private sector, especially small farmers and other types of markets. These have sort of a swap meet/farmer’s market feel about them, and they are now quite common.

These is also a serious problem with power or electricity in North Korea. That’s one of the reasons they have been trying to develop nuclear power. I don’t blame them.

“Wrong Turn,” by Alpha Unit

Pleading parents want their children back. The parents and children are American. The captors are Iranian. The children, all twenty-something adults, crossed the Iran-Iraq border last summer.

The story is that they had been tourists in Kurdistan, and had decided to go hiking in an area known for its waterfalls. They ended up in Iran. And in custody.

That Iran-Iraq border is pretty ambiguous. In some media accounts, it is said to be heavily guarded. According to others, border guards get bribed and look the other way while all kinds of people and things slip across.

What’s your pleasure? Extremists? Weapons? Oil? Drugs and booze make it through, as well. Is there anything that doesn’t make it across the Iran-Iraq border?

If all this smuggling of God knows what is going on at the border, how did the three American hikers not cross paths with alcohol runners, gun runners, insurgents, and everybody else? That Iran-Iraq border is really popular. And not just with smugglers. “Coalition” troops are supposed to be patrolling it, as well.

Kids, stay away from the Iran-Iraq border. There are other, less risky places to be a tourist.

No good can come from hanging around there.

Faisal Shahzad, Pakistani, Arrested in Failed New York City Car Bomb Attack

If you’ve been following the media, you would have heard of the failed car bomb attack on Time Square in New York City. Street vendors saw smoke coming out of a car in Times Square on Saturday, May Day, 2010. The device was very poorly and amateurishly made. A video captured a man in an alleyway who seemed to have recently vacated the bomb vehicle.

A fingerprint ID’d Shahzad, originally of the Malakand Region of Northwest Pakistan, who was naturalized in 2009. A manhunt was soon underway. He was arrested today as he tried to board a flight out of the US to an unknown location.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in response to the recent killing of two top Iraqi Al Qaeda leaders in Iraq in Tikrit. US forces surrounded the house and as they closed in, a bomb blast, apparently a from a suicide bomb vest, was heard inside. A US helicopter circling the site crashed, resulting in two US casualties.

Despite denials by Juan Cole and some of the antiwar crowd, the Pakistani Taliban now has deep ties to Al Qaeda, ties which deepen the more we stage drone attacks on them. In fact, it is the Pakistani Taliban who is harboring Al Qaeda in North and South Waziristan, Bajaur, Khyber, Mohmand and Dir in the northwest of Pakistan.

I doubt if this was an official Pakistani Taliban operation. They make way better bombs than this, and this was pretty much of a Rube Goldberg contraption. Seems like a Muslim version of the lone wolf phenomenon.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I’m sure the Republicans will play this as, “Obama failing to protect us from Muslim terror,” and the Moronican US public will probably buy it.

Recall that when George Bush failed to protect us from Muslim terror and 3,100 Americans were killed and one of our greatest landmarks destroyed, he was a national hero with 9

I don’t expect any kind of morality from Republican politicians, but it would be nice if their fanboys were not such a bunch of retards.

His Twitter page is here.

Lots of New Sick and Evil Videos Up on the Old Site

We have pretty much removed the sicko flicks from here because WordPress doesn’t want them, but we are continuing to post them over at the old site.

Traffic really plunged there. At the peak, it was up to 68,000 hits/day. Now it’s down to 3,500/day over there and 4,000/day here, for a combined total of 7,500/day for both sites. Traffic collapsed when the South Korean government banned my website! Everyone in South Korea has to go through some government server to get on the Net, so the government is able to ban sites pretty easily.

Anyway, for your twisted freaks on here:

Eating a Cooked Fish While Alive: The sickos in China think it’s cool to keep a fish alive until you cook it, then cook it in some weird way so it’s still alive, then consume the poor thing while it’s still alive! To be eaten alive! Good God, what a horrible punishment.

You know, the tribes of the SE US, from around Louisiana and the coast of Texas such as the extinct Karankawa, used to do this, . They would capture enemy warriors, tie them to a pole, then surround them with braves who would charge up to the poor sod with knives and slice off bits of his flesh, then eat them in front of him, just to freak him out even more. I assume at some point, they’ve eaten so much of the poor guy that he expires, but it’s sure a Helluva way to go. Gimme a heart attack any day. Hell, gimme cancer. Just not that.

Nick Berg Beheading Video: The original Iraqi Al Qaeda beheading video, released in 2003, with the poor, innocent but foolish Nick Berg meeting his end. The first time I watched this, I was shaking for hours afterward, and I was seriously freaked for a week or two. I watched it again and it was a little better, but not much. I’ve never watched it again – twice was enough! But it’s a classic as far as this shit goes. Includes a thorough writeup on the whole sad story behind the crime.

Man Electrocuted on Train in India: At a crowded train station in India, some idiot somehow finds himself on top of a train. He tries to get down several times, and people reach up to try to help him. Then he walks away and starts strolling down the roof of the train. Like a dumbass, at one point, he reaches up and touches a live electric wire. He is instantly electrocuted and killed. His body quickly catches fire, and he’s gone in a ball of flames in an instant. Electricity is a powerful motherfucker all right. I didn’t feel much sympathy while watching this because the guy’s such an idiot.

12 Year Old Pakistani Boy Beheads a Man: This has got to be about as evil is it gets. The Taliban bastards in North Waziristan capture a US spy, probably an ISI agent in the area, tie him up, and give the knife to a young kid so he can kill him. There are some other kids watching and holding the poor guy down, and maybe some girls watching too. It’s hard to tell. He takes forever to saw the guy’s head off, and reminds you of a butcher carving up an animal carcass. This is child abuse in its worst form. Don’t do this to kids.

Woman Electrocuted in China: Another idiot video. A middle aged woman, apparently mentally disturbed, climbs a utility pole in the middle of some seriously crowded Chinese city and won’t come down. The sheer mass of humanity below is breathtaking in itself. Rescuers are trying to get to her, but she’s just up there crying and won’t come down on the ladders.

There are power lines near her, and a few times, like a dumbass, she reaches up and grabs them, and of course gets electrocuted each time. But for some reason, possibly poor grounding, she gets off pretty easy. I’m told that she survived the ordeal with minimal injuries.

Worst Ankle Twist Ever: A soccer game is being performed, possibly somewhere in the Mediterranean or in the Southern Cone of South America – the players look like Med Whites of some sort. Anyway, soon some poor guy sustains a horrible injury to his ankle. People rush out, put him on a stretcher, and as he is being carried off, you see, incredibly, that his ankle appears to be twisted a full 90 degrees! I don’t know how that’s possible, or if there’s any way to fix it.

Arab Woman Stabs Guard at Israeli Checkpoint: A 21 year old Palestinian woman is getting ready to be searched before going through the Kalandia Checkpoint in Jerusalem. I do not understand the layout of this checkpoint, why it’s necessary, or where it goes to or from. Anyhow, the guards turn away from her, she reaches into her belt, pulls out a huge knife, rushes one of the male Israeli guards, and stabs him! Damn! He goes down, and other guards quickly pile on her and disarm her. The guard sustained minor injuries in the attack and survived.

Convicted Killer Tries to Grab Cop’s Gun in Court: A Black guy is on trial for the murder of his White wife and their son. Her family is in court. At some point, he rushes the bailiff and tries to grab his gun. Other cops, attorneys, all sorts of people, pile on the guy and handcuff him. Then they lead him out of court while the family of the dead woman he killed scream at him.

John Graziano Head Wound: Hulk Hogan’s son, age 17, borrows his Dad’s car and goes for a ride with his friend, Graziano. Possibly he’s drunk. At some point, he totals the car and nearly kills Graziano. Hogan’s son survives. The video shows this poor guy, Graziano, in the hospital afterwards. He seems to have lost a good part of the front of his forehead, that is, his brain! Somehow he’s still alive, but he’s a total vegetable. A lot of people were mad at the Hogans about this incident, and it’s apparently the source of a major lawsuit now. Really disturbing.

Photo of James Vance, Failed Shotgun Suicide: One of the really bad things about trying to kill yourself is that you might fail and actually survive afterward, but be so fucked up you wish you were dead. This is what happened to James Vance, a teenage boy from the US who was depressed and using drugs when he went to a playground and shot himself in the head. That night, he had been using drugs and listening to Judas Priest.

The case resulted in a lawsuit against the band for supposedly making this idiot try to kill himself, but the suit failed. There is a photo of Vance, plus a video interview with him. Even after much reconstructive surgery, he has one of the most fucked up faces on Earth. A few years after, he could not take it anymore, got some pills, and killed himself for good. I don’t blame him; I would have done the same if I looked like that.

Idiot Jumps Off Roof and Breaks His Leg: Stupid American teenagers are engaging in some weird sport called roof jumping, where you jump off a roof onto the lawn below. Something goes wrong, the kid lands wrong, and he breaks his leg. You can actually hear the bone snap on the video. Stupidity can be painful!

Nighttime Mobs Attack Cars in Oakland: This is the latest fad in some US Black ghettos. Crowds of young people gather on major street late at night, around 10 or 11 PM, on a weekend nite. Then they start attacking random cars as they drive by. Sometimes they try to pull the doors open to rob or assault drivers. Drivers fight back, hit them, try to run them over, etc. A good time is had by all, or many, or at least the attackers.

Mostly young Oakland Blacks here, but strangely, there are some young White girls there hanging out with the Blacks and attacking cars themselves.

If these fuckers did that to my car, I might try to hit them with my vehicle! I’ve already done so in a similar situation, and the dude went flying after I nailed him with my accelerating car! Don’t ever try this with me, punks!

Man Assaulted in New York Deli: A older White guy is ordering a meal in a New York deli with some young Black guy standing next him. Suddenly, at one point, the Black turns around and cold cocks the White guy, knocking him to the floor! Then he runs out of the building. No further info on where or why this happened, details on the crime, fate of the victim or results of the investigation.

Also lots of older stuff in foreign languages, but most of you won’t be interested in that.

Have fun, sickos!

Too Sick For Words

Here.

You know, something is seriously wrong with the men in this part of the world.

Everybody and their brother in the US was cheering on the glorious mujaheddin in Afghanistan. I did myself for a while, as my politics was not well-formed yet. In the early 1990’s, I learned that our glorious mujaheddin were blowing up girls schools and forcing the girls out of school at gunpoint. That was one of the things that got them fired up about the Communists in the first place.

The Communists banned the buying and selling of women and sent the girls to school. For that sin, they were as good as dead in reactionary Afghanistan. That the US egged this charade on with mountains of guns and money is beyond sickening. The Communists were pretty bad, but the reactionary warlords and religious idiots who have replaced them are no better, and are arguably worse.

“The Indian Independence Movement,” by Kumar Sarkar

A nice, short analysis of the Indian independence movement, written by Kumar Sarkar, the nom de guerre of an Indian Maoist revolutionary. Most Indian and Nepalese revolutionaries use noms de guerre due to state repression in their homelands. This is a good piece, nice and short, well-written by a smart guy, from a Marxist perspective, that you might enjoy if you are interested in the subject.

I believe that India was deindustrialized in the 18th – early 19th centuries. Following that, colonialism succeeded in preventing the growth of a national bourgeoisie capable of leading a democratic revolution and industrialization. Emerging bourgeois forces were not independent, and they compromised with Brahminic ‘feudalism’ instead of smashing it, as it happened in Europe during the ‘classical’ bourgeois democratic revolution.

The product was a predominantly comprador bourgeoisie, often still with feudal roots and a strange mixture of bourgeois-Brahminic feudal ideology. The non-comprador elements never gained any real strength.

Thus, the democratic revolution failed to take place, probably nipped in the bud that was once about to show itself, in Bengal. Casteism, discrimination against Muslims, which is an extension of casteism, Brahminic land relations and social order remained virtually intact.

The so-called nationalist movement that started in 1905 in Bengal against its partition was a deformed phenomenon from the beginning, without the support of the Muslims, and in fact often directed against them. This was repeated all over the sub-continent till 1947 with its abortive end and partition of India.

The role of Nehru, Krishna Menon, Subhas Chandra Bose, etc. cannot be understood with the European model of Marxism. The political philosophy of Bose and that of the so-called ‘socialist group’ within the Congress have not been researched yet. Nehru’s individual pro-Marxist attitude ended after his association with Gandhi. The class base of these people remains to be investigated and can only be understood in the background described above.

Interview With Communist Party of India (Maoist) Spokesperson Azad

This is an interview with Azad, a spokesperson for the Indian Maoists who are waging war against the Indian state. It’s wide-ranging and covers a wide variety of topics. This interview is very long – it runs to 80 pages – but I think it’s worth the read if you are interested in the subject.

In an exclusive interview with The Hindu, Azad, spokesperson of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) , answered in writing questions about the party’s proposal for a mutual ceasefire and talks with the Union government, how the party views the necessity of meeting the violence of the State with the revolutionary counter-violence of the masses, the issue of the role of schools in combat zones, and the building of a united front of all revolutionary and democratic forces against the Indian state.

Edited text of 12,262-word response by Azad, Spokesperson, Central Committee, CPI (Maoist)

1. In recent weeks one has seen statements by the Government of India and leaders of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) saying they are in favor of dialogue and talks but each side seems to lack seriousness. There has also been an element of drama or more precisely, theater, with Kishenji and P. Chidambaram exchanging statements through the media.

Our first question is whether Kishenji’s statements can be treated as authoritative pronouncements of the CPI (Maoist) central leadership in pursuance of a national strategy? Or are these tactical announcements by him keeping only the specifics of the Bengal situation in mind.

Azad: It is true our Party leadership has been issuing statements from time to time in response to the government’s dubious offer of talks. But to generalize that there is lack of seriousness on both sides does not correspond to reality. To an observer, exchanging statements through the media does sound a bit theatrical. And it is precisely such theatrical and sensational things the media relishes while more serious things are swept aside.

Now the stark fact is lack of seriousness has been the hallmark of the government, particularly of the Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram. It is Mr. Chidambaram who has been enacting a drama in the past four months, particularly ever since his amusing 72-hour-abjure-violence diktat to the CPI (Maoist) in the course of his interview with Tehelka Magazine some time last November.

As regards Kishenji’s statements, they should be seen with a positive attitude, not with cynicism. Though our Central Committee has not discussed our specific strategy with regard to talks with the government at the current juncture, as a Politbureau member, Comrade Kishenji has taken initiative and made a concrete proposal for a ceasefire.

Whether Comrade Kishenji’s statements are the official pronouncements of our Central Committee is not the point of debate here. What is important is the attitude of the government to such an offer in the first place. Our Central Committee has no objection to his proposal for a ceasefire. But as far as the issue of talks is concerned, our Party will pursue the guidelines given by our Unity Congress-9th Congress held in early 2007.

2. Both the Government and the Maoists are also laying down preconditions. Chidambaram says the Maoists should “abjure violence and say they are prepared for talks…I would like no ifs, no buts and no conditions.” Now ‘to abjure’ can mean to renounce or forswear violence, or even to avoid violence, i.e. a ceasefire. What is your understanding of Mr. Chidambaram’s formulation? What do you think is the implication of what he wants the Maoists to accept?

Azad: It is a very pertinent question as no one knows exactly what Mr. Chidambaram wants to convey by his oft-repeated, yet incomprehensible, abjure-violence statement. Hence I can understand your confusion in interpreting Mr. Chidambaram’s “abjure violence” statement. It is not just you alone but the entire media is left in a state of confusion. His own Party leaders are a confused lot.

Some interpret Mr. Chidambaram’s statement to mean that Maoists should lay down arms. Some say it means unilateral renunciation of violence by Maoists. Yet others say what this could mean is a cessation of hostilities by both sides without any conditions attached.

It is indeed very difficult to understand what Mr. Chidambaram wants to convey.

This seems to be a characteristic trait of Mr. Chidambaram whether it be his pronouncements on Telangana, which are mildly described by the media as “flip-flop” behaviour and interpreted by both pro and anti-Telanganites according to their own convenience; or on Operation Green Hunt which he describes as a “myth invented by the media” even as the entire political and police establishment, and the entire media, give out graphic descriptions of the huge mobilization of the security forces, and the successes achieved by Operation Green Hunt; or on MoUs signed by various MNCs and Indian Corporate houses with the governments of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal and others.

The Home Minister himself had displayed his split personality, not knowing what exactly he wants when he says Maoists should “abjure violence.” To a layman what this proposal obviously implies is that the state too would automatically put a stop to its inhuman atrocities on the adivasis, Maoist revolutionaries and their sympathizers. But not so to our Home Minister!

When you ask us what our understanding of Mr. Chidambaram’s formulation is, our answer is: we are very clear that the real intent behind his rhetoric is not a ceasefire between the government and the Maoists, like that with the NSCN, but an absurd demand for a unilateral renunciation of violence by the Maoists. Anyone with a bit of common sense would understand the unreasonableness of the Home Minister’s demand.

It is not that our so-called political analysts and others who appear on TV channels or write articles in the print media lack this common sense. It is their vested interests that come in the way of questioning the Home Minister in a straightforward manner.

Can they not put a simple question why the government cannot stop its brutalities on the people, adhere strictly to the Indian Constitution by putting an end to the police culture of fake encounters, abductions, rapes, tortures, destruction of property, foisting of false cases and such indescribable atrocities on the people and the Maoists?

Chidambaram is cozy in studios and press conferences before English-speaking TV anchors and correspondents but can never answer the questions put by illiterate adivasis. That is the secret behind his skipping the Jan Sunwaayi in Dantewada last December. For drama and real life are entirely different.

The implication of what Mr. Chidambaram wants the Maoists to accept is crystal-clear. He wants the Maoists to surrender. Or else [the state’s] para-military juggernaut would crush the people and the Maoists under its wheels. It is total surrender, pure and simple.

While repeating that he never wanted the Maoists to lay down arms – as if he had generously given a big concession – he comes up with an even more atrocious proposal: Maoists should abjure violence while his lawless forces continue their rampage creating more Gachampallis, Gompads, Singanamadugus, Palachelimas, Dogpadus, Palods, Tetemadugus, Takilodus, Ongaras, and so on.

Not a word does he utter even as scores of inhuman atrocities by his forces are brought to light by magazines like Tehelka, Outlook, a host of websites, and, to an extent, some papers like yours. What is it if not sheer hypocrisy on the part of the Home Minister to ask Maoists to abjure violence while his paramilitary forces indulge in crimes every day, every hour, in gross violation of the very Constitution by which he swears?

3. The Maoists also have their preconditions for talks.

In his recent interview to Jan Myrdal and Gautam Navlakha, Ganapathy made the following formulation on the issue of talks:

“To put concisely the main demands that the party has placed in front of the government [of India] for any kind of talks are:

1. All-out war has to be withdrawn;

2. For any kind of democratic work, the ban on the Party and Mass Organizations have to be lifted;

3. Illegal detention and torture of comrades had to be stopped and they be immediately released. If these demands are met, then the same leaders who are released from jails would lead and represent the Party in the talks.”

My question is whether these are realistic preconditions. For example, the “all out war” can be suspended first before it is “withdrawn,” i.e. a ceasefire, so why insist on its withdrawal at the outset? Are you asking for a ceasefire or something more than that?

Secondly, you want the ban on the Party and its mass organizations lifted and prisoners released. Usually in negotiations of this kind around the world between governments and insurgent groups, the lifting of a ban is one of the objects of talks rather than a precondition and the release of political prisoners an intermediate step.

Is the Maoist party not putting the cart before the horse, making demands that the government may be unlikely to accept as a starting point, rather than positing the same as one of the end points of the proposed dialogue?

Azad: I concur with the logic of your arguments. It is logically a valid argument that such demands could be resolved in the course of actual talks and not as a precondition for talks. But you must also understand the spirit of what Comrade Ganapathi has said in his interview given to Mr. Jan Myrdal and Gautam Navlakha. Some clarification is required here. I will try to clarify what Comrade Ganapathi has said.

Firstly what he meant when he said the government should withdraw its all-out war is nothing but a suspension of its war, or in other words, mutual ceasefire. Let there be no confusion in this regard. What Chidambaram wants is unilateral ceasefire by Maoists while the state continues its brutal campaign of terror. On the contrary, what the CPI (Maoist) wants is a cessation of hostilities by both sides simultaneously. This is the meaning of the first point.

A ceasefire by both sides cannot be called a precondition. It is but an expression of the willingness on the part of both sides engaged in war to create a conducive atmosphere for going to the next step of talks.

Secondly, if peaceful legal work has to be done by Maoists as desired by several organizations and members of civil society, then lifting of the ban becomes a pre­requisite. Without lifting the ban on the Party and mass organizations how can we organize legal struggles, meetings, etc in our name? If we do so, will these not be dubbed as illegal as they are led by a banned Party?

According to us, the ban itself is an authoritarian, undemocratic, and fascist act. Hence the demand for the lifting of the ban is a legitimate demand, and, if fulfilled, will go a long way in promoting open democratic forms of struggles and creating a conducive atmosphere for a dialogue.

Thirdly, what Comrade Ganapathi asked for is that the government should adhere to the Indian Constitution and put an end to the illegal murders in the name of encounters, tortures and arrests. We must include the term ‘murders’ which is missing in the third point. There is nothing wrong or unreasonable in asking the government to stick to its own constitution.

As regards the release of political prisoners, this could be an intermediate step as far as the nature of the demand is concerned. However, to hold talks it is necessary for the government to release some leaders. Or else there would be none to talk to since the entire Party is illegal. We cannot bring any of our leaders overground for the purpose of talks.

4. Would the Maoists be prepared to establish their bona fides on the question of talks by announcing a unilateral ceasefire or, perhaps the non-initiation of combat operations (NICO) after a particular date so as to facilitate the process of dialogue?

Azad: It is quite strange to see intellectuals like you asking the Maoists to declare a unilateral ceasefire when the heavily armed Indian state is carrying out its brutal armed offensive and counterrevolutionary war. How would the unilateral announcement of ceasefire or NICO after a particular date establish the bona-fides of our Party on the question of talks? What purpose would such an act serve?

It is incomprehensible to me why we are asked to “display this generosity” towards an enemy who has not the least concern for the welfare of the people and derives vicarious pleasure in cold-blooded murders, rapes, abductions, tortures and every kind of atrocity one could imagine.

And how would this “generous Gandhian act” on our part facilitate the process of dialogue with the megalomaniacs in the Home Ministry who do not spare even non-violent Gandhian social activists working in Dantewada and other places?

5. What do the Maoists hope to achieve with talks? Are you only looking to buy time and regroup yourselves – which is what the government said the CPI (Maoist) did during the aborted dialogue in Andhra Pradesh?

Or is it part of a more general re-evaluation of the political strategy of the party, one which may see it emerge as an overground political formation, engaged in open, legal activities and struggles, and perhaps even entering the electoral fray directly or indirectly at various levels in the kind of ‘multiparty competition’ that Prachanda says is necessary for the communist movement?

When you say you want the government to lift its ban on the party, are you also undertaking not to indulge in methods of struggle (e.g. armed struggle) which led to the imposition of the ban in the first place? There are other Maoist and revolutionary communist parties across India that are mobilizing workers and peasants through mass politics. They have not been banned.

Why does the CPI (Maoist) not believe those are legitimate forms of struggle? In Kashmir, the Hurriyat conference stands for the self-determination of J&K and seeks to mobilize people for this but the Indian state, which may use violence and repression and excessive force against people who peacefully protest, has not banned the Hurriyat. Does this not indicate that there is some space in the system for the Maoists to press their demands through peaceful political means?

Azad: Your question, or rather, a whole set of questions, requires a detailed answer. I am afraid it will take much space but I will try to be as brief as possible. Before I proceed, let me clarify at the very outset that the proposal of talks is neither a ploy to buy time or regroup ourselves, nor is it a part of the general re­evaluation of the political strategy of the party that could lead to its coming overground, entering the electoral fray, and multi-party competition as in Nepal.

Our CC had already dealt in detail with the question of multi-party competition in our Open Letter to the UCPN(M) and various articles and interviews by our Party leaders. So I will not go into it again here.

Now let me take up each point that you raised.

First, you asked what we want to achieve with talks. My one sentence answer is: We want to achieve whatever is possible for the betterment of people’s lives without compromising our political programme of new democratic revolution and strategy of protracted people’s war.

People have a right to enjoy whatever is guaranteed under the Indian Constitution, however nominal and limited these provisions are. And the government is duty-bound to implement the provisions of the Constitution.

We hope the talks would raise the overall consciousness of the oppressed people about their fundamental rights and rally them to fight for their rights. Talks will also expose government’s hypocrisy, duplicity, and its authoritarian and extra-constitutional rule that violates whatever is guaranteed by the Constitution. So talks would help in exposing the government’s callous attitude to the people and may help in bringing about reforms, however limited they may be.

Another important reason is: talks will give some respite to the people who are oppressed and suppressed under the fascist jack-boots of the Indian state and state-sponsored terrorist organizations like the Salwa Judum, Maa Danteswari Swabhiman Manch, Sendra, Nagarik Suraksha Samiti, Shanti Sena, Harmad Bahini, and so on.

Those who sit in studios and insulated rooms and make their expert analyses about how Maoists want to buy time or utilize the respite to regroup themselves, can never understand the ABC of revolution or the ground situation. This is actually not an argument at all.

If the Maoists try to utilize the situation, so would the police and the government. Why wouldn’t they? They created an extensive network of police informers during the six-month period of ceasefire in Andhra Pradesh in 2004. The intelligence hawks attended every open meeting and activity of the Maoists, took videos of people, and could easily target them after the clamp-down. Maoists definitely increased their recruitment but so did the enemy.

It doesn’t take much common sense to understand that both sides will utilize a situation of ceasefire to strengthen their respective sides. Then could this be called an argument at all? These cynics, or, I would rather call them, war-hungry hawks, itch for a brutal suppression of the Maoists and the people they directly lead, even if it means genocide.

They do not care if in the process thousands of police and paramilitary personnel also perish, for they are nothing but cannon-fodder in the eyes of these gentlemen.

So let me make it crystal clear: the proposal of talks is meant neither to buy time nor to regroup ourselves but to give some respite for the people at large who are living under constant state terror and immense suffering.

How many of our countrymen know that three lakh adivasis were driven away from their homes, that half the adivasi population in our country is already living under conditions of chronic famine and now even the rest of them now being pushed into a famine condition?

And why? Because of the insatiable greed of the corporate sharks that is fueling Chidambram-Raman Singh’s war in Chhattisgarh, Chidambaram­-Naveen Patnaik’s war in Orissa, Chidambaram- Buddhadeb’s war in West Bengal, Chidambaram-Shibu Soren’s war in Jharkhand, and so on.

Whoever has the minimum concern for the well being of the masses, no matter what his/her ideology is, would naturally think of how to save them from being decimated. But those who have nothing but sheer contempt for the poor and helpless people and only think of how to maximize the profits of a tiny parasitic class, put forth weird and cynical arguments deliberately intended to confuse the people.

They depict the Maoists as terrorists, create a fear psychosis in the middle and upper classes that the Maoists will soon come to your cities and disturb your supposedly secure lives; that they will seize power by the middle of this century, and what not.

By such hysteria whipped up by the rulers through the various means at their disposal, they justify the brutal war on the people and make the massive displacement, mayhem, massacres, rapes and atrocities appear like collateral damage in the larger noble objective of achieving peace, progress and prosperity for all.

On the question of the re-evaluation of political strategy of CPI (Maoist), demand for lifting of ban, and the issue of the legitimacy of open, legal forms of struggle:

There are a lot of questions related to the above and I feel this needs some detailed explanation keeping in mind several misconceptions making the rounds. Firstly you are wrong in assuming that it is the forms of struggle (armed struggle) pursued by the CPI (Maoist) that had “led to the imposition of the ban in the first place.”

On the contrary, it is the other way round. It is the imposition of the ban that had led the Party and mass organisations to take up arms in the first place. People are easily misled to believe that it is the violence of the Maoists that had compelled the government to impose the ban.

This is a classic example of how a white lie can be dressed up and presented as the truth by endless repetition. If you have even a cursory glance at the history of the revolutionary movement in our country you will find that the forms of struggle adopted by the Maoist revolutionaries from time to time corresponded to the forms of suppression pursued by the rulers.

A stark example of the transformation of a peaceful mass movement into a violent armed struggle is right in front of our eyes.

Lalgarh’s peaceful mass movement with its simple demands for an apology from the police officials and an end to brutal police repression was  transformed into a revolutionary armed struggle due to the brutal suppression campaign unleashed by the state and state-sponsored terrorists like the Harmad Bahini. Such was the case also in Kashmir and various states of North East.

Even in Naxalbari in 1967, the first shots were fired on unarmed women and children by the police. The people retaliated in their own manner and the party took birth and evolved a correct political line for the Indian Revolution.

In Srikakulam, Koranna and Manganna the first martyrs were killed, and these murders transformed the movement into an armed struggle. Even during the first great armed mass uprising of Telangana during the late 1940s, the spark was first lit when the cruel feudal lords murdered Doddi Komaraiah.

If you take the case of the transformation of the movement led by the erstwhile CPI (ML)[PW] or MCCI or the present CPI (Maoist), you will find the same pattern. The revolutionaries go to the oppressed, make them conscious of their inherent strength and the reasons for their misery, make them aware of their fundamental rights, organize and unite them, mobilize them into peaceful forms of protest and struggle.

Then the state enters with its baton in defence of the class of big landlords, contractors, industrialists, land mafia and other powerful forces that control the state and economy. Everywhere, the peaceful struggles are crushed brutally, entire areas are declared disturbed, fake encounters, abductions, disappearances, rapes, burning down villages, and untold atrocities become the order of the day. The Indian Constitution becomes consigned to the dustbin by the rulers and is not even worth the paper it is written on.

At that point of time any revolutionary party has to quickly switch to non-peaceful and armed forms of struggle if it is really serious about transforming the lives of the people and the oppressive conditions in the country.

The alternative is to surrender their revolutionary aims, make adjustments with the system and sail with other parliamentary parties albeit with some revolutionary rhetoric for a while. This, however, will not work for long as people cannot distinguish between the bourgeois-feudal parties and the ML party that has turned into a new parliamentary party.

When people are fighting a do-or-die battle, you cannot turn your tail but will have to provide them with new appropriate forms of struggle and forms of organization. And this is what our Party had done from the days of Jagtyal Jaitra Yatra.

What shook the rulers at that time and compelled them to declare the Jagtyala and Sircilla tauks in Karimnagar district of North Telangana as disturbed areas in 1978 was not the armed struggle of the Maoists (which had suffered a complete setback in Naxalbari, Srikakulam and elsewhere by 1972) but the powerful anti-feudal militant mass struggle that upset the hitherto established feudal order in the countryside.

And one of the main forms of struggle at that time was social boycott of the feudal lords and their henchmen, which witnessed the unity of over 9

From then on, the undeclared ban has been in vogue in parts of North Telangana until 1985 when it encompassed the entire state. CRPF was deployed for the first time to suppress the peaceful mass struggles that broke out against liquor. I remember how the mainstream media like the Indian Express published stories of policemen selling arrack at the police stations and forcing people to consume liquor in order to foil the anti-liquor agitation of the revolutionaries.

We find the same story in the urban areas too. The Singareni colliery workers organised themselves into a trade union called Singareni Workers’ Federation (SIKASA) in 1981, but it was unofficially banned within three years. An undeclared ban was imposed on the students and youth organisations, women’s organizations, workers’ organizations, cultural organizations and every form of peaceful, democratic protest was brutally suppressed.

One must see the development of armed struggle in the background of the strangulation of even the limited democratic space available in the present semi-colonial, semi-feudal set up, and the brutal suppression of the movement by unleashing the lethal instruments of the state.

To cut a long story short, it is not the forms of struggle and organization adopted by a party that led to imposition of ban but the very ban (whether declared or undeclared) on every type of open, legal activity including peaceful public meetings that compelled the revolutionaries to adopt non-peaceful and armed forms of struggle and underground forms of organization.

Our Party appeals to all independent observers and unbiased media personnel to look at this phenomenon historically and analyze this with an open mind. You will realize that what I said is 10

Revolutionaries never mince words. There is no need to. We believe that ultimately people have to take up armed struggle to seize power. But this does not mean we take up armed struggle at the cost of all other forms of struggle and thereby invite the state to unleash its brute force on the people.

On the contrary, it is only when all other forms of struggle fail to achieve the objective, when these are crushed under the iron heels of the state, that we resort to non-peaceful and armed forms of struggle.

It is very important to understand this, as it has become a common practice for some so-called political analysts and representatives of the ruling classes to charge the Maoists as responsible for all the violence since their very ideology talks of armed struggle. Hence, they conclude, there is no use in talks with the Maoists.

These simpletons resort to the method of reductionism: Maoists believe in violence and armed struggle to overthrow the state; hence they indulge in endless violence; there is no use of talking to people whose very ideology is rooted in violence; and hence there is no other way than to crush the Maoists with all the means at the disposal of the state. So goes their argument. I will deal with this later on.

I didn’t quite understand what you meant when you said referring to other open Maoist and revolutionary communist parties across India that are mobilizing workers and peasants through mass politics: “Why does the CPI (Maoist) not believe those are legitimate forms of struggle?”, you ask. Who has said we do not believe these are legitimate forms of struggle?

We consider all forms of struggle as legitimate, the right of social boycott as we practiced in Jagtyala, the hunger strikes as our comrades in various prisons and the various militant demonstrations. Armed struggle is also a form of struggle and assumes importance depending on the tactical moves by the enemy.

While all forms of struggle are legitimate in our eyes, some so-called revolutionaries, veterans of yesteryear, surprisingly exclude armed struggle from the forms of struggle and lay a one-sided emphasis on peaceful forms of struggle. They can just as well go join the Gandhian organisations and fight for some reforms instead of calling themselves  part of the ML stream or Maoists aiming for the revolutionary transformation of society.

For some of them, the ML ideology or label is only a fashion. They do not wish to bring about the revolutionary transformation of the society and state but instead only want to make a few cosmetic reforms.

The question of imposing or not imposing a ban on a certain party or organization depends on several factors. It would be too simplistic to conclude that just because a party believes in armed struggle and indulges in acts of violence it is being banned, while those who pursue open, legal forms of struggle are allowed to function freely.

During the Emergency, as we all know, both the revolutionary Left as well as the reactionary Right parties were banned. Yet even at the height of sectarian violence indulged in by the Hindu fascist gangs, they are allowed a field day.

They carry arms, display them openly, threaten the religious minorities with genocide, indulge in violence against the Muslims and Christians, and yet are deemed as legitimate organizations since they are part of the ruling classes and their integral culture of violence.

The acts of destruction in the violence that was organized in a planned manner [in Andhra Pradesh] by a faction of the Congress in one day far surpassed the so-called violent acts carried out by Maoists in an entire year! Yet our Union Home Ministry issues advertisements against Maoist violence while keeping mum about the mayhem and arson by his own Congress Party hooligans.

Thus the question of how you look at violence is colored with a class bias. The violence by the ruling class parties is considered legitimate while those by the oppressed masses and their organizations are dangerous and a threat to the security of the rulers. This has been true from the time of Charvakas.

6. If the government believes the Maoists “misused” the Andhra talks, your party believes the dialogue there was abused by the authorities to identify and then target your leaders. How, then, do you hope to deal with the risks of once again entering into a dialogue with the Indian state?

Azad: The talks we held with the Congress regime in AP provided us with important lessons. And these lessons will guide us in any future talks with the governments of the exploiting classes. It would be too simplistic to conclude that the police could identify and target the leaders by utilizing the talks interregnum.

They used it to some extent just as we used it to take our politics widely among the people in the State and outside. The setback we suffered in most parts of AP was not a fall-out of talks but due to several inherent weaknesses of our Party in AP and our failure to adopt appropriate tactics to confront enemy’s tactics. This is an entirely different subject and can be dealt with some other time.

What is of relevance here is that the talks in AP have given us a rich experience and important lessons. If a situation for talks arises once again -which we do not foresee in the near future given the inexorable compulsions on the government from the corporate sharks for total control of the mineral-rich region – we can instruct our leadership in various prisons to take the responsibility.

Our General Secretary explained this in the course of his interview with Mr. Jan Myrdal and Mr. Gautam Navlakha. The mistakes committed in AP during talks with the government will not be repeated.

7. There is a contradiction between the recent offer for talks made by Kishenji and the spate of violence and killing by the Maoists which  followed that. The Home Ministry has compiled a list of such incidents and circulated it to the media (attached as an annex).

No doubt there has been no letup in the government offensive during this period and you could produce your own counter-list, but many of these attacks by the Maoists do not appear to be ‘defensive’ but ‘offensive’. Can the offer of talks go hand in hand with the intensification of offensive Maoist military activities?

Azad: This is not as complicated as it is made out to be. The crux of the matter is: no ceasefire has been declared either by the Maoists or by the government. The Maoists made an offer of talks, which was immediately dismissed by the government as a joke and spurned by Chidambaram himself who wants nothing short of total surrender, whatever the language he uses.

When the government is not serious about a ceasefire and dialogue, and is placing a condition that Maoists should abjure violence without spelling out whether it will reciprocate with a simultaneous declaration of ceasefire, then what is the use of grumbling about acts of violence by Maoists? The acts of violence by both sides will cease on the day a ceasefire is declared.

Now I am not going into the innumerable atrocities by the police forces and the paramilitary gangs sent by [the state]. There has been wide coverage in magazines like Tehelka, Outlook and our own Maoist Information Bulletins. The statements and fact-finding committee reports by various organizations and Gandhians like Himanshu Kumar clearly show how savage the state has become.

Equally atrocious is the list compiled by the Union Home Ministry regarding the violent acts by Maoists to justify its rejection of the Maoist offer. The annex appended to your questionnaire speaks volumes about the duplicity and lies spread by the war-mongering hawks in the Home Ministry as part of their psy­war.

This is meant to lend an element of legitimacy to their rejection of the ceasefire offer by Maoists and also to their war waged for nipping in the bud alternative organs of people’s power and alternative development models, and for grabbing the resources in the mineral-rich region for the benefit of the class of tiny parasitic corporate elite they represent. I will not go into all the incidents listed.

The very first “heinous act of violence” cited by the Union Home Ministry in its annex circulated to the media to manufacture consent for its dirty war goes like this: “In West Bengal (February 22, 2010) – attack on a State Police-CRPF joint patrol party in PS Lalgarh, District West Midnapore. In the ensuing gun battle Lalmoham Tudu, President of the Police-e-Sangharsh Birodhi Janaganer Committee (PSBJC) was killed.”

The above incident was said to have taken place within three hours of the offer of a 72-day ceasefire made by Comrade Kishenji. Chidambaram himself has gone on record several times repeating this fabricated “heinous act” in a desperate bid to justify his rejection of the Maoist offer. Earlier, Chidambaram deliberately hurled an accusation against the CPI (Maoist) of massacring villagers in Khagaria District.

Coming to the so-called attack by Maoists on the joint patrol party, it is a 10

Initially, the SP of Paschim Mednipur asserted that Mr. Tudu died when the CRPF men “bravely” retaliated an attack by the Maoist guerrillas on the fortress-like CRPF camp in Kantapahari. Later, realizing the hollowness of his own story and fearing that it would evaporate like dew drops with the first rays of the sun, they changed the version by [saying] that Tudu and other two were killed when a Maoist guerrilla squad attacked the CRPF’s raiding party.

This lie is being propagated consciously, with a clearly worked out strategy of justifying the gruesome offensive by our own brand of George Bushes and Donald Rumsfelds. Tehelka Magazine, Star Ananda and other media sources have graphically exposed this lie.

As for your question regarding offensive and defensive actions, I wish to clarify to every well-meaning person who desires a reduction of Maoist violence that there is no such thing as defensive and offensive actions once the war has commenced.

However, our revolutionary counter-violence is overall defensive in nature for a considerable period of time. This does not mean we will retaliate only when we are fired at and keep silent the rest of the time when the police, paramilitary and the vigilante gangs unleash terror and engage in preparations for carrying out genocide.

To make this clear, let us suppose the men sent by Chidambaram are combing an area. When we come to know of it, we will carry out an offensive, annihilate as many forces as possible in the given circumstances, and seize arms and ammunition. We will also take prisoners of war where that is possible. This will be part of our overall defensive strategy although it is a tactical counter-offensive.

In the war zone, if you do not take the initiative, the enemy will seize the initiative. Likewise, we may have to attack ordnance depots, trucks carrying explosives, guards at installations such as NMDC, RPF personnel, and even outposts and stations far beyond our areas to seize arms, as in Nayagarh, for instance.

To fight a well-equipped superior enemy force that has no dearth of arms supplies and logistical support, what other option do we have but to equip ourselves with the arms seized from the enemy?

Some of these men are killed when they offer resistance. We feel sorry for their lives but there is no other way. Chidambaram may yell that innocent CISF jawans were targeted even though they were in no way related to the state’s offensive against Maoists. But that is how things are in a war zone.

The war will get dirtier and dirtier, engulf new areas and affect hitherto unaffected regions and sections of society. But this is precisely what [the ruling] coterie want.

We will also destroy the informer network built by the enemy, his supplies, bunkers, communication network and infrastructure.

We have to confiscate money from the banks and other sources for funding the revolution.

There is no use of yelling about the indiscriminate destruction by Maoists. We have to paralyze the administration, immobilize the enemy troops, cut off his supplies and perhaps even target the policemen engaged in removing the dead bodies of the enemy. There was a hue and cry when our guerrillas placed mines under the dead bodies.

But why such a hue and cry? Where are the rules in this war? Who has defined the rules? If there were rules, then why are the peace-chanting pigeons in the Home Ministry completely silent about the beasts in police uniform who chopped off the breasts of 70-year-old Dude Muye before killing her, who murdered in cold blood over 120 adivasis since August 2009 in Dantewada, Bijapur, Kanker and Narayanpur, and yet roam free and continue their atrocities without hindrance?

Chidambaram, Pillai, Raman Singh and their like should first define the rules of engagement and then, and only then, do they have a right to speak of violations of the rules. I am sure they would never dare to discipline their own forces while preaching meaningless sermons about Maoist “atrocities.”

We appeal to all peace-loving, democratic-minded organizations and individuals to ponder this question, pressure the government to adhere to the Geneva Convention, punish those who are creating Gompads, Gachampallis, Singanamadugus, Palachelimas, Tetemadugus, Takilodus, Dogpadus, Palods, and other massacres. If it is to be a war, then let it be, but the state should clearly state whether it will abide by its own Constitution and the International Conventions on the conduct of war.

8. The Maoists are engaging in armed struggle but have not hesitated to use violence against non-combatants. The beheading of a policeman, Francis Induvar, while in Maoist captivity shocked the country and was a blatant violation of civilized norms and of international humanitarian law, which the Maoists, like the Government, are obliged to adhere to.

If civil society condemns the security forces for killing civilians in places like Gompad village in Chhattisgarh and elsewhere and demands that justice be done and the guilty punished, it has an equal right to condemn the Maoists whenever they commit such crimes.

There have been some reports that the Maoist leadership has apologized for the killing of Induvar, but what steps have you taken to punish those who were involved? What steps have you taken to ensure such crimes are not committed by your cadres?

If your answer is that the state has also not punished those among its ranks who have committed crimes, are you then admitting that the political culture and moral universe the Maoists represent is the same as that of the state which you decry as illegitimate?

Azad: I already covered part of your question in my answer to your earlier question. Our attempt will always be to target the enemy who is engaged in war against us. Non-combatants are generally avoided. But what about the intelligence officials and police informers who collect information about the movements of Maoists and cause immense damage to the movement?

It is true most of them do not carry arms openly or are even unarmed. What to do with them? If we just leave them, they would continue to cause damage to the Party and movement. If we punish them there is a furor from the media and civil society. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea!

Our general practice is to conduct a trial in a People’s Court wherever that is possible and proceed in accordance with the decision of the people. Where it is not possible to hold the People’s Court due to the intensity of repression, we conduct an investigation, weigh the opinion of the people and dole out appropriate punishment.

I agree there is no place for cruelty while giving out punishments. I clarified this in one of my earlier interviews while referring to the case of Francis Induvar. But it is made into a big issue by the media when a thousand beheadings have taken place in the past five years by the police-paramilitary and Salwa Judum goons. You are saying the beheading of Francis Induvar was a blatant violation of civilized norms and of international humanitarian law which both sides in the war are obliged to adhere to.

Do you really think the government is adhering to the law? And has the media ventured to ask Chidambaram why [the state] hasn’t been following international law or at least the Indian Constitution when dealing with the people in the war zone or citizens elsewhere?

Just ten days ago, two of our Party leaders – Comrades Shakhamuri Appa Rao and Kondal Reddy -were abducted from Chennai and Pune respectively by the APSIB and the Central Intelligence officials and were murdered in cold blood. What cruel tortures these comrades were subjected to by the lawless goons of the Indian state no one will ever know. I can give a thousand such examples of killings of our comrades in cold blood while in police captivity in the past five years.

Why is the media silent about these murders but becomes hysterical when one Police Inspector is beheaded? What is civil society doing when such cold-blooded murders are taking place in police custody? Why single out a rare case of the beheading of one Induvar and play it up whenever you need an excuse to bash the Maoists?

When our comrades hear of these cold-blooded murders committed by the APSIB or other officials of the state, it is natural that their blood boils and they will not bat an eyelid to hack any of the perpetrators of these inhuman crimes, say a man from APSIB or Grey Hounds, to pieces if he fell into their hands. In the war zone, the passions run with such intensity which one cannot even imagine in other areas or under normal circumstances.

Could someone who has seen women being raped and murdered, children and old men being murdered by hacking them to pieces in the killing fields of Dantewada and Bijapur, ever give a thought to your so-called non-existent (I say non-existent as none of the combatants know what these are nor would follow these conventions as the history of fake encounters by the Indian state shows) international laws when the perpetrator of such crimes happens to fall into their hands?

The pent-up anger of the masses is so intense that even the Party General Secretary would perhaps fail to control the fury of the adivasi masses when they lay their hands on their tormentors.

Maoists are not for crude and raw justice as some are trying to make it appear. Maoist guerrillas are not thugs and mercenaries like the men who carry out their brutal heinous acts in the name of democracy and the “rule of law.” Maoists have great respect for human life. Democratic values and norms are an integral part of socialist and communist ideology. Yet at the same time we think it is necessary to destroy the few poisonous weeds to save the entire crop.

I once again request you and all others to imagine what you would have done if your mothers, sisters and daughters were raped in front of your eyes, and your fathers, brothers and sons were murdered by being hacked to pieces. And worst of all, when there is no guardian of the “rule of law” to receive your complaints and the complainant himself/herself is abducted.

When we do not understand the feelings of the affected people, it is better to imagine ourselves in their place. This may help us get nearer to the truth.

9. The Supreme Court has asked the petitioners who filed a PIL against Salwa Judum atrocities to draw up a rehabilitation plan for those displaced by the violence perpetrated in Chhattisgarh by Salwa Judum, the regular security forces and the Maoists.

Is the CPI (Maoist) prepared to give an undertaking that it will allow the rebuilding of schools and the establishment of basic government services (primary health care, anganwadi, PDS etc.) as part of a court-backed plan for the welfare of the tribals affected by the conflict? Will you agree not to attack government employees and officials who enter to provide services to the tribal masses?

Azad: Asking us to give an undertaking that we will allow the rebuilding of schools and establishment of basic government services in the areas we control and that we will not attack government employees and officials is quite bizarre, to say the least. The welfare of the masses is the first priority for the Maoist revolutionaries.

You should request Mr. Chidambaram to allow you to visit the areas in Dandakaranya, Jharkhand, Orissa, or the villages of Jangalmahal by keeping his paramilitary forces, SPOs, Salwa Judums, Shanti Senas, Nagarik Suraksha Samitis and Harmads from obstructing you. Then you will see with your own eyes a hitherto hidden story of how the adivasis are prevented from pursuing their normal activity by the state and state-sponsored terrorists.

You will find how the forces occupy school buildings for six months to a year, thereby preventing the children from pursuing their studies. You will find how the adivasis are prevented from buying their daily necessities from the weekly bazaars, most of which were forcibly closed through threats and intimidation by the so-called security forces.

Who is blocking the development of the adivasis, who is preventing them from carrying on their normal activity like cultivating fields, tending animals, collecting minor forest produce, picking tendu leaves, obtaining their daily necessities, and so on will become as clear as daylight once you visit these remote villages. Hence the government, its “security” forces, and vigilante gangs are hell-bent on preventing independent observers and fact-finding teams from visiting these areas.

It is worthwhile to keep in mind that it is not the lack of development that has become the problem in the rural areas, particularly adivasi-inhabited areas. On the contrary, it is its imperialist-dictated anti-people development model that is driving them to displacement and deprivation, death and destitution, and extreme desperation.

There need be hardly any doubt that the poor adivasis were a happier lot before the civilized [corporate] goons set their foot on their soil. The development model pursued by [the rulers] displaced them and made them aliens in their own land.

The so-called development you are referring to is the development that India saw under the British colonialists. The talk of roads in remote areas is not for the benefit of the people, who are without food and drinking water, but only for the speedier movement of the raw materials from the hinterland to the cities, to help the mining sharks transport the mineral wealth and forest produce.

And, of course, for rushing in the state’s troops to quell any militant people’s struggle against the rapacious plunder by the tiny parasitic class of blood-sucking leeches.

The entire world knows that George Bush invaded Iraq for oil even as the media in the US barked about Saddam’s non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction. All India knows that [the rulers] and the vultures they represent are itching to lay their hands on the abundant reserves of iron ore, coal, tin, bauxite, dolomite, limestone and other minerals of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and other states where their Operation Green Hunt has been launched.

Lastly, banding together Maoists with the state and vigilante gangs, and equating their revolutionary counter-violence in defence of the rights of the people with the counterrevolutionary violence of the state and vigilante gangs like the Salwa Judum is a despicable trick played by the rulers and those so-called democratic forces to obfuscate the stark reality of the brutal violence of the state and state-sponsored terrorists.

I can say with full confidence that there was no displacement, whatsoever, of innocent people due to the revolutionary counter-violence by the Maoists. It is only a handful of anti-people exploiters, tribal heads and landed gentry who fled the villages in the course of the class struggle. Many, however, surrendered to the people, mended their ways, and continue to live in the villages like others.

The Supreme Court should know that the displacement of the adivasis was done in accordance with a pre-meditated plan to evacuate the villages and settle them in Vietnam War-type strategic hamlets. And this policy is being continued by the BJP government in Chhattisgarh with full assistance from the Congress-led government at the Centre.

The Supreme Court, if it is serious about the displacement of the adivasis, should direct the central and state governments to immediately halt its brutal armed offensive on adivasi villages in the first place, which is resulting in the massive exodus of people estimated at around three lakhs since the current brutal war began in the name of Operation Green Hunt.

10. Human rights groups have condemned the security forces and the Maoists for not respecting the sanctity of schools. If the security forces take them over and convert them into barracks, the Maoists have also been guilty of destroying school buildings and infrastructure. Even in the absence of a ceasefire or dialogue, don’t you think both sides need to come to an understanding that schools and school children should not become targets of this war?

Azad: It has now become a fashionable thing for some human rights groups and the media personnel to play the role of referees in a sports event. By criticizing both sides equally they imagine they are being impartial or neutral in the war. If someone says that both Indians and the British were responsible for the violence in India during the two centuries of British rule, would you accept it?

Or that both Iraqis and the American occupiers are responsible for the violence in Iraq? Any freedom-loving person would unequivocally say it was the British colonialists that caused the bloodshed in India, and it is the American aggressors that are the cause of the unending violence in Iraq.

By criticizing both the so-called security forces and the Maoists for not respecting the sanctity of schools, these human rights groups imagine they are playing a neutral and impartial role. But they do not see the cause and effect chain of events.

They do not ask themselves the simple question: If the police and paramilitary do not occupy schools, then where is the need for the Maoists to destroy them? Do you know that in many villages it was not the Maoist squads but the people themselves who demolished school buildings since they did not wish to see the security forces create insecurity in their villages?

How can you ask the Maoists and the people to assure you that they will respect the sanctity of schools occupied or likely to be occupied by their tormentors?

My request to media people like you is: please do not be misled by an act or how it happened, but go deeper into why it happened. Only then you will reach the truth.

However, we agree with your proposition that even in the absence of a ceasefire or dialogue, both sides should come to an understanding that schools and school children should not become targets of the war. We take this occasion to convey to the GOI that it should immediately withdraw all its forces from school buildings and stop recruiting school children as SPOs and police informers.

If they withdraw their forces and assure they will not reoccupy school buildings, then our Party will desist from targeting schools. And if the government stops recruitment of school children as SPOs and police informers, then the very basis for punishing these people disappears.

But the larger issue is: can schools function even if the buildings are intact when the parents of the school children are murdered, raped, abducted, tortured, and are forced to flee? What do you have to say of the children of the three lakh people who fled the villages due to Operation Green Hunt I and II? What use are the school buildings and the talk of sanctity of schools when the villages themselves are deserted?

A more rational proposal would be to ensure that the inhabitants of the villages are resettled with the assurance that the police and paramilitary will not continue their atrocities and let them live in peace. This should assume first and foremost priority in the war theaters all over India, particularly Dandakaranya.

11. Is the Maoist party and leadership under pressure because of recent top-level arrests like that of Kobad Ghandy? Is there also a wider crisis of leadership with fewer activists from the intelligentsia getting attracted to Maoists?

Azad: I did not understand what pressure you are referring to. Is it the pressure for a ceasefire and talks? If so, then I would say you are completely off base. One cannot overcome pressure through such tactics. Actually the Party and leadership is growing rapidly in times of war.

Several new leaders are emerging out of the struggle. War is giving birth to new generals and commanders, which we never anticipated in normal times. While it took several years to produce a leader of caliber in relatively peaceful times, it is taking a fraction of that time in the midst of the war situation.

Today we even find children acquiring high level of consciousness at an early age. War is transforming the world outlook of the illiterate people, their understanding about the class nature of the state and its various wings, and how they have to get rid of the anti-people state and establish their own organs of power.

People have begun to understand from their own lives what Comrade Lenin had taught in his State and Revolution. This transformation has contributed to the development of leadership at all levels. At the central level, I agree there are some problems, though not very acute, after the losses in the past two years.

Overall, it is not true to say that there is a wider crisis of leadership due to drop in recruitment from the intelligentsia. You would be surprised to know that contrary to the assessment of various analysts and media personnel, the appeal of the Maoist movement has actually grown stronger in the intelligentsia.

And it is precisely this fact which is rattling [the rulers] and [their] trumpeters in the media. The threats and attacks on intellectuals have been increasing in tenor, and there are growing attempts at isolating the intellectuals who seem to sympathize with the Maoists. The more the growth in popularity of the Maoists and their politics, the greater the cacophony about the erosion of the mass base of Maoists, especially among the intellectuals.

You must also look at it from another angle, instead of concluding that [a] lack of intelligentsia has created a crisis of leadership. The mass base of the Maoists has actually grown stronger, notwithstanding the attempts of the rulers to destroy it by brute force. The more you try to crush it, the more it bounces back.

Our leadership is drawn basically from the oppressed class of adivasis, dalits, agricultural labourers and poor peasants. It is precisely because of this circumstance that our movement has become invincible. Intellectuals are a good asset for the party, but it is the basic classes that are the lifeblood of the Party. And we have plenty from these sections.

12. In Ganapathi’s interview to Jan Myrdal and Navlakha he said:

“I reiterate that at present no one party or organization is capable enough to be a rallying center for all revolutionary, democratic, progressive and patriotic forces and people. Hence, at present juncture our Party can play a significant role in rallying all revolutionary, democratic, progressive and patriotic forces and people.”

This suggests you see the Maoists as one part of a wider force of progressive, patriotic people. Who else do you consider part of these forces? Which organizations or parties do you regard as progressive and patriotic part of these forces? Does this not include the CPI and CPI (M)? Why then have Maoists in Bengal been involved in assassinating cadres of other communist parties like CPI (M)?

Azad: It is not only now, but all along we have considered ourselves an indivisible part of the broader force of other revolutionary, democratic and patriotic sections of people. Firstly, we are one of the several revolutionary detachments in the international detachment of the world proletariat, and we see ourselves as a part of the broad worldwide anti-imperialist front.

Our mass organizations are a part of the International League of People’s Struggles (ILPS) and are in the forefront of the struggle against American imperialism.

Within India, our Party was born in the midst of the revolutionary upsurge of the late 1960s, particularly with the glorious Naxalbari Uprising, and hence we are an indivisible part of all that is revolutionary in the Indian political stream.

We are also an heir to the great Telangana Armed Agrarian Uprising (1946-51), the Tebhaga Uprising of 1946, and all the revolutionary struggles led by the Communist Party since its birth in 1921, notwithstanding the betrayals by its central leadership at every critical turning point in the revolutionary political history of our country.

Second, and more pertinent to your query, is the fact that the Communist revolutionaries are politically (i.e., in terms of its program), a part of the wider democratic stream of all anti-feudal and anti-imperialist forces in the country.

This is the essence of our program of new democratic revolution (NDR), which seeks to unite all those opposed to imperialism, feudalism and comprador bureaucratic capitalism into one broad front to overthrow these enemies and establish a government comprised of the four-class alliance of the working class, peasantry, urban petty-bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie.

Once you grasp this political basis of our NDR, it will not be difficult to understand why we are trying to form numerous tactical united fronts as part of forming a strategic united front in various states and at the all-India level.

To identify the organizations or parties that can be called progressive (usage of the term ‘democratic’ would be more appropriate) and patriotic, one has to determine not only whether they have any anti-imperialist, anti-feudal and anti-state or anti-authoritarian aspect included in their political programmes, but also one needs to look at their actual practice. We consider most of the ML revolutionary forces as part of this front.

We consider national liberation organizations like the NSCN, ULFA, PLA of Manipur, and the JKLF in Kashmir as part of the wider democratic forces fighting the Indian state.

We consider the non-parliamentary trade union organizations, the progressive organizations belonging to the religious minorities which are persecuted by state-backed Hindu fascist organizations; the organizations of Dalits and other oppressed castes, adivasis and women; the non-parliamentary organizations that are fighting for demands like separate a Telangana, Gorkhaland, Vidarbha, Bundelkhand and so on; the organizations that are waging struggles against SEZs, mining and other so-called development projects leading to massive displacement of people; organizations fighting against the Liberalization-Privatization- Globalization (LPG) policies of the reactionary rulers; the organizations which boldly confront the growing authoritarianism and unbridled state repression resulting in fake encounters, mass murders, and violation of all fundamental rights of the people; and so on, as part of this broad-based non-parliamentary democratic people’s front.

There are also a large number of intellectuals and other democratic individuals who are concerned about the well-being of the people and the sovereignty of our country at large. We consider all these as genuine patriotic forces that are deeply concerned about the future of our country and about the well-being of the overwhelming majority of the Indian people rather than of a tiny parasitical class that runs the country through the so-called mainstream parliamentary parties.

I am obviously leaving out the names of the organizations and individuals who in our opinion could play a crucial role in the revolutionary transformation of our country into a self-reliant, genuinely democratic society. Today we are passing through a phase of Indian McCarthyism that brands every form of dissent and anyone who questions the authoritarianism of the Indian state as Maoist in order to legitimize its witch-hunting and brutal repression.

Today immense possibilities have unfolded for the rapid advance of the revolutionary war in India, and the task of the revolutionary Party lies in how effectively and ably it can utilize the present situation, rally all those who have become the victims of the anti-people, imperialist-dictated policies of the comprador-feudal forces ruling our country, and forge a broad-based united front of all these affected sections of our society and all revolutionary, democratic and patriotic forces in the country.

This task should be achieved by defeating the brutal all-out countrywide coordinated war unleashed by the reactionary ruling classes of our country with the aid and assistance of the imperialists, particularly the American imperialists.

If we fail in achieving broader unity of all these forces, the fallout would be disastrous for the Indian people at large, since the aim of this cruel armed onslaught is not only to suppress the Maoist movement, but also to suppress every form of democratic dissent and struggle of the people against the authoritarian, feudal and autocratic structure of the Indian state and socio-political system.

As put forth by our General Secretary, Comrade Ganapathi, in a recent interview: “This war is principally against the Maoist movement but not limited to this movement and is aimed enough against all revolutionary, democratic, progressive and patriotic movements and the movements of oppressed communities of our society,  including the oppressed nationalities. At this juncture, all these forces have to think together how to face this mighty enemy and how to unite to go ahead.”

Now coming to your specific question regarding the CPI and CPI (M). Are they not a part of the wider democratic and patriotic forces? I would say yes and no. As far as the rank and file cadre of these parties is concerned, there is still some sincerity and zeal to work for the well-being of the people among a section of them.

But the leadership has completely capitulated to the exploiting ruling classes and pursues a reformist line that only helps sustain the status quo albeit with a few cosmetic changes.

Here too, we have to differentiate the CPI from the CPI (M). We do not place both the CPI and the CPI (M) in the same category. The CPI leadership has been critical of the policies of the CPI (M), has consistently opposed counter-revolutionary vigilante gangs like Salwa Judum propped up by the State and central governments, and is opposing the Operation Green Hunt launched by the Centre.

One can witness the reactionary anti-people nature of the policies of the CPI (M), especially in States where it is in power. Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh, and a host of other names have stripped the CPI (M) of its guise of anti-imperialism and anti­-neoliberalism.

The CPI (M) is not even a democratic force, let alone  Communist. However, we are prepared to join forces with even these revisionists if they support non-parliamentary struggles on the basic issues of the people, and to the extent they uphold democratic values.

It is wrong to say we are assassinating the cadres of the CPI (M). We are confronting the armed onslaught by the stormtroopers like the Harmad Bahini and other armed [men] maintained by their party leaders by putting up courageous resistance. The struggle against the CPI (M) is part of the class struggle of the people against exploitation and oppression. We challenge them to an open debate on any issue.

Despite their diplomatic and opportunistic stance that their fight with the Maoists is mainly political, they are in the forefront in the war waged by the Indian ruling classes against the Maoists. Unable to confront us ideologically and politically, their leaders and spokespersons have unleashed a vicious campaign of outright lies and slander against the Maoists.

We call upon the cadres of the CPI (M) and other so-called left parties to come forward to unite with other forces to fight against the disastrous policies of the central and state governments and to unite with others to oppose the brutal war waged by the reactionary rulers guided by the US imperialists against the Maoist movement and all forms of democratic dissent. We are prepared to unite with all sincere and genuine forces in these parties who take the side of the broad masses of people.

13. Why has the CPI (Maoist) decided to reach out through the columns of The Hindu? To use a newspaper to clarify its views vis a vis the government?

Azad: Among the daily newspapers, The Hindu has a reputation for printing serious news and less of the sensational stuff that has become the norm of the media these days. Our party leadership has given interviews to this paper earlier, such as my interview on the developments in Nepal, which was covered in a two part article. In a lighter vein, I think it will reach out to our direct Enemy No. 1 at the present juncture, Mr. Chidambaram, too.

I think the media can play a role in carrying the views of a banned party to the government and the people at large, particularly at a time when facts about our Party are distorted, misinterpreted, and obfuscated in a meticulously planned manner. And when there is no scope for a dialogue given the determination of the rulers to carry out their pre-programmed war offensive that was worked out a year ago, we think it appropriate to reach out to the people at large through the media too.

Finally, I thank The Hindu for the thought-provoking and incisive questions it placed before our Party. We look forward to more such interactions with the media in future. On behalf of our Central Committee and our entire Party, I welcome any questions related to our ideology, political programme, strategy, tactics, and practice.

I hope through regular and active interaction between organizations like ours that are proscribed by the government and the media, an opportunity is provided to the people to arrive at a correct judgment and seek truth from facts. Otherwise, truth is certain to become a casualty in this world dominated by corporate sharks that control virtually every source of information that is fed to the people.

“The Truth About ‘Indian Socialism’,” by Peter Tobin

Via my colleague Peter Tobin, an explication of Indian socialism. I told him that commenters were saying that India had already tried socialism and it had failed, so Maoism was doomed from the start and had already been tried anyway. I doubted this and asked him for an explication of Indian socialism, how it differed from Maoism and why it failed, particularly even in a socialist sense.

Peter is very smart, and he’s also a very good writer.

Regarding the notion about India having already tried socialism – it depends on what you call ‘socialism.’

Congress India was a progressive nationalist party which had an, admittedly, sizable socialist faction. During the twenties and thirties it became dominant and at Independence could claim the adherence of the two leading figures in CI, Nehru and Menon.

Their socialism, however, was that of the Second International, which from the beginning of the 20th century became an openly reformist option, which accepted the constitutional niceties of bourgeois democracy.

It specifically rejected the path of Communist revolution in favour of Fabian strategy, which envisaged socialism coming through an evolutionary process, in which the free market dissolved before the logic of more intense collective measures brought about by the tendencies of all markets to monopolize and all industrial processes to become more collective.

This process would be aided by socialist/social democratic parties enacting progressive legislation through a parliamentary system, in which it would compete in the ‘market place of democracy’ with openly bourgeois parties.

The parties who successfully operated within these parameters were initially the Scandinavian countries before the second world war and fairly spectacularly by the post-war Labour party in Britain, which nationalized the commanding heights of the economy, rail, steel, coal, etc and initiated the Welfare State. Other European countries, to a greater or lesser degree, followed this path, among whom the most outstanding was West Germany.

These developments were made possible by Marshall Aid, granted by America, as a means of competing with the Soviet bloc at on level and containing it at another, (Viz Harriman, Kennan).

It is also a hard fact that large sections of the economy were left in private hands, and the principle of the mixed economy was accepted, with the proviso – and certainty – that they would inevitably wither (see above).

The SI came from Marxism (especially that of the German Social Democrats) but it abandoned Marx’s revolutionary side (vide; Kautsky) because it claimed that socialism was economically determined, as against Lenin and the Third International who argued for revolutionary political intervention and the involvement of the masses, under the leadership of a vanguard Communist party.

The progressive left of Congress India emerged under the influence of, and eventually joined, the SI. Mao, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, etc. followed the path of Lenin and the TI.

It is true that Congress India did try to follow a Western type of parliamentary democratic socialism in the post-Independence spirit of optimism, and a diluted form of socialism was promoted which stressed economic planning and welfare. There were also state investments where there were no private interests. There was a State Commission in 1950 which saw the first 5 year plan launched in 1951, which while nationalizing some of new, but still insignificant, modern industrial sectors, e.g, steel, mainly concentrated on raising agricultural output.

Initially there were some good GDP growth rates, but there was almost complete failure to provide decent, comprehensive welfare and to alleviate the plight of the overwhelming rural majority. But this socialism was a half dead thing in a half dead world because in did not involve a land to the tiller or cooperative element, leaving the landlords and the zamindars in ownership and control.

Crucially, while the Ambedkar Constitution outlawed casteism in theory, in practice it remained a decisive social and cultural force. How can expect to build socialism without the involvement, based on equality, of the broad masses?

Capitalist, Brahminical corruption remained and grew in strength, and with India’s humiliating defeat by the Chinese in 1962, Nehru’s attempt to, as he said in 1955 to establish “a socialist pattern of society,” was effectively over and India started the march towards Anglo-Saxon style capitalism.

The Chinese Communist Party did not fuck around; they seized all the commanding heights of the economy, especially agriculture, freed the peasants from the grip of the landlords and began their long march based upon collectivization, mass participation and cultural revolution. Ultimately, wherever they are at the moment, it was much more successful than the feeble Indian attempt.

It is Mao’s type of socialism that the Indian masses need, not Nehru’s (who was only picked by Gandhi to divert radicalism from Communism). That is what the comrades in the CPI (Maoist) are fighting for.

Please point to these people that therefore, socialism is not homogeneous, but takes different forms given different objective historical and ideological conditions. Also there are some who wave the red flag in order to oppose it.

India tried a form of democratic socialism that has since failed in the developed countries to a greater or lesser extent, as most of these SI parties are now more or less on board with the neoliberal form of free market capitalism that has dominated the last thirty years.

India gained its Independence in heroic circumstances and after bitter struggle, but it did not follow through with a thoroughgoing revolution that emancipated and unlocked the creativity and potential of its peoples.

But it is never too late, so let the corrupt, gangster, Brahminical, comprador class tremble. There is a broom moving that will sweep them in to the dustbin of history. They know this and that is why they have launched Operation Green Hunt, with American and Israeli aid – and generally replaced the ‘world’s biggest democracy’ with the world biggest fascist state.

Inquilab Zindabad!

The “China Has Moved to Capitalism” Lie

In the comments section, a defender of capitalism (who I think doesn’t understand it very well) takes issue with my defense of Maoist China:

True, Maoism has a spotty record, but compared to India, Communist China looks like paradise.

Compared to India, many parts of Oakland look like paradise!

Under Mao, China experienced great famines, political repression, persecution of intellectuals during the cultural revolution, and other problems during the so-called “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution” (More like “Great Leap Backwards” and the “Cultural Devolution”).

Only when Deng Xiaoping took over did China begin to prosper, which they did by adopting Capitalism. As he said, “I don’t care if a cat is black, white, red, or yellow, so long as it catches mice” (paraphrase). While China is more Socialist than India due to its relative absence of baseline poverty, China’s economic growth came more from Capitalism than Communism.

Of course, let’s also not forget that China has a ton of people. Therefore, even if the vast majority of people are poor, there are at least 400-500 million well educated and middle class people, which is more than the entire population of the United States. I know that India also has a ton of people and they’re not doing as well, but you get my point. Besides, India’s on the rise.

Robert, I think you too often conflate Capitalism with neoliberal economics and corporate America. Adam Smith hated corporations and believed in a truly free market.

If he were alive today, he wouldn’t approve of corporations outsourcing jobs, corporate tax breaks at the expense of working people, or the fact that many politicians are on the payroll of corporations and special interests. He wouldn’t approve of monopolies that harm local industries and drive people out of business.

I’m just as angry about corporate greed and theft as you are, but to attribute various ills to Capitalism is just wrong.

Also, let’s be honest, Can you name a nation that became wealthy through an economic system that wasn’t Capitalism? Sure, you have European nations that are Socialist in many ways, but they got rich in the first place through Capitalism. The wealthy non-western nations (ie. Japan, South Korea, Singapore) became wealthy by adopting western ways, which practiced Capitalism.

Well, I hate capitalism. Recall that I am a socialist. However, I support any kind of socialism, from piecemeal programs in places like the US to social democracy in Europe to China’s neo-Communism. The best system is a mixed economy with capitalist, socialist, collective, family and other forms of ownership. I call that socialism. You may call it what you will.

First of all, China and India were in the same place in 1949. Even all through the Mao era, China kicked India’s ass, and they are still doing so under neo-Communism. Maoism and neo-Communism simply kick ass on the Indian system, period.

Also understand that China’s economy grew by about 1

The Great Leap Forward did have a problematic famine, and in one year, there were 4.3 million excess deaths as compared to 1949. But in the years immediately before and after that year, the death rate was vastly higher in 1949.

The real killer was capitalist China! Every year, Maoism was saving a good 10 million plus lives.

We need to take this into consideration when thinking of why people put up with Maoism.

A new system comes in, Maoism. It’s repressive, but so was the old system. More importantly, the state cares about you, the lowly worker or peasant. And with each year after 1949, increasingly fewer and fewer people are getting sick and dying. People are living longer and longer every year. Looking back at the previous system, many more people were sick, many more were dying, and people were not living as long. Sure, there was a small setback and a famine for one year, but there was more like a short return to the bad old days.

Seen in this context, you can see why the people regarded Maoism as a Godsend and not some killer system. Sure, the system killed a few people, but many more were being killed before. You do the math!

It is important to note that China’s recent growth has not occurred due to “capitalism.” Most of that growth is coming from public firms, generally controlled by small municipalities and labor collectives. Under Mao, all firms were officially owned by the workers. Such is the case in China of today – all Chinese firms are officially owned by the workers. Sound like capitalism to you? The 3rd largest manufacturer of TV’s in the world is a public firm – it’s owned by the workers – a socialist enterprise.

Under the Chinese system, municipalities and labor collectives run firms. They compete with each other. For instance, if a municipality has a very successful enterprise, they will make lots of money. They will pay their workers more and give them better benefits. So workers flock to those cities from all over China to try to work for that firm. In this way, cities compete with each other. Sound like capitalism to you?

The cities that do best turn into “company towns.” They provide public housing for the workers, public transportation, public day care, etc. Sound like capitalism to you?

It is illegal to own land in China. Does that sound like capitalism to you? This is another Mao era decree that the radicals have been trying to get rid of. Chinese land ownership is so fair precisely because of the forbidding of the private ownership of land. Were that not in place, a few rich people would own all of rural China, like they do in India.

The state owns all the land. You go out into the wild areas, and it’s all state-owned. And much of it is protected too. If the state didn’t own that land, private speculators would have bought up a lot of that land and destroyed it.

They do let you lease the land your home is on. And if you have been paying rent on your home for a long time, increasingly, the state is just giving you the house. You own your house. You can even sell your house to someone else. You can sell the land-use rights on the land that you own the rights to. The state gives you a house to live in for free. Sound like capitalism to you?

There is a system of free public education available to most Chinese, through the graduate level. Sound like capitalism?

China offers health insurance, but it’s rather expensive, and most cannot afford it. But it covers 8

The Chinese state is now planning to spend a tremendous amount of money upgrading the rural areas, because there is starting to be some serious poverty there. People are leaving the rural areas to work in the cities. The state will spend vast sums of money on roads, infrastructure, irrigation, schools, housing, health care, etc in the rural areas. Only a socialist state would do that. Capitalist states never do these things.

All farmland in China is owned by the state. It is often managed by rural collectives though, and they can keep a lot of what they sell. A capitalist country where all farmland is owned by the state? Come on.

The banks in China are very heavily regulated. This is why China largely avoided the latest Neoliberal World Recession. Sound like capitalism to you?

China has not “moved to capitalism.” It is a mixed system with capitalism, socialism and other forms of ownership, a huge public sector and a vast state with tremendous spending power that spends wild amounts of money. The state has very heavy involvement in the economy, including planning it in some ways.

Deng’s reforms have resulted in millions of Chinese dying for lack of health care who would have not have died otherwise. That is because under these wonderful capitalist reforms, all state medical clinics began charging for visits and medicine. Many people can’t afford it, so they just get sick and die. Was it worth it? I say no.

Deng’s reforms have resulted in the closing of schools all over rural China. In some areas, 8

The great growth in Western Europe occurred after World War 2 in the context of a mixed socialist-capitalist system called social democracy. It’s not true at all that Western Europe developed due to capitalism.

Japan has had a social democracy since World War 2, but the benefits are provided by corporations, not by the state so much.

South Korea, Taiwan and Japan all had extensive land reforms that helped their economies take off. Your economy will never go anywhere with semi-feudal relations in the countryside.

Taiwan has an extensive social democracy in place.

Singapore has a very well-developed social democracy. Furthermore, Singapore is not reproducible. Sure, it’s rich, but the area around it in Malaysia is poor. Malays commute to work in Singapore every day. Singapore’s riches have come via paying low wages and buying cheap materials from surrounding poor countries.

None of those East Asian states developed via neoliberalism. They all had land reforms, extensive social democratic programs run by either corporations or the state, and especially massive state involvement in the economy, even including economic planning.

India is up and coming? 5

The “pure free market” of Adam Smith was nothing of the sort. Actually, Smith was an advocate of state intervention to protect society from the ravages of unfettered capitalism. He described pure free market capitalism as one of the most evil systems ever designed by man.

You ever hear neoliberals quote Smith on that? Of course not. All neoliberals are liars. They pick and choose what they want out of Smith and elide the rest. They describe China as “capitalist”, but if we tried to transplant a tiny bit of the Chinese system to the US, they would scream “Communism!”

The pure free market you laud is nothing but neoliberalism. Guess what? It doesn’t work. It only works for about the top 2

It creates incredible inequality and tons of poverty at the same time it produces vast riches at the top, and is everywhere associated with a tremendous amount of corruption of the political class. Everywhere you have a pure free market, you generally have a massively corrupted political class, since the capitalists purchase the state via money-based elections and their control of the media. Corruption under pure free market conditions is not a bug, it’s a feature. It goes right along with it, always.

Maoism in China: A Look at the Record

The current lie, or meme, in US, if not world, popular culture, is “Mao ruined China.” If they are being charitable, they say, “Mao nearly ruined China.”

People can and do say anything to further their cause, in this case, the cause of neoliberal capitalism and especially imperialism. Since Maoism is one of most potent enemies of both these days, it needs to be stamped out by any means necessary, lies, truth, whatever it takes, just take it out, who cares how you do it.

Let’s take a look at the real record here.

Keep in mind that the comparisons to India are because China and India were at the same level in 1949. The record below indicates how horribly India has failed compared to Maoist and even neo-Communist China. There’s no comparison. China kicked India’s ass. Indian capitalism has been nothing but 60 years of repetitive failure.

In 1949, the Chinese peasantry existed on the border of starvation and death. Life expectancy was 32 years. As if that was inevitable, note that in Russia in 1913, life expectancy was 32 years. By 1949, it was 63 years. A 32 year life expectancy for China in 1949 was not inevitable for any possible universe. More than anything else, that figure alone represents the utter and complete failure of Chinese semi-feudal capitalism.

If a peasant was ill, if he had money, he could go to a clinic in the city. If not, he would wait until he either got better or died. There were no medical facilities in the rural areas. People might add that this was inevitable in any possible China. But was it really? This was the situation in Russia in 1916. By 1949, there were clinics in every Russian village, and hardly a Russian lacked for medical care. Why was horrific lack of medical care inevitable?

By 1976, there was a polyclinic in every Chinese commune and a medical facility in every district.

Apologists, generally neoliberals who oppose all state spending on health care, since health care is a matter of private sector, say that this was inevitable. But was it really? Says who? China had not accomplished this in the decades before 1949, so why would they have accomplished it afterwards? Further, there are many nations where health care is still about as bad as 1949 China. The Maoist record on health care was so Earth-shatteringly great that even the UN’s World Health Organization complemented China on its achievement.

In 1949, China had serious problems with smallpox, leprosy, pestilence, cholera, malaria and tuberculosis. By 1976, they were nearly wiped out. Apologists say that this was inevitable? But why? The Chinese capitalists had failed, or not even tried to eliminate epidemic diseases before, why would they have suddenly changed their tune after 1949? Further, these diseases continue to be epidemic in many parts of the world, including India. India started out at the same place as China in 1949, so it’s a useful comparison.

Population growth was controlled, hunger was solved for the first time in Chinese history, and the principal fatal infectious diseases were controlled, in contrast to India, Indonesia and South America, where hunger and infectious diseases are still catastrophic problems. By comparing China to South America, India and Indonesia we can clearly see how disastrously capitalism has fared in those places and how totally Maoism has kicked capitalism’s butt.

Starvation, poverty and illiteracy were wiped out. China was self-sufficient in food for the first time ever. For the first time ever. For the first time ever. Repeat that as many times as you want to until it sinks in. So much for the lie that “Communism brings nothing but starvation.”

The industrial growth rate was double that of India. Keep in mind that China’s and India’s industrial growth rates were about the same in 1949. In industrial growth, Maoism has left India in the dust.

In 1949, China had about the same number of scientists per capita as India. In the meantime, China under Mao and his successors has completely devastated India in the number of scientists per capita. Communist China made huge efforts to increase the number of scientists in society through incredible increases in the availability of education and offering free education to the masses who only had private education for the rich before.

India’s education system is a catastrophe, and the nation places zero emphasis on producing scientists or educated people of any nature. The public education system is disastrously underfunded, and most Indians can’t afford to go to school. The rich send their kids to private schools, but that’s not good for society, as it does not produce the number of highly skilled people that a society needs to develop.

It will take India 150 years to catch up with China in the number of scientists per capita.

Most Indian scientists leave the country; most Chinese scientists stay in China and serve the nation. As you can see, the Communists have cultivated a love of service and of nation in their scientists.

Indian scientists are essentially traitors with purely capitalist values. They spout Hindutva nonsense and the Indian ultranationalist fascist mantras of the day, but they have no love of nation. Their only value is money, and they quickly hop the first plane out of India to hightail it to the UK or the US to cash in on the big bucks, leaving their catastrophe of a nation in the lurch.

From their new perches in the West, they preach contempt for the Whites that enabled them to earn these fat wads of cash while dishonestly singing jingoist praises for the glorious Jai Hind, Bharat India that they so unceremoniously dumped.

Consumption of electricity in agriculture went from 20m kilowatts/hour to 6,000m. Grain production rose

I am not sure why agriculture has failed so badly in India, but semi-feudal relations in the countryside and lack of land reform must have something to do with it. As long as India is under capitalist rule, there will never be the necessary land reform that this suffering land needs, as the feudal lords have always owned the Indian state and always will until revolution sweeps them away.

Many or most Indian farmers are actually sharecroppers in perpetual debt slavery to large semi-feudal landlords. Until this system is eliminated, India will never develop into a real nation.

Production of chemical fertilizers increased 32X, steel 4.2X, oil 63X. Those figures are amazing. Fertilizer increased by 32 times! Oil increased by 63 times! Wow.

Why was this inevitable? If it was inevitable, why had capitalist China so failed to develop these essential industries before 1949? Easy. Because capitalist China, ruled by feudal lords, placed absolutely zero emphasis on the development of a national economy. The feudal lords of capitalist China cared only about increasing their own wealth,the nation be damned. Today we see the same thing in Latin America and the same underdevelopment that results. Some people never learn.

One argument which makes no sense is that India already tried socialism, and it failed. But exactly what kind of socialism was that, anyway? It was a fake crony socialism with a small public sector in which almost all of the economy was in private hands, mostly in the hands of monopoly capital. There was no land reform in the countryside where  semi-feudal relations continued to rule. Sure, the Communists have been running West Bengal for 20 years. Who on the Left thinks there is any kind of real socialism or Communism in West Bengal?

If China and India were practicing the exact same kind of system (they were not) then why was China creaming India every step of the way, year and year out, even all through the Mao era? Answer. Indian socialism wasn’t any good, and it hardly deserved to be called socialism.

There was nothing good about Indian “socialism.” It left 5

The state sector was and is tiny. The state sector in India, including local, state and national levels combined, is about 5-1

In India, for all intents and purposes, in most places, the state is nearly nonexistent. It’s always been that way, a tiny, corrupt, crony capitalist state, even during the Indian Socialism era. The Indian state is a neoliberal dream, with a minimal government and the ruined society that always flows from that.

Industry grew by 1

Looking at these figures with a clear eye, you can see why so many Indians are getting behind Maoism. True, Maoism has a spotty record, but compared to India, Communist China looks like paradise.

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

That’s what little Afghan boys are made of.

Oh, and don’t forget man-love Thursdays. Beats TGIF by a mile! J/k.

I’m not trying to dog their culture or anything, but this is what happens  when you put your females in purdah starting at age 12 and make them wear bags outdoors for the rest of their lives: the guys start screwing each other like crazy.

Situational homosexuality is universal. If the chicks aren’t putting out for one reason or another, the guys, especially the young guys, are going to start fucking each other. Which is a great argument either for socially approved mass early marriage, sexual revolution or legalized prostitution, or some combination.

I’ve seen it with my own horrified eyes in California in the early 1980’s, and I fended off plenty of “straight” (wink) guys myself. A young man has a semi-hardon all day, and all it takes is a breeze to give him a full one. Nature abhors a useless hardon as much as she abhors a vacuum and will strive to fill the vacuum and find any hole in a storm for that lonely hardon.

Your choice, Afghans. Don’t like man-love Thursdays? Fine. Get rid of the purdah for tweens and the bags later on.

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